The human genome was not sequenced to find genes.
on
A Map to Nowhere?
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· Score: 2
I am a genetics phd student, and I think that there is an important justification for sequencing the genome which has not been mentioned.
The reason to sequence a genome is not to find particular genes(there are better ways to find disease genes), but because there are questions you can ask when you have the complete sequence that you cannot ask otherwise. For instance, if you have systematically assayed all genes in the genome and none of them display a particular motif, you can say that the organism completely lacks that motif. The complete sequence can also be put to use to make high throughput assays such as microarrays which have complete coverage of the whole genome, and thus allow you to make statements that you cannot make with a bunch of random genes.(or highly non-random genes, since most of the human genes we had previously sequenced were studied for a reason) Experiments at the genome level ask fundamentally different questions than experiments at the gene level... a microarray is not 6000 Northern blots! The genome project allows us to ask genome level questions, it may or may not identify more genes for the "one gene one postdoc" crowd.
because, guess what, I'm in my mid-twenties, female, and love working with technology.
Sounds good to me... are you single too?;)
Seriously, does requiring technical knowledge imply that the net is necessarily gender biased? I believe that the gender distribution of technical information is a function of society, and it is our society which is not gender neutral. For example, most of the operators of early computers (which were themselves called computers) were female; at the time, computing was consider boring and secretarial. Of course, all those women did was move around the program cards which some man made, but it still required more intimate knowledge of how the machine worked than win95.
Furthermore, as computers become easier to use, and more importantly as communications become a more common use of computers, I predict more females will get online, although maybe not in a highly technical capacity. Is that necessarily bad? What do you think will contribute more to net politics, posting to discussion groups or editing routing tables?
Slashdot Mirror
The reason to sequence a genome is not to find particular genes(there are better ways to find disease genes), but because there are questions you can ask when you have the complete sequence that you cannot ask otherwise. For instance, if you have systematically assayed all genes in the genome and none of them display a particular motif, you can say that the organism completely lacks that motif. The complete sequence can also be put to use to make high throughput assays such as microarrays which have complete coverage of the whole genome, and thus allow you to make statements that you cannot make with a bunch of random genes.(or highly non-random genes, since most of the human genes we had previously sequenced were studied for a reason) Experiments at the genome level ask fundamentally different questions than experiments at the gene level... a microarray is not 6000 Northern blots! The genome project allows us to ask genome level questions, it may or may not identify more genes for the "one gene one postdoc" crowd.
That's not recursive. Try something like
ONS = ONS's not SSH
Seriously, does requiring technical knowledge imply that the net is necessarily gender biased? I believe that the gender distribution of technical information is a function of society, and it is our society which is not gender neutral. For example, most of the operators of early computers (which were themselves called computers) were female; at the time, computing was consider boring and secretarial. Of course, all those women did was move around the program cards which some man made, but it still required more intimate knowledge of how the machine worked than win95.
Furthermore, as computers become easier to use, and more importantly as communications become a more common use of computers, I predict more females will get online, although maybe not in a highly technical capacity. Is that necessarily bad? What do you think will contribute more to net politics, posting to discussion groups or editing routing tables?