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 Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=12767