BOSTON — Researchers at a laboratory in Massachusetts have accidentally discovered a microscopic organism whose genetic code breaks a rule scientists believed was nearly universal, and the scientific community has responded with the appropriate mix of excitement and the formal apology that any discovery of lawbreaking requires.
The organism, a previously unknown protist collected from pond water during a test of a new DNA sequencing technique, treats a genetic “stop” signal — the instruction that tells a cell to finish building a protein — as, essentially, a suggestion. The cell reads the stop sign, considers it, and keeps driving.
“We were not looking for a rule violation,” admitted Dr. Helen Marchetti, the study’s lead author, who has been asked approximately four hundred times whether the discovery was on purpose. “We were testing a sequencing method. The organism was in the sample. The organism, it turns out, was also in the wrong.”
The rule in question has held for essentially all known life, which is why it is called universal, which is why the organism is now being referred to in the lab’s internal correspondence, according to three separate people who have seen it, as “the defendant.”
The finding does not mean biology is broken. It means biology has always had one guy. And science, as has been well-documented, handles exceptions through paperwork.
THE DEFENDANT: KNOWN INFORMATION
- Charges: One count of disregarding a stop codon. Plea: not guilty, on grounds that it never agreed to the codon.
- Prior record: None. Entirely new species. First offense in four billion years of the statute.
- Where found: Pond water. The same pond water that has been in every lab for decades and had simply never been read carefully before.
- Sentence sought: A new textbook chapter, effective fall semester.
- Appeals: The organism is not represented. The organism is one cell.
Textbook publishers have reportedly already begun reprinting, which is the part of the process the public never sees: the moment a rule breaks, the printing presses start running, and within a school year, an entire generation of students will learn the rule with the asterisk, never knowing it used to be clean.
Philosophers have been asked what it means. They have answered, which is what philosophers are for. Dr. Marchetti was asked the same question and gave the better answer: “It means we should sequence more pond water.”
At press time, the lab had collected forty additional pond samples, and a graduate student had been put in charge of what the grant application calls “codon compliance monitoring,” which is, in the specific, the phrase a scientist uses for the word “probation.”