From: Robert J. Bradbury (bradbury@aeiveos.com)
Date: Wed Mar 05 2003 - 05:15:07 MST
Joao,
"Whole genome engineering" is precisely what it sounds like -- being
able to design and engineer "whole" genomes. It is what the Dept.
of Energy has given a very large grant to the "Institute for Biological
Energy Alternatives" to pull off, but I think/hope that Robiobotics
may be ahead of them. We shall see.
I agree that HIV is a nasty/messy problem, in large part because of
its variability. Also in large part because we don't know everything
within cells that it is messing around with. But I'm reasonably
optimistic that if we can stop it at the receptor level we will
defeat it. (If it can't get in, it can't replicate.) The National
Science Foundation also appears to be pushing the crystallography
capabilities into the 10,000+ per year level. We *are* going to
know what everything inside looks like (membrane proteins are a
bit trickier because they don't crystalize as easily, but "Blue Gene"
may help us out significantly in that respect). But I'd say we are
going to have a *very* good picture of the "structures" of the human genome
by sometime between 2005-2010. The growth in PDB entries is tracking
the growth in Genbank entries with perhaps a 5-8 year lag time.
I also agree that aging will be a very very complex problem to solve.
*But* we have multiple examples (tortises, whales, rockfish, parrots,
etc) of species that already have evolved genomes that are probably
quite good at preserving an individual.
We don't have to "invent" when we can copy.
So between "whole genome engineering", which I hope will allow us to
"patch" our genomes using intracellular bacteria (or similar bionanotech)
and real nanotech (which will allow us to rewrite the "natural" programs)
I'm reasonably optimistic.
Of course there is a lot of work to do, the comparative genomics of
the species I mention above, is alone, a huge amount of work.
Best,
Robert
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