how much scientific effort has been displaced into "finding other ways to make stem cells" that could otherwise have gone into "finding ways to use stem cells to treat medical conditions".
The key difference here is that, ideally, you'd like to be treated with your own stem cells. Think organ transplants -- you could get stem cells from some embryonic source, but your body would likely reject them. I'm not a proponent of recent science-policy regarding stem cells but, in retrospect, these "workarounds" may end up being critical discoveries on the path to cell-based therapy.
You can also pretty easily show that our ability to sequence DNA is growing much faster than Moore's law. Right now, we seem to be in a nice world where we can process all the DNA we sequence, but we are already getting to the limits of pretty high powered workstations. The next step will probably tax the high powered cluster computers. But, assuming this rate keeps up, we quickly will reach a state where sequencing will be cheap and easy, and computer power will become the rate limiting step.
One of the real advances here is the ability to do this on a single molecule. Existing DNA sequencing techniques all depend on an amplification step, known as ploymerase chain reaction (PCR), in which the DNA is iteratively duplicated (this is done by basically hijacking DNA replication machinery from bacteria). However, PCR introduces numerous biases in the final population of DNA molecules: shorter segments and certain sequences are easier to duplicate than others. As a result, what you end up sequencing is always skewed.
This may not be too important when it comes to (re)sequencing a genome, but there are a whole cadre of experimental techniques that use sequencing to investigate regulation and modification of DNA, and here that bias can really skew findings and generate many false positives (things that amplify too easily) and negatives (things that don't amplify well at all).
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Amino acids are "left-handed", but most sugars are "right-handed". Would that even out in the end?
how much scientific effort has been displaced into "finding other ways to make stem cells" that could otherwise have gone into "finding ways to use stem cells to treat medical conditions".
The key difference here is that, ideally, you'd like to be treated with your own stem cells. Think organ transplants -- you could get stem cells from some embryonic source, but your body would likely reject them. I'm not a proponent of recent science-policy regarding stem cells but, in retrospect, these "workarounds" may end up being critical discoveries on the path to cell-based therapy.
You can also pretty easily show that our ability to sequence DNA is growing much faster than Moore's law. Right now, we seem to be in a nice world where we can process all the DNA we sequence, but we are already getting to the limits of pretty high powered workstations. The next step will probably tax the high powered cluster computers. But, assuming this rate keeps up, we quickly will reach a state where sequencing will be cheap and easy, and computer power will become the rate limiting step.
One of the real advances here is the ability to do this on a single molecule. Existing DNA sequencing techniques all depend on an amplification step, known as ploymerase chain reaction (PCR), in which the DNA is iteratively duplicated (this is done by basically hijacking DNA replication machinery from bacteria). However, PCR introduces numerous biases in the final population of DNA molecules: shorter segments and certain sequences are easier to duplicate than others. As a result, what you end up sequencing is always skewed. This may not be too important when it comes to (re)sequencing a genome, but there are a whole cadre of experimental techniques that use sequencing to investigate regulation and modification of DNA, and here that bias can really skew findings and generate many false positives (things that amplify too easily) and negatives (things that don't amplify well at all).