And its reputation therefore depends upon the talent which it can attract and leverage – the earlier in its growth, the better. Once talent exists, the reputation will draw in more – it will reinforce itself.
Wish me luck!
Four new Japanese restaurants are opening up near me at the same time.
Paradise 🙂
Why has every spam message that has hit my inbox in the past 2 weeks been about Paris Hilton? Stupid subjects, too: scenarios such as her being abducted by aliens.
Seriously, do people really care so much about her? If so, they need to find something else to talk about. Like how to improve their own lives. As a rule, you should care more about your own affairs than about celebrities’.
So we can go from inorganic molecules to organic molecules under primordial conditions. Let’s even say we can go from organic molecules to things like nucleic acids. The next step always gave me a sense of unease, however: a popular assumption is that cells somehow arose from this mixture – that after DNA formed, all of the cellular machinery that makes life’s (and DNA’s) self replication possible somehow sprung into existence, inconsequentially.
This doesn’t seem right to me. Cells are pretty complex. There are a lot of things that they do – that they have always been doing, as far as we know – that weren’t likely to spontaneously arise without some prior means of evolution (and thus something that reproduces).
I think something like a prion or a virus is a more probable step. Prions in particular, since modern viruses need to hijack cells in order to reproduce, while prions just need to come in contact with the right proteins. That means if viruses were the first “living” organisms, they would have required a capability that they somehow lost over the interceding time. Among viruses, I think something akin to retroviruses in particular would be good candidates, since direct RNA replication would cut out a great deal of complexity associated with DNA transcription and still result in a semi-viable means of genetic propagation. Of course, modern retroviruses reverse-transcribe their RNA into DNA prior to replication, but that’s because that’s what the cell uses.
Those are just some of my thoughts for today. The question of life’s origin fascinates me, and it irks me a bit that we have no way to simulate processes that took great spans of geological time to find some answers.
I often wonder whether it would be possible to simulate these sorts of things on a computer… but I wouldn’t even know where to begin.
I think I’ve found a way to condense about twice the material normally presented into a CS class. Unfortunately, everyone just thinks I’m overestimating the students’ ability. Perhaps that’s true, perhaps not, but now there is no way to tell. Worse, there’s no way to pick out the students who would excel in such an environment.
How are new educational methods tested, if not in a classroom? How will the system ever improve?
Why am I the only one who cares?
*Shrug* No choice but to see how it works. Maybe the students really don’t have the potential I give them credit for. It is my first time teaching, after all.
Seeing possibilities is so incredibly frustrating. Anyone who thinks it’s a picnic doesn’t do it very often. My life isn’t easier for it. Quite the contrary: I’ve probably exhausted several typical lifetimes of mental anguish, and I haven’t even broken 25 yet.
“Perhaps the most difficult thing for creative individuals to bear is the sense of loss and emptiness they experience when, for some reason, they cannot work. This is especially painful when a person feels his or her creativity drying out.” –From http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/index.php?term=19960701-000033&page=4
This is so incredibly accurate that I had to post a link to this article based on that alone. Being prevented from following our ideas gives us an incredible amount of pain. It took me two years to get over it, and I still feel a bit resentful.
The rest of the article is rubbish because it consistently embraces both sides of each personality dichotomy. I’m all for eliminating false dichotomies, but I fail to see how one can be both introverted and extroverted, for example – the two are opposing conditions. Introverts gain energy from being alone and lose it with others. Extroverts gain it from being with others and lose it alone.
Not being a biologist, I had assumed that telomerase was “hard-coded” with the telomere DNA sequence it writes at the end of a chromosome. This is actually not quite the case; the coding for a telomere is encoded in a sequence of RNA that the telomerase wraps around (making it a ribonucleoprotein) called TERC.
I, probably like many others, had once thought that inactivation of telomerase would result in a cure for many different cancers. However, for some reason, probably due to activation of other immortality pathways, this is not the case (although drugs that rely on this principle appear to be among the more successful treatment modalities in trials). This also appears to be one of those ideas that everyone is aware of but no one is acting on – I blame the way that science currently works for this (as I’ve mentioned before, how you express your values tangibly affects the impact you will have on reality; if you prefer to publish a lot and have a stable job, then you will not have the time to embark on the sorts of long-range high-risk research projects that actually make a difference).
Anyway, mere inactivation is unlikely to work. However, because TERC actually provides a template for what telomerase writes on the end of the cell’s chromosomes, inactivation is not necessary.
Here’s the fun part where I get to speculate wildly about the current state of the art because I can’t get the training that actually matters to actualize these sorts of ideas (you want your “committee of experts” and I’m the computer scientist. Fine, but the whole team suffers for the lack of synergy and vision):
Modification would do as well. If we could change what telomerase writes out to the end of the cell, we can write anything we want to it – and it would be specific to telomerase-immortalized cells (few normal cells carry this immortality, but it is very common in cancer cells), which means a treatment based on this idea would have few to no side effects.
What could we code for? I’m really not qualified to answer this, but some choices that seem obvious to me are the tumor suppressors that the cancers are inactivating in the first place, such as p53. Reactivate the suppressors, stop the tumors, and they won’t harm normal cells that produce telomerase but are making tumor-suppressors already. Again, minimal to no side effects.
And that’s the idea! It’s another interdisciplinary fusion:
This is what, in computer science, we would call a “buffer overflow with arbitrary code execution”. The code in this case is DNA. The “program counter” is the position of the ribosome. The end of the buffer is the telomere. Telomerase writes code out to the end of this buffer. You can take advantage of software this way by executing whatever code you want; you should be able to do the same to cells.
Implies that they gave me something to begin with.
There’s a Brahms influence in my recent compositions. How odd.