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Russia Plans To Build World First DNA Databank of All Living Things
An anonymous reader writes Researchers from Moscow State University plan to build a database that will house the DNA of every creature known to man. The University has secured a $194 million grant for the project dubbed "Noah's Ark." The gigantic "ark," set to be completed by 2018, will be 430 sq km in size, built at one of the university's central campuses. "It will enable us to cryogenically freeze and store various cellular materials, which can then reproduce. It will also contain information systems. Not everything needs to be kept in a petri dish," MSU rector Viktor Sadivnichy says.
Refrigerated storage of samples? They'll probably just a build a wall around a 430 km^2-sized area in Northern Siberia and call it a day. ;-)
Ezekiel 23:20
It depends on what you mean be "reproduce".
If you are talking about having babies, the technology is science fiction, but near science fiction – not far science fiction like cryogenic freezing people. For example, synthetic life is a viable field of study. We can build bacterium from scratch. We are a long distance from resurrecting mastodons – which we have the DNA for. However the issues we face are known. To reach cryogenics we face many unknown hurdles. That is blue sky territory.
However, "reproduce" could mean reading and understanding the DNA of creatures, a much lower and viable hurdle. Sequencing unknown genomes is expensive but the cost is falling fast. There are many species on the verge of extinction. Better to collect the samples know and sequence latter.
"First DNA Databank of All Living Things"
"database that will house the DNA of every creature known to man"
Those might be grammatically similar, but the numbers differ by several orders of magnitude.
Humans really know mostly about multi-cellular critters, plus the tiny fraction of the single-celled species that interact with us somehow. Almost all single-celled species are yet to be discovered.
One of the more interesting bits of evidence is that all of the deep-drilling projects, which have sampled only a tiny chunk of the planet's crust, have reported single-celled living things "all the way down". It'll take a while for us to do a good study of everything living deep down there. Similarly, several deep-water sampling projects have turned up large numbers of unknown microscopic species throughout their water columns.
I guess this mostly goes to show how difficult it can be to do a good journalistic job of summarizing scientific work so that non-scientists can understand the actual results. "Ordinary English" (or French or Russian or any other human language) is sufficiently imprecise that it's very difficult to avoid misleading mistakes like the two summaries of this story.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
The same happens the world over. this isn't unique to russia