I wiki'd smallpox and found out that in 2004, a librarian found an envelope from the civil war era marked "smallpox scabs" and the CDC showed up pretty quickly. So that shows 2 things 1. The CDC would show up if you were bragging about having smallpox 2. There were some sickos during the civil war. Saving smallpox scabs in an envelope?
Ray Bradbury is good, although I was less inclined to read him once I found out that my mother had herself read them when she was a kid (not having the term "pre-teen" in her day.)
Granted also that I didn't understand them... and still don't.
Was someone claiming oppression? I didn't read the article very closely, but it seemed to be more along the lines of "Just FYI, you aren't ensured rights by private webspaces."
But by all means, feel free to put words in the author's mouth and then make fun of them.
If you're going to do that though, you should at least get a better strawman argument. An individual's house is not the same thing as a corporation's web service. Legally they might be the same thing, but since we're not in politics or a courtroom, we can use common sense.
Corporate censorship on hosted services seems (to me, and I haven't done any studies) to be motivated mostly by fear of lawsuits and a fear of offending customers (or, more often it seems, the customers' grandparents).
I understand this and it's not exactly their fault that people are idiots and abuse the legal system when they don't like something. Still, it is crap for individuals who think some things need to be said even if they do offend. The marketplace of ideas should not be limited just because large parts of it happen on privately held web services.
And that's of course different than going into someone's house and saying whatever you want: they didn't make their house as a public forum.
If you were to invite everyone over for a townhall discussion of, say, evolution, and then kick people out if they say anything that might be offensive to anyone, you're an idiot and a coward. That's a more analogous situation.
Having seen the patriot act pass, maybe the CA legislature feels that people are too willing to exchange their rights for percieved security.
An ad like "The government is trying to force you to buy medical insurance! Send us your DNA and you can buy super cheap medical insurance from us and avoid HUGE fines!" would probably work on a lot of idiots out there.
Then of course if you get turned down for that you're flagged as having risky genes and everyone (in the insurance industry) benefits.
Yeah I know! Whoever wrote this needs to try getting a trepanation for ill humors. These days they make you fill out a MILLION forms. Used to be I could get that done at my local barber.
the whatcoulpossiblygowrong meme is lame as hell. It's attached to absolutely every damn article that is even remotely associated with biology.
While I'm appalled by the liberties you've taken with the english language, I agree with that statement. The only reason biology is tagged with this is pretty blatant fear born of ignorance....unless it's a legitimate question, someone actually wants to know what could possibly go wrong. And I guess can only figure out how to make tags not actually post?
On the chance that this is one of those cases, here is what could go wrong:
-You could accidentally inject some of the artificial nucleotides into your DNA and by chance it might get incorporated into the promoter region of an oncogene, rendering it silent in that cell, and maybe if there were a few other oncogenes silenced in that cell you could develop cancer that might eventually metastasize and kill you.
Chances of that happening: 1 over a big number. Zero if you avoid breaking into the lab and injecting yourself with random chemicals.
Chances of that happening even if you do happen to break into this lab and inject yourself with a high concentration of the stuff: probably about the same as if you injected any other mutagen into yourself.
-Another nightmare scenario: A researcher could spill the stuff on his or her shoes, and that would be really gross and also would waste a lot of the undoubtedly expensive artificial nucleotides.
-Last nightmare scenario: maybe the suspension buffer is flamable, and it catches on fire and the fire spreads and eventually the whole world is on fire and everyone dies.
I think that last one is a lot more realistic than any zombie scenario you could come up with.
I'm speaking outside of my expertise here, but I think it's fair to say that the first computers in the early 40's were slower, many times more expensive, and required much more maintenece than alternative technologies which were already in use at the time (abacuses, for example.)
Of course it would have to be developed further to be practical. Still, it's not inconceivable for artificial enzymes to be developed that recognize these artificial bases that could manipulate the DNA as needed for computing.
