The telomeres (that is, the ends of chromosomes) are shortened a little bit each time the chromosome is copied (the DNA replication process doesn't work very well when the strand suddenly comes to an end, so it kind of hacked a solution together). Clones will inherit the telomeres of their donor, while the telomeres of twins have no such relationship.
There is some evidence, though not conclusive, that telomeres may be linked to aging.
Other posters have treated the issue of actual property vs. licensing, so I'm not going to touch on that. What I do want to address is this:
Quoth the poster: It doesn't matter whether or not the RIAA is bad...
Yes, it does matter that the RIAA is bad. "Stealing" their copyrighted material is illegal, yes -- but that does not make it immoral. I (and many other/.ers, I believe) subscribe to a moral system which frowns upon the RIAA's distribution methods and attempt to regulate and repress the flow of information. To this end, I feel justified 'stealing' from them. I've had enough of paying $16.95 for a CD which has only one track that I like on it -- I'd much rather download that track directly and pay the artists $0.50 -- and I'll go out on a limb here and say that's still more than they get from the RIAA. A system of micropayments set up like that would allow us to get the music we want, put control of the music back in the hands of the artists, and seriously limit the role of the middleman. Furthermore, it might actually do some good for the quality of the music produced -- no longer will a record company be able to pick four random girls and rocket them to stardom (and ambassadorships) -- the artists will sink or float based on their talent and on the quality of the music they produce as judged by the masses rather than on the basis of bland, vulgar, corporate propaganda. It's possible that we will once again see true artists -- people with personality and talent *gasp* -- writing and preforming music.
OK, back to homework...
------------------------ If at first you fail: patch, patch again.
Oh, yes. I thought that some of the metaphysical imagery was particularly effective....and, um, interesting photographic devices, too, which seemed to counterpoint the, uh.....counterpoint the surrealism of the underlying metaphor of the...humanity of the director's compassionate soul which contrived through the medium of the film's structure to sublimate this, transcend that, and come to terms with the fundamental dichotomies of the other, and one is left with a profound and vivid insight into, uh....into whatever it was that the film was about.
In principle, I agree with you -- the theft of coffee was biological piracy. However, coffee was not protected the same way a modern trade secret is. Monsanto will go to great lengths to assure that you don't get your hands on their proprietary trade-secret biological material...and the law (in most countries) will back them. There was no way to prevent someone from stealing coffee once they had their hands on the bean and, right now, the same applies with genetically modified material. But I'm thinking that big biotech firms will start doing the same things software companies do -- genes that degrade after a certain period of time if they're not supplemented with a chemical only the original purchaser will give you (read: short-term license agreement), obfuscated genes (since I can't think how you'd encrypt them), that sort of thing. If they do make you reliant on chemicals they have to keep their gene active, then we might see the development of middlemen who buy the chemicals from the companies and sell them to you, making sure everyone is happy.
I'm a plant biology senior at UC Berkeley and one of my professors went over patents/IP law recently, so I have some understanding of how it works. Here at Berkeley, the general license agreement works so that the University of California Regents keep all the patents that come from our research. Private corporations that fund research get to be first in line to apply for a license (exclusive or otherwise), while the Federal Government always gets a license. Furthermore, from what I understand, most licenses/patents allow ues of a technology for non-profit/academic purposes (that's not really relevant, but I thought I'd mention it).
While I'm posting, I might as well explain how patenting genes works, too. The way things are set up at the patent office now, you will not get a patent based solely on sequencing information. In order to even have a chance at a patent, you have to be able to predict the amino acid sequence of the protein the gene encodes (this isn't as easy as just reading across the sequence and matching codons [three letter 'words' in the sequence] with the corresponding amino acid -- only parts of the gene actually get transcribed into protein, the rest gets spliced out...so you have to know a bit about the gene to do this). Generally, however, people also try to get some understanding of a gene's function and operation before they apply for a patent, since this will strengthen their patent...which means maybe they can try to cover other organisms' copy of the gene in their pattern (so they could pattern a gene in, say, mice and also patent any gene that shares 70% of the sequence).
I'm not sure if I explained that terribly well, but I hope it's clear. Now I'd like to present my take on patenting in biotech. Personally, I don't believe in patents. I'm somewhat idealistic -- I'd rather nobody ever had to patent anything because everyone would be socially responsible enough to give credit when using other people's work and to make their work available in return...basically, the GPL. I'd rather we all work because we're excited about what we're doing or we recognize that a service needs to be provided. Unfortunately, that's not the kind of world we live in right now. Patents seem to be necessary in modern economies. After college, I'm going to go back home and run my own biotech company -- and I will patent my work. Not because I believe in it, but because I need to in order to protect myself. If I am open about my work, then others will take it and incorporate it into their proprietary products and my family won't eat. This is why I prefer academic environments -- it's the closest you get to the GPL, because most licenses make exception for it.
