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A Map to Nowhere?
Aruges writes "It seems as if there some serious doubts about the value of the human genome map. The main thrust of the problem is that since there are far fewer genes than once thought, the old idea of "one gene, one protein" has fallen by the wayside. The upshot of this is that it may be several decades before we see any benefits, if we see them at all.
Check this story on Spectator for more information."
Well, the entire genome can be fitted on a CDROM. That isn't very much data at all. Are we really saying that the human body is no more complex that a copy of Windows 2000?
Obviously, it is.
Not so "obviously" at all. A complex-looking object can easily arise from simple rules and/or simple building blocks.
When I build a house, I don't have to specify where every brick is laid. I just have to tell you how bricks fit together to make walls, and where I want the walls to be.
The Mandelbrot set is another example, for the math geeks among us. It looks infinitely complex, and it _is_ infinitely detailed, but the algorithm that produces it can be stated in one sentence.
In summary, the amount of data needed to describe the human body could conceivably be quite small.
Overall this article seems to be more a demonstration of the ability of journalists to blow scientist's claims out of proportion than the ability of scientists to make important, but incremental, discoveries. I think the article tries to be provocative, and it's not completely off-base.
However, there are number of factual details that the author leaves out here:
The number of genes predicted by these programs varies wildly (Incyte claims 100k+, Celera says ~30k). This is because these different organizations use different software packages to find the genes. But the reality is that no-one really knows yet. No one has actual studied all these genes, yet. No one has purified the actual protein molecules that they are supposed to encode. Very few (less than 1000) have been extensively studied, and in almost every one we've learned more about what makes a gene.
The sequencing of the genome is a hugely important achievement. But, as other have said, it is just a first step. It gives us the substrate upon which many many years of research will be based. It's clear that there is a lot of work left to be done. Already many research labs are moth-balling their DNA sequencers and replacing them with NMR magnets to examine the 3D structure of these gene-products. The protein folding problems remains one of the most studied, unsolved questions remaining in bioinformatics.
Hope this was somewhat useful.
-c"If you are an idealist it doesn't matter what you do or what goes on around you, because it isn't real anyway."-R.P.W.
A lot of optimism assumed that a single gene had a single function, for all time through the life of the cell. But as one would expect with a biological system, things are far more complex. Geners are "turned on" and "turned off." Multiple genes interact indirectly.
The key is that the cell is an emergent system. It exhibits extremely complex behavior as a result of vast numbers of interactions of simpler parts. Thus we may never find a "gene" that "codes for" the shape of a nose. The fact that a nose arises at all from a bunch of protein specifications is itself a clue that things are extremely complicated.
The decoding of the genome will indeed be extremely valuable. But it won't "solve" biology anymore than the understanding of the laws of gases "solves" the weather forecast problem!
The only good weather is bad weather.
I am writing a paper for Molecular Biology about this right now interestingly enough. For a long time we have had little information about bitter, sweet, and umami (monosodium glutamate... meat! (well mostly)) taste receptors.
But one day someone found that a genetic mutation at a specific allele can cause changes in a mouse that effects perception of a specific bitter taste. When they researched the area around the mutation with the genomic database, they found an entire bitter receptor. When they searched for similar bitter receptors across the entire genomic sequence, they found an entire array of bitter taste receptors! This goes for humans too. With so much less work, we've found a whole class (the T2R) of bitter taste receptors.
Now you all may say "WHO GIVES A FUCK?!?", but this is actually important. Since we never knew how sweet receptors worked, we've always guessed about what compounds will substitute for sugar. For example, all the artificial sweetners that I know of were found accidentally, with a chemist tasting the substance during lunch or dinner after working with it for something unrelated. Now that we're gaining more information about receptor function we could conceivably find the perfect artificial sweetner... BILLIONS OF DOLLARS.
Besides, if you can't see by now that finding new receptors and quick searches for similar (consensus) sequences in the genomic database isn't going to herald all sorts of scientific advances, you're pretty dense... While it's true that there are alot of different ways the genetic code is used (substitution of polyadenylation sites in leukocytes, different intron splicing in cochlea frequency detectors), we know about alot of them, and with more analysis we will continue to learn more about ourselves even faster than we ever have before.
