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Download The Human Genome

Posted by Roblimo on from the ultimate-in-do-it-yourself dept.

CMU_Nort writes: "The San Francisco Gate has a story about the completion of the human genome project. Apparently the University of California at Santa Cruz has put the Genome online for downloading here. I don't know about you, but I think this sort of sharing is very cool. We finally have the source for human beings. Now if only they'd GPL it."

6 of 159 comments (clear)

  1. Gotta watch those errors... by Uruk · · Score: 3

    Keep in mind that there is only a 5% genetic variance between monkeys and humans.

    Which means, that unless they checked and double checked this data, if you actually try to compile it into a human, you may end up with a 5-nosed purple haired, blind and deaf armadillo-platypus mix with ESP and a penchant for buggery. :)

    They really do need to GPL this, if for no other reason than for the NO WARRANTY clause.

    --
    -- Truth goes out the door when rumor comes innuendo. -- Groucho Marx
  2. Contig Assembly -- a mere hack isn't enough by Jonathan · · Score: 5

    Although the article doesn't really explain it, what this programmer did was write a contig assembly program -- a program that tries to find the most likely ordering of the fragments in the raw sequence data.

    While it is very impressive that a programmer was able to write a contig assembly program in four weeks, and that it only took three days to assemble the entire genome, I really doubt that this particular assembly of the genome is going to be definitive. People like Gene Meyers and Phil Green have devoted years to developing such programs, and I think the results of their programs, although probably taking more than three days to run, are likely to yield more accurate results.

  3. Re:About 1500 MBs by Animats · · Score: 3
    ow much data is in a genome...
    Human DNA is roughly a gigabyte. It's interesting that the download, compressed, is also about a gigabyte.

    Now we have the object code. Much of the rest of this century will be spent trying to disassemble and comment it.

  4. Patent your genome before it's too late! by Bruce+Perens · · Score: 3
    An oft-overlooked characteristic of the U.S. patent office is that they gladly accept models to support a patent claim. So, I suggest that Slashdot readers fill out the form and send in a test-tube to support their claim. What to put in the tube is left as an exercise for the reader :-)

    Bruce

    --
    Bruce Perens.
  5. Re:Compression by Jonathan · · Score: 5

    Actually, DNA compression is a topic of interest, not only from the standpoint of saving disk space, but also for analyzing the sequence -- areas that compress differently may have different functional roles. You can read a paper on the subject by some people I know here

  6. Argh, everything is NOT open source by Hrunting · · Score: 3

    Now if only they'd GPL it.

    Geezus, why does everything have to be related to open-source software? We're not dealing with software here, folks, no matter how many analogies you want to make.

    Guess what, the human genome is better than GPL'd. It's completely free. If you alter it, you have a copy of the new code right in the genes. We did majority of the work on decoding the genome in the last 2 years. Decoding is practically trivial now, and the finished product carries with it the code that made it.

    Everything is not software, and not everything should live by the rules of software. I personally would love to stop hearing talk about licenses with respect to the human genome and start hearing talk about the responsible use of the code. My greatest fear isn't that someone will modify the genome to create a superhuman and then not tell anyone what they did. My greatest fear is simply that the genome will be modified at all.

    There's a fine line between advocacy and zealotry