 DNA function can be illustrated by the central dogma of biology. And I'm going to tell you that the central dogma of biology is awesome and slightly misleading, not really the complete picture of how it all works. And all I can tell you is that right now we're studying, basically we're studying genetics. Looking at DNA, we're going to spend the next chunk of time talking about heredity and diversity and what you look like and what your babies are going to look like. But we could spend an entire class on the molecular processes revolving around DNA and how it functions. And if you look at an organism, any organism, a freaking fruit fly, hopefully, I mean, a fruit fly is a phenomenal existence. It's how does it work and why does it work? It's incredible. And DNA, back in the day we thought, oh, this is how it is and it's this simple, that DNA provides instructions for building messenger RNA, which carries the message to the ribosome which builds a protein. But this is kind of the flow of information in the human body and it's like why we have DNA at all. It didn't take long before people realized, dude, it's way more complicated than this. However, the central dogma of biology has persisted and the concepts that it entails have persisted. And the concepts are what we're talking about in the next two lectures. The process of taking the information in DNA and turning it into a molecule of messenger RNA is called transcription. And the process of taking the messenger RNA and using the information in that to build a protein is called translation. And we're going to take a second to kind of expand on that just a little bit before looking specifically at transcription. That's our topic for this day.