Re:Good, but the hard work remains to be done. (Score 2)

"Having a complete map of a creature's DNA tells us, in principle, all of the proteins that it can synthesize throughout its lifetime. This gives us the building blocks that the creature uses to build things, and the chemical signals that it uses to direct internal operations.

This is wonderful, and essential. To use an analogy, this is like a Victorian scientist, after years of studying a 1999 notebook computer, managing to deduce how transistors and the wires that connect them work. "

Correct in some parts. However, what most people don't seem to look at is that organisms are not static. You don't derive the output of a protein solely from the perceived input of a gene sequence. There are other considerations.

Even assuming a wonderfully simplistic gene (no introns, single well-defined promoter sequence, well-defined "end" sequence) - all you receive from this is (essentially) a one-dimensional string of peptides. The problem is that the string doesn't stay "one-dimensional" for long. As sections of the string exit from the ribosome, they begin folding into two- and three-dimensional structures, due to environmental factors (an example being how pH affects binding affinity between protein domains). While protein modelling has advanced enormously, it is still wildly insufficient to accurately predict the outcome of domain/finger interaction necessary to generate any but the most simplistic protein structures.

In a nutshell, seeing the peptide sequence for a gene gives you about as good of an idea what the final protein will look like as seeing one bit-representation memory map of a self-modifying program will allow you to determine what the final outcome of the program will be (not to mention not knowing which *parts* of the memory map are actually part of the program and which are parts of the environment ... )

So, yes, there's still *tons* of stuff left to do. But the Victorians will fully understand their computer a heck of a lot sooner than we will fully understand our genome and how such a self-repairing, self-modifying system interacts with a wildly dynamic environment like a cell under stress. :-)

TTYL,

Scott Ferguson