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Genome of DNA Pioneer Is Deciphered
unchiujar writes "The New York Times reports that the full genome of James D. Watson, one of the discoverers of the structure of DNA in 1953, has been deciphered, marking what some scientists believe is the gateway to an impending era of personalized genomic medicine. A copy of his genome, recorded on a pair of DVDs, was presented to Dr. Watson on Thursday in a ceremony in Houston by Richard Gibbs, director of the Human Genome Sequencing Center at the Baylor College of Medicine, and by Jonathan Rothberg, founder of the company 454 Life Sciences. 'The first two genome sequences belonging to individuals are now being made available to researchers within a few days of each other. One is Dr. Watson's and the other belongs to J. Craig Venter, who as president of the Celera Corporation started a human genome project in competition with the government. Dr. Venter left Celera after producing only a draft version of a genome, his own, in 2001, which the company did no further work on. He has now brought his genome to completion at his own institute in Rockville, Md., and deposited it last week in GenBank, a public DNA database, he said.'"
this is really really cool for obvious reasons. it's also really really scary for equally obvious reasons. if I wasn't so afraid of the potential harm of misusing this power I'd sign my name now to be the third person done.
thats right, I rarely use capitals. deal with it. but don't mistake my laziness for stupidity
I've often thought about this (I'm a doctor...)
.75 billion bytes = .75 GB = 750 MB.
By my calculations:
3 billion base pairs in the entire human DNA sequence (give or take). Each base pair can be A, C, T, or G. (look at wikipedia or biology text for details.) Thus, each base pair can be represented by a 2 bit number (00 01 11 or 10).
Thus, 3 x 10^9 base pairs * 2 bits / base pair = 6 x 10^9 bits = 6 billion bits * 1 byte / 8 bits =
A standard DVD holds 4.3 GB, so you could fit almost 6 full humans on a DVD. Of course, this doesn't count compression (which would be astoundingly effective given repetition and patterns in DNA sequences) nor the fact you could just encode the delta as much DNA is conserved. In fact, very little DNA varies between humans, so I'd bet you could quite deterministically encode a human in as little as 100 MB if you had a "standard human DNA sequence" for reference.
Of course, you would need some magical method to reconstruct this DNA and put it into an egg at the right timing, which would likely form an approximation of the identical twin of a person. The technology for this is not here yet. Also, this does not encode any of the proteins / apparatus / mother that is needed to go from DNA in egg to functioning human.
Still, it is interesting to think about!
Slashdotter, ID #101. UIDs are in binary, right?
Just for anyone not following along:
Celera is a bad news company, and news involving them should always set off alarm bells.
They are decent at motivating people, though. Based on their track record and stated intentions they caused a massive movement to decode the human genome as public property after they announced they would compete with the federally funded decoding initiatives for the purpose of patenting the findings and licensing that data to private companies. As John Sulston, who led the British arm of the Human Genome Project put it: 'We were in a position of responsibility... without us, the human genome would be privatized.'
Here's a quote from The New Atlantis:
"Celera's mission was to sequence the human genome better and faster than its government-funded rival. It aimed to sell access to genomic information as well as the tools to interpret it, with an eye to "big pharma" and other biotechnology companies looking for a treasure trove of new drug targets."
Venter, named in the submission, was the CEO of Celera at the time this strategy was developed and was deposed several months after it became clear that the public would beat Celera to the goal.
This is admitedly troll bait, but I feel a burning personal need to inform people about this man's actions whenever I see his name in print.
Regards.
everyone talks about the actual coding sequence but not much about epigenetics- whether or not certain cytosine residues are methylated and what not- quite important if you think about it- put the whole sequence back together and certain genes dont quite work the same way. so really counting all of that it would take quite a significant amount of more information to truely be able to reconstruct the genome as it was. then again only about 3% is methylated in that fashion...
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
Disclaimer 1: I don't know much about Eugenics so the following may be totally wrong.
Disclaimer 2: I know that 28 Weeks Later was just a movie. Bear with me, I just bring it up to illustrate my theory.
One way Eugenics is potentially bad for the species is that by weeding out undesirable characteristics we reduce genetic diversity. And if diversity decreases and some terrible disease hits the species it might be able to take a bigger bite out of the population.
If you saw the movie 28 Weeks Later you may recall that the kid that was resistant to the so-called "Rage Virus" also had some genetic anomaly that led to each of his eyes being a different color. They seemed to imply that these two things were somehow connected. So let's say we encountered some similar situation in reality, but we had determined that having differently colored eyes (as an example) is undesirable. It's entirely possible that by eliminating that trait we also wiped out the few people who would have survived the next big plague.
I don't think so. He is widely reputed to be a crude and insatiable womanizer, who screwed (or attempted to screw) every pretty girl who worked for him.
Too much Law; not enough Order.