The single-celled organisms appeared to be harmless, though we were cautioned not to touch anything, to keep the windows shut, to wash our hands.

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At the time, Venter was trying to accelerate the process of sequencing whole genomes, first one-celled organisms, but ultimately gearing up to take on the decoding of the human genome.

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But even if single-celled organisms are all we can manage to discover in the foreseeable future, Darling is eloquent about the ways in which such findings are now changing how we think about our own existence.

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