I do have to say that DNA CAN in fact be locked away on its's own for years. Bacteria won't decompose it unless it's contaminated and you provide a variety of nutrients they need. DNA in water won't support any life and won't degrade. Also, all artificial forms of storage are at least somewhat vulnerable to radiation and chemicals.
DNA is in fact extremely stable, which is undoubtedly the reason all known life other than some viruses and humans use it to store most of their information.
(There are RNA viruses, and we store more information in libraries and the internet than we have in our genomes, we do still use DNA of course.)
As far as sequential reading, that's not true either. As someone else pointed out, transcription factors are used by the cell to identify sequences throughout the genome. There isn't a transcription factor for every single sequence, but with combinations a wide variety of sequences are identified.
Moreover, a DNA computer won't need to use transcription factors only, it could use other nucleotide sequences to identify sequences, so yes, you can identify sequences wherever it lies in the genome, "random access at the base level."
As far as the atomic transistors, I don't know much about those, but I can't imagine they're as stable as DNA, as easy to replicate or produce. And we already have a stunning array of insanely efficient molecular tools for DNA manipulation, all tested by evolution for millions of years. The replicase can copy something like 1000 base pairs a second under the right conditions.
So to sum up, DNA holds a lot of promise as a stable, cheap, and versitile data format with a lot of tools developed by nature. That's the point.
This plan is particularly dangerous when you consider we're not entirely sure how the sun works! Some reports indicate it may be powered by nuclear reactions and it MAY release high amounts of radiation!
We're considering using this in our backyards?!? WON'T SOMEONE THINK OF THE CHILDREN!
The findings, in a nutshell, are: People get each other SNW profile owners are generally seen by others as they see themselves (i.e. impression agreement was substantial) People on Facebook get each other Impression agreement was associated with context (agreement was stronger on the basis of Facebook profiles than on YouJustGetMe profiles) Women are better guessers and easier to guess than men (random assignment) within the context in which raters were judging unknown targets (i.e., YouJustGetMe profiles), women were better raters than men and were rated with higher levels of agreement than men Some profile elements provide better clues than others several specific elements of the profiles were associated with increased or diminished levels of impression agreement.
The only remotely suprising thing was that women were both easier to understand and understood people better through profiles. Which is somewhat suprising, given the fact that 90% of people who use the internets are perverts and stalkers.
Some profile elements are more revealing than others? No shit. Of course my "favorite movies" is going to reveal more about me than my birth date. Assuming as I do that astrology is crap.
Cancer is already a big umbrella funding source for research. You're researching a gene involved in embryonic bone development? Bad news: there may or may not be a "bone development association" and even if there is they're not going to give you much money to research it. Good news: there is a very good chance the gene is involved in cancer and you'll probably be able to get some money from some cancer fund.
If people stop donating money to cancer research because it's cured, it's going to decrease funding to a lot of areas that are only tangentially involved in cancer but have huge potential for human health. Trying to get people to donate to studies involving things that can't be explained with one word will be impossible.
Not to say of course that cancer shouldn't be cured, just that it's going to slow other research.
In unrelated news, scientists at IBM today isolated a new gene called the "anal retentive gene." It is highly related to the "grammar nazi" gene, and belongs to the "someone has way too much time on their hands" family of genes.
Anyway, alomex, you should probably e-mail Mars and IBM right now. They're going to be wasting a lot of time and chocolate otherwise.
Now biology is heading in the same direction. The models we were taught in school about "dominant" and "recessive" genes steering a strictly Mendelian process have turned out to be an even greater simplification of reality than Newton's laws. The discovery of gene-protein interactions and other aspects of epigenetics has challenged the view of DNA as destiny and even introduced evidence that environment can influence inheritable traits, something once considered a genetic impossibility.
In short, the more we learn about biology, the further we find ourselves from a model that can explain it.
