Remember how mapping the human genome was going to lead to cures for different genetic diseases? The idea was pretty simple: compare the genes of healthy people to the genes of people with diseases ranging from cancers to allergies and – voila – fix the genes that were making them sick. Instant cures, right?

Well, maybe not.

It seems like things turned out to be a lot more complicated than that.

In The Gene Bubble published in November’s Fast Company, David Freedman explains that in spite of the billions of dollars poured into mapping the human gnome “with precious few exceptions virtually no promising new treatments or even highly useful diagnostics have emerged.”

Why?

Because of “junk DNA.” Apparently, junk DNA “accounts for 80% of a genes influence over disease and is incredibly difficult to sort out.”

According to Nadav Ahituv, a geneticist at the University of California, San Francisco:

“It’s very discouraging, but we don’t have any kind of code for understanding junk DNA. I can find the switches, but I don’t know what they do. There are switches for the switches, and switches for those switches. It’s endless.”

Meanwhile, Wired reports on a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that showed that it isn’t just the sequences of genes but how a gene is folded up. “It’s become clear that the spatial organization of chromosomes is critical for regulating the genome,” said study co-author Job Dekker, a molecular biologist at the University of Massachusetts Medical School.

So remember: even in nature, how you fold your junk matters.