X Prizes for DNA, Nanotech, Autos, Education

An anonymous reader writes "Larry Page and Craig Venter are now on the X Prize Board of Trustees, and Peter Diamandis, the man behind the $10 million space prize, said new X prizes are in the works for innovations in automobiles, education, nanotech and DNA reseach. Diamandis, from the article: "Why do we still drive cars that use an internal combustion engine and only get 30 miles per gallon? I think that we'll see some amazing achievements in this area." This is in addition to the foundation's incentive to completely decode the DNA of 100 or more people covered earlier on Slashdot."

Comments

"Decode DNA"? Oh really? DES or RSA?

[eldavojohn]

This is in addition to the foundation's incentive to completely decode the DNA of 100 or more people covered earlier on Slashdot.

If there's one thing that confuses me, it's why anyone ever uses the verb "decode" when speaking about DNA. Maybe it's just because it sounds cool and "sequence DNA" isn't quite as futuristic. Because that's all their asking for them to do--read the DNA into a form that reflects the ordering of G, T, A or C which are abbreviations for the different possible amino acids.

Now, to "decode" that would mean that it's encrypted somehow, but it's not. It's there in strands in the center of a cell's nucleus. Maybe "extract" would work as a verb, but we're certainly not cracking any encryption. Do I use RSA encryption to protect my genes from you? No. Even if I did, they'd likely only have to crack it once unless everyone used separate public keys.

What it would really mean to decode DNA would be to figure out what the sequence is actually telling us and we are a far far way from that. The sequence reveals the three letter nucleotides and these then reveal many different proteins that form upon folding. We need to find out which are junk, how recombination works, what defines a stop codon, which nucleotides form which proteins, understanding the C-value, etc. Once that happens, then we can start claiming we've decoded something. Please, people, its function is encrypted, not its sequence.

When an X-prize is issued using this wording, it really makes me think twice if they really even know what they want done to win the prize. If you take it literally, that's awfully ambitious. Of course, there's no way to reverse the use of this word as I believe the media has made it a permanent house-hold phrase ...