The last thing I'd like to bring up is something that I've rarely seen discussed, although it's highly relevant to biotech IP law. How will piracy develop in biotech? Many similarities can be drawn between biotech and CS, both in development and in the nature of the work...and I have no doubt that, once biotech products become more available on the market, they will be pirated. Probably not by individuals, but certainly by corporations. And while that may be illegal here, it's not in China (or a host of other countries)...and several of these countries (China in particular) have both the technological capability and the incentive to steal a product...and it is remarkably easy to do. All you need are a few cells -- you can propagate a whole population from them and then use it to study what Monsanto did and take it. If you never signed a license (or clicked one), would it be illegal? Will we have to sign some form of license agreement to shop in the GMO section at our supermarket? Or will we figure out how to encrypt genes somehow?
Sorry if I rambled, this post got somewhat out of hand....
I went to DoubleTwist's page and had a look at the press release. What they did was use several Sun machines and some proprietary analysis technique to annotate the 80% of the genome already sequenced by the HGP. That means that they took the sequence that the Human Genome Project has and ran an analysis on it to try and find out which portions of the genome are actually genes (that is, are actually translated into proteins) and tried to guess their function (based on similarity to known genes in humans or other organisms). I think this is definitely A Good Thing (tm)...but the sequencing race isn't over yet, and, from what I can see, DoubleTwist isn't even part of it.
Re:Heaven's Gift? -- Nope (Score:3) by Hrunting (hrunting@nospam.texas.net) on Friday April 14, @07:40AM EST (#180) (User Info) http://hrunting.home.texas.net/ This is a quote from the leading online gaming source, Blue's News. There are scary implications here. When you cannot trust software made by one of the world's largest software companies, what do you do when if[sic] comes to all the little homebrew progams that are available? This is exactly the mentality that keeps open-source from advancing. As strange as it may seem, the corporate world does not see open-source software go through the same sort of rigorous QA that (they assume) corporate products go through. An event such as this is only going to serve to make people doubt more software in general and that has a negative effect on open-source software which already has to face the FUD about its quality. No, this isn't Heaven's Gift, it's Satan's Blessing. Too many people see Microsoft as the sort of God of software and when your God fails you, where do you turn? Certainly not to the meek. Why not? They're supposed to inherit the Earth, neh?
While this is something of a valid concern, I want to make it clear that engineered species will very often be less fit than the wild type...these organisms have spent quite a while adapting to their environment...if they are deficient in a protein (or susceptible to something, or whatever), it is probably for a good reason. Twiddling with this will often result in a less fit organism. Introduced organisms (from other ecosystems) might have a competitive advantage, due to a lack of predators, etc...this is not necessarily the case for engineered organisms, however.
Even if he manages to clean up polution, how is it better to have polution in the cells of trees that your burn and release into the air? Of course organics don't have this problem (much), but other chemicals just get absorbed into the plant and then what? A question I immeadiatly have that isn't answered.
It's not pollution in plant cells - that's the whole idea. The plant takes up these species in a toxic format and either (1) volatilizes them, releasing them into the atmosphere (no, this is NOT air pollution...several of these substances are fixed by other organisms, so it's more like recycling) or (2) metabolized into a non-toxic form and then stored in the plant cells. These plants can then be fed to people/animals with deficiencies, acting like a mineral supplement.
True, it is difficult to get people to act beyond their own self interest. However, phytoremediation can often be profitable for the companies involved - that's why the funding for several of these projects comes from corporations (yes, I know this...I work in a lab researching phytoremediation).
Another good reason to use trees is their perennial nature. A lot of other possible plants would need to be harvested and replanted every year (or every few years), while trees will stay there for decades. On the other hand, in some cases it might be useful to harvest the plants, since we might be able to use the chemicals they've taken up (for example, plants that have taken up selenium can be fed to cattle with a selenium defficient diet (or to humans, who often have some measure of Se defficiency).
I also bought a TNT card. I also got shafted. Instead of posting gripes to/., why don't we all contact nVidia. Be polite, but let them know that they've lost your business...if you feel justified in asking for a refund, as for one. Again, BE POLITE. We've seen the/. effect take down sites...let's see what it can do about corporate policy.
I for one am going to call/email them tonight...if someone with Apache running wants to set up a petition type website, that'd be great, too.
Contact info from their site: NVIDIA Corporation: 3535 Monroe Street Santa Clara, CA. 95051 Tel: (408) 615-2500 Fax: (408) 615-2800 info@nvidia.com
Slashdot Mirror
There is some evidence, though not conclusive, that telomeres may be linked to aging.
