As you'll often hear from geneticists these days, one person's junk is another person's treasure.
There certainly was an attitude for a long period of time that our DNA was full of junk[0], but the field has since characterized much of what we once thought was junk (i.e. non-functional DNA) actually is just non-coding DNA[1] that serves one or more of a wide array of biological functions.
In many ways, you can't really blame scientists of the 70s for thinking that much of what we now know is ncDNA was inscrutable junk. In many ways, given the technology at the time, it was.
Perhaps people should use the term "non-functional DNA" instead of "junk DNA" more often. Calling something as "junk" has unnecessarily dismissive connotations.
There certainly was an attitude for a long period of time that our DNA was full of junk[0], but the field has since characterized much of what we once thought was junk (i.e. non-functional DNA) actually is just non-coding DNA[1] that serves one or more of a wide array of biological functions.
In many ways, you can't really blame scientists of the 70s for thinking that much of what we now know is ncDNA was inscrutable junk. In many ways, given the technology at the time, it was.
It's a super interesting area of study.
[0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/5065367
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-coding_DNA