The Human Genome Project promised genetic-based cures for all the major diseases of mankind, from cancer, to Alzheimer, to schizophrenia. A quarter of a century later, and these sweeping cures haven’t materialized. Biologist Denis Noble and his co-authors Raymond Noble and Reine Bourret argue that this failure reveals a flawed foundation in modern biology: treating genes as the system’s controllers rather than its tools. For 60 years this central dogma has mislead biology. Once we overthrow it, we can transform our understanding of how species evolve.

Figure 1: diagram of the Central Dogma

Biology during the twentieth century was firmly based on Watson and Crick’s famous work on the structure of DNA. They discovered (with important data input from Wilkins and Franklin) that DNA forms double helical threads, each thread being a complementary sequence to the other. The nucleotide bases C and G join together, while A and T also do so. So, a sequence like AACGTTCC in one thread is matched by the complement TTGCAAGG. They realized that this has an important implication. When the threads are unwound, each thread can attract its complementary sequence automatically, so creating two new threads. It is easy to imagine their excitement since the quantum mechanics pioneer, Erwin Schrödinger, had proposed self-replication “like a crystal” in his book What is Life? a decade or so earlier. Crick incorporated all of this into his Central Dogma of Molecular Biology.