Walk before you can run, read before you can write
The three ‘R’s of genetics are reading, writing, and arithmetic. Of course, only one of those skills starts with an actual letter ‘R’, but as the arithmetic portion of genetics is often met using a statistical program that happens to be called ‘R’, it’s only ‘writing’ that is the real outlier. Writing stands out in another way, besides being spelled ‘rong. We read a lot of genetic sequence (almost 1.5 trillion bases of whole genome sequence has been read, to date). We use a lot of arithmetic in figuring out what those 1.5 trillion bases are doing. However we have yet to write out a whole animal genome. We change a word here and there in the genetic code, but writing isn’t a skill we’ve mastered in genetics. That could soon change.
Though reading usually follows writing, in genetics it’s the opposite. We can read well, but writing is hard.
In general, things are written before they are read. Even the world’s sacred texts, which you could imagine might arise via supernatural fiat and spontaneously burst into being, didn’t. They were written. God wrote the ten commandments on stone tablets with his finger (pen doesn’t write well on stone, and crayons just melts in his hands). Moses wrote down the first five books (except probably the last bit, where he dies). The Vedas began as an oral tradition, the Koran was transcribed by Muhammad’s disciples, and the entire Star Wars prequel series was simply adlibbed throughout. The closest inversion of the normal order of write-> read is in the book of John, where he says that, “In the beginning was the Word”. But this doesn’t seem to be a word that was actually written somewhere. It just Is. Which certainly saves on paper.
The human genome is an exception, we first read it (that was the Human Genome Project, completed in April of 2003), and we’re now just beginning to talk about writing it.
