GENOMICS: REVOLUTIONIZING MEDICINE

A monumental amount of information
The human genome contains 3 billion base pairs or 6 billion individual bases. If one were to identify each by its letter (A, G, C, and T) and write those letters sequentially, the list would fill at least 200 phone books, each containing 1,000 pages. When stacked, the phone books would reach to the top of the Washington Monument. However, with modern high-density storage, that same amount of information can be stored on one or two CD ROMs.

Left: Scale illustration of phone books stacked to the top of the Washington Monument.

Right: A CD ROM can store the entire 3-billion base pair sequence of a human genome.