[MacDorcha]

Good point.

BTW doc, I just recalled my thought process:
Based on the thoughts of any engineer.

If speed is inverse to accuracy, then would slowing down the process make forming DNA easier? Fewer repititions, sure, but that would also mean less chance for malignant radicals. (metabolism)

Any thoughts?

[balrog666]

BTW doc, I just recalled my thought process: Based on the thoughts of any engineer. If speed is inverse to accuracy,

It's not. You need a new thought. And a process wouldn't hurt.

[js1138]

Speed is pretty much irrelevant here. What is needed is understanding of the steps necessary. We already know that living things can replicate in minutes or even seconds. What we don't know is how the pieces came together and under what conditions. With understanding and under controlled conditions, the whole process could happen in minutes or hours. If this happens in the laboratory, it will tell us something about what early conditions might have been.

This is a big project and no drug company is investing in the research. It could take five years or five hundred. I' guessing between 20 and 50, but that's just an off the top of my head guess.

Who would have predicted fifty years ago that genetic engineering would be a huge industrial enterprise in the year 2005?

[Doctor Stochastic]

Speed is not necessarily inverse to accuracy except in the case where one has a finite aperture stopwatch. (Or in quantum mechanical measurements which can have limited resolution.) There is the problem that at higher temperature, there are more "mistakes" in copying DNA; but that could be either good or bad.As I used to point out when I worked for Cray Research: "Our computers can generate correct answers faster than any others on the market."

There is a lot of discussion of reaction speeds, accuracy, etc. in several journals. (I don't have access to the titles right now.) The operations research people spend a lot of time trying to optimize things which have diverse criteria to be optimized; their journals might have some interesting ideas. The biology journals and a math journal "Journal of Evolutionary Equations" (I did remember one) also cover the subject.