From: everything-list@googlegroups.com [mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com] Subject: Re: DNA Wormholes can cause cancer (what!?) Chris, Hi. It sounds like you might be in computing since you mentioned some terms like "reposited" (I've never heard of that in bio!)? Yeah I write software for a living… and reposited is a pretty common jargon (that implicitly abstracts the particular details of whatever repository behind the notion of a repository interface). If so, you are very well educated in biology. Nice job! Your knowledge of the complexity of a cell and of things moving around via motor proteins and the cytoskeleton as opposed to diffusion only, etc. are real impressive. Many of the computer and engineering guys I know seem to be allergic to biology knowledge. Although, I admit I know almost nothing about computing either, except for stuff from a few simple classes in Pascal, Fortran, etc. a long, long time ago. I have long been fascinated with biology – being a biological entity myself J I'd never heard of that model where they ran it backwards to find the genesis of life, but it sounds pretty neat. I think it's certainly possible that life started in a far away stellar nursery and then came to Earth on a comet or something. Although, I kind of liked that Star Trek (The Next Gen.) episode where some ancient race of bald people seeded lots of different oceans with their DNA and put a code in their that, once we decipher it, will play a video of the bald people talking to us. I thought that was one of their best episodes. But, the final question is still there. How did the life originate where ever it came from? I can't rule out anything, but I bet they'll be able to someday figure out a chemical mechanism for things to start replicating themselves. I think that we are closing in on this and that within a decade or two – if we don’t blow ourselves up beforehand – we will be able to do genesis in the lab. Already Craig Venter’s group is getting close to creating synthetic life – albeit within an existing de-natured cell that’s had its own DNA removed. See: http://www.ted.com/talks/craig_venter_is_on_the_verge_of_creating_synthetic_life?language=en Just read an article today shown that micro-strands of DNA can self-assemble in liquid crystals. Quoting from the article: “The new research demonstrates that the spontaneous self-assembly of DNA fragments just a few nanometers in length into ordered liquid crystal phases has the ability to drive the formation of chemical bonds that connect together short DNA chains to form long ones, without the aid of biological mechanisms. Liquid crystals are a form of matter that has properties between those of conventional liquids and those of a solid crystal—a liquid crystal may flow like a liquid, for example, but its molecules may be oriented more like a crystal. "Our observations are suggestive of what may have happened on the early Earth when the first DNA-like <http://phys.org/tags/molecular+fragments/> molecular fragments appeared," said Clark. <http://phys.org/news/2015-04-hints-spontaneous-primordial-dna.html#jCp> http://phys.org/news/2015-04-hints-spontaneous-primordial-dna.html#jCp One big advantage that computing and engineering have over drug discovery is that the scientist can design a system he or she wants to make when it's code or a chip or something. But, because everything is so wet, bouncing around, cross-reacting and "squishy" in bio, it's hard to design things to work just the way you want them. Cells are always mutating, proteins are always moving around and chemicals are always cross-reacting. I think we'll eventually need to combine small mol. drugs and biological drugs with nanotechnological devices and tiny molecular computers to cure diseases. But that is also what makes it so interesting and also unfathomable at times. J Chris I checked out that article on microbes being passed from generation to generation. It was very interesting; although, it kind of sounded like it was passed via an environmental route because the next generation of animals lived in the same environment as the previous generation, and the microbes are probably all over the environment in the form of feces, shed fur, surfaces, animals touching each other, etc. I'd have to read more about it, but it sounded like not quite a direct mechanism of transmission. One more pontification, and I promise I'll stop, but I think some of the physics guys could learn from biochemists because biochemists are always looking for mechanisms of action for how things work. But, it seems like the physicists are more content to say something works and we have the math to describe it. For instance, I don't think they really know even why positive and negative charges attract or two positive charges repel, do they? I know there are fields of force, and exchange of photons (or other force particles for other forces), but how exactly does this lead to attraction or repulsion? I admit I know very little about it, but this kind of thing frustrates me when reading popular physics articles. In their defense, though, force particles are much smaller than proteins! At least, Monday is over! Have a good week. Roger -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. 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RE: DNA Wormholes can cause cancer (what!?)
'Chris de Morsella' via Everything List Tue, 07 Apr 2015 21:49:11 -0700
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