X-Message-Number: 12767
From: "John Clark" <>
Subject: Blueprints and Recipes
Date: Sat, 13 Nov 1999 13:43:04 -0500

Somebody, I don't know who, wrote:


    >Follow the blueprint!  The Human Genome Project is projected to be done 
    well
    >within two years.  Once you have a blueprint you need only make simple
    >devices to follow them.

Charles Platt <> Responded:

    >Oh yeah right. Let me give you a billion or so instructions for synthesis
    >of protein molecules

I grant you that the original poster overstated his case, but in objecting to
it you overstated your position just as much. Forget about a crummy protein
molecule, an entire (newborn) human being could be made with only
1.5 billion bytes worth of instructions, figuring 6 billion base pairs in the
genome, 2 bits per base pair, and 8 bits per byte; you could fit that in a
small corner of a modern hard drive and hardly know the it's there.


By saying this I do not want in any way to minimize the extraordinary difficulty
of figuring out what shape a protein molecules will fold into if all you know
is the amino acid sequence. Also, it's astronomically hard to figure out the
amino acid sequence if all you know is the protein shape.

I'd also say that the genome is not a blueprint of a human being, it's a recipe
for a human being.

    >we'll see how many lifetimes you require to make "simple devices"  which

    >will follow this "blueprint" with ZERO tolerance for unexpected 
    consequences.

We don't need ZERO tolerance for unexpected consequences, good thing
too because nothing has that property or ever will, certainly not life.

     John K Clark      

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