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* If you're a movie fan, you rrangement of these building blocks. In the Seattle Flu Study, the idea was that all the samples gathered from hospitals and from public places would be tested. When one tested positive for the flu, the case would be marked on a digital map showing, nearly in real time, how many people in Seattle had the flu. Then the virus would go through a further step: Its genetic code would be studied and compared with genes from other flu viruses found around the world. This genetic work would be a key part of the Seattle Flu Study, because it would let the scientists understand how different cases were related to each other. How do different flu strains enter the city? If there was an outbreak at the university, how far would it spread within the community? Genetic information is so useful due to a fortuitous flaw in the way genes work. Every time a pathogen makes a copy of itself (or forces the host cell to do the copying, as a virus does), it duplicates its genetic code, or genome. The genomes of all living things are made up of just four building blocks, which we represent as As, Cs, Gs, and Ts.* If you're a movie fan, you might remember a sci-fi film with Uma Thurman and Ethan Hawke about genetically enhanced humans, the title of which--Gattaca--is a clever arrangement of these building blocks. The genome gets passed down from one generation to the next, ensuring that children resemble their biological parents. It is what makes a person a person, a virus a virus, and a pomegranate a pomegranate. The more complex an organism is, the longer its genome is. COVID's consists of about 30,000 As, Cs, Gs, and Ts, while yours and mine consist of several billion. * Viruses actually have Us instead of Ts, but the two substances are functionally identical, so I am sticking with Ts for the sake of simplicity.