Free The Violinist's Thumb: And Other Lost Tales of Love, War, and Genius, as Written by Our Genetic Code by Sam Kean Page A

there’s no profound reason DNA codes for twenty amino acids and not nineteen or twenty-one. Nor was there any profound reason (as some hoped) that a given triplet called for a given amino acid. The entire system was accidental, something frozen into cells billions of years ago and now too ingrained to replace—the QWERTY keyboard of biology. Moreover, RNA employs no fancy anagrams or error-correcting algorithms, and it doesn’t strive to maximize storage space, either. Our code is actually choking on wasteful redundancy: two, four, even six RNA triplets can represent the same amino acid. * A few biocryptographers later admitted feeling annoyed when they compared nature’s code to the best of the Tie Club’s codes. Evolution didn’t seem nearly as clever.
    Any disappointment soon faded, however. Solving the DNA/RNA code finally allowed scientists to integrate two separate realms of genetics, gene-as-information and gene-as-chemical, marrying Miescher with Mendel for the first time. And it actually turned out better in some ways that our DNA code is kludgy. Fancy codes have nice features, but the fancier a code gets, the more likely it will break down or sputter. And however crude, our code does one thing well: it keeps life going by minimizing the damage of mutations. It’s exactly that talent that Tsutoma Yamaguchi and so many others had to count on in August 1945.

    Ill and swooning, Yamaguchi arrived in Nagasaki early on August 8 and staggered home. (His family had assumed him lost; he convinced his wife he wasn’t a ghost by showing her his feet, since Japanese ghosts traditionally have none.) Yamaguchi rested that day, swimming in and out of consciousness, but obeyed an order the next day to report to Mitsubishi headquarters in Nagasaki.
    He arrived shortly before 11 a.m. Arms and face bandaged, he struggled to relate the magnitude of atomic warfare to his coworkers. But his boss, skeptical, interrupted to browbeat him, dismissing his story as a fable. “You’re an engineer,” he barked. “Calculate it. How could one bomb… destroy a whole city?” Famous last words. Just as this Nostradamus wrapped up, a white light swelled inside the room. Heat prickled Yamaguchi’s skin, and he hit the deck of the ship-engineering office.
    “I thought,” he later recalled, “the mushroom cloud followed me from Hiroshima.”
    Eighty thousand people died in Hiroshima, seventy thousand more in Nagasaki. Of the hundreds of thousands of surviving victims, evidence suggests that roughly 150 got caught near both cities on both days, and that a handful got caught within both blast zones, a circle of intense radiation around 1.5 miles wide. Some of these
nijyuu hibakusha,
double-exposure survivors, had stories to make stones weep. (One had burrowed into his wrecked home in Hiroshima, clawed out his wife’s blackened bones, and stacked them in a washbasin to return them to her parents in Nagasaki. He was trudging up the street to the parents’ house, washbasin under his arm, when the morning air again fell quiet and the sky was once again bleached white.) But of all the reported double victims, the Japanese government has recognized only one official
nijyuu hibakusha,
Tsutomu Yamaguchi.
    Shortly after the Nagasaki explosion, Yamaguchi left his shaken boss and office mates and climbed a watchtower on a nearby hill. Beneath another pall of dirty clouds, he watched his cratered-out hometown smolder, including his own house. A tarry radioactive rain began falling, and he struggled down the hill, fearing the worst. But he found his wife, Hisako, and young son, Katsutoshi, safe in an air-raid shelter.
    After the exhilaration of seeing them wore off, Yamaguchi felt even more ill than before. In fact, over the next week he did little but lie in the shelter and suffer like Job. His hair fell out. Boils erupted. He vomited incessantly. His face swelled. He lost hearing in one ear. His reburned skin flaked off, and beneath it his flesh