Erez Lieberman Aiden was an undergraduate at Princeton University in 2000 when scientists announced with great fanfare that they had sequenced the first human genome, yielding a trove of information about what happens inside every human cell. But Aiden wondered what it would be like to see what was happening inside a human cell. How does this gigantic genome—which would stretch 2 meters if you unwound it from its 5-micron-wide coil in the nucleus—actually go about its work?
To get to the bottom of this central question, he parlayed his mathematics major into applied math and health sciences and technology Ph.D. work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and at Harvard University, where he is currently a Harvard Fellow. Today in the journal Science, he explains the fruit of this work: a technique for mapping the genome that has already shed light on the human genome in all its 3-D glory. The essay won this year’s GE & Science Prize for Young Life Scientists.
To read the full, original article click on this link: Human Genome Untangled in 3-D [Video]: Scientific American
