What makes you human or me a penguin? Genes. These are the instructions for how to build a body which all living things have.




Tiny creatures like snails have them just as big animals like whales do. So do all plants and other living things. Genes are clumps of information about how to make parts of living bodies … a little like a recipe for a cake or a music track on a cassette tape or CD. But they don't just exist on their own. They are packaged up in long strings called chromosomes like a whole music album on tape.

All these genes - that's all the instructions needed to make you or me - are stuffed in the middle of tiny blobby packets called cells. As millions and millions of these cells stick together, what we call a body begins to form. That could be a snail, a whale; you or me. (How this 'sticking together' happens is very complicated and no-one understands it properly.)

When you grow, some of your millions of cells split into pairs of identical new ones. Start with one million and, whooo! - you've got two million - twice as big! Now this is the clever bit: all the gene instructions get copied exactly just before the cells split. This is like copying your music tape onto another blank tape to give to your friend. So every cell of every body of every living thing on the planet always has this gene body-building information - the genetic code - inside it.

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