The 97.5% number, as it reads in the newspaper article, is wrong. If you compare the complete DNA sequence of mouse to human, the correct number is around 70%.
Even if you restrict yourself to the genes shared between mouse and human, the DNA sequences are not 97.5% identical. I don't remember the number off the top of my head, but it's somewhere closer to 90%.
Note that this 97.5% number is not in the scientific article -- I double checked on the website. It looks like a number that the newspaper guy pulled out of a hat, probably from some other book or study he'd read.
My guess is that 97.5% refers to some other, much more specialized calculation, e.g. the percent identity at the protein level of genes that have clear counterparts in mouse or human, or perhaps to the fraction of known genes in human that have a counterpart in mouse.
In any case, the newspaper writer screwed up. As it's written, the 97.5% identity statement is very misleading.
I worked briefly as a science reporter, so I can say a couple of things from my experience.
The main problem with science reporters is not that they're uninformed -- lots of them have at least undergrad degrees in science and many of them read scientific journals regularly. The real problem is that they have this underlying fear of causing trouble, which leads to "balanced" stories. Editors and higher ups get nervous when a story has too clear of a policy implication, and feel much more comfortable when the story is a straight news piece.
For example, I once wrote a story on "alternative" medicines (echinacea, gingko biloba, comfrey, etc.). The basic premise of the story was that people should be extremely careful of eating these things, because they're unregulated. To illustrate this point, I researched and described cases of herbal supplements that have killed people. I also mentioned some cases of herbals possibly helping people, but the central point was for people to be wary, because there are no government controls on what goes into them.
My editor gave me a long lecture about the story, citing balance problems. It was rewritten by someone else, and what came out instead was a story talking about the economic power of the alternative medicine industry, and about what herbals are now popular. See? Story with a point becomes a story that doesn't offend anybody.
I believe that the reason for this is that a lot of editors are afraid of getting the paper sued. Usually the reporter feels pretty comfortable with the science in the story, but the next editor up feels less so. As you go up the chain, people know less and less about the science, and the fear of lawsuit becomes stronger and stronger until you finally get to the publisher, who cares the least about science and the most about avoiding lawsuits. This leads to system-wide cowardice in the whole organization.
That immunologist doesn't know what he's talking about. Arguing that computer viruses are good is kinda like arguing that getting kicked in the nuts is good for you. Yeah sure, if you get kicked in the nuts a lot, you probably could deal with having your nuts cut off better than the next guy. But are you really happy you got racked so many times?
The analogy to biological viruses is wrong for a couple of reasons.
1) Unlike viruses that attack organisms, computer viruses cause significant harm even if they don't kill your computer.
2) Unlike biological immune systems, computer systems can improve even without viruses.
Point 1 ----------- From a biologist's perspective, an organism is successful if it survives to reproduce, but this perspective is not appropriate for computer viruses. Biologists tend not to worry about the pain and suffering that you endure when you're sick, because evolutionarily speaking, the only important consideration is whether you live to have children. However, computer viruses cause a lot of damage during the period when the virus is active, even if they don't crash your hard drive. Think about the hours of productivity lost, not to mention the psychological annoyance, so many people suffer. There's a lot of harm caused even if your computer doesn't fail. How can this be a good thing? Answer, it can't. Of course, it's very bad if your computer actually fails. But it's certainly possible that viruses do so much crap to your computer that you might wish you'd never even had one in the first place.
Point 2 -------- Second, computer security doesn't have to evolve the same way the immune system does. In biological systems, there is no other mechanism to build up antibodies other than exposure to a pathogen. So you need viruses to gain immunity. However, there are plenty of ways to test computer security other than to have a virus over-run the internet. For example, how about a controlled stress-test on a private network? Sure, testing of computer security helps improve computer security, but it doesn't have to be done in the damaging ways viruses "test" security.
You've asked some very broad questions which delve into both technical and social issues. I'm not much of a social theorist, but I do know something about computing and biotechnology. I'm a postdoc in a lab that studies genomics and biological regulatory networks using computational methods.
There are two basic approaches to merge bio and computing: 1) You try to improve computing by using ideas or techniques from bio, and 2) You
try to do something interesting in bio by using ideas from computing.
