The books of my youth - that were books by Stanisl/aw Lem, the polish sf writer (he's also #1 in Germany, and quite known in the States AFAIK). He described an informalypse for the first time in a book entitled "A diary found in a bath" - a book written in the early sixties. This disaster doesn't play an important role in the whole story, it is only mentioned in the "introduction" - written by an editor somewhere in the far future, a representant of an other civilization, which arouse on the Earth after the fall of our civilization - which was due to a viruse eating... paper.
In many later books Lem refers to an informatic catastrophe: sometimes it is caused by a necro-virus, a product of a computer evolutions (the arm race was banned from Earth and transported to the Moon, where sophisticated computer systems worked automatically on weapon development. Each nation was allowed to get the weapons back on Earth, but that meant others could equally prepare; somehow, the automata on the Moon get out of control and start evolving, finally leading to a nanobot-virus thriving on silicon chips - therefore the title, "Peace on Earth"), sometimes by basic physical properties (in a humorous story "Prof. A. Donda" the title hero discovers a basic equality between energy, mass *and* information, and one of the consequences is that if information achieves a certain density it changes into matter, that - a new universe. God's word was counting from infinity to zero in an infinitely small time:-) ).
I admit - I was gestaltet by Lem's writing. Many of his ideas from sixties and seventies came to life in the nineties (e.g. virtual reality or sciences which deal only with information retrieval). I do believe that information storage is a problem - but not because the medium would not last forever, but because of the signal / noise ratio you have even in your personal files. As I look on the four Macs we work with in our lab, and the couple of Gigabytes of data, and then dozens of GB of backups, different versions, obsolate versions, alternate versions, gel pictures you have no idea where they came from and who needs them, and so on, and so on... Yes, there are better solutions than using a Macintosh in a multiuser environment, but that's not the point. I've been using Linux for years and have my personal data at home, and I seem to have a GB or so of data I'm to afraid to remove just in case. And there are so many alternatives of storage, backup, databases... and I'm just a simple biologist!
Returning to Lem - yes, I do believe we are approaching a critical point, like a bifurcation in a chaotic equation, and the word "chaotic" fits here in especially well. What happens next? He who cometh and giveth us a system (not OS, but an information retrieval system), he hath the power and our souls. Well, mine at least. Hope he doesn't come from Redmont, though.
So. Is it the new version of/.? I remember, some time ago it was possible to look at someone else's karma. I mean - what's the reason of karma points if I can't boast about it? HELLO! I want all the world know that I have, um... oh, forget it.
Seriously, though, it happened to me several times lately that I get posts with high scores displayed underneath a couple of "Score 2" posts. Yes, I reloaded the page, stating explicitely that I want "Highest scores first". No, it wasn't a "4" response to a "2" article.
Least but not least, I want to express my outmost joy about having the possibility to read/. and seeing it developed. I think/. i a precursor of future shape of Usenet-like forums: self-moderated discussions with a configurable look&feel.
The bottom line is that these NOSes offer a wide range of characteristics and provide enterprise customers with a great deal of choice regarding how each can be used in any given corporate network. If you want a good, general purpose NOS that can deliver enterprise-class services with all the bells and whistles imaginable, then Windows 2000 is the strongest contender. However, for high performance, enterprise file and print services, our tests show that Novell leads the pack. If you're willing to pay a higher price for scalability and reliability, SCO UnixWare would be a safe bet. But if you need an inexpensive alternative that will give you bare-bones network services with decent performance, Red Hat Linux can certainly fit the bill."
From what you posted on/. you might think that this is an "anti-Linux" article. Please, keep cool - they say many warm words about Linux, and I think that they are quite fair.
Mon cher ami, ca, on laise pour les hommes en Quebec. Ca et la independence de Quebec - je pense que c'est deja beaocoup pour un garcon si intelligent comme toi, et quand a moi, tu peux monopolizer tout les deux activites.
Il faut pas judge par lui meme, tu sais.
Have a nice life,
January
P.S. Excusez moi les erreux horrible je fais quand j'ecris en francaise, mais j'ai apprix la langue... oralement, on peux dire.
P.S.II...et moi, j'ai croie que les peuples de Quebec sont si sympathic que les Francaises je connais ici.
