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Years Of Human Genome Data Lost In UCSC Fire
dsavitsk links to a New York Times article which reports that several years of data related to the human genome project have been lost in a fire at the University of California at Santa Cruz, seemingly with no backup.
The data was not what was lost. It's the actuall genetic strains that have been cultivating over the past 14 years. The lead of the project says that it may take that long to re-generate the same strains...
Why must we assume that what was lost was data/computers.
From my take on the article, it was physical strands of DNA / biological matter which was lost.
gus
.. if only.
Chief Hernandez said the building did not have a sprinkler system because it was built in 1987, before fire codes required one.
Well if it wasn't required, then it wasn't needed really right? Besides, I hear lab equipment and 14 years of research is very cheap these days, much cheaper than decent fire-prevention measures...
Wax-Museum Fire Results In Hundreds Of New Danny DeVito Statues
The fire probably didn't destroy much (or any) electronic data. But the genetic strains should have been "backed up" just as any of us know that we should backup our data.
My girlfriend's previous employment was in a lab that appears similar to this blackened one. They carried out research using cell lines with genetic traits that had taken years to develop. These cells can generally be frozen for later use, but since the freezer is in the same building a fire could destroy that too. So they donated cell-lines to other research groups, on the condition that they stored a portion of the sample.
Accidents happen. Data-loss doesn't need to.
Let me just rattle on a bit to try to get past the lameness filter. It seems to me, if the lameness filter really worked, Slashdot might be pretty hungry for comments. I'm not saying I don't make a lot of lameness myself, but calling something like this a "lameness" filter would be like checking if someone is breathing and calling it an intelligence test.
Furthermore, how could a site for "nerds" be set up to filter out a small snippet of source code. Hello! Earth to
Anyhow, I'm hoping that if I spew enough lame but not-lame-looking text I can actually post, what I thought was an amusing joke, but
In desperation I have now changed my nicely formatted C++ code to pseudo-code.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
Who stands to gain the most by a setback in the Human Genome Project?
God. He get's to keep the insipid sourcecode for these pesky humans closed for a few more years.
Didn't his patent expire yet?
... on the research, not the fire. If you look at the Professor's homepage, you can see that he was working on:
Our work centers on the mechanisms and regulation of splicing. Splicing is required to remove intron sequences from pre-mRNA and create coding sequences for translation. Yeast has been our organism of choice for these studies because it offers simple, powerful genetic approaches and has a splicing machinery similar to that in mammalian cells. In addition the yeast genome is completely sequenced, the location of nearly every intron is known and genes for most splicing factors have been identified. This provides unique advantages for the study of splicing.
Kinda puts some perspective on what was lost as opposed to "data related to the Human Genome Project."
In Soviet Russia, sig types you!