Of course this wasn’t junk.
Table lamps were very popular items of home furnishing in those days. Father turned the bases on his lathe & fitted the electrics, mother made the shades – pleated silk was particularly popular.
One day after he was invited in to admire the newly-completed lamp adorning the living room he asked Mummy: Do you remember that piece of wood you threw in the dustbin?
It was now of course the base of the new lamp.
It is a good thing that no housekeeping molecular biologist ever came up with a plan for getting rid of the junk in the human genome. While we admire & congratulate them for all the work that has brought us to the stage of understanding that most of our DNA does serve a vital purpose, we hope they will spare us from lofty reminders that ‘junk DNA’ is a phrase they no longer use.
Especially those of us who, with no scientific qualifications to speak of, maintained all along that it could not be junk. Nature may be profligate, but that is not the same as carelessly wasteful. Why go to all the effort of continually dividing & accurately copying mere clutter?
One of the most exciting things about the latest finding, that our genome contains c4 million switches which activate the mere 20,000 protein-coding genes provides a whole new set of questions to answer – the more we know, the more we know we don’t know.
One that I should like to ask is – are they simple binary, on/off switches, or do they function like taps, or dials turning up the volume?
And who (or what) turns the switches on or off, up or down, & makes sure that they are operating in the right order & combinations?
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