I mean, a maths schoolbook is more intriguing than this toys. Has it some nifty maths behind it? Is it about figuring things out, the way Lego is? No. Is it about being clever about finding new solutions? Connecting things? Making things work? No, I don't think so. Well, I am an East-European geek subspecies, maybe I'm just different from the West-Europeans and Americans, but I don't think this thing is geeky - at all.
P.S. Yes, I used to play with Lego. And chemicals. Rockets. And old radios. Transistors. Repairing things. And so on. Any kind of toy which had screws in it.
I mean, I looked through the page, and I haven't found a single reference to open source and/or licensing of the software developed by Patmos. The whole site is quite small, the technical info very brief, no names, no adresses... well, I have only experience with biotech companies, and if this were one, I would be very supectful.
Each time I see something about genes / DNA / cloning on/. I have a bad feeling. Which usually gets worse after I've read the actual article.
I think I know what the problem is: unless you are into a certain field, something like "scientists found now a way of switching genes on and off" sounds like a sensation, and "it seems that leptine plays an important role also in lizard metabolic regulation" does not - even though the first one is, roughly speaking, nothing but journalistic bullshit, and the second a real revelation.
In spite of my miserable English knowledge I keep submitting to slashdot articles from Nature science update and some other sites that are providing good scientific information. Unfortunatelly, they do not sound as interesting and enthusiastic as what you can read about biology in "XXN news for housewifes".
By the way, I work at ZMBH, Bujard, who developed the tet-system (which seems to work quite fine in many applications) also works here.
Although I don't think that the cloning patent is as ridiculous as one of those from amazon-click-once-dpt., I am quite sure that you don't have the full picture here, basically due to huge media coverage Wilmut got with his Dolly.
First, he was "sitting on the back of the giants" - there was huge research in this field going for years. He didn't start with nothing: he definitely was the first one to get to the point of having a clone of a mammal not derived from embryo cells, but there are still some important issues. I wonder whether this patent is going to stop the scientific community from doing further research.
This patent is much more disturbing then the one from Amazon (after all, one click, two clicks, who cares, how much time you spend on reading the book you've bought with this marvellous technology?). It will hamper some of the most important research fields in modern medicine, like getting finally xenotransplants work.
If everyone patented every scientific discovery the way Wilmut did you wouldn't be reading slashdot now. And Wilmut wouldn't have had even the chance of starting his research. On the other hand - yes, I agree, the team at Roslin Institute is responsible for the breakthrough - namely, choosing the right cell cycle stage for nuclear transfer. Remember, he did not invent the nuclear transfer, which has been conducted for the first time in 1952.
Regards,
January
P.S. Two links for you:
The Cloning of Dolly, a nice and easy explanation what is this nuclear transfer all about and how cloning works, and
There is an article in today's Nature issue entitled "In praise of open software". It states, among other things, that "[bioinformatic] Tools [for genomics] that add value to genome data are to be welcomed, but as the licensing strategy being adopted by Celera Genomics becomes clear (see page 231), it gives new grounds for wariness." I know this is slightly off-topic, I just want to stress that the growing number of patents / license in my field of science is a matter of concern for many biologists, as it is clear from this article in the leading scientific journal.
Unfortunately, those of you who have no access to "Nature" cannot read the full article, but I put some exerts here. Actually, it was my today's slashdot submission (rejected, of course - I have never seen anything posted to slashdot referring to any good biological site). I thought the article is interesting, because it targets the whole scientific community (there is hardly a biologist out there not reading "Nature"), and is the first article in such a journal which mentions Linus Torvalds and Linux, therefore making these names known to a large number of scientists who never heard them before. In a certain way, it could bring Linux more publicity then an editorial in "Times".
Both Corel Linux Distribution and Corel WordPerfect for Linux have poor (=none to speak of) support of foreign languages (keyboard, fonts, dictionaries, locales). For me, who types in polish as well as in german Word Perfect is useless, and Corel Linux could be useful only after modifications which are not easy for a new user. The 8th version of WordPerfect was a great disappointment for me, because in respect of alternative character set support it was a step back even compared to WP 7, which was much worse then the DOS/Windows versions 5.2 and 6. By the way, one of the reasons Corel lost the battle with Microsoft in East European countries was it's pathetic language support (in the cases it was present). Is Corel going to do something about it? Or shall I rather stick to multilingual-oriented distributions like SuSE?
