Reading Our Genome is Tough, But Epigenetics is Giving Us Valuable Clues

When scientists sequenced the human genome a decade ago, they hoped to unlock the code of life, the sequence of molecules lined up in every cell that, summed together, made a person a person—and possibly reveal new ways to understand and treat diseases. But the results turned out to be opaque. Biologist Eric Lander, who helped lead the effort, famously summed up the results in seven words: “Genome: Bought the book; hard to read.”

So the research community went looking for CliffsNotes. A decade ago scientists started looking into the “epigenome,” chemical modifications to DNA that tell cells which genes to turn on or turn off. This week that project got a huge data dump—24 journal articles laying out what the genomicists know so far about 111 different cell types, the inner lives of brains, hearts, blood, and skin. “It is giving us a view of the living, breathing genome in motion, as opposed to a static picture of DNA,” says Manolis Kellis, a computational biologist at MIT who worked on two of the new papers.

Just about every...