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Human Genome Mapping Completion TBA
rit writes: "According to this CNN article, both The Human Genome Project and Celera Genomics, Inc., two groups who have been working on mapping the human genome, are scheduled to hold news conferences Monday in which they will announce the completion of the Human Genome. This should prove interesting, and makes me wonder: what will we do next?"
Mapping that region of space where that 1 sock escapes to from the dryer.
The Blaster Master Fighting for Truth, Justice, and Evil Pie since 1979
What abominations await my "raza" now that the human genome is in their sights?
Are you adequate?
I predict that as these functions are identified, genetic research companies will patent tests for specific genes (if not the genes themselves.)
As a result, actually getting the benefits of these tests - like early warnings for predicting diseases etc. - will cost way more than it otherwise would, in order to pay the license fees the patent holders will demand (kind of like how brand-name drugs cost more than generics.) People with insurance that covers such tests will be fine, but people will find it harder and harder to get insurance as companies begin raising rates based on the results of such tests.
Some European countries will pass laws preserving individual rights to privacy which will prevent such behavior from insurance companies, but in the US it will take abuse from HMO's and insurance companies before Congress passes laws providing a weaker form of protection.
Of course, my crystal ball may be on the fritz. Check back in a few years and we'll see if any of this comes true... ;)
Finally, don't forget this is just a first draft - there's still a lot of donkey work required to map out tricky regions and to verify already covered regions.
"Just once, I'd like to meet an alien menace that wasn't immune to bullets." -- The Brigadier, Dr. Who
Celera and the government funded Human Genome Project are going to announce project completion simultaneously. Surely this is political. The question is, which one of the two is the "most complete"?
This project is probably equal or greater in scale to the Manhattan project in it's potential effect on humanity. For the next 50 years, we're going to be worrying how bio-genetics will be misused while reaping the benifits of a new revolutionary technology. I wonder what will be the equivelant of "duck and cover"? Hold your breath for as long as you can?
Humanity's revolution for the next two decades to be feuled by bio-genetic discoveries, not by advances in computing power (not that one didn't catalyze the other)
The diffrence between this and the moon is simple. It's more than just been there done that, we went to the moon proved it wasn't made of cheese after all, brought back (I believe) roughly 2000lbs of moon rock, there isn't a whole lot of new things we are going to learn. While the genome project has just started what we will be cappable of. This opens the doors for hundreds of new treatments for diseases, birth defects etc etc. Medical science is going to benifit an whole lot from this in the next 20 years. I can't wait!
I know I'm jumping the gun a lot here, since we can't do much more sophisticated things than cloning a sheep and curing cystic fibrosis in lung tissue that is not attached to an organism, but...
It strikes me that genetics are a lot like source code, and that we've sort of reverse-engineered a template for writing this code.
So the big question is: when they start coming up with genetic enhancements to make us smarter, stronger, and more fragrant, are they going to be packaged in such a way that we can't tell what they are without doing the whole reverse engineering process over again (i.e. MicroSoft Harry), or are the specs going to be put out for all to see, so that we can all create our own personalized monkey-men (i.e. GnuMonkeyMan)?
I'm a little disturbed by my own post.
"Beware he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he deems himself your master."
This is a fun time to be alive, and I'd love to see if there are any interesting results if one were to gzip DNA. I'm sure there are all kinds of interesting thing you could learn from just that.
Marxism is the opiate of dumbasses
I'd like to use this as a stepping stone to note that our genetic diversity provides a certain resiliancy to -unknown- attacks.
Since I'm a geek, I'll compare it to a computer network. [Warning: I don't know what 'mapping a genome' really means, how much we understand of which genes do what and how they interact based on the mapping.] Suppose you run a computer network. You keep up to date on all the latest patches, you read bugtraq religiously and patch all the holes you can find in your systems. You're still going to miss something somewhere. Some malevolant force creates a 'sploit versus your favorite operating system which goes undetected for some period of time. In that time, the kiddies have compromised all of your systems, bringing down the whole enterprise.
Obviously, you'd be in a better position if you used a more heterogeneous (even the word makes my analogy) network strategy. Having a system of like-configured boxes makes each box as strong as possible against KNOWN enemies, but makes the network less resiliant against UNKNOWN enemies.
In case you're having trouble following the analogy, consider the human race =~ network and human being =~ individual system.
Now the question becomes, "Who is going to want to forego protection against the known in order to protect the race against the unknown?" Imagine if computers were able to choose their own OS.. would any choose to be [insert your least favorite OS] as opposed to [insert your favorite OS], just for the good of the network, at significant personal risk?
Merely mapping (which I don't think that they have, considering we don't even know when we stop mapping the human genome.. it's not like there is a big sign that says, "You have reached the end of the genome, thank you, now go home") doesn't achieve ANYTHING. At all, I wrote DNA analysis software to identify possible "interesting" strands as they went through the processor. The methods used to map DNA, if just stuck in there will contain A LOT of contamination and misreads, hence their so called complete map is one that would be analagous to that drawn of a third grader with a crayon. Granted, they are doing a significant amount of research and should be commended for it, but just mapping doesn't mean anything.
The thing that I really have a problem with is that Celera just dumps all their gene reads into the patent office and gets rewarded the intellectual property for said read. This is complete crap - they did not discover anything that should be worthy of a patent. Maybe we should branch off a new patent office for this type of work. The read should be forced to be open and free to use after 3 years maximum, this will stop someone who figures out the gene for cancer, obesity, intelligence, whatever from forming a monopoly screwing us out of healthy, slender, really smart people.
