Posted on 07/19/2009 7:46:56 PM PDT by djf
Research by a group of Montreal scientists calls into question one of the most basic assumptions of human genetics: that when it comes to DNA, every cell in the body is essentially identical to every other cell. Their results appear in the July issue of the journal Human Mutation.
This discovery may undercut the rationale behind numerous large-scale genetic studies conducted over the last 15 years, studies which were supposed to isolate the causes of scores of human diseases.
(Excerpt) Read more at sciencedaily.com ...
All I know is that my 6 pack abs cells have morphed into aluminum keg cells over time!
Laminites might be Jewish after all!
Idiots. OF COURSE the tissue and the blood are not going to match. The cancer DNA is what has MUTATED.
The cells in my legs that went from pushing near 500lbs at age 14 and under 100lbs went to probably barely able to push 150lbs at age 23 and 125lbs.
Look on the bright side, mamelukesabre: "Ideas do not have to be correct in order to be good; it is only necessary that, if they do fail, they do so in an interesting way." This is actually how science advances.
The rather spectacular failure of the Human Genome Project tells us that there is something fundamentally "wrong" with the way it attempted to model reality. So, back to the drawing board....
It's saying far more than that: it's saying that the DNA changes according to the needs and functions of specific cells.
What that means is, there is something that controls that change: a mechanism that alters DNA according to specific function. So what is that mechanism? How does it work, and from where does the relevant information come?
That's a very interesting question, which may be answered by the discoveries that have been accumulating about "meta information" within the DNA: information may be encoded "above" the single-gene level. My simple-minded analogy would be that the individual genes represent syllables, and the meta-data represents words of one or several syllables....
I hadn't been aware of a "spectacular failure," which is to be expected as I don't keep up with it very well. Could you spare a link or a very top-level view?
I'd hazard a guess that the failure is more the assumptions behind the project more than the project itself.
The information gathered in the project no doubt has it's uses, just like the information gathered from alchemists had its uses; we at least found out what DIDN'T work.
That's a question you might wish to ask yourself, actually.
How does EVOLUTION explain the apparent alteration of DNA within a particular individual according cellular function? What is the mechanism? How is the relevant information stored and transmitted?
It could be that DNA codes the most basic processes for a cell and that as the cells themselves reproduce in their given areas, complete with mutations, that the cells themselves adapt and evolve to fit in their niche in the body. In this case, there need be no meta-information stored anywhere--the process relies on natural selection to pick the best cells for the functions they are supposed to perform, and those that don't are reabsorbed by the body.
Following this logic to its end, when these processes go awry, you get autoimmune disorders or cancers. Maybe they are the flip sides of the same process, where an autoimmune disorder is the body eating itself because something didn't evolve properly and all the cells get targeted for removal. Then cancers would be the case where the cells mutated too well and outsmarted the body's ability to keep them in check.
bkmk
That doesn't work for a lot of reasons.
"Natural selection" clearly doesn't work as an explanation for differentiated cells within an individual -- especially for cells that only make sense in context of interacting with other cells of a different type -- the endocrine system being a prime example. Differentiation follows a predictable pattern for all individuals, which is not quite what one would expect from a natural selection process of the sort you hypothesize.
The problem is that you've simply pre-supposed the existence of the various cells; and also gloss over the fact that the same process occurs in the same types of cells, for all individuals. In the developing embryo, a cell somehow "knows" what it's going to be before it actually achieves it (which is the whole deal with pluripotent stem cells).
There clearly is meta information in operation here.
I'm hardly a molecular biologist, r9etb. The allegation of "spectacular failure" is not mine — it's something I've been coming across in my reading lately, which is to say in Robert Rosen and others. That characterization evidently is based on three things: (1) the incredible hype that went into the HGP; (2) the astounding resources (in scores of millions of dollars) that were poured into it; (3) its general failure to find what it was looking for. Though as metmom has already pointed out, it wasn't a complete bust; I'm sure some valuable things were learned that can help the effort in the long run.
