The Smithsonian's 'Genome: Unlocking Life's Code' exhibit.

When the National Institutes of Health approached the Smithsonian Institute about doing a human genome exhibit at the Natural History Museum in Washington, D.C. in 2011, the NIH thought it had good timing: 2013 marks the 10th anniversary of the sequencing of the human genome, and the 60th anniversary of James Watson and Francis Crick's discovery of DNA's structure.

Little did the people behind the exhibit know that when they decided to open the it, genomics would be a topic of national conversation and DNA-based ancestry projects. Visitors in Washington will get a chance to see the 29,000-square-foot exhibit starting today.

In the past few weeks, the Supreme Court has ruled on two landmark cases involving human genetics: On June 3, the court ruled that law enforcement could take DNA swabs of anyone who has been arrested, a decision that could open the door for the creation of a national DNA criminal database. On Thursday, the court ruled that naturally occurring human DNA is inherently not patentable.

[READ: Supreme Court: Human Genes Can't Be Patented]

"Genomics raises a lot of really interesting social questions in people's minds," says Kirk Johnson, director of the museum. "It's a regular drumbeat in the news. We're trying to arm people with the basic understanding of this so they can understand the challenges and make their own decisions."

Some of those challenges include the moral implications of human cloning, genetic engineering, prenatal genetic testing and the creation of genetically modified organisms.

But creating an engaging museum exhibit about genetics isn't exactly easy: Even when magnified to hundreds of times its microscopic size, DNA is, at its heart, a series of bonded chemicals. The best visual representation of it is a bunch of A's, C's, T's and G's (for adenine, cytosine, thymine and guanine, respectively, the four "nucleic acids" that make up every single living thing on Earth).

"It's not quite looking at a dinosaur," says Eric Green, director of the National Human Genome Research Institute at the NIH, which headed the Human Genome Project. "We had to bring it to life; we had to make it engaging for the middle school visitor."

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Smithsonian Opens Genetics Exhibit

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