From: Steve D
Location: Kent, UK
Date: 06/14/2007
To my layman's brain, the findings discussed in the following article seem to be getting very close to Darwin's Radio territory:
http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/findings-challenge-basic-views-human-genome-13465.html
The next few years could be fascinating.
Slashdot discussion here:
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/06/13/2246219&threshold=3
Steve
From: Greg Bear
Date: 06/17/2007
Thanks, Steve! We are indeed deep into the future of biology I speculated about in DARWIN'S RADIO and elsewhere. I've been highly critical of the notion of so-called "junk DNA" since the early 1980s, when I was writing BLOOD MUSIC--but the idea is remarkably stubborn! So I'll put it bluntly--there is no junk DNA. The term should fade away. All of it is put to some use or another.
From: Kurt9
Location: Oregon
Date: 06/19/2007
The subject of the article has been obvious for a long time. The "one gene to one protein" paradym has been obviously flawed for some time and the notion of large portions of the genome being "junk" has never made sense to me. I know that natural processes are supposed to be inefficient, but having most of the genome being "useless" has always seemed over the top to me.
The good news is that bio-science, like any other science, is tool-driven; and the performance/cost of those tools is continually progressing.
From: patrick
Location:
Date: 06/20/2007
I think - as with the case of the condensing of Maxwell's equations by those who either didn't understand the unabridged set, or used them for their own ends - biology is no different than other branches in that those in the field have contrived it according to their own psyche.
Archives: [Oct-Dec 2004] [Jan-June 2005] [July-Dec 2005] [Jan-June 2006] [July 2006] [Aug-Dec 2006] [2007] [2008] [2009] [Current] [Search Blog Archives]
***All images & text are, of course, copyright and all rights reserved;
may be downloaded and viewed for personal use only.***
Questions? Email webmaster@gregbear.com
