I was in the Horse Store earlier in the week looking around at all the neat stuff they have for the horse lover. As I was standing at the till, I noticed a little freebee booklet called “The Gatepost” self described at the Greatest little horse magazine. How could I resist?

The magazine seemed to flip open automatically to a page with a beautiful stylistic drawing of a DNA molecule and an article titled “Turn on Your Horse”.

As we prepared for the 21st Century, there seemed to me to be a whole trend of predicting and forecasting what would be the trends of the future. On the list of the best sellers was the book, Megatrends 2000 by John Naisbitt and Patricia Aburdene. They examined ten new directions. One of them was “The Age of Biology”

While much of what they speculated about the importance of biology, biotechnology and genetics has come become a reality, I don’t believe that they could have had any idea of how much genomics would become a part of our culture.

“Turn on Your Horse” has a little side bar FastFacts which tells us that:

• a chromosome is a large molecule containing DNA located within a cell
• horses have 32 chromosomes
• DNA contains 20,000 genes
• DNA is made up of 4 Bases (A,T,C & G)

Now that I know the FastFacts, I am pleased to read “The unknown is now known” and we “can now read your horse’s most basic structure” “and soon potentially manipulate your horse’s future”.

Wow!!!

Now I don’t want to sound as if I am criticising the article by Jake Davidson. No, in fact I really enjoyed the article and how he brings in a discussion of epigenetics and nutrigenomics. He talks about SNP’s, gene chips and microarrays. And he does all this in less than 3 full but little pages.

In an age when TV shows are about crime fighting with DNA, and every newspaper has some article on a recent genetic development. When genomics is being used by genealogists and archeologists alike and our metaphors have become much more the language of biology. We must ensure that biology is an absolute core subject in the curriculum. Furthermore, we must ensure that the biology is not just taught from an ecological perspective. Yes, the environment is important, but it is not the only important aspect. Citizens will be required to understand and make important decisions and they will need to have more than the four FastFacts to make these decisions.