There is now a better way. Petabytes allow us to say: "Correlation is enough." We can stop looking for models. We can analyze the data without hypotheses about what it might show. We can throw the numbers into the biggest computing clusters the world has ever seen and let statistical algorithms find patterns where science cannot.
So basically he's saying "Mendel got it wrong, and was a human, therefore we need to let computers come up with our theories."
I, for one, welcome our new robotic scientist overlords.
On a more serious note, as we learn more about genetics, the more we realize mendel's rules were a simplification, but it's ridiculous to say we can't find a model to incorporate the newer findings. Our understanding of epigenetics dovetails nicely with dominance and recessiveness, indeed, epigenetics is an elaboration on more classical genetics, it's not a whole new thing that disproves mendelian genetics at every level.
The more we learn about biology the better our model becomes.
And then there's this nice nonsense summary
Correlation supersedes causation, and science can advance even without coherent models, unified theories, or really any mechanistic explanation at all.
It's all good and well to notice that there is a correlation between X gene and Y phenotype, but that's really the easy part and also unfortunately is worthless without the harder second part: figuring out how to fix it (in the event that Y phenotype is, say, a very bad phenotype.) And the only way to know how to fix it is by gaining a mechanistic explanation.
There's no reason to cling to our old ways. It's time to ask: What can science learn from Google?
Google search: how can we prevent children from inheriting their parents' dwarfism?
A special kinship with trees?!? How did this make it to Nature?
It didn't, it made it into NPR.
The abstract for the nature article:
The oxygen isotope ratio (18O) of cellulose is thought to provide a record of ambient temperature and relative humidity during periods of carbon assimilation1, 2. Here we introduce a method to resolve tree-canopy leaf temperature with the use of 18O of cellulose in 39 tree species. We show a remarkably constant leaf temperature of 21.4 2.2 C across 50 of latitude, from subtropical to boreal biomes. This means that when carbon assimilation is maximal, the physiological and morphological properties of tree branches serve to raise leaf temperature above air temperature to a much greater extent in more northern latitudes. A main assumption underlying the use of 18O to reconstruct climate history is that the temperature and relative humidity of an actively photosynthesizing leaf are the same as those of the surrounding air3, 4. Our data are contrary to that assumption and show that plant physiological ecology must be considered when reconstructing climate through isotope analysis. Furthermore, our results may explain why climate has only a modest effect on leaf economic traits5 in general.
So it made it into Nature because their results challenge an apperantly widely held assumption used in determining global warming... I think? I'm no ecologist/arborologist/whatever science is involved here. But it's actual science.
More to the point, I think government paternalism is justified when the public insists on acting like scared children with candy. "Oh, if I send you a DNA sample and let you sequence it and keep it in a public file you'll be able to keep my kids safe from terrorists? How much money and DNA do you need?!?"
You're right, that would be renewable, I should have said something like non-carbon emitting. I should also have pointed out apperantly that all of those scenarios were just to make fun of the "whatcouldpossiblygowrong" tag. A researcher ruining his or her shoes is what could reasonably go wrong, these bugs will not create a horrible plague.
Is this the reason for the everpresent "whatcouldpossiblygowrong" tag?
The e-coli they would use would most likely be weakened strains that wouldn't stand a chance against your immune system.
These modified bugs also would be starting off at a huge disadvantage to normal e-coli: the other ecoli are just making energy for their survival, a lot of the energy these modified bugs would be producing would be going to making oil. So if you were to ingest some, the bugs would probably very quickly get out-competed by their non-OPEC peers.
There would be some introduced antibiotic resistance probably so that in the tank these bugs would be able to dominate over contaminating strains, but this is extremely common in research and hasn't caused any epidemics yet that I know of. I personally make antibiotic resistant e-coli on a weekly basis.
Also, since this is (if it ever works) going to be a multi trillion dollar industry, you can bet that any bugs that do make oil will be guarded better than some nuclear weapons. The only way you're going to become exposed to these bugs are if you're trying to sneak into the lab to steal some, the armed guards pump you full of lead and you fall off the catwalk into a vat as you're dying.
