Issue link: http://cp.revolio.com/i/356
AI 26 Feb 2009 enhAnCeD nAno neURo hUMoR FoReVeR YoUng bIo MoirA'S lAW Moira A. gunn, Ph.D. T he new millennium brought us the culmination of the human genome Project, but this didn't mean that there was one single human whose genome was decoded. Rather, it was a deliberate combination of adults, most of whom were unidentifi ed volunteers from buffalo, new York, along with J. Craig Venter, who jumped in and churned up the water, but that's another story. It's taken until 2008 for any individual to have his DnA completely decoded and publicly published. The fi rst four are: James Watson of Watson & Crick fame (sans two biomarkers which are currently believed predictive of Alzheimer's), J. Craig Venter again (who most agree probably beat Watson to the digital punch but held back for history's sake), an unidentifi ed Asian male, and an unidentifi ed African male. one might ask why this is important. And it's a good question. The truth is: It's not. not yet, anyway. Think of it as the biotech equivalent of Metcalfe's Law. bob Metcalfe is a well-known computer scientist, who co-invented the ethernet and founded the communications company 3Com. he's been all about networks for decades and he formulated Metcalfe's Law as follows: "The value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users of the system." For most of us, it means this: The value of one telephone — where you can call no one — is zero. The minute someone else gets a telephone, then the two of you can talk and the value of all telephones goes up. As more and more people get telephones, the value of the whole network goes up. It's an idea anyone can understand. getting back to this whole-genome decoding of human DnA, it's not the same. The decoding of the second one only marginally increases the value of the fi rst, if it does at all. We see the DnA decoded all right, we see the raw data but we don't know what it means yet. In the meantime, we've decoded smaller swaths of human DnA, and we've discovered quite a lot. We once thought we got one set from Mom and one set from Dad. It turns out that we sometimes get multiple copies of strings of DnA from the same parent. Could these variants be the "nature" part of the "nature vs. nurture" equation, the reason why children of the same parents each seem to be a lot more different than alike?