Word: nucleus
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...blank stare from most Americans, whose taxes will largely support the project's estimated $3 billion cost. Explains biochemist Robert Sinsheimer of the University of California at Santa Barbara: "The human genome is the complete set of instructions for making a human being." Those instructions are tucked into the nucleus of each of the human body's 100 trillion cells* and written in the language of deoxyribonucleic acid, the fabled DNA molecule...
...concern, as well as the cost, reflects the complexity of the human genome and the magnitude of the effort required to understand it. DNA is found in the human-cell nucleus in the form of 46 separate threads, each coiled into a packet called a chromosome. Unraveled and tied together, these threads would form a fragile string more than 5 ft. long but only 50 trillionths of an inch across...
...chromosomes? Scientists cleverly tackled that problem by fusing human cells with mouse cells, then growing hybrid mouse-human cells in the laboratory. As the hybrid cells divided again and again, they gradually shed their human chromosomes until only one -- or simply a fragment of one -- was left in the nucleus of each cell...
...refining their techniques in experiments with mice, and Mulligan believes that the first human-gene-therapy experiments could occur in the next three years. Looking further ahead, other scientists are experimenting with a kind of genetic microsurgery that bypasses the retrovirus, mechanically inserting genes directly into the cell nucleus...
FOOTNOTE: *Except red blood cells, which have no nucleus...