VivaSync

The Present: We're Less Wrong Now

Before we jump into how wrong many of history's great thinkers were, here's what we know now. A sperm cell and an egg cell each contain half the DNA to make a person. Encoded in that DNA are genes – instructions on how to make everything from eyelids to elbows. Some traits, like height, use a combination of instructions from both parents' DNA. For others, like eye color, one copy can win out over another. And you're stuck with the DNA you have - it doesn't pick up new traits over your lifetime to pass to the next generation.

We just told you DNA doesn’t change over your lifetime, but it’s a little more complicated than that. While the underlying code doesn’t change, your DNA can pick up chemical tags that change how and when its read based on your environment. And those changes can be passed down to future generations.

Your DNA has 6 billion base pairs that code for about 20,000 genes. And also a lot of junk that never gets used.

Step 1: A sperm and egg each contains half the genetic material to make a human - 23 bundles of DNA called chromosomes.

Step 2: A sperm and egg join up to make a zygote. It's just one cell, but has all the instructions it needs to grow into a whole new human.

Step 3: That zygote starts dividing to grow, and each new cell contains all 46 parental chromosomes.

~500-400 BC: It’s All About Dad

In about 500 BC, ancient Greek philosophers like Hippocrates and Pythagoras believed fathers held the answers to heredity. They thought that men’s semen floated around their bodies and collected the essence of their bodies, from their height to physical strength to hair color. That essence would condense into a person in the womb. They also thought that if a person’s body changed, that fluid would record and pass on those changes - so a weightlifting daddy would make a muscular baby.

Yes, that’s the same Pythagoras as from geometry class. He was fascinated by the elegance of triangles and thought babies worked the same way.

One classic example to illustrate this wrong idea is an explanation for how giraffes got their long neck.

Imagine that way back in history there was a short necked giraffe that finished eating all the easy-to-reach leaves. And so it stretched and stretched and stretched its neck to reach more leaves.

It's body would pick up on the neck stretching, and its child would be born with a slightly longer neck.

And then that child would stretch, and stretch and stretch, and its child would have an even longer neck. And all the way up to giraffes.

These days we know this isn’t true, but it sure was a tempting idea for generations of scientists!

~300 BCE: Wait, What about Women?

A few hundred years later in around 300 BC, Aristotle pointed out that some kids also look like their moms and grandmas, and that traits like grey hair showed up after somebody made kids, but still made it into the next generation. He introduced the idea that it might be instructions that are passed along instead of a physical template, a blueprint rather than bricks. But he did stick to the idea that info got captured by semen and menses floating around the body.

Aristotle also thought that the father provided the baby’s spirit, or pneuma, which would power up the rest of its organs

It’s getting hot in here! Aristotle believed that temperature played a role in determining if the baby would be a boy or girl. That’s not how human sex determination works, but it’s true for reptiles! Warm nest temperatures make sea turtles female, and cold temperatures make them male.

Aristotle did some of the first recorded observations of embryo development by partially opening chicken eggs and watching the heart beat.

1000: We Inherit More than Good Looks

Father of surgery Al-Zahrawi wrote an enormous encyclopedia on medicine around 1000. He also wrote the first detailed record we have of a hereditary disease, which is an illness that is passed along in a family. Now we know that disease - a clotting disorder called hemophilia - is more common in men than in women because it’s linked to the X chromosome. If one of a woman’s X chromosomes has the hemophilia mutation, she has a backup and will avoid most of the symptoms. But if she passes that mutated copy to her son, he will have hemophilia. Colorblindness is another sex linked trait.

Hemophilia became well known in the 1800s when it became common in Europe’s royal families due to generations of inbreeding

If a man has a disease-causing gene on his x-chromosome, he will have the disease.

If he has a baby with a woman who doesn't have that broken gene, any boy they have will be disease free, because he does not pass on the damaged X chromosome.

But if they have a daughter, he will pass on that disease-causing gene. The baby girl won't have the illness, because she has a backup copy of the X chromosome from her mother that can compensate.

Now, each time that daughter has a baby, she has a 50% chance of passing on the damaged x chromosome.

That means her sons have a 50% chance of having the disease, but her daughters will just have a 50% chance of being a carrier like her. They'd only have the disease if their father also passed on a damaged copy.

1600s: Honey, We Shrunk the Kids?