So to answer the "what could possibly go wrong," here are a few bad scenarios I could envision, from most likely to least likely:
-This plan utterly fails, the bugs never make oil, we never get off fossil-based petroleum, and get into WWIII over it -A researcher accidentally spills a test tube full of the stuff on his new sneakers and it's gross and he has to throw away his shoes. -The plan works, we never invest in renewables or mass transit and keep getting bigger and bigger SUVs causing global warming and we all die of starvation in a worldwide traffic jam.
Well yes, but will the sand still work? Will I be able to build sandcastles out of them after they've been nuked by cosmic rays? If we ever send a guy to mars, he might get bored on mars. Maybe they have sand there, and he will be able to build sand castles there ASSUMING that space sand works right.
Slashdot Mirror
Most websites on the internet are porn.
Most porn sites are not free.
Therefore, your idea is already used by most of the internet.
Measles? Probably not.
Ebola or smallpox yes.
I wiki'd smallpox and found out that in 2004, a librarian found an envelope from the civil war era marked "smallpox scabs" and the CDC showed up pretty quickly. So that shows 2 things
1. The CDC would show up if you were bragging about having smallpox
2. There were some sickos during the civil war. Saving smallpox scabs in an envelope?
Porn?
Eww... not diseases in porn I hope.
I want to cancel my subscription to the internet immediately if that's the case.
Ray Bradbury is good, although I was less inclined to read him once I found out that my mother had herself read them when she was a kid (not having the term "pre-teen" in her day.)
Granted also that I didn't understand them... and still don't.
Was someone claiming oppression? I didn't read the article very closely, but it seemed to be more along the lines of "Just FYI, you aren't ensured rights by private webspaces."
But by all means, feel free to put words in the author's mouth and then make fun of them.
If you're going to do that though, you should at least get a better strawman argument. An individual's house is not the same thing as a corporation's web service. Legally they might be the same thing, but since we're not in politics or a courtroom, we can use common sense.
Corporate censorship on hosted services seems (to me, and I haven't done any studies) to be motivated mostly by fear of lawsuits and a fear of offending customers (or, more often it seems, the customers' grandparents).
I understand this and it's not exactly their fault that people are idiots and abuse the legal system when they don't like something. Still, it is crap for individuals who think some things need to be said even if they do offend. The marketplace of ideas should not be limited just because large parts of it happen on privately held web services.
And that's of course different than going into someone's house and saying whatever you want: they didn't make their house as a public forum.
If you were to invite everyone over for a townhall discussion of, say, evolution, and then kick people out if they say anything that might be offensive to anyone, you're an idiot and a coward. That's a more analogous situation.
Better idea: cut the wings off the airplane. No one will hijack it then.
Having seen the patriot act pass, maybe the CA legislature feels that people are too willing to exchange their rights for percieved security.
An ad like "The government is trying to force you to buy medical insurance! Send us your DNA and you can buy super cheap medical insurance from us and avoid HUGE fines!" would probably work on a lot of idiots out there.
Then of course if you get turned down for that you're flagged as having risky genes and everyone (in the insurance industry) benefits.
Yeah I know! Whoever wrote this needs to try getting a trepanation for ill humors. These days they make you fill out a MILLION forms. Used to be I could get that done at my local barber.
While I'm appalled by the liberties you've taken with the english language, I agree with that statement. The only reason biology is tagged with this is pretty blatant fear born of ignorance. ...unless it's a legitimate question, someone actually wants to know what could possibly go wrong. And I guess can only figure out how to make tags not actually post?
On the chance that this is one of those cases, here is what could go wrong:
-You could accidentally inject some of the artificial nucleotides into your DNA and by chance it might get incorporated into the promoter region of an oncogene, rendering it silent in that cell, and maybe if there were a few other oncogenes silenced in that cell you could develop cancer that might eventually metastasize and kill you.