Other posters have treated the issue of actual property vs. licensing, so I'm not going to touch on that. What I do want to address is this:
/.ers, I believe) subscribe to a moral system which frowns upon the RIAA's distribution methods and attempt to regulate and repress the flow of information. To this end, I feel justified 'stealing' from them. I've had enough of paying $16.95 for a CD which has only one track that I like on it -- I'd much rather download that track directly and pay the artists $0.50 -- and I'll go out on a limb here and say that's still more than they get from the RIAA. A system of micropayments set up like that would allow us to get the music we want, put control of the music back in the hands of the artists, and seriously limit the role of the middleman. Furthermore, it might actually do some good for the quality of the music produced -- no longer will a record company be able to pick four random girls and rocket them to stardom (and ambassadorships) -- the artists will sink or float based on their talent and on the quality of the music they produce as judged by the masses rather than on the basis of bland, vulgar, corporate propaganda. It's possible that we will once again see true artists -- people with personality and talent *gasp* -- writing and preforming music.
Quoth the poster:
It doesn't matter whether or not the RIAA is bad...
Yes, it does matter that the RIAA is bad. "Stealing" their copyrighted material is illegal, yes -- but that does not make it immoral. I (and many other
OK, back to homework...
------------------------
If at first you fail: patch, patch again.
I don't know about Wired, but the Ars Technica article dealing with that can be found here.
Oh, yes. I thought that some of the metaphysical imagery was particularly effective....and, um, interesting photographic devices, too, which seemed to counterpoint the, uh.....counterpoint the surrealism of the underlying metaphor of the...humanity of the director's compassionate soul which contrived through the medium of the film's structure to sublimate this, transcend that, and come to terms with the fundamental dichotomies of the other, and one is left with a profound and vivid insight into, uh....into whatever it was that the film was about.
Now all we have to do is figure out how to use humans instead of potatoes...and hire Keanu Reaves.
In principle, I agree with you -- the theft of coffee was biological piracy. However, coffee was not protected the same way a modern trade secret is. Monsanto will go to great lengths to assure that you don't get your hands on their proprietary trade-secret biological material...and the law (in most countries) will back them. There was no way to prevent someone from stealing coffee once they had their hands on the bean and, right now, the same applies with genetically modified material. But I'm thinking that big biotech firms will start doing the same things software companies do -- genes that degrade after a certain period of time if they're not supplemented with a chemical only the original purchaser will give you (read: short-term license agreement), obfuscated genes (since I can't think how you'd encrypt them), that sort of thing. If they do make you reliant on chemicals they have to keep their gene active, then we might see the development of middlemen who buy the chemicals from the companies and sell them to you, making sure everyone is happy.
On another note, I don't drink coffee.
I'm a plant biology senior at UC Berkeley and one of my professors went over patents/IP law recently, so I have some understanding of how it works. Here at Berkeley, the general license agreement works so that the University of California Regents keep all the patents that come from our research. Private corporations that fund research get to be first in line to apply for a license (exclusive or otherwise), while the Federal Government always gets a license. Furthermore, from what I understand, most licenses/patents allow ues of a technology for non-profit/academic purposes (that's not really relevant, but I thought I'd mention it).
While I'm posting, I might as well explain how patenting genes works, too. The way things are set up at the patent office now, you will not get a patent based solely on sequencing information. In order to even have a chance at a patent, you have to be able to predict the amino acid sequence of the protein the gene encodes (this isn't as easy as just reading across the sequence and matching codons [three letter 'words' in the sequence] with the corresponding amino acid -- only parts of the gene actually get transcribed into protein, the rest gets spliced out...so you have to know a bit about the gene to do this). Generally, however, people also try to get some understanding of a gene's function and operation before they apply for a patent, since this will strengthen their patent...which means maybe they can try to cover other organisms' copy of the gene in their pattern (so they could pattern a gene in, say, mice and also patent any gene that shares 70% of the sequence).
I'm not sure if I explained that terribly well, but I hope it's clear. Now I'd like to present my take on patenting in biotech. Personally, I don't believe in patents. I'm somewhat idealistic -- I'd rather nobody ever had to patent anything because everyone would be socially responsible enough to give credit when using other people's work and to make their work available in return...basically, the GPL. I'd rather we all work because we're excited about what we're doing or we recognize that a service needs to be provided. Unfortunately, that's not the kind of world we live in right now. Patents seem to be necessary in modern economies. After college, I'm going to go back home and run my own biotech company -- and I will patent my work. Not because I believe in it, but because I need to in order to protect myself. If I am open about my work, then others will take it and incorporate it into their proprietary products and my family won't eat. This is why I prefer academic environments -- it's the closest you get to the GPL, because most licenses make exception for it.