Examples of (1) trying to improve computing by using bio would be such things as DNA computing or doing massive combinatorial searches in chemical solutions. In DNA computing, you use various enzymes or chemical agents to modify a DNA string. Think of it as a turing machine acting on a strip, except the strip is now a piece of DNA. Since the DNA strip is modified over the procedure, the "state function" is partially encoded in the data strip, not just internally in the chemical agent. The great advantage of DNA as a computing medium is that there are methods for selectively replicating DNA based on its "state". So you can run your chemical procedure over many different possible DNA sequences simultaneously and then only replicate the particular sequence with the desired state, which gives your answer. At the moment, DNA computing is most useful for search problems. For example, several years ago, the traveling salesman problem was tackled in a DNA system. There is a lot of research now into new operations that can be performed on DNA strings (e.g. ways of doing multiplication or addition using various enzymes and data encodings) to broaden the types of problems that can be tackled.
Anyway, this is one way people are using bio to improve computing, broadly defined. In a lot of ways, this isn't really bio anymore. Scientists discovered DNA and enzymes in cells, but now we're just using them as materials for computation. People also use similar search techniques with non-biological molecules. Some similar search and amplification procedures are used to make synthetic organic compounds in drug discovery. DNA, however, is particular useful because it's a long molecule so a lot of operations can be performed on it.
As far as how DNA will affect computing in the long run, I don't know. We're still very far from making a dna computer that can achieve anything like what silicon-based systems can. But there could be big technological advances eventually. I don't know of any ways that bio systems have affected our ideas about computing at a software level -- except to perhaps funnel more interest towards massive parallelism. Again, I don't want to imply pessimism about what could be invented.
As for (2) how computing could affect biology, this is much less concrete. I'll interpret this to mean that one is trying to program biological systems to do something. i.e. if we give a well-defined instruction set, can we get a cell, organ, or organism to yield a particular output? This to me is just the basic problem of science -- trying to understand how stuff works. We'll be able to "program" cells, organs, or organisms if we understand them as well as we now understand the chemical properties of DNA, or even better, as well as we understand silicon-based semiconductors.
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The 97.5% number, as it reads in the newspaper article, is wrong. If you compare the complete DNA sequence of mouse to human, the correct number is around 70%.
Even if you restrict yourself to the genes shared between mouse and human, the DNA sequences are not 97.5% identical. I don't remember the number off the top of my head, but it's somewhere closer to 90%.
Note that this 97.5% number is not in the scientific article -- I double checked on the website. It looks like a number that the newspaper guy pulled out of a hat, probably from some other book or study he'd read.
My guess is that 97.5% refers to some other, much more specialized calculation, e.g. the percent identity at the protein level of genes that have clear counterparts in mouse or human, or perhaps to the fraction of known genes in human that have a counterpart in mouse.
In any case, the newspaper writer screwed up. As it's written, the 97.5% identity statement is very misleading.
I worked briefly as a science reporter, so I can say a couple of things from my experience. The main problem with science reporters is not that they're uninformed -- lots of them have at least undergrad degrees in science and many of them read scientific journals regularly. The real problem is that they have this underlying fear of causing trouble, which leads to "balanced" stories. Editors and higher ups get nervous when a story has too clear of a policy implication, and feel much more comfortable when the story is a straight news piece. For example, I once wrote a story on "alternative" medicines (echinacea, gingko biloba, comfrey, etc.). The basic premise of the story was that people should be extremely careful of eating these things, because they're unregulated. To illustrate this point, I researched and described cases of herbal supplements that have killed people. I also mentioned some cases of herbals possibly helping people, but the central point was for people to be wary, because there are no government controls on what goes into them. My editor gave me a long lecture about the story, citing balance problems. It was rewritten by someone else, and what came out instead was a story talking about the economic power of the alternative medicine industry, and about what herbals are now popular. See? Story with a point becomes a story that doesn't offend anybody. I believe that the reason for this is that a lot of editors are afraid of getting the paper sued. Usually the reporter feels pretty comfortable with the science in the story, but the next editor up feels less so. As you go up the chain, people know less and less about the science, and the fear of lawsuit becomes stronger and stronger until you finally get to the publisher, who cares the least about science and the most about avoiding lawsuits. This leads to system-wide cowardice in the whole organization.
