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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Chuzzlewit who wrote (33615)	4/2/1999 11:38:00 PM
From: Jacques Chitte	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 108807

> The current art is highly sophisticated< I disagree. Excising a trait is a hit-or-miss affair. You have to identify a gene - this is not routine. It's still the stuff of headline academic research. Site-directed mutagenesis is a powerful tool, by current standards - but it is a shotgun thing. We don't know enough to write a decent gene from basic components. >You know how proteins are encoded, and sophisticated analysis reveals their secondary and tertiary structure. < We know the "genetic code", but we are nowhere near being able to predict secondary or tertiary structure from the primary peptide sequence. We have tools to view tertiary structure for many but not all proteins. Our computational models are not good enough to model conformational changes in these proteins except in the most cartoonish examples. And we sure can't build a working protein from amino acids, unless we already have a Nature-proven blueprint. (Example to illustrate what I mean. Task: write the code for an enzyme - bacterial is ok - that will selectively degrade DDT.) >There is nothing primitive about this< The techniques are intensive in terms of labor and operator skill. Much very high technology is required. But we are just scratching the surface. Can we write a gene from basic principles? No. We can mess with an existing gene (or gene candidate) and see what happens. But this is not a predictable process. We can't neatly insert a gene into the right part of the right chromosome without lots of metaphoric masking tape. We use crippled viruses to shotgun the genome with tweaked genes - and we hope to get a clone out that has working copies of the gene. We are just starting to scratch the surface! We cannot string together a working bacterium from a library of codons. We need to master that, and learn what a gene is, and have a working lexicon of what works and doesn't. First we need to learn to do this, and I predict that a century from now we'll still be pretty bad at it. So from this perspective - our genetic art is primitive indeed. >why consider engaging in this kind of thing at all? There is no benefit to it < Okay, Chuzzlewit, I'm flat out mystified. Are we talking about the same thing? Wiping out cystic fibrosis is a benefit. Spreading the genetic wealth of those who seem too have the immune system of a hyena - that's a benefit. Figuring out what brain structure confers clarity of thought, and putting that on the option menu - who wouldn't grab at that with both hands? Granted, these are not things that would work well if oldstyle sexual reproduction with its blind blackjack of alleles continues. But if a prospective parent is given the choice between playing traditional genetic roulette and building up a new person by a sort of deliberate genetic epitaxy - well, I suspect that the way that person chooses will be a cultural/religious thing. Conservative vs. progressive, in the largest sense of the words. The real danger that I see is if engineers try to reach beyond their grasp. They need to be proficient on the prokaryotes before they go for doing real work on larger life forms. Scientists have famous egos. If they make spectacular mistakes on people or even mice - they will turn public opinion against them and construct such a moral barrier against gene work that the science will be killed for reasons that don't have to do with the science.