Searching for Life's Blueprints 310
Makarand writes "If the
claims made by the accomplished biophysicist Andras Pellionisz hold any water, life's blueprints may indeed be in fractal patterns found in the DNA.
In a human, genes constitute only around 2-3% of the total DNA (the exons). The rest
of the non-genic DNA (called introns) play a role that has not
yet been understood and some have even suggested that these
may merely be evolutionary leftovers. Removal of this "junk-DNA", however, has been proven to be lethal. The introns, he claims, may have
the "building construction blueprints" in the form of fractal patterns that
the exons use to build living tissue. A patent application covering attempts to count, measure and compare the fractal properties of introns for diagnostic and therapeutic purposes has been made.
He hopes his patent will help him launch his company and make it a key player in this field."
Patent First: (Score:5, Insightful)
I used to think that science was the last field which blatant greed had not infested yet, and I am proven wrong yet again...
Oh Joy, another patent on genetics. (Score:3, Insightful)
Patenting the method, as long as its not the only method? Thats fine. Patenting the discovery? Thats absurd.
No Big Surprise (Score:3, Insightful)
No surprise that the "junk genes" in one of the most complicated structures in nature - DNA - that has been fine tuning itself for billions of years, turn out to have a function and a critically important one. True insight will always come from people with enough courage to say, "I don't know."
In programming terms... (Score:3, Insightful)
So I guess mankind is just self-evolving code. Cool!
Of course a simpler explanation... (Score:5, Insightful)
Humans as fractal creatures? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Patent First: (Score:3, Insightful)
Maybe that guy went a bit quickly to the patent office, but still... scientists don't have hats made of money [penny-arcade.com]
What took so long? (Score:2, Insightful)
When you have a hammer (Score:5, Insightful)
Why should DNA act anything like computer code?
Let's look at it objectively, and see what it has to teach us, instead of straight-jacketing it into familiar metaphors.
Damn right (Score:4, Insightful)
Now I know in the Fantastic Land of Slashdot that making money is always a bad thing, but at some point one has to grow up and become an adult about things and approach them with some measure of maturity.
Furthermore, where the hell have you been for the past 50 years? You didn't think money and greed were factors in the field of science? Money and greed are a factor in EVERY industry. There is no "innocent" industry left. I'm also not fond of the idea that someone who brings us such a great discovery should only have it attributed to him, and not also make a fortune. If somone comes up with something that could cure thousands of ailments and help billions, then he desereves a very large fortune indeed.
psuedo-science (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Patent First: (Score:2, Insightful)
Don't assume all patents are established entirely with profit in mind.
There are concepts of protecting intellectual property and the value of research in terms of both time and money.
-Alex
Junk (not likely) (Score:3, Insightful)
The same geneticists now have the ability to tinker with the code of life and release their monstrosities into the environment that we depend on for our very lives. "Here let's see what happens when I do this! Don't worry, I'm a geneticist and I understand DNA completely and all the ramifications of releasing this new creation into the wild." And we thought nuclear (or is that nuke-u-lar) weapons were how we were going to destroy ourselves.
Re:Humans as fractal creatures? (Score:4, Insightful)
Basically, if you force something like this, then you can make a connection. Doesn't mean the connection is real.
Patents should go to ... (Score:3, Insightful)
How can any asshole claim to have a patent restricting me what I can do with my DNA and how to process is? This is just intelectual violence. We should find a different way to reward these scientists when and if their contributions to society are proven to be worthy.
I'm kind of stating to get bored about raping of the humans by other humans. You can't fit everything under the free market schema with hacks like patent law or copyright. It can help in certain cases, but generalized like this, they turn into a pie divider of societies gains through time which happens to be unacceptable (to me).
Re:i've got him beat (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously, this patenting nonsense is completely antagonistic to the spirit of scientific inquiry. There are so many extremely difficult problems to be solved in molecular biology. How can we predict protein folding? How does morphogenesis produce perfectly formed organs? How do neural networks store and retrieve memories? It's a fascinating challenge and to solve it we need to maintain an open scientific environment with the free flow of ideas.
As others have noted [tuxedo.org], the Open Source software movement has drawn upon the paradigm of scientific research for its extraordinary growth and success.
What Pellionisz is doing is just the opposite. He's promoting the 'Proprietary Corporate Control' paradigm for scientific research.
