Interviewee: Jim Kent. Transposons and repetitive elements in the human genome.

There's a lot of different things you see when you're looking at the human genome. It's made up of many different parts. So one of the first things that comes to mind when you see it is that almost half of it is made up of these sort of quasi-viral elements that seem to exist only to reproduce themselves in your own genome. They're like, I guess you could view them as information parasites almost. They simply copy themselves and insert another copy of themselves someplace else. And half your genome is, is composed of these things. They're called transposons.

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