Cracking the Code of Life. Cracking the Code of Life PBS Airdate: April 17, 2001 ROBERT KRULWICH: When I look at this—and these are the three billion chemical letters, instructions for a human being—my eyes glaze over. But when scientist Eric Lander looks at this he sees stories. ERIC LANDER (Whitehead Institute/MIT): The genome is a storybook that's been edited for a couple billion years. And you could take it to bed like A Thousand and One Arabian Nights, and read a different story in the genome every night.
ROBERT KRULWICH: This is the story of one of the greatest scientific adventures ever, and at the heart of it is a small, very powerful molecule, DNA. For the past ten years, scientists all over the world have been painstakingly trying to read the tiny instructions buried inside our DNA. J. ROBERT KRULWICH: And what it's telling us is so surprising and so strange and so unexpected. ERIC LANDER: How different are you from a banana? ERIC LANDER: You may feel different... ROBERT KRULWICH: I eat a banana. We asked Dr. DNA Interactive: Discovering the DNA Structure and beyond. DNA Science and Technology Behind Paternity Testing and DNA Immigration Tests. DNA from the Beginning - An animated primer of 75 experiments that made modern genetics.