Newton stood upon the shoulders of giants to make his great discoveries. These days people like Pellionisz use the boots of greed to trample science into the mud.
mhack
Re:Damn right (Score:4, Insightful)
get your lazy bum out of your chair and check WHO actually discovered things.
ALL (not some, ALL) medicines currently known against aids were first researched at a university
same for virtually any other disease.
You seem to think that competition (= not cooperating, but working to kill off, or at least bancrupt, your collegues) works, it doesn't.
Even the simplest of molecules used in the human body has thousands and thousands of possible incarnations. WAY to much for even multinationals to research.
In universities, where researchers are given a free hand in research, they occasionally stumble upon new medicines. Eg. someone is researching some ancient plant and discovers a poison the plant uses to kill of insects that helps against a disease.
Understand that we don't understand even the energy production in a cell, transport systems haven't even all been identified.
The processes we're talking about are not only VERY sensitive, but also play on a very small scale (transport systems in a cell for example, work by merging, melting, mixing, breaking, etc molecules that contain thousands of atoms, and each and every one of those atoms has a function. Determining the composition of a single of the molecules is a work that takes years with the most advanced tools available.
Keep in mind that the biggest thing that happened last year in biotech was the succesful analysis of ONE enzym involved in energy production in the cell (out of more than 10.000 different enzyms).
That analysis took 5 years of intensive communication between a lot of different universities. With competition (that means without communication) you don't stand a chance.
Most, if not all biotech startups fail, promise great things, but deliver none. And these are the things you want to stimulate ?
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof (Score:5, Insightful)
Just what is this guy proposing the fractals do? What is the mechanism for reading these fractals?
Until this guy can propose a specific biochemical pathway using his fractals that can't be explained on the basis of protein and transcription regulation, I won't take him seriously.
One of the fundamental problems in genetics is deciding whether a particular streach of DNA is or is not part of a gene. There are a number of very effective statistical methods for identifying genes, but they are not 100% accurate. Part of the reason is "alternative splicing" wherein a particular sequence might be an intron sometimes and an exon at other times. The whole gene, introns and exons intact, is transcribed to mRNA, then proteins splice out the introns, but in many cases, different parts may be left in or taken out, so that a single gene produces a number of related proteins. If somone tried to remove all the introns from any sort of eukaryote, it's exceedingly likely that they'd cut out something important unintentionally.
As for prokaryotes, they don't have alternative splicing, but they have very few introns to begin with. The most time-consuming step in cell division is DNA replication, so prokaryotes whose survival strategy is exponential growth are under a lot of evolutionary pressure to minimize junk DNA. It seems they don't need it, anyway. Higher organisms, however, are full of so-called "transposable elements" - essentially proto-viruses. They are genes that encode proteins that then act on the original gene, spliciing it out of the chromosome and putting it back somewhere else. The genome is full of these, along with non-functional truncated or mutated versions of them. These are mostly just parasitic.
Finally, there are the "highly non-conserved" portions of DNA. These are areas with extremely high variablility between members of a species, meaning that there is no evolutionary pressure to conserve the function. The best explanation for this is that there is no function.
Non-coding sequences can however play structural roles, since the chemistry of the nucleotide bases can introduce "kinks" into the DNA strand. These form the basis of many protein recognition sites for regulation, duplication, splicing, error correcting, etc.
We have all these ways for accounting for a lot of the DNA, but it sounds to me like this guy said to himself "Wouldn't it be cool if all this DNA were like, a fractal or something!" This would be a tremendous discovery if it were true, but the article shows no evidence that he has any clue how it might work or what it might accomplish.
Re:Damn right (Score:3, Insightful)
mhack
Pot. Kettle. Black. (Score:5, Insightful)
Your kneejerk reaction to defend the privatization and monopolization of human knowledge is unfortunate. Government entitlements in general are antithetical to free markets, government monopoly entitlements particularly so.
1) Biotech and pharma companies routinely exaggerate their R&D costs, often by orders of magnitude, rolling standard corporate costs of doing business into the sum total.
2) most bio and pharma research is done with a mixture of private and public capital, yet those donating money to (e.g.) AIDS research are not given a portion of the "ownership" once the patent is granted. Indeed, that same patent prohibits, by force of a government gun, the donator from persuing research along the very same lines his or her donation helped to initially fund.
