Cell Division and Freeway Construction

By Paul Kedrosky · Monday, November 13, 2006 ·
The following from a recent MIT lecture by Michael Yaffe on computational approaches to cancer is fascinating:
If the distance between each DNA base pair were one foot apart, then each time a cell divided, it would have to copy 568 thousand miles of DNA. This ... is enough to go around the circumference of the earth more than 22 times. What’s more, the cell has to copy its DNA with no errors. “I don’t know (if) civil engineers ... could make 10 miles of road without making single error,” says Yaffe.
1