Three Billion Letters of Wonder

On April 14, 2003, scientists announced what thirteen years of painstaking work had finally achieved — the Human Genome Project was complete. Researchers from twenty institutions across six countries had mapped the entire human genetic code: 3.1 billion base pairs of DNA, containing roughly 20,500 genes. It was the largest collaborative biological project in history.

Francis Collins, the geneticist who directed the effort, was not shy about what the discovery stirred in him. At the White House announcement of an earlier milestone in June 2000, he had described the genome as catching "the first glimpse of our own instruction book, previously known only to God." President Clinton, standing beside him, called it "the language in which God created life."

Consider the sheer scale. Every one of the thirty-seven trillion cells in your body carries a complete copy of this code. If you could unspool the DNA from just one cell and stretch it out, it would extend roughly six feet. Yet all of it is folded into a space far smaller than the point of a pin. And this staggering complexity begins its work in the quiet darkness of a mother's womb.

The psalmist wrote three thousand years before any microscope: "You knit me together in my mother's womb. I praise You because I am fearfully and wonderfully made" (Psalm 139:13-14). David knew nothing of nucleotides or base pairs. But he knew the Maker. And he responded the only way such knowledge permits — with wonder.