Autobiography - The Galindo Group

Ram Galindo THE MAKING OF AN AMERICAN Page 156
refined even further by our desire to give our issue a better life than we ourselves had.
However, we are free to pursue this, or to ignore it, as individuals in our private lives
and as members of society in our public lives. Admittedly, our much-valued freedom of
choice can supersede the instinct if we so choose. Clearly, some of us follow the calling
to improve the lot of our children more vigorously than others. A few don’t even seem to
heed it.
Drawing on my career’s work as a real estate developer who makes things such as
subdivisions, buildings and houses come out of the ground, I often make an analogy
with the works of divine creation. The Supreme Developer, known to humanity as God,
mandated our instinct for survival and improvement by including it in our basic design.
Making a comparison with my familiar construction practices wherein we have a
complete set of drawings and specifications for the whole project in the project
manager’s office at the construction site, the Supreme Developer also placed the
specific instructions needed to construct a living creature in a carefully enclosed “office”
(the nucleus) in each and every cell (construction site) that makes up that creature (the
project). Within this nucleus, among other items needed to control the operations of the
cell, is a set of plans and specs for the whole project (the complete life form’s body), not
just the cell.
We call this set of plans the genome and the amino acids of which it is made DNA. We
know that the genomes for all life on earth, the decoded set of plans, specifications and
building materials needed to build each individual, are different from specie to specie
only in small percentages of the total, and even less so among individuals in the same
species. The majority of the plans and specs are the same for anything that lives,
pointing directly to a common creation formula.
An average human is made of around 10 quadrillion cells. All of these cells (except a
few such as male sperm and female egg) carry within their nucleus 46 chromosomes,
23 from the mother and 23 from the father. Each of these chromosomes is like a
chapter in a book, and the whole book is each person’s genome. The genome is the
book of materials specifications, labor and procedures needed to assemble the
complete living form, but it apparently says nothing about how to operate it.
The chromosomes are laid out in the shape of a double helix spiral incredibly crunched
up, some 6 feet if stretched out. (It is easy to calculate that the average human carries
60 quadrillion feet or 1,136,000 miles of it, enough to circle the globe at the equator
some 45 times). The upright sides of the double helix are made of a sugar called
deoxyribose, and the transverse rungs are made of four different nucleic acids. Thus the
name of this magical spiral is deoxyribonucleic acid, or simply, DNA. The book is written
with an alphabet that only has four letters (the base rungs). Most of the text in this book
has no apparent meaning. About 3 % is intelligible writing. These parts are what
scientists call “coding DNA” and constitute the genes that trigger most of the cells’
reproduction and repair instructions. The astounding part is that DNA likes to split right
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