The original article appeared in Science, you can find the abstract here.
As it was mentioned by other/.ers here, this is real cloning, because cloning, in generally, means "getting something genetically identical". In especially, in molecular biology you often say about "cloning a gene", which has less in common with getting a dozen of Einsteins out of a bunch of Einsteins' hair.
The goal of the study was twofold. First, it is the first time a nonhuman primate clone was obtained. Second, the idea is of making a large scale experiment to look for possible abnormalities and/or distortions of resulting clones, as well as differences among them.
Another question was, at what stage of development is it safe to do the embryo splitting, e.g. is it possible to get a 32 cell embryo and divide it into 32 single cells, each resulting in a viable embryo?
The authors did not answer all the question fully, they rather prepared the ground for research yet to come. There are a lot of things to test, the goal not being necessarly cloning of humans (or even monkeys) itself, but rather basic research on development of primates and establishing cultures of embryonic cells (which are, as you know, very useful, because they are able to develope into any mature cell of a given organism).
Of course, getting genetically identical monkeys for drug research is also an issue, although I personally consider research on monkeys very questionable. Chimpansees are much more close to humans then most of the people think - if you haven't read any of Jane Goddals books on chimpansees, do not answer to this point of my reply. What I want to say is that I consider it to be more human to do the phase I drug research on human volunteers, yes, or even humans which are forced to do so - but are conscious of what is happening to them. Doing experiments on chimpansees is something like doing research on children for me.
Let me cover myself in mud and spend a couple of centuries there, then.
The funny is that I'm a bacterial genetist working with a gram po... ne... gram positive cousin of Bacillus. Theoretically I know how the cell wall of B. subtilis looks like (e.g. that it is much thinner than in the case of E. coli, a gram negative), so the interior part can get stained in the course of Gram staining, therefore making the cell "gram positive".
Another article from I-fall-for-every-hoax-on-the-net-dpt.
1. There are many qualified sources of biological information on the net. Contrary to what you probably expect(*), wired is *not* one of them, as opposed to Nature science update, for example.
2. Although spores of B. subtilis are quite resistant to many external factors, it is a highly evolved gram negative bacterium - and it's ancestors, as much we can tell, do not share its peculiar capabilities. I could think about several higher organisms which could survived a direct impact deep inside a meteorite, but they could not give rise to the diversity of life as we know, not to mention that it would not fit into any theory explaining the mechanisms of observed evolution, because those insects - as well as B. subtilis - are quite specialized and, genetically speaking, very complicated life forms.
3. It is a well known fact that one could imagine a very primitive ancestor of all life forms as we know it capable of hitch-hiking through our solar system. Unfortunately, this is not sufficient for a sound scientific theory. This is why nobody takes the panspermia theory seriously, even though some great scientists are promoting it. Nobody but the media, but media take seriously even Microsoft publicity, right?
Regards,
January
(*) Whenever I read something like this/. news I feel the urge to reply quoting two polish humourists, J. Tuwim and A. Slonimski: "Dear madam; either someone did not inform you precisely enough, either - what the editors consider more probable - you didn't understand something. The man is not a descendant of Darwin."
Probably there will be a lot of comments on how bad is it for privacy, and what bad, bad things will follow - like, goverment control, "Big Brother is watching you" and so on. On the other hand, this had to happen, we all knew it - all the way long. Implants you can track, globally - this is not a new sf idea, and we all knew that the components are already available. Hence my question: is it only my impression, or could we have prepared us better for such a coup? Like, at least, informing the "broad" public that things like that are possible?
Personally, I think that the coming century will be The Century Of Lost Privacy. Everyone easily accessible, everyone online, everyone with a handy and a PID, you give someone a handshake and he hacks into your PAN... no, not even that: you give your data automatically, because you are expected to, just as you are expected now to have a phone at home, so people from the office can reach you any time (no, I have no phone at home. But I spend most of my time in the lab anyway). Privacy will be a luxury, an expensive treat: like, you have to pay to have your phone removed from the telephone book, only more. What I'm saying here isn't a new prophecy: we are all expecting it, aren't we? So what can we do against it? Staing online when we want on one hand, but disconnecting from the global information system when we want.
