While Carlson makes the analogy to Moore's law in exponential growth of biological sequence information, the real bottleneck is not the sequence but actually understanding the biology of each gene. Currently all human genes have been sequenced and most are even classified to families. Paradoxically, pharmaceutical companies are finding it harder and harder to find targets. The problem is validating what each gene is useful in the context of thousands of others which form networks.
A simple example is how little we know about HIV which has only 9600 nucleotide genome and despite the fact that 110,000 papers have been published on HIV (about 12 paper/nucleotide of the virus!). I don't even want to extropolate that to human genome which is magnitutes and magnitutes more complex.
The issue of home grown Biohackers is also very complex. Unlike computer hackers, biohackers need highly sophisticated labs and many many years of advanced training. Biological systems are very fragile and require expensive equipment and reagents to manipulate (incubators, freezers, pcr machines). Unlike computer technology biological experiments are getting more expensive to perform every day. It is true that the cost of sequencing a gene has followed the Moore's law but the actual cost of experiments have not decreased becuase sequence of a gene nowadays is a trival aspect of the biological experiments. An average serious biology labs have yearly budgets in hundreds of thousands of dollars.
It is therefore not realistic to imagine a similar open source movement in biology can be established simply by hobbiest. However there is a serious open source movement at the level of biology scientist for publication of results as an online journal PLOS (plos.org).
So the real bottleneck in biology is not the lack of information (in fact there is too much of it) but lack technological means and high level concepts to rapidly decode the meaning of biological programs.
I have been playing non-stop since this morning! The game is so immersive and beautiful! It runs very smoothly even in hi resolution. I had only one problem in the last 6 hours of play (got stuck somewhere) petitioned for it and received a respone within a minute! Can you believe someone responded and helped me in a minute in a game's first day that probably had 10s of thousands of players with problems. THis is indeed a true mmorgp along the lines of UO and clearly will not satisfy powerlevelers. I can see how it will evolve in 6-12 months. I just ordered my second copy:)
Don't believe the negative comments, SWG simply rocks!
SnowCrash
Slashdot Mirror
While Carlson makes the analogy to Moore's law in exponential growth of biological sequence information, the real bottleneck is not the sequence but actually understanding the biology of each gene. Currently all human genes have been sequenced and most are even classified to families. Paradoxically, pharmaceutical companies are finding it harder and harder to find targets. The problem is validating what each gene is useful in the context of thousands of others which form networks. A simple example is how little we know about HIV which has only 9600 nucleotide genome and despite the fact that 110,000 papers have been published on HIV (about 12 paper/nucleotide of the virus!). I don't even want to extropolate that to human genome which is magnitutes and magnitutes more complex. The issue of home grown Biohackers is also very complex. Unlike computer hackers, biohackers need highly sophisticated labs and many many years of advanced training. Biological systems are very fragile and require expensive equipment and reagents to manipulate (incubators, freezers, pcr machines). Unlike computer technology biological experiments are getting more expensive to perform every day. It is true that the cost of sequencing a gene has followed the Moore's law but the actual cost of experiments have not decreased becuase sequence of a gene nowadays is a trival aspect of the biological experiments. An average serious biology labs have yearly budgets in hundreds of thousands of dollars. It is therefore not realistic to imagine a similar open source movement in biology can be established simply by hobbiest. However there is a serious open source movement at the level of biology scientist for publication of results as an online journal PLOS (plos.org). So the real bottleneck in biology is not the lack of information (in fact there is too much of it) but lack technological means and high level concepts to rapidly decode the meaning of biological programs.
I have been playing non-stop since this morning! The game is so immersive and beautiful! It runs very smoothly even in hi resolution. I had only one problem in the last 6 hours of play (got stuck somewhere) petitioned for it and received a respone within a minute! Can you believe someone responded and helped me in a minute in a game's first day that probably had 10s of thousands of players with problems. THis is indeed a true mmorgp along the lines of UO and clearly will not satisfy powerlevelers. I can see how it will evolve in 6-12 months. I just ordered my second copy :)
Don't believe the negative comments, SWG simply rocks!
SnowCrash
There won't even be people left to post comments at /.
Snow Crash (a computer virus that infects hacker neural code).