The "useless" Y chromosome is not useless. In fact, it's very useful. The reason it's seen as bad is because the X and the Y chromosome DO pair up - the Y chromosome is smaller, so it matches up with less of the X chromosome.
The way our genes work (most of you probably remember from HS biology) is that the two genes (one from each chromosome) combine to from a trait. Whether I can roll my tongue or not is a good example. Let's call the ability to roll my tongue "T" and the inability "t". I inherit either a "T" or a "t" from my mother and my father. So, if I have TT or Tt, then I can roll my tongue. If I have tt, then I can't. This means that there are "recessive" traits which are hidden - you can't tell by looking at a Tt that they have the "t" trait because they can do just as much as the TT's.
When dealing with the X-Y pairing, certain loci (locations) on the X chromosome don't have an analog on the Y chromosome. So if there's a recessive trait (think "t") on the X chromosome and it's one of those loci that isn't paired up, then the person won't be able to roll their tongue.
This causes problems in things like male-pattern baldness. Essentially, the recessive trait can get handed down from the mother to son (mother is "Bb" and so on one X chromosome is contained "B" and on the other is "b"). If the son gets the "b" X chromosome, then with no gene on the Y chromosome, they will exhibit male-pattern baldness.
Back to the "useless" part: If this were true for every characteristic on the X chromosome, males would be disease-ridden, pus-infested beings. According to some, that may already be true:> . But it's important that some vital genes exist on the Y chromosome, so it's not quite useless.
... there's one "Asian" cook. It'd be nice if there were several though, as European cooking tends to be pretty homogeneous and Asian cooking is so completely different.
Also, is Shatner just gonna make a mockery out of this? He doesn't exactly get good gigs anymore...
The truth is, there's no need for new HTML . If CSS were fully implemented (as is in Netscape 6.0), you can do just about ANYTHING with it, above and beyond the capabilities of HTML. The W3C is working on more important things like XHTML and XML rather than improving on a hack of a markup language, HTML.
No matter what, we're still going to have to deal with old browsers that don't support new "standards". Ugh.
For certain areas of the body, yes, you can change small areas of the genome. For instance, in Cystic Fibrosis (CF), the most effective therapy to this point has been to introduce plasmid vectors of a sort to the throat of an affected individual - the genes of the vectors introduce themselves to the human's genes and they have a little party and switch things up. Because every cell in your body has the same genome, it's impossible to change every cell in your body (your cells change over every 24 hours) with current technology.
The closest thing we have to creating alpha's (Brave New World) is to do genetic screening in the womb early on, and THEN alter the genetic makeup while there are still a managable amount of cells.
Cancer is not simply mutation - a cancer starts off as a cell that does not know when to stop reproducing because it has no growth inhibitors in its genome. So it just keeps on producing more and more cancerous cells. It's not that these cells actually carry any disease - it's that they get in the way of normal bodily functions that's the problem.
As someone who could be entering the research field, this is incredibly exciting - but not because it's any sort of breakthrough development. Sequencing has been around for a while, just not on this scale. This sort of in-depth cataloguing is like maintaining a list of every grain of sand in a 64 sq.ft. area of beach.
The real magic comes in when researchers take someone who can curl their tongue and someone who can't, do a diff on their genomes and in addition to finding out what sequences are responsible for each trait, find out what nonsense sequences are linked. Something that has been lost in all of this hubbub is that there is all sorts of nonsense data in the genome, or at least it's thought to be. It's kinda like dark matter to physics. One theory holds that it protects the chromosomes from decay - every so often, a base from the ends of the chromosome gets lost, so if you have some junk DNA there, you protect the good DNA. This is thought to be part of the aging process (wow - a molecular event proceeding on a visible level!). It could be a key to some sort of fountain of youth for all we know!
Slashdot Mirror
The "useless" Y chromosome is not useless. In fact, it's very useful. The reason it's seen as bad is because the X and the Y chromosome DO pair up - the Y chromosome is smaller, so it matches up with less of the X chromosome.
:> . But it's important that some vital genes exist on the Y chromosome, so it's not quite useless.
The way our genes work (most of you probably remember from HS biology) is that the two genes (one from each chromosome) combine to from a trait. Whether I can roll my tongue or not is a good example. Let's call the ability to roll my tongue "T" and the inability "t". I inherit either a "T" or a "t" from my mother and my father. So, if I have TT or Tt, then I can roll my tongue. If I have tt, then I can't. This means that there are "recessive" traits which are hidden - you can't tell by looking at a Tt that they have the "t" trait because they can do just as much as the TT's.
When dealing with the X-Y pairing, certain loci (locations) on the X chromosome don't have an analog on the Y chromosome. So if there's a recessive trait (think "t") on the X chromosome and it's one of those loci that isn't paired up, then the person won't be able to roll their tongue.
This causes problems in things like male-pattern baldness. Essentially, the recessive trait can get handed down from the mother to son (mother is "Bb" and so on one X chromosome is contained "B" and on the other is "b"). If the son gets the "b" X chromosome, then with no gene on the Y chromosome, they will exhibit male-pattern baldness.
Back to the "useless" part: If this were true for every characteristic on the X chromosome, males would be disease-ridden, pus-infested beings. According to some, that may already be true
John
... there's one "Asian" cook. It'd be nice if there were several though, as European cooking tends to be pretty homogeneous and Asian cooking is so completely different.
...
Also, is Shatner just gonna make a mockery out of this? He doesn't exactly get good gigs anymore
The truth is, there's no need for new HTML . If CSS were fully implemented (as is in Netscape 6.0), you can do just about ANYTHING with it, above and beyond the capabilities of HTML. The W3C is working on more important things like XHTML and XML rather than improving on a hack of a markup language, HTML.
No matter what, we're still going to have to deal with old browsers that don't support new "standards". Ugh.
The closest thing we have to creating alpha's (Brave New World) is to do genetic screening in the womb early on, and THEN alter the genetic makeup while there are still a managable amount of cells.
Cancer is not simply mutation - a cancer starts off as a cell that does not know when to stop reproducing because it has no growth inhibitors in its genome. So it just keeps on producing more and more cancerous cells. It's not that these cells actually carry any disease - it's that they get in the way of normal bodily functions that's the problem.
As someone who could be entering the research field, this is incredibly exciting - but not because it's any sort of breakthrough development. Sequencing has been around for a while, just not on this scale. This sort of in-depth cataloguing is like maintaining a list of every grain of sand in a 64 sq.ft. area of beach.
The real magic comes in when researchers take someone who can curl their tongue and someone who can't, do a diff on their genomes and in addition to finding out what sequences are responsible for each trait, find out what nonsense sequences are linked. Something that has been lost in all of this hubbub is that there is all sorts of nonsense data in the genome, or at least it's thought to be. It's kinda like dark matter to physics. One theory holds that it protects the chromosomes from decay - every so often, a base from the ends of the chromosome gets lost, so if you have some junk DNA there, you protect the good DNA. This is thought to be part of the aging process (wow - a molecular event proceeding on a visible level!). It could be a key to some sort of fountain of youth for all we know!