© Chad Baker / GettyCan DNA predict the details of an organism that develops from it?
From Newton to Hawking, scientists love wagers. Now Lewis Wolpert has bet Rupert Sheldrake a case of fine port that: "By 1 May 2029, given the genome of a fertilised egg of an animal or plant, we will be able to predict in at least one case all the details of the organism that develops from it, including any abnormalities." If the outcome isn't obvious, then the Royal Society will be asked to adjudicate.Lewis WolpertI have entered into this wager with Rupert Sheldrake because of my interest in the details of how embryos develop, and how our understanding of this process will progress. In my latest book, How We Live and Why We Die, I suggest that it will one day be possible to predict from an embryo's genome how it will develop, and I believe it is possible for this to happen in the next 20 years.
I am, in fact, being a little over-keen because 40 years is a more likely time frame for such a breakthrough. Cells and embryos are extremely complicated: for their size, embryonic cells are the most complex structures in the universe.
Animals develop from a single cell, a fertilised egg, which divides to produce cells that will form the embryo. How that egg develops into an embryo and newborn animal is controlled by genes in the chromosomes. These genes are passive: they do nothing, just provide the code for proteins. It is proteins that determine how cells behave. While the DNA in every cell contains the code for all the proteins in all the cells, it is the particular proteins produced in particular cells that determine how those cells behave.