That immunologist doesn't know what he's talking about. Arguing that computer viruses are good is kinda like arguing that getting kicked in the nuts is good for you. Yeah sure, if you get kicked in the nuts a lot, you probably could deal with
having your nuts cut off better than the next guy.
But are you really happy you got racked so many times?
The analogy to biological viruses is wrong for a couple of reasons.
1) Unlike viruses that attack organisms, computer viruses cause significant harm even if they don't kill your computer.
2) Unlike biological immune systems, computer systems can improve even without viruses.
Point 1
-----------
From a biologist's perspective, an organism is successful if it survives to reproduce, but this perspective is not appropriate for computer viruses. Biologists tend not to worry about the pain and suffering that you endure when you're sick, because evolutionarily speaking, the only important consideration is whether you live
to have children. However, computer viruses cause a lot of damage during the period when the virus is active, even if they don't crash your hard drive. Think about the hours of productivity lost, not to mention the psychological annoyance, so many people suffer. There's a lot of harm caused even if your computer doesn't fail. How can this be a good thing? Answer, it can't. Of course, it's very bad if your computer actually fails. But it's certainly possible that viruses do so much crap to your computer that you might wish you'd never even had one in the first place.
Point 2
--------
Second, computer security doesn't have to evolve the same way the immune system does. In biological systems, there is no other mechanism to build up antibodies other than exposure to a pathogen. So you need viruses to gain immunity. However, there are plenty of ways to test computer security other than to have a virus over-run the internet. For example, how about a controlled stress-test on a private network? Sure, testing of computer security helps improve computer security, but it doesn't have to be done in the damaging ways viruses "test" security.
You've asked some very broad questions which delve into both technical and social issues. I'm not much of a social theorist, but I do know something about computing and biotechnology. I'm a postdoc in a lab that studies genomics and biological regulatory networks using computational methods. There are two basic approaches to merge bio and computing: 1) You try to improve computing by using ideas or techniques from bio, and 2) You try to do something interesting in bio by using ideas from computing. Examples of (1) trying to improve computing by using bio would be such things as DNA computing or doing massive combinatorial searches in chemical solutions. In DNA computing, you use various enzymes or chemical agents to modify a DNA string. Think of it as a turing machine acting on a strip, except the strip is now a piece of DNA. Since the DNA strip is modified over the procedure, the "state function" is partially encoded in the data strip, not just internally in the chemical agent. The great advantage of DNA as a computing medium is that there are methods for selectively replicating DNA based on its "state". So you can run your chemical procedure over many different possible DNA sequences simultaneously and then only replicate the particular sequence with the desired state, which gives your answer. At the moment, DNA computing is most useful for search problems. For example, several years ago, the traveling salesman problem was tackled in a DNA system. There is a lot of research now into new operations that can be performed on DNA strings (e.g. ways of doing multiplication or addition using various enzymes and data encodings) to broaden the types of problems that can be tackled. Anyway, this is one way people are using bio to improve computing, broadly defined. In a lot of ways, this isn't really bio anymore. Scientists discovered DNA and enzymes in cells, but now we're just using them as materials for computation. People also use similar search techniques with non-biological molecules. Some similar search and amplification procedures are used to make synthetic organic compounds in drug discovery. DNA, however, is particular useful because it's a long molecule so a lot of operations can be performed on it. As far as how DNA will affect computing in the long run, I don't know. We're still very far from making a dna computer that can achieve anything like what silicon-based systems can. But there could be big technological advances eventually. I don't know of any ways that bio systems have affected our ideas about computing at a software level -- except to perhaps funnel more interest towards massive parallelism. Again, I don't want to imply pessimism about what could be invented. As for (2) how computing could affect biology, this is much less concrete. I'll interpret this to mean that one is trying to program biological systems to do something. i.e. if we give a well-defined instruction set, can we get a cell, organ, or organism to yield a particular output? This to me is just the basic problem of science -- trying to understand how stuff works. We'll be able to "program" cells, organs, or organisms if we understand them as well as we now understand the chemical properties of DNA, or even better, as well as we understand silicon-based semiconductors.