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PHILIP BALL | It was, in short, what felt like an immensely valuable exchange of a sort that too rarely happens.

PHILIP BALL | According to the old story, we once thought that all this other DNA was just “junk,” a term coined in this context in the 1970s. It was accumulated over the course of evolution, for example by viruses inserting their genetic material into ours, and it did nothing useful but just cluttered up our genome the way all our old detritus of a lifetime clutters up our attic.

PHILIP BALL | Someone quipped that if the ferry from Hamburg had sunk, so would have quantum physics for a generation...

PHILIP BALL | One sign of this shift is that biology is becoming more ready to accept and to speak of concepts long considered taboo...