It's clear for me that those implants will become extremly popular: the drawbacks are much weaker then the profits, and, what is probably more important, the *comfort*, the easieness of achieving certain goals. Say, most of the cases a kid is lost it's the parents who didn't pay attention as they should. Now - implanting this tracking device is much easier then being reasonable, isn't it? People are striving towards easy solutions, even if they are bad in the longterm. What is easier *now* is better.
Har, har, har, I must laugh here. Yeah, I tried Corel Linux, esp. because I'm somewhat the target group of this software (a dumb computer-illiterate biologist). Well, let me put it that way: my first Slackware 2.0 installation with kernel 1.3.1 when all I knew about Unix was "rm, ls, pico" was a lot faster and... easier. Easier, because I had to RTFM and help hints during the installation, and there are practically none with Corel Linux.
Back to the topic, anyway. Corel s***d up my XF86Config. It launched KDM right away before reassuring that the graphics is properly tuned (I did a standard, idiot-proof instalation! starting with formatting the disk - well, *a* disk I didn't need). I have a quite old SVGA monitor and a S3 PCI graphics card. I didn't look at the config file produced by Corel (just replaced it with the proper one), but it was certainly flawed.
It's like "HIV virus" or "BSE encephalopathy". You can't say "EOS system", because after expanding the variable "EOS" you get "Earth observing system system".
Regards,
January
Re:On men and Mycoplasma (P.S.)
on
Planet Gattaca
·
· Score: 2
Ugh, OK, I found the article, it's in the Friday issue of Science, Hutchison III et al. Transposon mutagenesis of mycoplasmas using tn4001 is an old story, they just did it on a larger scale. OK, this is something new, although all my other comments apply (I still have doubts about the method as I mentioned). The "minimal gene complement" was proposed to be +- 250 in 1996 - Hutchison et al think it is something like 250-350, so this isn't a new statement either. Maybe what is most interesting are the 100 unknown genes, which have possibly an important function.
For my own purposes there is no trouble of finding information on the Net - google, Altavista and a few specialized databases are good enough for me, independently whether I look for a pidgin-English dictionary or a protocol for AMV reverse transcriptase. At worst you find a link to an index page with "interesting links" or something. Basic IQ and knowledga about how the search engines work is enough.
Still, I see a potential threat in information becoming unmanagable, and, most of all, ways of finding information being abused (like using unrelated keywords just to get some visitors). Stanislaw Lem, the polish sf-writer described this situation in many of his books - starting with the 60s, when noone was even starting to think about such problems.. Sooner of later we'll have a large branch of computer sciences dealing only with searching information in Internet; searching services are already available, but they are either incomplete, or not evaluated. The latter is the key: and google is the first service I'm aware of which tries to automatize evaluating (by counting links pointing to a specific page).
There has been a lot of talk about "Internet agents" a couple of years ago (I remember an article in Scientific American...) - could some good soul explain to me how is the situation now?
Hello, I'm January and I work on Mycoplasma pneumoniae genomics and transcriptomics. I want to add a few words on C.J. Venters revelations.
Mycoplasma genitalium, sequenced by Fraser and Venter, is in principle a deletion mutant of Mycoplasma pneumoniae, sequenced by people from the group I'm in. That means, it lacks a few genes M. pneumoniae still considers interesting for general survival, but all in all those two species are highly similar, with the same genetic apparatus etc.
Both species can be subjected to random transposon mutagenesis - you shot at the genome with a tiny little thingie called "transposone", which randomly destroyes some gene. If the gene destroyed is important, such a cell will not grow and reproduce. Therefore in the mix you have only mycoplasmas, whos important genes are preserved, will grow. You can then use the Polymerase Chain Reaction to amplify and examine what genes specifically got destroyed - that means, which genes are not necessary to grow...under laboratory conditions, of course. And ceteris paribus, that means - all other conditions being equall. Especially, other genes being intact.
