What is a gene and what does it do?
Recipe Book Inside You
What is a gene and what does it do?
Imagine your body came with an instruction manual — a cookbook so thick it would fill a library. Inside are the recipes for making every part of you: your eyes, your bones, the curl in your hair. A gene is just one recipe in that book. That's the whole secret, and we're going to taste every page of it.
First, where does the cookbook live? In almost every cell of your body, tucked inside a tiny control room called the nucleus, there's a long, twisted ladder called DNA. It's wound up tight to fit, like a fire hose coiled in a closet. If you stretched the DNA from a single cell, it would be about two meters long — folded into a space smaller than a dust speck.
