National Geographic: The Incredible Human Body Page #2

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Narrator:
Dr. Prosser positions

the egg, magnified 400 times,

And readies the single sperm

he has selected

from a pool of hundreds.

the sperm is injected

and the critical moment

for fertilization arrives.

Like a great celestial director,

he repeats the procedure,

guiding sperm to another egg.

If this is the meeting

that proves successful,

we are observing -

in the immediacy of real time -

the first miracle of many

that will lead to

the life of a child.

At this moment,

two human destinies intertwine

as genetic material from Inez's

egg and from Darryl's sperm

are shuffled together.

Each contributes

strands of information

that will soon unite.

Like a microscopic

mountain range,

each chromosome carries genes

built of molecules of DNA -

the most basic design element

of human life.

Together, these molecules

form an intricate instruction manual -

the blueprint for

an entire new human being.

The human body, like a house,

is built from a roll-Up,

rolled-up set of blueprints,

which is rolled up

into a little chromosome

and it's a DNA sequence,

and it says "blue eyes;"

it says "female;"

it says "about five foot eight

with brown hair."

Narrator:
The epic accomplishment

of revealing our genome -

the codebook of human life -

may soon open a floodgate

of biological revelations.

Craig Venter is at the crest

of this wave of knowledge.

Venter:
A genome is our collection

of all our genetic information.

It's a four-letter alphabet

composing DNA,

and when we sequence the genome,

we determine the exact order

of roughly three billion

of those letters.

It's elegant in it's simplicity.

The genetic code

has four different chemicals;

we substitute A, C, G, and for those.

We attach

four different color dyes -

one color for each of

the letters of the genetic code.

It's like just solving

a jigsaw puzzle,

only the jigsaw puzzle has, in

our case, 27 million pieces...

So it came in a very big box

and there was no picture

on the cover.

Narrator:
Putting the pieces

of this puzzle together

has provided knowledge

that will enhance the quality

of human life -

and perhaps even extend it.

Coffey:
We're at the

very fundamental first steps

in a very powerful force.

There's some relationship

between aging and our genes.

So if we can control

those genes,

will we be able

to extend the aging process?

Well, it's distant stuff,

but probable.

Knowing the human genome,

and mapping up how it changes,

is a major step forward

in understanding

the making of this wonderful

human body that we've got.

Through the history of time,

the DNA sequence

has been marching down

through generation after

generation of your relatives,

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