Venter tries to a) make the impression that he did the work b) he's got a strain with xxx genes "switched off", which is not true. We only know that all of this 150+ genes are not needed for mycoplasmas to grow if other genes are intact. The way to constructing the "minimal cell" is long, if you want, I can get into details.
By the way, this information has three to four years, and Venter started talking about his "custom-made" M. genitalium about two years ago.
The whole project will make huge publicity and a very little contribution to science. First, "essence of life", my foot. A piece of RNA with a couple of molecules surrounding it is perfectly capable of proliferating, evolving and making you deathly sick, providing it finds enough cells to proliferate within. Intact mycoplasmas need a lot of organic substances in their growth medium - you have to add bovine serum. Essentially, the border between something quite inanimated like virus and a living cell is smooth. Next, this "crucial genes" will be different for different systems and assemblies. Finally, you have assembly this living cell out of "living" molecules - it needs polymerases, ATP, lipids, synthetised DNAs and RNAs and so on just to start living. Ian Wilmut put dead DNA into a "dead" (unable to proliferate, without genetic material) cell, so did he created new, artificial life? Bulls..cience. Artificial life will be when you start with natural, inorganic and simple molecules. Assembling existing parts has not much in common of finding an existing formula of life, especially because it will not help you understand how those parts work! And this is a different research (proteomics/transcriptomics) and it is really a way to go before there will be an appriopriate article on/.. By the way,/. publishes lately a lot of cheap sensations. Sorry to say it.
Regards,
January
(from the JanKatz-Falls-For-Every-Commercial-Trick-Dpt.)
...and another thing to add to your comment: not only newbie-centered, but also english-as-THE-language centered. International support is practicly not existent in Corel Linux, you have to download your own fonts and keymaps, whereas in SuSE you can choose from dozens of different languages during the first few steps of the installation! Well, I'm do speak a little English, I'm a reader of CNet - but nonetheless I like to see Linux speaking polish with me. It is not very hard to prepare a multi-language support in Linux! The least thing to do is to provide at least the Iso-latin-2 and maybe kyryllic fonts for X, so the language schemes from KDE look properly. It's there, it wouldn't cost much effort or disk space.
Regards,
January
P.S. And if they say SuSE is too technical as compared to Corel, then I think Linux made a long way towards the newbie user. SuSE was one of the most user-friendly distributions at a time, and though I'm not a techie, it still annoys me sometimes by it's user-friendliness (I disabled SuSE-config, for example)
This might be a stupid question, but it's related to the X \ rodent problem. I'd really like to be able to cut & paste between virtual consoles without using the mouse. I mean, once you use the mouse, it is cool to cut via left-click and paste via middle-click, much better then command-c / command-v (or ctrl-c/ctrl-v), but how to cut and paste without moving your hands from the keyboard?
The best thing would be to have something like the keypad option in X, but, obviously, the keypad is not intuitive - it should be "hjkl", of course!
Slashdot Mirror
In many later books Lem refers to an informatic catastrophe: sometimes it is caused by a necro-virus, a product of a computer evolutions (the arm race was banned from Earth and transported to the Moon, where sophisticated computer systems worked automatically on weapon development. Each nation was allowed to get the weapons back on Earth, but that meant others could equally prepare; somehow, the automata on the Moon get out of control and start evolving, finally leading to a nanobot-virus thriving on silicon chips - therefore the title, "Peace on Earth"), sometimes by basic physical properties (in a humorous story "Prof. A. Donda" the title hero discovers a basic equality between energy, mass *and* information, and one of the consequences is that if information achieves a certain density it changes into matter, that - a new universe. God's word was counting from infinity to zero in an infinitely small time :-) ).
I admit - I was gestaltet by Lem's writing. Many of his ideas from sixties and seventies came to life in the nineties (e.g. virtual reality or sciences which deal only with information retrieval). I do believe that information storage is a problem - but not because the medium would not last forever, but because of the signal / noise ratio you have even in your personal files. As I look on the four Macs we work with in our lab, and the couple of Gigabytes of data, and then dozens of GB of backups, different versions, obsolate versions, alternate versions, gel pictures you have no idea where they came from and who needs them, and so on, and so on... Yes, there are better solutions than using a Macintosh in a multiuser environment, but that's not the point. I've been using Linux for years and have my personal data at home, and I seem to have a GB or so of data I'm to afraid to remove just in case. And there are so many alternatives of storage, backup, databases... and I'm just a simple biologist!
