| Conclusion | |
|
SECTION 1
Introduction SECTION 2 SECTION 3 HGP SECTION 4
|
Are you
wondering where all of this is taking us (besides a DIMACS workshop)?
I'd like to leave you with a quote from "As the Future Catches
You" by Juan Enriquez. And if you want to know more about where
bioinformatics is taking us, I highly recommend you read the whole book.
"The skin and pulp of the orange that sits on your desk.... is just packaging... What matters is the code contained in the seeds. Each seed has a long string of gene data that looks like....
The seed guides growth, how a tree and its leaves develop... The size, flavor, color, shape of fruits. If you can read the code... And rewrite it... You can turn an orange into a vaccine, a contraceptive, a polyester. Each of these things has already been done in corn.
Today, bananas and potatoes can vaccinate you against things like cholera, hepatitis, diarrhea. You can harvest bulletproof fibers... Grow medicines in tobacco. And it's not just apples, oranges, and corn that are rapidly becoming different organisms.
Mosquitoes
are flying hypodermic needles. They can infect you with malaria, dengue, and other awful things. They do so by transferring a little bit of genetic code through their saliva... Into your bloodstream... Which then reprograms part of the way your cells operate... By changing your genetic code ever so slightly... In ways that can make you very sick. So why not engineer mosquito genes so that they have the opposite effect?
If mosquito saliva contained antibodies... Or if you made it hard for malaria to mutate inside a mosquito's body... You could immunize people and animals... By making sure they were bitten.
Because the language of genes (A, T, C, G) is the same for all creatures... You can mix species. If you are an artist, the genes that make jellyfish fluoresce at night... Can be used to make a bunny glow under black light. If you are an M.D., the same genes can be placed in monkeys to serve as markers... Which help identify cures for diseases like Alzheimer's and cancer.
By reading and rewriting the gene codes of bacteria, plants, and animals... We start to turn cells, seeds, and animal embryos into the equivalent of floppy disks... Data sets that can be changed and rewritten to fulfill specific tasks. We start deliberately mixing and matching apples and oranges... Species... Plants and animals.
These discoveries may seem distant, abstract, more than a little scary today. But they will change the way you think about the world... Where you work... What you invest in... The choices your children make about life... What war looks like."
As the Future Catches You by Juan Enriquez Random House, Inc. New York pages 4-6 |
  |
