I can’t read Philip Ball’s ambitious and eye-opening book without remembering the stupidest thing I ever heard a scientist say. It was in grad school, years ago, at a seminar on big questions in biology.
Living things have different kinds of symmetry, we were reminded. Humans are bilateral: you can bisect us and get two mirror images. The real mystery, the prof intoned, was how you get a human, which is bilateral, out of DNA, which is not.
I was the only non-molecular biologist there. “We don’t start life as strands of DNA,” I spluttered. “We start as eggs and sperm. Did your dad never have that chat with you?” I hoped the slight levity would soften my outburst. It didn’t. He ignored me. Everyone else glared. I snuck out.
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