Chances of that happening: 1 over a big number. Zero if you avoid breaking into the lab and injecting yourself with random chemicals.
Chances of that happening even if you do happen to break into this lab and inject yourself with a high concentration of the stuff: probably about the same as if you injected any other mutagen into yourself.
-Another nightmare scenario: A researcher could spill the stuff on his or her shoes, and that would be really gross and also would waste a lot of the undoubtedly expensive artificial nucleotides.
-Last nightmare scenario: maybe the suspension buffer is flamable, and it catches on fire and the fire spreads and eventually the whole world is on fire and everyone dies.
I think that last one is a lot more realistic than any zombie scenario you could come up with.
That was a little harsh, not to mention redundant.
I'm speaking outside of my expertise here, but I think it's fair to say that the first computers in the early 40's were slower, many times more expensive, and required much more maintenece than alternative technologies which were already in use at the time (abacuses, for example.)
Of course it would have to be developed further to be practical. Still, it's not inconceivable for artificial enzymes to be developed that recognize these artificial bases that could manipulate the DNA as needed for computing.
I do have to say that DNA CAN in fact be locked away on its's own for years. Bacteria won't decompose it unless it's contaminated and you provide a variety of nutrients they need. DNA in water won't support any life and won't degrade. Also, all artificial forms of storage are at least somewhat vulnerable to radiation and chemicals.
DNA is in fact extremely stable, which is undoubtedly the reason all known life other than some viruses and humans use it to store most of their information.
(There are RNA viruses, and we store more information in libraries and the internet than we have in our genomes, we do still use DNA of course.)
As far as sequential reading, that's not true either. As someone else pointed out, transcription factors are used by the cell to identify sequences throughout the genome. There isn't a transcription factor for every single sequence, but with combinations a wide variety of sequences are identified.
Moreover, a DNA computer won't need to use transcription factors only, it could use other nucleotide sequences to identify sequences, so yes, you can identify sequences wherever it lies in the genome, "random access at the base level."
As far as the atomic transistors, I don't know much about those, but I can't imagine they're as stable as DNA, as easy to replicate or produce. And we already have a stunning array of insanely efficient molecular tools for DNA manipulation, all tested by evolution for millions of years. The replicase can copy something like 1000 base pairs a second under the right conditions.
So to sum up, DNA holds a lot of promise as a stable, cheap, and versitile data format with a lot of tools developed by nature. That's the point.
This plan is particularly dangerous when you consider we're not entirely sure how the sun works! Some reports indicate it may be powered by nuclear reactions and it MAY release high amounts of radiation!
We're considering using this in our backyards?!? WON'T SOMEONE THINK OF THE CHILDREN!
... DEEZ NUTS!
Sorry sorry sorry, I'll go write "I will not talk about my nuts" 500 times on the chalkboard now.
We tied actually, although you were first modded down so I guess you do win.
The only remotely suprising thing was that women were both easier to understand and understood people better through profiles. Which is somewhat suprising, given the fact that 90% of people who use the internets are perverts and stalkers.
Some profile elements are more revealing than others? No shit. Of course my "favorite movies" is going to reveal more about me than my birth date. Assuming as I do that astrology is crap.
Cancer is already a big umbrella funding source for research. You're researching a gene involved in embryonic bone development? Bad news: there may or may not be a "bone development association" and even if there is they're not going to give you much money to research it. Good news: there is a very good chance the gene is involved in cancer and you'll probably be able to get some money from some cancer fund.
If people stop donating money to cancer research because it's cured, it's going to decrease funding to a lot of areas that are only tangentially involved in cancer but have huge potential for human health. Trying to get people to donate to studies involving things that can't be explained with one word will be impossible.
Not to say of course that cancer shouldn't be cured, just that it's going to slow other research.
So you read up on slashdot why? For the star wars jokes?