Returning to Lem - yes, I do believe we are approaching a critical point, like a bifurcation in a chaotic equation, and the word "chaotic" fits here in especially well. What happens next? He who cometh and giveth us a system (not OS, but an information retrieval system), he hath the power and our souls. Well, mine at least. Hope he doesn't come from Redmont, though.
Regards,
January
Seriously, though, it happened to me several times lately that I get posts with high scores displayed underneath a couple of "Score 2" posts. Yes, I reloaded the page, stating explicitely that I want "Highest scores first". No, it wasn't a "4" response to a "2" article.
Least but not least, I want to express my outmost joy about having the possibility to read /. and seeing it developed. I think /. i a precursor of future shape of Usenet-like forums: self-moderated discussions with a configurable look&feel.
Regards,
January
Il faut pas judge par lui meme, tu sais.
Have a nice life,
January
P.S. Excusez moi les erreux horrible je fais quand j'ecris en francaise, mais j'ai apprix la langue... oralement, on peux dire.
P.S.II ...et moi, j'ai croie que les peuples de Quebec sont si sympathic que les Francaises je connais ici.
Go on - flame me, but I think The Amateur Scientist article series from Scientific American can provide you with more interesting cool things to play with.
Not to mention Klein Bottle.
Regards,
January
P.S. Yes, I used to play with Lego. And chemicals. Rockets. And old radios. Transistors. Repairing things. And so on. Any kind of toy which had screws in it.
Regards,
January
I think I know what the problem is: unless you are into a certain field, something like "scientists found now a way of switching genes on and off" sounds like a sensation, and "it seems that leptine plays an important role also in lizard metabolic regulation" does not - even though the first one is, roughly speaking, nothing but journalistic bullshit, and the second a real revelation.
In spite of my miserable English knowledge I keep submitting to slashdot articles from Nature science update and some other sites that are providing good scientific information. Unfortunatelly, they do not sound as interesting and enthusiastic as what you can read about biology in "XXN news for housewifes".
By the way, I work at ZMBH, Bujard, who developed the tet-system (which seems to work quite fine in many applications) also works here.
Regards,
January
First, he was "sitting on the back of the giants" - there was huge research in this field going for years. He didn't start with nothing: he definitely was the first one to get to the point of having a clone of a mammal not derived from embryo cells, but there are still some important issues. I wonder whether this patent is going to stop the scientific community from doing further research.
This patent is much more disturbing then the one from Amazon (after all, one click, two clicks, who cares, how much time you spend on reading the book you've bought with this marvellous technology?). It will hamper some of the most important research fields in modern medicine, like getting finally xenotransplants work.
If everyone patented every scientific discovery the way Wilmut did you wouldn't be reading slashdot now. And Wilmut wouldn't have had even the chance of starting his research. On the other hand - yes, I agree, the team at Roslin Institute is responsible for the breakthrough - namely, choosing the right cell cycle stage for nuclear transfer. Remember, he did not invent the nuclear transfer, which has been conducted for the first time in 1952.
Regards,
January
P.S. Two links for you:
The Cloning of Dolly, a nice and easy explanation what is this nuclear transfer all about and how cloning works, and
A brief history of nuclear transfer, a nice essay at the Roslin Institute.
Unfortunately, those of you who have no access to "Nature" cannot read the full article, but I put some exerts here. Actually, it was my today's slashdot submission (rejected, of course - I have never seen anything posted to slashdot referring to any good biological site). I thought the article is interesting, because it targets the whole scientific community (there is hardly a biologist out there not reading "Nature"), and is the first article in such a journal which mentions Linus Torvalds and Linux, therefore making these names known to a large number of scientists who never heard them before. In a certain way, it could bring Linux more publicity then an editorial in "Times".
Regards,
January
Regards,
January
Regards,
January Weiner
Regards,
j.
P.S. Now describe to me what JonKatz looks like!
