2024-12-04
14 分钟From the online Trends that dominated 2024.
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You're listening to Short Wave from NPR.
Hey, hey, shortwavers.
John Hamilton here filling in for Regina Barber, who is caravanning somewhere in the Southern hemisphere.
So here's a question.
What makes a human distinctly human?
Back in 2003, there was this idea that scientists might be about to answer that question because they had more or less completed a map of the human genome that meant they could read all the genetic instructions you need to build and maintain a member of our species.
But that was really just the beginning, because a genome is the genetic blueprint for just one species.
To understand how humans are different from other animals and how animals are different from one another, scientists will need lots of genomes.
Fortunately, they're working on it.
So we're trying to take one or two individuals per species and sequence the genetic code, the entire code of that animal that represents that species and do that for everybody.
And we're putting it into a database that we're calling genome arc, with the pun intended like, you know, an arc to basically save the genetic code of all species on the planet.
That's Eric Jarvis, a dancer and neuroscientist from Rockefeller University, who says these days he is heavily into genomics.
He's also an expert on the brain circuits that allow species, including people and some birds, to learn new vocalizations.
Eric chairs the Vertebrate Genomes Project.
It's an international group of scientists who plan to sequence the genomes of about 70,000 species.