The last thing I'd like to bring up is something that I've rarely seen discussed, although it's highly relevant to biotech IP law. How will piracy develop in biotech? Many similarities can be drawn between biotech and CS, both in development and in the nature of the work...and I have no doubt that, once biotech products become more available on the market, they will be pirated. Probably not by individuals, but certainly by corporations. And while that may be illegal here, it's not in China (or a host of other countries)...and several of these countries (China in particular) have both the technological capability and the incentive to steal a product...and it is remarkably easy to do. All you need are a few cells -- you can propagate a whole population from them and then use it to study what Monsanto did and take it. If you never signed a license (or clicked one), would it be illegal? Will we have to sign some form of license agreement to shop in the GMO section at our supermarket? Or will we figure out how to encrypt genes somehow?
Sorry if I rambled, this post got somewhat out of hand....
I went to DoubleTwist's page and had a look at the press release. What they did was use several Sun machines and some proprietary analysis technique to annotate the 80% of the genome already sequenced by the HGP. That means that they took the sequence that the Human Genome Project has and ran an analysis on it to try and find out which portions of the genome are actually genes (that is, are actually translated into proteins) and tried to guess their function (based on similarity to known genes in humans or other organisms). I think this is definitely A Good Thing (tm)...but the sequencing race isn't over yet, and, from what I can see, DoubleTwist isn't even part of it.
Re:Heaven's Gift? -- Nope (Score:3) by Hrunting (hrunting@nospam.texas.net) on Friday April 14, @07:40AM EST (#180) (User Info) http://hrunting.home.texas.net/ This is a quote from the leading online gaming source, Blue's News. There are scary implications here. When you cannot trust software made by one of the world's largest software companies, what do you do when if[sic] comes to all the little homebrew progams that are available? This is exactly the mentality that keeps open-source from advancing. As strange as it may seem, the corporate world does not see open-source software go through the same sort of rigorous QA that (they assume) corporate products go through. An event such as this is only going to serve to make people doubt more software in general and that has a negative effect on open-source software which already has to face the FUD about its quality. No, this isn't Heaven's Gift, it's Satan's Blessing. Too many people see Microsoft as the sort of God of software and when your God fails you, where do you turn? Certainly not to the meek. Why not? They're supposed to inherit the Earth, neh?
While this is something of a valid concern, I want to make it clear that engineered species will very often be less fit than the wild type...these organisms have spent quite a while adapting to their environment...if they are deficient in a protein (or susceptible to something, or whatever), it is probably for a good reason. Twiddling with this will often result in a less fit organism. Introduced organisms (from other ecosystems) might have a competitive advantage, due to a lack of predators, etc...this is not necessarily the case for engineered organisms, however.
Even if he manages to clean up polution, how is it better to have polution in the cells of trees that your burn and release into the air? Of course organics don't have this problem (much), but other chemicals just get absorbed into the plant and then what? A question I immeadiatly have that isn't answered.
It's not pollution in plant cells - that's the whole idea. The plant takes up these species in a toxic format and either (1) volatilizes them, releasing them into the atmosphere (no, this is NOT air pollution...several of these substances are fixed by other organisms, so it's more like recycling) or (2) metabolized into a non-toxic form and then stored in the plant cells. These plants can then be fed to people/animals with deficiencies, acting like a mineral supplement.
True, it is difficult to get people to act beyond their own self interest. However, phytoremediation can often be profitable for the companies involved - that's why the funding for several of these projects comes from corporations (yes, I know this...I work in a lab researching phytoremediation).
Another good reason to use trees is their perennial nature. A lot of other possible plants would need to be harvested and replanted every year (or every few years), while trees will stay there for decades. On the other hand, in some cases it might be useful to harvest the plants, since we might be able to use the chemicals they've taken up (for example, plants that have taken up selenium can be fed to cattle with a selenium defficient diet (or to humans, who often have some measure of Se defficiency).
I also bought a TNT card. I also got shafted. Instead of posting gripes to /., why don't we all contact nVidia. Be polite, but let them know that they've lost your business...if you feel justified in asking for a refund, as for one. Again, BE POLITE. We've seen the /. effect take down sites...let's see what it can do about corporate policy.
I for one am going to call/email them tonight...if someone with Apache running wants to set up a petition type website, that'd be great, too.
Contact info from their site:
NVIDIA Corporation:
3535 Monroe Street
Santa Clara, CA. 95051
Tel: (408) 615-2500
Fax: (408) 615-2800
info@nvidia.com
Google is running Linux...a humorous sys-admin?