However, I know a lot of you think that this work would not be done if they didn't patent this work so they could sell it to pharmo's to make money. You are right, they should be able to have limited commercial rights to it. The ability to cure a plague upon humanity should be a non-commercial engagement.
Just my overly long $0.02.
nerdfarm.org
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
We'll finally have the script to our bodies. Whether you believe in God or Evolution or some combination thereof, this is a landmark event. For the first time, a species will have the ability to view and eventually change its own blueprint.
My fondest hope is that our society will be able to catch up enough with technology, so we can deal with this the Right Way(tm). I think Gattaca had some very relevant messages, that need to be discussed as we move into this technology. We the public need to be very aware right now of what is happening with the patenting of genes. There is a great potential for abuse.
I'm glad that both the public project and the private sector will be announcing this together. The Human Genome Project immediately publishes their data on every night. You can be sure that Celera's downloads it every morning. It would be an affront to the scientists who did so much work in the public project if Celera tried to steal all the credit.
Be sure to check out the Charlie Rose show this week on PBS. He has been running a week long special on all this. I highly recommend it.
The more you know, the less you understand.
(We'll ignore the thorny issue of genetics-as-IP for the moment)
As I recall, large chunks (if not the majority) of our DNA is really junk information, stuff that doesn't really _do_ anything. Sorta like the bit-rot that accumulates on hard drives after a couple of years of use. That fragment over there used to be part of a tarball I deleted, that over there was part of my mail spool, and so on. Areas that once held information, but are now marked as "free blocks" and so unused.
It wouldn't suprise me to find little chunks of "how to grow a tail" or "how to put bright blue pigment in your buttocks" in human DNA.
So from the point of view of someone hoping to make money off the annotation process, you've got to hope you annotate something that's actually part of the program, instead of "how to grow gills and scales" or some such.
That strikes me as a lottery, not a business model.
BTW, can somebody in the know comment on how the annotation process works? How do you know what gene [foo] does without actually flipping it and watching the results? Do we have a good enough understanding of the inner workings of DNA that we could model it, and simulate flipping the bits?
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
As someone doing his PhD research in bioinformatics and computational biology, I'm surprised that no one here knows that what both Celera and HGP are announcing is not the 100% complete, every base is sequenced, here's the whole thing on a 3.2 Gb disk for you. They're announcing that they've assembled most of what they have into a reasonable approximation to the true sequence, with substantial sequencing errors and misassemblies left to be worked out over the next few years. Think of it as having finally finished scanning the pages of the complete works of Shakespeare, and running a first pass OCR algorithm on it - you've got the data, you can see where the plays start and end, and even alot of information about acts and scenes, but alot of cleanup and closer examination is necessary before you post it to ebooks.org
So the HGP and Celera have managed to sequence the geonome of a single person. This doesn't really address the fact that there are variations on genetic sequences even those that code for important proteins. Some of these variations cause problems but others don't. Although HGP is attempting to sequence the geonome's of 4 different people in other to get this variation, this doesn't really capture the distributions across different ethnic groups. Getting that is problem that is even larger than sequencing a few geonomes.
Another problem I see is that even if we are able to sequence the genetic code for all the proteins, what are we going to do with them. Identifying genetic diseases before they occur is all well and good but is it really that valuable if all we can tell people right now is that twenty years down the line you're going to get Hunington's disease or someother incurable ailment and die?
The outlook for coming up with effective genetic therapies is pretty bleak. We haven't really been able to treat even the diseases that are purely genetic and are caused by a well defined mutation. With this sort of track record how are we going to do against diseases that are caused by multiple mutations or where different individuals with the disease have different mutations? And this isn't even considering diseases that are caused by interactions between interactions between the gene and environment/history of the individual or disease caused non-genetic inheritance.
It seems like alot of people see genetics as a panacea for all human ills. However this overlooks the fact that the environment is just as important as genetics. In some respects, the attention that whole gene therapy is getting resembles the hype that surrounded radiation in the early 20th century when radiation was going to cure anything and everything.
"When you sit with a nice girl for two hours, it seems like two minutes. When you sit on a hot stove for two minutes, it
The first step is to use the data to help us understand what makes us tick. Why does alzheimers make us vegetables, why doesn't our body regulate fat accumulation better, why does macular degeneration occur for some and not for others.
Once we understand the workings of our bodies and how to repair them, we can greatly advance our treatment of virtually every ailment known to man (including old age). When you ask about the practical applications, I'm somewhat at a loss, there are far too many to list here.
Cloning (in comparison) is a simplistic matter, it only involves trying to copy somebody's genetic matter.
Review boards aside, this information will be used for good (hopefully predominately) and to further causes of greed or malevolence. To draw an analogy, for molecular biologists this is like having somebody dump the source code to the universe on your lap. We still have to wade through it all and figure out what it means, but we now have the friggin source (although obsfucated).
Unbreakable toys can be used to break other toys.
Knowing the amino acid sequences is a big key to being able to figure out how things work. Some examples:
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
I hereby declare my own genetic code open to the public. Anyone may use, modify, and distribute any base pair sequences that are part of me.
Interested parties may obtain samples by sending cute women to collect them. Due to restrictions imposed by nature, and the fact that I hate needles, samples may only be collected in halves, through all-natural means. Putting these sample halves back together again is your own problem.
(Well, I thought it was funny...)
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- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
IBM has already decided to throw a massive ammount of CPU power at protein folding. The supercomputer will be named Blue Gene (no, I'm not joking, I wish I was).
-B