Interviewee: Matt Ridley. Matt Ridley talks about chromosome 8, transposable elements.

Here on chromosome 8, as on all the other chromosomes, there is a lot of "junk" DNA. Something like 97 percent of our DNA doesn't consist of protein coding genes. About half the rest of it, does actually seem to consist of short repeats that are repeated over and over again. These are a bit like computer viruses. They're stretches of text that have been copied over and over again within our DNA. They're good at jumping in and out of chromosomes and landing in unexpected places, leaving copies of themselves behind. If they land in the middle of a gene, they can cause a genetic disease.

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