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October 23, 2006
NMPDR - When Science Fiction Becomes Something Completely Different From Science
Having a molecular biologist as a pet is not without its problems. Those who know Bruce consider him the very model of the sort of foggy-brained individual who will design some new biological weapon without understanding that it might be misused.
But in fact, the bug everyone wants nowadays is not a new plague but rather something that will convert trash into cheap ethanol. The mutation we risk from this project is not a bacteria that will wipe out the human race but a communicable disease that makes you drunk and stupid without having to visit a liquor store.
Hang on a minute. I may have come up with a scientific explanation of Illinois politics.
Anyway, Bruce isn't working on that side of the equation anyway. His group is trying to identify what genes do which. The nightmare scenario here is that we'll find some way to engineer babies in the womb, or develop a test that enables us to detect conservative political beliefs while it's still legal to abort.
The truth is, however, that we're nowhere near that stage. The great Human Genome Project, for example, did not produce a detailed description of which portions of your DNA controlled eye color: instead, it produced a an organized sequence of 3.2 billion letters. You can see the highlights here. The page lists over 50 gene sequences used in various bits of cell activity ranging from the methylcitrate cycle (which converts a waste product from some of the other reactions into substances used to help the cell grow) to the fatty acid oxidation pathway (which burns fat to generate energy). Conspicuously missing are the blue eyes or a tendency to vote based on your religion.
The problem here is there are billions of different human DNA sequences living on this planet and we're working with a single sequence that was assembled like a jigsaw puzzle from thousands of samples. Another problem is that DNA drives the chemistry of a single cell. How that chemistry relates to other cells is a very complicated and poorly-understood process, and all the interesting human traits come from that process.
So the science fiction concept of the designer child is not going to come out of current research. Instead of things like eye color, Bruce's group is looking at the basic processes that keep a cell alive and functioning. These processes are called subsystems, and the nice thing about subsystems is that if you've mapped a particular subsystem for one organism it's easier to find the same subsystem in other organisms. For example, this page shows a table of the genes used by mice, rats, dogs, humans, and chimpanzees to burn fat. The rows of the table correspond to the organisms and the columns correspond to the steps required to oxidize a fatty acid. In each table cell is a list of the genes that do the column's job for the row's organism. Fatty acid oxidation is a pretty important subsystem, so you'll notice that there are multiple genes doing each job.
So there you have it. Not science fiction, but rather simple science, in which ordinary conclusions are build from decidedly non-fantastic building blocks. It's a far cry from what you'll see in the next made-for-TV techno-thriller, but it provides a real hope for fighting disease, and that's enough for Bruce and his co-workers.
Respectfully submitted,
Ferdinand T. Cat
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