1
00:00:00,358 --> 00:00:09,894
An organism is a machine, and the laws of physics and chemistry, most believe, are enough to do the job, given sufficient time and research funding.

2
00:00:09,894 --> 00:00:16,108
Putting a living cell together will be a moon shot, not an Einsteinian revolution of space and time.

3
00:00:16,111 --> 00:00:26,954
Complexity in real organisms is being taken apart swiftly enough to enliven the pages of Nature and Science each week and drain away the need for conceptual revolution.

4
00:00:26,971 --> 00:00:36,035
A great vaulting revolution may occur, and suddenly, but the busy and well-fed masses of researchers are not awaiting it in desperate suspense.

5
00:00:36,035 --> 00:00:40,459
The machine the biologists have opened up is a creation of riveting beauty.

6
00:00:40,459 --> 00:00:49,448
At its heart are the nucleic acid codes, which in a typical vertebrate animal may comprise about 50,000 to 100,000 genes.

7
00:00:49,449 --> 00:00:54,517
Each gene is a string of 2,000 to 3,000 base pairs (genetic letters).

8
00:00:54,537 --> 00:01:01,351
Among the base pairs composing active genes, each triplet (set of three) translates into an amino acid.

9
00:01:01,352 --> 00:01:14,875
The final molecular products of the genes, as transcribed outward through the cell by scores of perfectly orchestrated chemical reactions, are sequences of amino acids folded into giant protein molecules.

10
00:01:14,875 --> 00:01:19,296
There are about 100,000 kinds of protein in a vertebrate animal.