Four decades ago astronomer Frank Drank launched the SETI program— the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. Still going strong as current president of the SETI Institute, Dr. Drake is perhaps best known for formulating the Drake equation, his attempt to estimate the number of extraterrestrial civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy. The Drake equation involves quantifying the estimated number of sunlike stars in our galaxy, the probable number of stars having planets in the stars' habitable zones, the number of planets on which scientists think life could spontaneously arise, the number of planets on which life could have evolved into intelligent beings, and how long such beings may have used communication signals (radio waves) that could be detected from earth. Using the Drake equation, the late astronomer Carl Sagan calculated there should be a million civilizations in our galaxy capable of interstellar communication. Yet, in spite of spending hundreds of millions of dollars and countless scientific resources in the search for alien intelligence—including scanning billions of frequencies and innumerable stars and presumed planets—the number of likely candidates for alien-civilization contacts astronomers have identified remains precisely zero. Meanwhile,much closer to home, over recent months researchers have issued a string of announcements about the progress of the Human Genome Project— the attempt to decode each of the almost 100,000 genes that form a human being. This effort is truly ambitious. Scientists hope, among other things, to identify and isolate genetic factors that contribute to diseases and develop preventive measures and treatments to fight them. Some expect science will, as a result, slow or even reverse the aging process. Some predict that decoding the human genome—and then the genomes of other creatures—will lead to a scientific revolution that could surpass the astounding advancements of the space age. Is there a connection between these two great scientific ventures? SETI is dedicated to searching for signs of alien-nonearthly-intelligent life. The Human Genome Project seeks to decode the product of an intelligence we are only beginning to comprehend. What the scientists in the first project are diligently searching for, those in the second project are busily decoding and studying. And, interestingly enough, neither seems to see the connection. The SETI scientists daily search the skies for messages that could point to the presence of other intelligent life in the universe. Yet an intricate, coded message has been right under their noses the whole time. It's within each of us, in the 100 trillion cells that make up our bodies. The computer revolution has brought us remarkable advances in storage technology. We can store whole books on floppy disks and entire libraries on CDs. But nothing compares with DNA. All the instructions that reveal the design of the most complex mechanism we know—a human being—weigh only a few billionths of a gram. By some estimates the DNA from all people on arth could fit within a pair of aspirin tablets. In spite of its tiny size, the coded instructions within our DNA contain all the information needed to plan and form a human body complete with heart, lungs, kidneys, liver, digestive system and skeletal framework to support them all. It carries directions for creating the sensory organs—eyes, ears, mouth, nose and skin—and a brain with 100 billion neurons and trillions of connections to process and analyze information from the organs. And that's just the beginning. This issue of The Good News follows these themes and explores the scientific findings. Although it's impossible to do them justice in a few pages, we hope this issue's articles will encourage you to consider crucial questions about your place in the universe: How did life begin? What is its purpose? Are scientists discovering messages from an intelligence beyond earth? And, most important, what do the messages tell us?