tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10749031.post322720732042758552..comments2023-10-17T10:51:35.255-04:00Comments on ...Of Cabbages and Kings: Stone washed genesJoel Shurkinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14601737202428103535noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10749031.post-42392062929551547002007-06-15T09:00:00.000-04:002007-06-15T09:00:00.000-04:00Good highlighting of a good article. It's going to...Good highlighting of a good article. It's going to take a while to disabuse ourselves of the assumptions built into the phrase "genetic engineering": that knowing the genome, or even the proteome, automatically gives us the same capabilities we would get from having, say, source code or a wiring diagram. <BR/><BR/>Not so: genetic information is what a programmer would consider extremely gnarly, re-entrant "spaghetti code," with the same module (protein) doing six different things in different tissues. Clean points of control, where activating or inactivating one gene has one desired therapeutic effect and no other, are the exception rather than the rule.<BR/><BR/>If we insist on the comparison to IT, we should at least realize that we're going to spend a long time drawing flow charts before we can get much past "hello world."Monte Davishttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15437698071525916855noreply@blogger.com