the.com/dna

a three-billion-letter instruction manual you'll never read but obey completely.

means DNA is the molecule inside your cells that stores genetic information as a coded sequence, directing how living things are built, run, and passed on to offspring.

from An abbreviation of deoxyribonucleic acid, assembled from chemistry's plain building blocks: deoxy- (lacking one oxygen), ribo- (from ribose, the sugar at its backbone), nucleic (of the cell's nucleus, where it was first found, from Latin nucleus, 'little nut' or kernel), and -ic. The full term dates to the late 19th and early 20th centuries as biochemists named the stuff inside cell nuclei; the famous double-helix structure wasn't worked out until the mid-20th century. So the name is older than our understanding of what it actually does.

length: Stretched out, your DNA spans 60 trillion miles
shared code: You're 60 percent banana, genetically speaking
storage: All human DNA fits in a single rice grain
ancient copies: Recovered intact from million-year-old mammoth teeth
daily damage: Each cell takes tens of thousands of hits daily

for instance

rosalind franklin's photo 51 — x-ray crystallography image that revealed dna's helical structure in 1952

watson crick model 1953 — double helix model built at cambridge that won the nobel prize

human genome project — international effort completed in 2003 that sequenced all 3 billion human base pairs