The Tip Of The Flagellum
Jan 24th, 2008 by Eats Wombats
No sooner had I written about the universe giving us the flagellum than Craig Venter, given to us by the universe, has announced that artificial life — or at least a first synthetic genome — is almost here. Perhaps we’ll need to add a branch back to the family tree of life! Or start a new one?
As he’s done before, Venter analogizes writing genomes to developing software, using high level tools. Aram Fingal comments
In the article, Venter says that they will need something similar to high level programming tools in order to accomplish useful modifications. I think that there is already plenty of evidence that genetic systems have procedural abstraction. In talking about gene activation, Biologists often use the term “ordered cascade” to describe what’s happening when one gene activates a few more and those genes, in turn, activate other genes. If you think about it, it’s exactly like subroutines of a program. Construction of the bacterial flagellum, for example, starts with the activation of one gene, which activates others, leading to the contribution of about 25 genes. These genes contribute various parts of the flagellum and activation of the cellular machinery to put it together and attach it to the cell wall.
I ought not to be scared of the prospect of software developers I have known, or their contemporaries, creating monsters. I’m with the professor who was the only person to put his hand up at a software conference and say, with equanimity, that he wouldn’t hesitate to get on a plane controlled by software developed by his students. He assured his colleagues that it would
never get off the ground
Still, it does all make you think.
The article ends with Chris Voigt of the University of California saying that such tools were needed because
“(Otherwise it’s like) writing Vista in binary,” he said. “It’s just not going to happen.”
Vista might be the most complicated artifact ever made by humanity, and yet… it’s astonishingly fragile.
I tried to add a 750Gb drive to my Vista Media Center PC today and I inadvertently deleted the data partition of the original drive.
Yes, I deleted hundreds of megabytes of data with a slip of the mouse.
Yes, it was only TV.
Yes, I had an external backup, of course, but I’d added a few new devices since making it and recorded a few programs, not all of which I’d watched. Nothing very important.
The most recent backup of the C: drive was on the D: drive that I had deleted, but this should have been a minor inconvenience.
But, no. Welcome back to the Microsoft universe.
After a few minutes with Google I concluded that the easiest way to restore the partition would probably be to use Acronis’s Disk Director Suite, which I have a copy of. So, I installed it on Drive C: and agreed to a reboot. After that the system was effectively dead.
The new drive, with no operating system, was designated as Drive C:. Everything you can find online says it’s not possible to change the letter of the Vista boot drive, but if you simply fail to assign a drive letter to a new drive it will be become C: on the reboot when Disk Director Suite is installed.
I’ll fix it, somehow, and I should be able to recover the partition but… what a waste of time.
But… if we can’t program software to do what we want, what chance have we got of programming DNA?
“It’ll never get off the ground”?
How about, “It’ll shut down the avionics when coming in to land”? as may have happened at Heathrow the other day.
I can’t quite see us facing a genetic analog of the Millennium bug, outside Hollywood, but certainly a fight between closed and open source genomics is on the cards, and there will be accidents and mischief.
