One of the reasons that I learned to love revisions in wordpress is because I tried to write an article several weeks ago about the Personal Genome Project [PGP], a successor to the Human Genome Project [HGP]. (Edit: The original article got killed… my web hosting company, Hostmonster, is not as great as I thought when I first signed up.)
A quick recap for those who have less time or interest than me to follow such things. In the HGP, mankind mapped the entirety of the DNA map for all of humanity (approximately 25,000 gene sequences and their function.) While popular opinion holds that the HGP is complete, there is still a small number of repetative base pairs that make up a chromosone that have not been evaluated. So called “Junk DNA” which has been disregarded to date due to the belief that they do not affect human form or condition in a significant way.
Almost every day now it seems that we find more and more in the news regarding genetic discovery. Personal Genomics is becoming available and possibly even trendy. Take for instance this news reporter who decided to get three opinions on her genetic make up, only to discover the limits of the Personal Genome Project: The PGP knowledgebase currently only evalutes geographically isolated genetics. If you’re ancestry mixes two or more geographically diverse genetic structures (in the case of the reporter, European and Asian), the tests available are very conflicted on how they apply to you.
Wired Magazine recently did an article on how Personal Genomics could unlock the mysteries of life. The interesting thing about it is that Church, who started personalgenomes.com, a competitor to some of the PGP companies mentioned in the previous article, is also responsible for some of the most exciting stem cell research results I’ve seen in the last several years, the Holy Grail of Stem Cell research itself, making stem cells from adult skin cells.
If you consider the medicinal possibilities of non-controversial stem cells derived from adult skin cells, as opposed to extremely controversial stem cells derived from embryoes, or even cloning. Well, my money is on Church [i.e., the scientist by that name] personally. I’m definitely not one of those people who believes that because a biological form matches that of a human being that they immediately become human, but nonetheless, raising human clones to slaughter like cattle for their spare parts makes something in me go squeemish. The clones may be missing that indefinable element that makes them human, but it’s too easy to identify with them.
Of course, Lanza does paint some interesting possibilities about treatments and life extension, assuming that we can get past the philosophical debate raging around some of the more controversial methods of obtaining these benefits.
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