I think the article only confirms that the author doesn't know much about genetics. No geneticist (that I've even spoken to, at least,) believes that a list of genes equals a useful API for making/modifying humans.
The clones we made of sheep, mice, and other animals resembled the products of buggy code made by lazy programmers or those forced to write shit by insane business models (remember the sig, "it compiles! Ship it!"). We didn't realize the significance of the slow, steady process of genetic replication within the embryo.
Exactly right. Cloning is a "neat hack" in the Computer Science sense: I don't know what X does, but I know enough to make a copy of it. No one involved in cloning claims they understand all the processes involved in growth... they just have used a bunch of tools to provide a proof of feasibility. Think of them as writers of "bit copiers" (for those that remember the old days of floppy disk duplication.) Ask them if it's an exact copy, and the better of them will say "I'm not sure, but it seems to work so far."
Likewise, we hurled gazillions of dollars at the genome project, in private and public searches. Why were the gazillions hurled? Because of the notion that we could find nice, patentable pieces of genetic code, controlling various physiological processes.
Now that we realize we have got a map to nowhere, lets table the whole deal until we understand more about the operation of genes.
Yep, "map" is a dumb term. I'd prefer to think of it as having the object code to an operating system and its associated applications, running on a processor that we don't have the spec for. Some crashes we can cure (they occur in application code that is clearly fixable,) but most problems are due to interactions amongst parts of the system.
Cancer is similar to the infamous Blue Screen of Death. Yes, it's obvious that something bad has happened, but we aren't going to find a line of code that says BlueScreenOfDeathNow(). It's an emergent property of a complex system.
I am all for scientific research but I worry that further pushes down this line of inquiry will be driven by the profit motive, not any kind of medical or healing motive.
You're more of an optimist that me. I reckon most easily curable deseases with be cured pretty soon. The bulk, however, will fall into the category of: "system crashes after 70 years uptime. no solution other than complete redesign."
One thing that is not at all well conveyed by the article is that people have known that the "one gene/one protein" view is oversimplified for quite some time. The concept of splicing variants, i.e. that a single gene produces a variety of related products, is something that my coworkers take as being so natural that it doesn't even bear mention. Yes, it's true that the textbooks may need to be rewritten, but that's because textbooks are always decades behind the cutting edge research.
In any case, people have already been working out ways to take advantage of the genomic data without needing to figure out in advance exactly how it is processed to produce proteins. That's because figuring out the exact splicing points is very tough, and people wanted to use the data before it was completely annotated. Thus the techniques they've been establishing are already well suited to dealing with multiple proteins coming from a single gene. It's a bump, but nothing like the drastic problem presented in the article.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
Saying that the genome project was a "map to nowhere" is the same sort of neo-luddite crap we hear from people bashing pure research all the time. Whether it is measuring the age of the universe or decoding the human genome, the simple fact of the matter is that pure research is often done for just that... research.
There is no assured outcome any time you do pure research, but the knowledge continues to prove useful in many disperate fields. Anthropology, history, medicine... they have all had tangible results ALREADY from the work that was done.
Just because the initial "decoding" is done doesn't mean that the project is finished. Much like version 1.0 of software, there is much research and debugging to be done. Not really sure what the point of this article was... We don't have instant results on April 17, 2001??? Give it time.
I would have to say that explosives are the most abused technology in all of history.
[The following makes the rhetorical assumption that the parent is not a troll]
...and when we do figure it out, will you recant and become a card-carrying atheist?
...what happens is science does end up solving the problem, and your rational reason for believing in God instantly evaporates.
This kind of "God of the Gaps" argument for the existence of God will get you in trouble. Every time a representative of "The Church" makes the following claim:
"Science can't explain X, therefore it must be the work of a Supreme Being, which therefore must exist."
So what do you do then?
There are other reasons for believing in the mystical, and some of them are much easier to defend. Read about it. That goes for all o'y'all.