Looking for a really exotic place to capture your imagination? You don't need to travel far.
Could there be a stranger place on Earth? Is there one area with more TV documentaries devoted to it? Maybe, but Area 51 in Nevada certainly has peaked the interest of millions who seek answers to the unknown. If there were critters from outer space, they, too, would be intrigued. Why? Just the number of names for the place is astounding. Area 51 also goes by Homey Airport, KXTA, Groom Lake, Dreamland, Paradise Ranch, Home Base, and Watertown, and to that list we can add Restricted Area 4808 North, which can be shortened to R-4808N. National Geographic has made a documentary. National Geographic! We all know how prestigious we consider those guys. If they think there’s enough material there for a documentary, there must be something significant about the place. And if the place is “restricted,” then the government “MUST,” so the aficionados say, “be hiding something, some alien or alien spacecraft deep in an underground hangar. They won’t release the secret information.”
Photo 51 is not a picture of Area 51 taken from a satellite. Rather, it’s a bit more of a close-up image. And it’s not even a photo on the order of what you do with your digital camera and your printer. It’s an X-ray image of DNA, and it’s the one Rosalind Franklin and her team of X-ray crystallographers made in the early 1940s. Photo 51 was, like Area 51, somewhat mysterious. But unlike Area 51, Photo 51 led to some very concrete information and revealed a secret. It’s the image that helped Watson and Crick uncover the mysterious structure of DNA, a discovery that has led to all we know today about the genomes of humans and other life and to branches of medical research that were as alien to the world before the early 1950s as Area 51 still seems to be for many people today.
Nature, not the US government, had hidden the structure of DNA for our first 200,000 years on the planet. For 10,000 human generations Nature had kept the secret in a place restricted from view. All of our ancestors were a collective secret place. All of them hid the secret of life deep within their cells. But now we know, and our knowledge has had practical applications, even leading to efforts to heal the sick.
Why are so many more people seemingly interested in Area 51 than in Photo 51? Is the mystery of life elsewhere in the universe greater than the mystery of life on Earth? Look around. There are strange creatures everywhere: tube worms in the deep ocean, bacteria deep in rocks, starfish and the corals on which they feed, insects and arachnids, pandas and yaks. We are surrounded by alien-looking creatures in our air, water, and land. But here’s the difference. Through DNA and our chemical composition we appear to be related to all of them in some way. You want to find a mysterious place? Look around. Look at your own body. You hold more secrets than any government restricted area could ever hold. You are the embodiment of Photo 51. You are the secret held for 10,000 generations. National Geographic needs to produce another documentary just about you, the mysterious place of life's secrets.
Could there be a stranger place on Earth? Is there one area with more TV documentaries devoted to it? Maybe, but Area 51 in Nevada certainly has peaked the interest of millions who seek answers to the unknown. If there were critters from outer space, they, too, would be intrigued. Why? Just the number of names for the place is astounding. Area 51 also goes by Homey Airport, KXTA, Groom Lake, Dreamland, Paradise Ranch, Home Base, and Watertown, and to that list we can add Restricted Area 4808 North, which can be shortened to R-4808N. National Geographic has made a documentary. National Geographic! We all know how prestigious we consider those guys. If they think there’s enough material there for a documentary, there must be something significant about the place. And if the place is “restricted,” then the government “MUST,” so the aficionados say, “be hiding something, some alien or alien spacecraft deep in an underground hangar. They won’t release the secret information.”
Photo 51 is not a picture of Area 51 taken from a satellite. Rather, it’s a bit more of a close-up image. And it’s not even a photo on the order of what you do with your digital camera and your printer. It’s an X-ray image of DNA, and it’s the one Rosalind Franklin and her team of X-ray crystallographers made in the early 1940s. Photo 51 was, like Area 51, somewhat mysterious. But unlike Area 51, Photo 51 led to some very concrete information and revealed a secret. It’s the image that helped Watson and Crick uncover the mysterious structure of DNA, a discovery that has led to all we know today about the genomes of humans and other life and to branches of medical research that were as alien to the world before the early 1950s as Area 51 still seems to be for many people today.
Nature, not the US government, had hidden the structure of DNA for our first 200,000 years on the planet. For 10,000 human generations Nature had kept the secret in a place restricted from view. All of our ancestors were a collective secret place. All of them hid the secret of life deep within their cells. But now we know, and our knowledge has had practical applications, even leading to efforts to heal the sick.
Why are so many more people seemingly interested in Area 51 than in Photo 51? Is the mystery of life elsewhere in the universe greater than the mystery of life on Earth? Look around. There are strange creatures everywhere: tube worms in the deep ocean, bacteria deep in rocks, starfish and the corals on which they feed, insects and arachnids, pandas and yaks. We are surrounded by alien-looking creatures in our air, water, and land. But here’s the difference. Through DNA and our chemical composition we appear to be related to all of them in some way. You want to find a mysterious place? Look around. Look at your own body. You hold more secrets than any government restricted area could ever hold. You are the embodiment of Photo 51. You are the secret held for 10,000 generations. National Geographic needs to produce another documentary just about you, the mysterious place of life's secrets.
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