On my reading, Robert Rosen suggests that the entire conceptual model of the HGP was the wrong way to attack the problem. For the genome is a complex system, and there is as yet no "good physics" for complex systems. In short, HGP was attempting to address the genome as a simple "mechanical" system, one that would conform to the standard of scientific "objectivity" that satisfies Church's Thesis — which is that all "effective" material systems in nature are "computable" — that is, theoretically reduce to the syntactical level capable of execution by a Turing Machine. The thesis says that only in this way can we be sure that our results are truly "objective."
Of course, the thought comes to mind that imposing Church's Thesis on science means that a good deal of reality — indeed, possibly even the most of it — cannot be addressed by science at all. (One can impose the "Church test," but material systems that fail to satisfy it do not then just conveniently disappear from reality.)
Complex systems — which Rosen says are the generic or "typical" case in nature, and simple systems the nongeneric — are simply not computable; they do not reduce to algorithms. They have the beastly habit of spawning what Bertrand Russell called impredicativities, or "vicious circles" involving self-reference and semantic meaning which cannot be reduced to syntax/algorithms/computability. Worse, they seem to invoke the Aristotelian "final cause" — which has been utterly banished from science for the past three hundred and more years because final cause in some sense seems to put the "cause" of something in the present in the future, and this the Newtonian formalism absolutely forbids. Though biologists working on what are generically called "anticipatory systems" evidently are trying to put it back into the scientific mix.
At the end of the day, perhaps we will discover that Robert Rosen (a very great mathematician and biophysicist) is right: Biology is not a "special case" of physics at all. Rather, the reverse is true: Physics is a special case of biology. Biology is "generic"; physics is nongeneric, or "special." My suspicion is that, if science can just get the hang of that notion, maybe then science could find an effective way to get a handle on complex material systems, such as the biological genome.
Paradigm shift, anyone?
Who sys God doesn't have a sense of humor?
LOLOL!!!!!!!!!! You so funny, dear metmom!
What went wrong? It turns out they were testing somebody's cat by mistake? /sarc>
Seriously -- that is the first time I'd ever heard it failed.
Can you point me to a link please?
Cheers!
I hate to be rude, but...
FAIL.
There is nothing biological about Fourier transforms, for instance.
or any other complete basis set, for that matter...:-)
Cheers!
No I can't provide a link. My indirect source is Robert Rosen, in his books Life Itself and Essays on Life Itself. My direct sources are various other rumblings I'm hearing from within "the biological community," as reported to me by a theoretical biophysicist friend who is working on the development of complex systems theory. I gather the common complaint increasingly has been, "we've got mountains and mountains of data. What we lack is a suitable biological theory or model by which to probe it." Occasionally, such comments make the press. But not usually.
As my friend has written,
Nowadays the vital need to develop a solid basis for complexity sciences and biology is in the focus of scientific efforts. The US National Science Foundation realizes this is a key challenge, and promotes the development of theoretical biology and complexity science as one of its top priorities. “We have accumulated very many details about biological events in the all, but due to a lack of a theory of biology, we very much narrow down the path on which we can proceed to understand life processes.… The US National Science Foundation has allocated in this fiscal year 1.8 billion dollars for theoretical biological physics.” (Ladik, 2004). “Today, by contrast with descriptions of the physical world, the understanding of biological systems is most often represented by natural-language stories codified in natural-language papers and textbooks…. But insofar as biologists wish to attain deeper understanding (for example, to predict the quantitative behavior of biological systems), they will need to produce biological knowledge” (Brent and Bruck, 2006). “Promoting research that encourages a holistic perspective to ‘understand complex systems’ is a long-term investment priority in the strategic plan of the National Science Foundation of the United States” (Hübler, 2007). ...[W]e [need to] develop an approach to a proper foundation of theoretical biology suitable to dispel the “growing frustration” that “can be observed in the community of biologists” (Brent and Bruck, 2006).In short, IMHO (FWIW) HGP was a flop because its model — ultimately premissed in the Newtonian formalism — wasn't up to the job. It cost a ton of money to learn this lesson. So I do hope we have learned it.
Thanks so much for writing, grey_whiskers!
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