As it was mentioned by other /.ers here, this is real cloning, because cloning, in generally, means "getting something genetically identical". In especially, in molecular biology you often say about "cloning a gene", which has less in common with getting a dozen of Einsteins out of a bunch of Einsteins' hair.
The goal of the study was twofold. First, it is the first time a nonhuman primate clone was obtained. Second, the idea is of making a large scale experiment to look for possible abnormalities and/or distortions of resulting clones, as well as differences among them.
Another question was, at what stage of development is it safe to do the embryo splitting, e.g. is it possible to get a 32 cell embryo and divide it into 32 single cells, each resulting in a viable embryo?
The authors did not answer all the question fully, they rather prepared the ground for research yet to come. There are a lot of things to test, the goal not being necessarly cloning of humans (or even monkeys) itself, but rather basic research on development of primates and establishing cultures of embryonic cells (which are, as you know, very useful, because they are able to develope into any mature cell of a given organism).
Of course, getting genetically identical monkeys for drug research is also an issue, although I personally consider research on monkeys very questionable. Chimpansees are much more close to humans then most of the people think - if you haven't read any of Jane Goddals books on chimpansees, do not answer to this point of my reply. What I want to say is that I consider it to be more human to do the phase I drug research on human volunteers, yes, or even humans which are forced to do so - but are conscious of what is happening to them. Doing experiments on chimpansees is something like doing research on children for me.
Regards,
j.
(Pause)
Oh.
Let me cover myself in mud and spend a couple of centuries there, then.
The funny is that I'm a bacterial genetist working with a gram po... ne... gram positive cousin of Bacillus. Theoretically I know how the cell wall of B. subtilis looks like (e.g. that it is much thinner than in the case of E. coli, a gram negative), so the interior part can get stained in the course of Gram staining, therefore making the cell "gram positive".
But I'm also dumb, arogant and stupid.
Somebody kick me, PLEASE!
j.
1. There are many qualified sources of biological information on the net. Contrary to what you probably expect(*), wired is *not* one of them, as opposed to Nature science update, for example.
2. Although spores of B. subtilis are quite resistant to many external factors, it is a highly evolved gram negative bacterium - and it's ancestors, as much we can tell, do not share its peculiar capabilities. I could think about several higher organisms which could survived a direct impact deep inside a meteorite, but they could not give rise to the diversity of life as we know, not to mention that it would not fit into any theory explaining the mechanisms of observed evolution, because those insects - as well as B. subtilis - are quite specialized and, genetically speaking, very complicated life forms.
3. It is a well known fact that one could imagine a very primitive ancestor of all life forms as we know it capable of hitch-hiking through our solar system. Unfortunately, this is not sufficient for a sound scientific theory. This is why nobody takes the panspermia theory seriously, even though some great scientists are promoting it. Nobody but the media, but media take seriously even Microsoft publicity, right?
Regards,
January
(*) Whenever I read something like this /. news I feel the urge to reply quoting two polish humourists, J. Tuwim and A. Slonimski: "Dear madam; either someone did not inform you precisely enough, either - what the editors consider more probable - you didn't understand something. The man is not a descendant of Darwin."
Regards,
January
Personally, I think that the coming century will be The Century Of Lost Privacy. Everyone easily accessible, everyone online, everyone with a handy and a PID, you give someone a handshake and he hacks into your PAN... no, not even that: you give your data automatically, because you are expected to, just as you are expected now to have a phone at home, so people from the office can reach you any time (no, I have no phone at home. But I spend most of my time in the lab anyway). Privacy will be a luxury, an expensive treat: like, you have to pay to have your phone removed from the telephone book, only more. What I'm saying here isn't a new prophecy: we are all expecting it, aren't we? So what can we do against it? Staing online when we want on one hand, but disconnecting from the global information system when we want.
It's clear for me that those implants will become extremly popular: the drawbacks are much weaker then the profits, and, what is probably more important, the *comfort*, the easieness of achieving certain goals. Say, most of the cases a kid is lost it's the parents who didn't pay attention as they should. Now - implanting this tracking device is much easier then being reasonable, isn't it? People are striving towards easy solutions, even if they are bad in the longterm. What is easier *now* is better.
