I never miss a chance to bring some poetry to this list!( even though in a recent post you said you had little use for it)
Rabbie Burn's "To A Mouse"
But, Mousie, thou art no thy lane, In proving foresight may be vain; The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men Gang aft agley, An'lea'e us nought but grief an' pain, For promis'd joy!
And who knows whether the genome project will: "lea'e us nought but grief an' pain, For promis'd joy!"
Richard Lewontin for one has his suspicions!
Only the Beginning
In that context, there's the view of Richard Lewontin, a population geneticist at Harvard University who warns us that much more knowledge of how cells "read" genetic material will be required before we grasp which proteins produced by genes might contribute to an illness or behavior. Lewontin has been a strong and consistent critic of the hype surrounding the genome project.
I read Lewontin's new book called The Triple Helix, which blisters the notion that the genome project will finally reveal to us what it means to be human.
This is an absurd viewpoint often expressed by biologists who should know better. Is some of this foolishness related to the economic spoils that await anyone with a new genetics test or therapy? I'll bet it is.
The danger of this simple-minded thinking is that we'll have simple-minded medical approaches to the complex condition that is humanity.
Nicholas Regush Nicholas Regush produces medical features for ABCNEWS. In his weekly column, published Wednesdays, he looks at medical trouble spots, heralds innovative achievements and analyzes health trends that may greatly influence our lives. His latest book is The Virus Within.
Take care, Brian McAndrews ----Keith wrote:-------------------------
The item of news that jumped out at me on BBC radio last night was that 99%
of our genes have close counterparts with mice, and 80% of them are
identical. Nine thousand new mouse genes have been discovered and 1,200 of
these are now identified to be the same as human genes. John Steinbeck must
be chuckling somewhere in the informational universe.
The latest issue of "Nature" contains the first draft of the mouse genome.
This has been produced by the Genome Project at Cambridge in England,
though a private US company had already cracked the code (and I have a
vague memory that a Chinese research group have also done so quite
recently). However, the Cambridge results are now publicly available on the
Net.
In short, the mouse genome is contained in 20 chromosome pairs (cf 23 in
humans) containing 2.5 billion nucleotides (the "letters" of the code --
2.9 billion in humans) and, altogether, has about 30,000 genes -- about the
same number as humans.
The fact that we only have about 30,000 genes was humbling news some two
years ago when the draft of the human genome was first announced. Most
geneticists were expecting at least 60,000 genes and some, 100,000.
However, "our" set of 30,000 genes produces many times more proteins in our
body (and a more complex brain) than the almost identical set of mouse
genes, so there's obviously much more involved than just the genes themselves.
This is the big mystery that now faces geneticists. There are many genes --
such as those responsible for blood pressure and bone growth -- that carry
out almost identical functions in both mice and humans. These genes have
hardly changed in the 75 million years that have elapsed since we shared a
common ancestor which co-existed with the dinosaurs. But caution must be
exercised is assuming this for all genes which are similar in both mice and
men. For example, we still have the same genes that produce tails in mice.
Is it that they're simply repressed in our case? More likely, they are now
used for entirely different purposes.
However, the genes that are responsible for immunity in specific
environments or for sexual activity or for basic life-and-death situations
have diverged very markedly in the same period according to the uniquely
different trail of environments along which mice and humans have
experienced entirely different sorts of survival crises. Discovering the
function of individual human genes by means of noting what their equivalent
(or identical) genes do in mice or other creatures can't be relied upon in
a straightforward way. The proteins these genes produce may be similar or
even identical to those of mice -- but carry out entirely different
functions in man.
It seems to me that gene therapy, much flaunted in the prospectuses of
newly-launched biotechnology companies, is going to take a backward seat
for a long time to come until more is known about the interaction and
permutations of individual genes at the stage of protein synthesis. This
will depend on more precise knowledge of what used to be called "junk DNA"
-- the very long strings of apparently nonsensical DNA that supposedly
merely linked the genes like the cable between the lights on a Christmas
Tree. The interconnecting stretches of junk DNA are now more respectfully
termed "introns" and it's now being realised that they have a curious,
repetitive type of pattern which may be significant but not yet understood.
Introns with abnormal sequences seem to be associated with diseases that
were hitherto considered to be due to faulty genes alone. It is probable
therefore that introns are important in determining the way that single
genes from different parts of the chromosome are actually brought together
in different ways in order to make different proteins. Proportionately,
humans have far more intron DNA than mice, so -- to those who worry about
these things -- our superior status has been restored! Thorstein Veblen
would have been amused by this.
All this new complexity means that mankind is not going to safely
manipulate many human genes for therapeutic (or eugenic) reasons for a long
time to come -- at least until introns are thoroughly understood. For this,
the study of simpler creatures, such as bacteria, with much smaller numbers
of genes and introns, is going to be more important in the years
immediately ahead.
Keith Hudson ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
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Keith Hudson, General Editor, Handlo Music, http://www.handlo.com
6 Upper Camden Place, Bath BA1 5HX, England
Tel: +44 1225 312622; Fax: +44 1225 447727; mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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