When Antonie van Leeuwenhoek vastly improved the microscope in the 1600s and observed living cells for the first time, humanity started to understand we are made up of tiny parts. And then we jumped to the conclusion that we’re so complex that the only way we could make something as complicated as a baby human was if it was already put together and just needed to grow. This miniature human was called a homonculus, and scientists thought it was fully pre-formed inside either a sperm cell or an egg cell, and needed just a womb to grow in or a sperm to jump-start.

The first record we have of cells is from Roberte Hooke, who looked at cork under a microscope and noticed the texture. Because the cells were dead, they didn’t have any of the other structures inside a living cell.

1800s: Darwin’s Problem

In the 1800s, Charles Darwin had big ideas about how species evolved when natural selection killed off members with bad traits. But he didn’t have a good grasp on how those traits were passed along from parent to child. What he put forth was similar to Hippocrates’s idea - that body parts emit particles that affect eggs and sperm. He called them gemmules, thinking that better body parts produced better gemmules, and that each parents gemmules would blend in a baby. But his theory of evolution kind of needed inherited traits to be stable, unchanging units.

Darwin almost read an excerpt of a paper by Gregor Mendel that would have given him the data he needed to understand this, but he skipped over that page while he was reading.

Another blow to the idea that body parts passed along information came from a scientist who cut off generations of mouse tails to prove that mice were still born with tails.

Darwin's cousin Francis Galton tried to test Darwin's idea by injecting blood from one kind of rabbit into another.

If rabbits really had little particles called gemmules that collected information about their characteristics, transferring those gemmules into another rabbit should make that bunny's babies look different.

Of course, that didn't happen. There are no gemmules, so the rabbit babies looked like their parents, not their 'gemmule' donors.

1800s: Mistakes Were Made

Gregor Mendel was a 19th century monk who liked to tinker in his garden. He bred generations of pea plants and meticulously kept track of each plant’s traits from size to color to seed shape. He observed that parental traits didn’t blend together in a baby pea plant, but appeared and disappeared with mathematical precision. This could have been a breakthrough, demonstrating to the scientific world that traits were passed on in stable units of information, but everyone ignored his work. He even wrote to a scientist he admired for advice, who thought his experiment was dumb and told him to switch to a different kind of plant that happened to be much more complicated.

Mendel pollinated each of his thousands of pea plants by hand, carefully using a paintbrush to transfer the pollen and not contaminate another plant.

Genes flow through generations without blending. Even if a white plant's color is overpowered by a purple partner, that gene still exists and can pop up in the future.

1950s: Discovering DNA

To really understand how something works, you have to know what it looks like. Many scientists got almost all the way there but fell short. One figured out the bases stacked flat on top of each other like coins, another almost figured out how the bases paired together, but no one put all the pieces together until the 1950s when James Watson and Francis Crick used data from Rosalin Franklin and other scientists to unveil the elegant double helix. This discovery allowed researchers the first glimpse of how our traits are physically coded in our DNA.

1970s: Cracking the Code

Knowing the general shape of DNA is good, but until scientists could read the code, they couldn’t make a lot of progress in understanding how our genes affect our health and lives. At first, it was slow. One of the first published DNA sequences was just 24 base pairs long and took the team two full years in the 1970s. But by the late 1980s, computers could read 1000 base pairs a day. Once they could read the sequence of a gene, scientists still had to figure out what it does.

When a scientist wants to know what a gene does in the body, they often will genetically engineer an animal with a broken version of that gene. If they figure out what goes wrong when the gene is broken, they can learn its function.

DNA sequences: One gene in the 1970s.

DNA sequences: Up to the 32 billion basepairs in an axlotl in 2018.

1990s: Putting it All Together

In the early 1990s, the international community came together to sequence the entire human genome, all 3 billion base pairs. Techniques for computerized gene sequencing got faster and faster and they finished in 2003. Over the last 20 years, the cost of sequencing a genome has dropped from more than $100 million to just $1,000. And now, scientists are learning to quickly and accurately change DNA, perhaps in the future allowing them to cure many genetic disorders.

The Human Genome project wasn’t just a cool milestone to hit. It’s still used by genetic testing companies and researchers today as a scaffold. They can take shortcuts in their sequencing by using the reference genome as a template.

Each human’s DNA is less than 1% different than any other human. So while the Human Genome project doesn’t capture every possible genetic difference, it covers almost everything.

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