I think I'm in a pessimistic mood today...
Regards,
January
Back to the topic, anyway. Corel s***d up my XF86Config. It launched KDM right away before reassuring that the graphics is properly tuned (I did a standard, idiot-proof instalation! starting with formatting the disk - well, *a* disk I didn't need). I have a quite old SVGA monitor and a S3 PCI graphics card. I didn't look at the config file produced by Corel (just replaced it with the proper one), but it was certainly flawed.
Regards,
January
Regards,
January
Regards,
January
Still, I see a potential threat in information becoming unmanagable, and, most of all, ways of finding information being abused (like using unrelated keywords just to get some visitors). Stanislaw Lem, the polish sf-writer described this situation in many of his books - starting with the 60s, when noone was even starting to think about such problems.. Sooner of later we'll have a large branch of computer sciences dealing only with searching information in Internet; searching services are already available, but they are either incomplete, or not evaluated. The latter is the key: and google is the first service I'm aware of which tries to automatize evaluating (by counting links pointing to a specific page).
There has been a lot of talk about "Internet agents" a couple of years ago (I remember an article in Scientific American...) - could some good soul explain to me how is the situation now?
Regards,
January
Mycoplasma genitalium, sequenced by Fraser and Venter, is in principle a deletion mutant of Mycoplasma pneumoniae, sequenced by people from the group I'm in. That means, it lacks a few genes M. pneumoniae still considers interesting for general survival, but all in all those two species are highly similar, with the same genetic apparatus etc.
Both species can be subjected to random transposon mutagenesis - you shot at the genome with a tiny little thingie called "transposone", which randomly destroyes some gene. If the gene destroyed is important, such a cell will not grow and reproduce. Therefore in the mix you have only mycoplasmas, whos important genes are preserved, will grow. You can then use the Polymerase Chain Reaction to amplify and examine what genes specifically got destroyed - that means, which genes are not necessary to grow ...under laboratory conditions, of course. And ceteris paribus, that means - all other conditions being equall. Especially, other genes being intact.
Venter tries to a) make the impression that he did the work b) he's got a strain with xxx genes "switched off", which is not true. We only know that all of this 150+ genes are not needed for mycoplasmas to grow if other genes are intact. The way to constructing the "minimal cell" is long, if you want, I can get into details.
By the way, this information has three to four years, and Venter started talking about his "custom-made" M. genitalium about two years ago.
The whole project will make huge publicity and a very little contribution to science. First, "essence of life", my foot. A piece of RNA with a couple of molecules surrounding it is perfectly capable of proliferating, evolving and making you deathly sick, providing it finds enough cells to proliferate within. Intact mycoplasmas need a lot of organic substances in their growth medium - you have to add bovine serum. Essentially, the border between something quite inanimated like virus and a living cell is smooth. Next, this "crucial genes" will be different for different systems and assemblies. Finally, you have assembly this living cell out of "living" molecules - it needs polymerases, ATP, lipids, synthetised DNAs and RNAs and so on just to start living. Ian Wilmut put dead DNA into a "dead" (unable to proliferate, without genetic material) cell, so did he created new, artificial life? Bulls..cience. Artificial life will be when you start with natural, inorganic and simple molecules. Assembling existing parts has not much in common of finding an existing formula of life, especially because it will not help you understand how those parts work! And this is a different research (proteomics/transcriptomics) and it is really a way to go before there will be an appriopriate article on /.. By the way, /. publishes lately a lot of cheap sensations. Sorry to say it.
Regards,
January
(from the JanKatz-Falls-For-Every-Commercial-Trick-Dpt.)
Regards,
Grin-Duck-And-Run-Nuary
P.S. Only 22%? Then you are more sane than the rest of the world...
Regards,
January
P.S. And if they say SuSE is too technical as compared to Corel, then I think Linux made a long way towards the newbie user. SuSE was one of the most user-friendly distributions at a time, and though I'm not a techie, it still annoys me sometimes by it's user-friendliness (I disabled SuSE-config, for example)
The best thing would be to have something like the keypad option in X, but, obviously, the keypad is not intuitive - it should be "hjkl", of course!
Regards,
January