26 THE STUFF OF LIFE
clobbers us. Our bodies to do sobecause t. e are vessels for toget proportion yet found in any organism—don’t do anyt all, as far asell, except reproduce themselves.
All organisms are in some sense slaves to t’s ures more or less beyond counting are prepared to die in ting. to breed, to disperse one’s genes, is t poure.
As S it: “Empires fall, ids explode, great sympten,and be is a single instinct t demands satisfaction.” From an evolutionary pointof vie a reo pass on our genetic material.
Scientists most of our DNA doesn’t doanyted findings began to turn up. First in Germany and tzerland researcs t produced curiouslyunbizarre outcomes. In one took t controlled t of a mouse’seye and inserted it into t fly. t it migerestingly grotesque. In fact, t only made a viable eye int fly, it made a fly’s eye. ures t sor for 500 million years, yet could sic material as if ters.
tory to certain cells of flies, and t it as if it heir own.
2Junk DNA does is tion employed in DNA fingerprinting. Its practicality for tally by Alec Jeffreys, a scientist at ty of Leicester in England. In 1986Jeffreys udying DNA sequences for genetic markers associated able diseases to to ly for solving criminal cases-and so it proved. A young baker cenced to terms in prison for the murders.
Over 60 percent of turns out, are fundamentally t flies. At least 90 percent correlate at some level to tail, if only tcer field,researc ode udying essentially t appeared, o