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The logic of life Even though the entire human genome has now been 'read' - the chemical composition of our DNA has been more or less mapped out, gene by gene - we still have a rather poor grasp of how living cells actually work. That's because the genome is not really a 'book of life', but is just a catalogue of the parts of the cellular machinery, rather like a list of all the electronic components in a complicated computer circuit. The key challenge for biologists in the twenty-firstt century is to figure out how those component genes are wired together. To do that, they may need help from physicists, electronic and computer scientists, and others.
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