The scary thing is I knew it was a Salvage-I reference before I even clicked on the link... Go Hydrazine!
Notes from an Ex-molecular biologist
on
Build Your Own Virus
·
· Score: 2, Informative
IWAMB (I was a molecular biologist, until I discovered programming paid better, at least before the last round of layoffs...)
This news should not be surprising. The technology to synthesize multiple large genes has been around for years; and it has been known that the pieces could be combined in a host cell to yield whole, infectious virions. The novel thing here is that somebody has combined the two technologies, creating the polio genes synthetically before putting them into a host.
Two older articles describing the combination of cloned viral genes in vivo to make infectious virus are: This article showed that the bovine herpesvirus genome could be cloned into a bacterial vector, maintained indefinitely, then reintroduced into cow cells to produce active virions. This article showed that infectious rabies virus could be produced by putting cloned rabies genes into a suitable host.
Nowdays, if you have a gene sequence, you can synthesize it in pieces and assemble it (with modifications, if you choose) with PCR quite easily. You don't need any source material from the original organism. I synthesized a small gene from scratch myself, once, back when I was an underpaid M.S. in a biotech company.
Of course, I never tried this with a whole FREAKIN' POLIO VIRUS!!!!! WTF!!!! Didn't these guys ever read "The Stand"?!
Woo hoo! I haven't had an Atrac tape player since I wrapped my '77 Chevy around that phone pole. Now I can listen to my 'Pure Prairie League' and 'Three Dog Night' tapes again!
Huh, In the movie 'Lilo and Stitch', they said that 'Ohana means family, and that nobody gets left behind, or forgotten'. They didn't say anything about 'Ohana means fibers, of maximum a few kilometers'. Next thing you'll be telling me that poi isn't a dish of boiled taro roots...
"Man, they say that Overwhelmingly Large Telescope is one big mutha-" "...shut yo mouf!" "I'm just talkin' about the Overwhelmingly Large Telescope!" "...we can dig it!"
>It might get further away, but it will still be around when the Sun goes Nova and swallows it all anyhow.
Except the earth will probably not be swallowed when the sun goes off main sequence. It turns out that the astronomers who first suggested this neglected the fact that the sun will have radiated a significant portion of its mass as light during the billions of years left in its lifespan. As the sun loses its mass, the planets will gradually move further away from the sun, so the Earth will live to see the Sun become a white dwarf. Still, the Earth will be pretty toasty by that time, and will probably have lost its atmosphere to the solar wind long before that (once the Earth's core cools and we lose our magnetosphere.)
The SEDS Nine Planets website has a nice review of the search for an intra-Mercurial planet (to be called, surprise surprise, Vulcan), back before Einstein explained away the discrepancies between Mercury's predicted and actual orbits.
"Java Compiler Compiler (JavaCC) is the most popular parser generator for use with Java applications. A parser generator is a tool that reads a grammar specification and converts it to a Java program that can recognize matches to the grammar. In addition to the parser generator itself, JavaCC provides other standard capabilities related to parser generation such as tree building (via a tool called JJTree included with JavaCC), actions, debugging, etc. "
It's very cool, and there are scores of grammars already defined.
This reminds me of the Wim Wenders film, "Until the End of the World." In it, a scientist has developed a means of allowing blind people to see, by directly recording the electrical impulses of a seeing person's brain, then transmitting them into the blind person's brain. He does this for his wife, who has been blind for most of her life. After he starts transmitting images of their children and friends to his wife, she has such a crisis, as described in this narration from the movie:
"Edith Eisner had been 8 years old when she lost her sight. The experience of seeing the world again was exhilirating, but it was also confusing and disorientating, and unpredictably sad. Her childhood friends aged 50 years in a minute, but the world they lived in was darker and uglier than she could have possibly imagined."
Slashdot Mirror
The scary thing is I knew it was a Salvage-I reference before I even clicked on the link...
Go Hydrazine!
IWAMB (I was a molecular biologist, until I discovered programming paid better, at least before the last round of layoffs...)
This news should not be surprising. The technology to synthesize multiple large genes has been around for years; and it has been known that the pieces could be combined in a host cell to yield whole, infectious virions. The novel thing here is that somebody has combined the two technologies, creating the polio genes synthetically before putting them into a host.
Two older articles describing the combination of cloned viral genes in vivo to make infectious virus are:
This article showed that the bovine herpesvirus genome could be cloned into a bacterial vector, maintained indefinitely, then reintroduced into cow cells to produce active virions.
This article showed that infectious rabies virus could be produced by putting cloned rabies genes into a suitable host.
Nowdays, if you have a gene sequence, you can synthesize it in pieces and assemble it (with modifications, if you choose) with PCR quite easily. You don't need any source material from the original organism. I synthesized a small gene from scratch myself, once, back when I was an underpaid M.S. in a biotech company.
Of course, I never tried this with a whole FREAKIN' POLIO VIRUS!!!!! WTF!!!! Didn't these guys ever read "The Stand"?!
-dexter ("Don't Fear the Reaper", my ass) riley
Woo hoo! I haven't had an Atrac tape player since I wrapped my '77 Chevy around that phone pole. Now I can listen to my 'Pure Prairie League' and 'Three Dog Night' tapes again!
Huh, In the movie 'Lilo and Stitch', they said that 'Ohana means family, and that nobody gets left behind, or forgotten'. They didn't say anything about 'Ohana means fibers, of maximum a few kilometers'.
Next thing you'll be telling me that poi isn't a dish of boiled taro roots...
E pili mau nâ pômaika`i me `oe!
-dexter
"Man, they say that Overwhelmingly Large Telescope is one big mutha-"
"...shut yo mouf!"
"I'm just talkin' about the Overwhelmingly Large Telescope!"
"...we can dig it!"
I want an Ein!
>It might get further away, but it will still be around when the Sun goes Nova and swallows it all anyhow.
Except the earth will probably not be swallowed when the sun goes off main sequence. It turns out that the astronomers who first suggested this neglected the fact that the sun will have radiated a significant portion of its mass as light during the billions of years left in its lifespan. As the sun loses its mass, the planets will gradually move further away from the sun, so the Earth will live to see the Sun become a white dwarf. Still, the Earth will be pretty toasty by that time, and will probably have lost its atmosphere to the solar wind long before that (once the Earth's core cools and we lose our magnetosphere.)
Yeah, I had my 1 gigasecond "birthday" about 2 years ago. Damned if nobody got me a card or nothin'.
"It's strange, it's not like anything
we've faced before...
It seems familiar somehow...
Of course!
The spell we cast with Buffy
must have released some primal evil
that's come back seeking,
I'm not sure what...
Willow, look through the chronicles
for some reference to a warrior beast.
I've got to warn Buffy!
There's every chance she might be next!
And Xander,
help Willow!
And try not to bleed on my couch,
I've just had it steam-cleaned.
No, wait..."
(microphone feedbacks)
That's fine...I'll just have my attorney, Johnny Cochrane, counter-sue you.
"This is Chewbacca..."
-dexter "still looking for planet x" riley
...must be on welfare by now! After all, the Onion said all their groupies were 31-year old computer programmers! :)
-dexter "it's not true, I turn 34 next month" riley
Of course, if you WERE dead, you wouldn't be sweating it anyway...
...unless you went the the bad place, that is.
>Will you get the satisfaction of pointing to your computer and saying "I built that", and have fun in the process? No.
But he WILL get the satisfaction of looking at the mainboard (or DIMM, or sound card, or whatever) sitting in the trash, and saying, "I fried that."
I tried watching this movie on my Linux box, but the opening credits never got past "LI".