What’s in a name?
For this week’s assignment, I looked at the New York Times science section online. The article I read was titled “Now: The Rest Of The Genome,” and it was written by Carl Zimmer.
The article was about how the definition of DNA as we know it might not be entirely accurate, and how this might affect the future of the Human Genome Project. For years, students have been taught in high school biology class that a gene is, according to the article, “a single chunk of DNA encoding on a single protein.” DNA makes genes, and genes are passed on from parent to child. This was generally accepted as the truth. However, scientists are beginning to question the validity of this definition, saying that perhaps it is not the DNA that plays the most important role in genetics.
The coverage of this subject does not seem sensationalized. The writer presents straight facts, none of which seem aimed at grabbing the reader’s attention. While the contents of the article are controversial and innovative, they are not presented in such a way as to make them seem more interesting than they actually are.
The research in the article is straightforward and clear. The analysis is not biased or sugarcoated in any way, and the main goal seems to be to help the reader understand all the scientific terms, rather than get a subjective point across.
The reporter did a very good job of answering questions about the topic. When I first started reading the article, I was skeptical as to whether there could be logic behind the claim that DNA isn’t the main component of genetics. I also was confused by some of the terminology, but by the end of the article, both problems had been solved.
The sources quotes in the article seemed very credible and I had no trouble believing them. Three doctors of various subjects were quoted about different aspects of genetics, and what they had to see seemed perfectly believable to me.
Because the story was about such a controversial idea that shakes the foundations of what we know, it was important to me that the writer qualify what he was saying. He did a good job with this, least of all through the research he cited. Also, he made it very clear that even though all these new discoveries are being made about the genome, there is still so much that we don’t know, and that we as readers need to keep that in mind.
Even though I am not a huge fan of science, and I struggle to understand it, this article was very interesting to me, and I thought the writer did an excellent job of presenting his work in an un-sensationalized manner.
