RE: DNA Wormholes can cause cancer (what!?)

['Chris de Morsella' via Everything List]

 

 

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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 

 

 

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