3) Patents stifle research. This has been demonstrated historically time and time again. The Wright Brother's patent led to the United States falling a generation behind in aircraft technology, stifling improvements so much so that with the advent of World War I the US government, in an unprecedented move (and a tacit admission that patents do in fact stifle progress, no surprise since they are antithetical to competition which unlike patents actually does promote progress) seized their patent, opened it up to all comers to promote competition, and granted the Wright Brothers an arbitrary 1% royalty so that the technology would be improved and we'd have a fighting chance against the much more advanced German aircraft (whose builders had not been hamstrung by such patents).
More recently, several lines of research into potential cures for breast cancer and AIDS have been stopped, in response to Cease and Desist letters sent by patent holders very similiar to the person you so blindly laud.
Your anti-slashot ranting and raving aside, monopolies are antithetical to competition, antithetical to free markets, and antithetical to progress. Yes, they enrich the inventor (sometimes, often they do not, they enrich instead the inventor's employer), but even in the best case (such as the Wright Brother's invention of the airplane, or perhaps this case), all further improvements on the technology will only come from a very limited group: the patent holder themself, or those few they license to use the patent. Vast numbers of researchers are thus excluded, and a vast number of improvements essentially left unexplored for at least 20 years.
With fundamental science like this, that's a lot of research, a lot of unrealized cures or treatments, and a lot of dead people as a result. Not in Fantastic Land, in the real, hard world.
There are other methods to funding research besides granting government entitlements to 20-year monopolies, and almost all of them are vastly better than the patent system we are employing today.
Re:Damn right (Score:2, Insightful)
Before you go all holier-than-thou with academia, I would suggest to you that with out the finanical support of the biotech firms much of that research would not be funded or possible. Lets not forget that those biotech students often have the desire to graduate and take home a paycheck. You can't have one without the other.
You need to foster that learning environment and you need the application of the technology to keep the cycle going.
What needs to happen is a balance to keep everyone on track and honest, having that patent keeps the control with the idea maker. I can see where it would be in the best interest of the professor to patent his ideas, lest you have biotech firms run with his idea, make billions, and never return the favor back to the university with grants, scholarships, etc.
Don't think though that the university system can be solely creditted with all the great achievements. In order to have the luxury of time devoted entirely to research, somebody has the pay the bills, buy the equipment, pay the profs, fund the grants.
This does not surprise me (Score:3, Insightful)
It shouldn't take anyone very long to realize that the scientific field of genetics is in such an infantile state, and all the biotech buzz going around so far (to me personally) seems to be rather much ado about nothing. Albeit, we can make insulin, clone sheep, and poke the human genome, but really, other than the recombinant DNA technology we've developed to use with bacteria and a few crop-altering techniques, I really don't find biotechnology to be a very applicable science, or even practical for that matter.
Now, I'm not going to claim the theory, because I come up with many hairball theories about stuff all the time, not really having proof behind any of it, however, I always did suspect that this "junk DNA" was good for something, and I found it rather peculiar that fractitions (made the term up myself ^^) have found correlations between certain morphological structures and fractals. I actually attributed the fractal behaivor to be the result of some abstract physical phenomenon resulting from the cells themselves, not DNA, but this guy's theory holds a lot of weight with me as he is much more highly educated and obviously knows what he's talking about. I advise everyone to pay heed to this theory, because it has great potential to change the face of the WORLD as we know it. ;)
While on the subject of biotechnology, I would like to defend the genetecists' position against religious fanatics. From my studies, I have concluded that genetics is a subject of absolutely no spiritual/religious/moral import whatsoever. The moral dilemas in biotechnology can be considered very minute in comparison to that of other situation that politicions engage in. Obviously, anyone can agree that risky human experimentation is immoral (which is the same for any field of science), but other than that, I don't see any other relevant issues that are practical at the same time.
Also, just to set the records straight, cloning is a science that is centuries old. It brought us the Irish Potatoe Famine, and yet it also saved the wild orchid. I always hope to believe the benefits outweigh the losses.
Re:nature scares vs. lab scares (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm still waiting for some argument that "not destroying ourselves" is a goal that we should have
Well, in the words of Ren Hoeck, "Stimpy, you've really lost it this time." Survival is a mechanism bred into all creatures through the process of evolution.
Man, if I would have realized I was arguing with a religious fanatic I would have stopped wasting my time about four posts back. Bye bye, Christian Taliban. Go stone a harlot or something.