Juan Enriquez, Senior Research Fellow and Director of the Harvard Business School of Life Science Project, wrote a book entitled ‘As the Future Catches You: How Genomics and Other Forces Are Changing Your Life, Work, Health, and Wealth’. An excerpt from his book reads

The dominant alphabet is rapidly becoming the language that codes for all lifeforms, DNA/proteins. This is already creating the world’s largest data/knowledge sets, and it has started to change large portions of the global economy including chemicals, pharmaceuticals, energy, biotech, food, seeds, and cosmetics.

So, now that we realize how important DNA is in the grand scheme, maybe we should take some time to study more about it.   The University of Utah Learn.Genetics website has a very good do-it-yourself (DIY) experiment that shows you how to extract the DNA from dried green split peas.  What is really cool about this tutorial is that it uses tools and ‘chemicals’ that you probably have on-hand in your kitchen.  Before you do the ‘hands-on’ experiment though, view the virtual DNA Extraction Lab and learn a bit about the science behind this experiment.  Give it a try!