30 April 2015

The LilBubome



Disclaimer: I am more in the side of dogs than cats, for one simple reason: if you throw a dog a stick or ball he'll go and fetch it, and he'll play with you, filled with happiness; if you throw a stick or a ball to a cat, most likely he will look at you like saying 'Do you think I am a stupid dog? you go fetch the ball yourself'.

That said, cats are sure a big thing in our lives and our culture. IBM decided to start building an AI some time ago, and while they could try to emulate in silico the computational power and prowess of any animal, they went for a cat brain. Even Google's AI, when it (he, she?) came to life, it decided that of all the things it could possibly want to know, of ALL of them, it wanted to know what the fuck was a cat. And it started watching YouTube cat videos. There have been a number of reasons why cats maybe so dominant in our culture

Nevertheless, there are some of our felid companions that stand out above all their fellows for different reasons. And one of them is Lil Bub, of whom you can learn by yourself if you did not know him already. At a medical level, Lil Bub has several abnormalities that give him his unique looks. And because of this, a group of researchers in the Max Plank Institute in Berlin (among who I count one of my very best friends) are crowdfunding for sequencing the genome of this prominent feline, in hopes not only to learn more of his unique phenotype, but also about the genetics of how limbs develop in general.

If you are a fan of Lil Bub, Science or both, just head to experiment (a crowdfunding for science) and support the LilBubome.






23 April 2015

GATTACA

And I say GATTACA, not Gattaca, for when writing a DNA sequence you do not capitalize as if it was the name of someone, all letters go either upper or lower case. Or maybe TGTAATC in the complementary strand of DNA. Who knows, since this sequence happens hundreds of thousands of times in a single human genome. And to be clear, it does not have a specific function that we know of.



But speaking about the movie GATTACA, we are one step closer to stop being just random humans (meaning genetically random humans whose genetics have been selected across countless rounds of random mutation and natural selection, from long before we were humans, to a time were our many-great grandfathers were tiny bacteria). Some Chinese scientists have made the first modification using the CRISPR/cas9 method in (non-viable polyploid) human embryos.



The cautionary tale in their publication is that we still have to overcome many technical difficulties, but it will be doable in the near future. Applications besides Hollywood making movies? editing the genome of an embryo so it will not have some (or all) genetic diseases, and making kids look more like Scarlett or Brad according to the parents wishes (and budget).

Ethical implications? you name them. There is a current of scientists that pose we should not go down that path (and for several good reasons, as detailed in the article), but still we will do it. Why? Because when we CAN do something, we do it. It is that simple for humans. For anything imaginable (and I mean anything), if (or when) it becomes doable, you'll always find some human clever/stupid/brave/committed/maniac enough to do it. There's is no stopping this kind of things.

So people better stop saying "do not do it" and start regulating it, and preparing for the outcomes. After all, every single new discovery in the history of humanity can be used for good or for bad. Hence, just enforce the proper environment (laws, conscience, education) to avoid as largely as possible the bad outcome of it.

But then again, what is good and what is bad?