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Cut’n paste
Creating frankensteins or fantastic futures?
Panditji has come to the railway station today to receive his niece Shreya. He is excited because he is meeting her for the first time in 12 years! The train arrives, and scores of people start getting off it. Pandit ji spots Shreya standing amidst the crowd, looking lost, and goes to her. Pandit ji: Hello Shreya! How are you? Shreya: Oh Pandit ji! I’m fine, how are you? How did you spot me so quickly among so many people? Pandit ji: Oh you look exactly like your grandmother – as fair, with the same curly locks… And these hazel brown eyes… like your father. It obviously flows in your family. I just hope you do not have his temper.
Pandit ji: There you go again! Your laugh is unmistakably like your grandmother. Shreya: I know. Actually, everybody tells me that I’m so much like my granny. At least I now know how she looked when she was young. But Pandit ji, isn’t it kind of strange that I resemble her so closely? Pandit ji: It is not strange at all. It’s in your genes. Your genes decide all your physical traits, and pass them through generations. In fact they do much, much more… Yes Shreya, genes determine how we are – we have curly hair or straight, we are fair or dark, we are tall or short, we have freckles or not, how we behave, what we like or dislike and even what disease we might be prone to! And it’s not just human beings who have genes. All plants and animals have genes too. So what are these genes? The blueprint Cells are the structural and functional unit of all known living organisms. So how do they know what their tasks are? Say, how does a cell in our inner nose know it has to support smelling and not hearing? Well, it gets instructions – just like we do when we perform– telling it what its role is in the functioning of the human body. These instructions with all the necessary information lie in the nucleus (core) of every cell. Each nucleus of a human cell has 23 pairs or 46 chromosomes. Chromosomes act as cases for a molecule (chemical compound) called DNA (DeoxyriboNucleic Acid), which stores all the instructions. Are you wondering how molecules can store so much of information? Well, DNA molecules are made of two twisting, paired strands called Double Helix. They look like twisted ladders! And the ladder’s rungs are made of four-letter DNA alphabet (chemical units, called nucleotide bases):  which pair specifically: an A always pairs with a T and a C always pairs with a G. Now, these alphabets make words: 
...and these words make sentences 
...Thus, a cell is “told” what it has to do! This is how our nose cells know that they have to work with other cells in the group to smell (and not to hear). Do you know what these sentences are called, Shreya? GENES.
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Twenty different types of amino acids combine to create me. I make up body structures like tissue and organs, control chemical reactions (as enzyme), carry signals between cells (as hormone), and act as antibody to protect from foreign particles like viruses and bacteria.