In unrelated news, scientists at IBM today isolated a new gene called the "anal retentive gene." It is highly related to the "grammar nazi" gene, and belongs to the "someone has way too much time on their hands" family of genes.
Anyway, alomex, you should probably e-mail Mars and IBM right now. They're going to be wasting a lot of time and chocolate otherwise.
So basically he's saying "Mendel got it wrong, and was a human, therefore we need to let computers come up with our theories."
I, for one, welcome our new robotic scientist overlords.
On a more serious note, as we learn more about genetics, the more we realize mendel's rules were a simplification, but it's ridiculous to say we can't find a model to incorporate the newer findings. Our understanding of epigenetics dovetails nicely with dominance and recessiveness, indeed, epigenetics is an elaboration on more classical genetics, it's not a whole new thing that disproves mendelian genetics at every level.
The more we learn about biology the better our model becomes.
And then there's this nice nonsense summary
It's all good and well to notice that there is a correlation between X gene and Y phenotype, but that's really the easy part and also unfortunately is worthless without the harder second part: figuring out how to fix it (in the event that Y phenotype is, say, a very bad phenotype.) And the only way to know how to fix it is by gaining a mechanistic explanation.
Google search: how can we prevent children from inheriting their parents' dwarfism?
36,305 results. Most relevant: HOTT MIDGET SEXX!!!##!!! FREE TRIAL V1AGRA c1@LIS!@@$!
I'm going to have to quote that, oahazmatt.
It didn't, it made it into NPR.
The abstract for the nature article:
So it made it into Nature because their results challenge an apperantly widely held assumption used in determining global warming... I think? I'm no ecologist/arborologist/whatever science is involved here. But it's actual science.
More to the point, I think government paternalism is justified when the public insists on acting like scared children with candy. "Oh, if I send you a DNA sample and let you sequence it and keep it in a public file you'll be able to keep my kids safe from terrorists? How much money and DNA do you need?!?"
You're right, that would be renewable, I should have said something like non-carbon emitting. I should also have pointed out apperantly that all of those scenarios were just to make fun of the "whatcouldpossiblygowrong" tag. A researcher ruining his or her shoes is what could reasonably go wrong, these bugs will not create a horrible plague.
Is this the reason for the everpresent "whatcouldpossiblygowrong" tag?
The e-coli they would use would most likely be weakened strains that wouldn't stand a chance
against your immune system.
These modified bugs also would be starting off at a huge disadvantage to normal e-coli: the other ecoli are just making energy for their survival, a lot of the energy these modified bugs would be producing would be going to making oil. So if you were to ingest some, the bugs would probably very quickly get out-competed by their non-OPEC peers.
There would be some introduced antibiotic resistance probably so that in the tank these bugs would be able to dominate over contaminating strains, but this is extremely common in research and hasn't caused any epidemics yet that I know of. I personally make antibiotic resistant e-coli on a weekly basis.
Also, since this is (if it ever works) going to be a multi trillion dollar industry, you can bet that any bugs that do make oil will be guarded better than some nuclear weapons. The only way you're going to become exposed to these bugs are if you're trying to sneak into the lab to steal some, the armed guards pump you full of lead and you fall off the catwalk into a vat as you're dying.
So to answer the "what could possibly go wrong," here are a few bad scenarios I could envision, from most likely to least likely:
-This plan utterly fails, the bugs never make oil, we never get off fossil-based petroleum, and get into WWIII over it
-A researcher accidentally spills a test tube full of the stuff on his new sneakers and it's gross and he has to throw away his shoes.
-The plan works, we never invest in renewables or mass transit and keep getting bigger and bigger SUVs causing global warming and we all die of starvation in a worldwide traffic jam.
Well yes, but will the sand still work? Will I be able to build sandcastles out of them after they've been nuked by cosmic rays? If we ever send a guy to mars, he might get bored on mars. Maybe they have sand there, and he will be able to build sand castles there ASSUMING that space sand works right.