Do you remember being very dubious of all those aliens and humans mating and having children on Star Trek? Now wait a minute, didn't you say? How could beings from totally different planets with different histories of genetic descent possibly do that?

Some researchers are hinting at an answer. Seems that 10 of our 20 amino acids are very likely to form in the cosmos. Hmmmmm. Maybe Klingon-Human hybrids are possible after all. Check out the hot action here.

We know that amino acids are common in our solar system and beyond. Various first experiments to recreate the conditions in the Earth's early atmosphere have produced 10 of the amino acids found in proteins. Curiously, analyses of meteorite samples have found exactly these same 10 amino acids. Various researchers have noted this link but none have explained it.

Now we know why, say Higgs and Pudritz. They have ranked the amino acids found in proteins according to the thermodynamic likelihood of them forming. This turns out to match the observed abundances in meteorites and in early Earth simulations, more or less exactly.

That's a neat piece of work. They go on to argue that the first genetic codes must have evolved to exploit these 10 prebiotic amino acids. The other amino acids which are all bigger and generally more difficult to synthesise must have been incorporated later. At any rate, Nature had settled on the full 20 we see today by the time the earliest common ancestor of all organisms on the planet first emerged, at least 3.5 billion years ago.

Posted by Sally J Morem at 09:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

I have green eyes, while my parents and all my siblings have blue eyes. I always thought that my eye color was the same as theirs, just tinted slightly differently. But the way I read this story, that is simply not the case:

ALL BLUE-eyed people can be traced back to one ancestor who lived near the Black Sea 10,000 years ago.

Human beings had brown eyes until a single mutation in a gene called OCA2 arose by chance in one individual, Professor Hans Eiberg from the University of Copenhagen said.

The mutation "turned off" the mechanism that produces brown melanin pigment and "diluted" brown eyes to blue.
Most likely occurring in the north-west part of the Black Sea between 6000 and 10,000 years ago, the gene was dispersed in the rapid waves of migration to northern Europe that followed the end of the last ice age.

Professor Eiberg said the finding, published in the journal Human Genetics, helped to explain why Europeans were far more likely to have blue eyes than any other ethnic grouping.

Europeans also had a far greater range of skin tones and hair colours living in the one community than the rest of the world, where people are almost uniformly dark-haired and dark-eyed.

The researchers examined mitochondrial DNA and compared the eye colour of blue-eyed people in countries as diverse as Jordan, Denmark and Turkey.

Variation in the eye colour from brown to green can all be explained by the amount of melanin in the iris, but blue-eyed individuals only have a small degree of variation in the amount of melanin in their eyes.

"They have all inherited the same switch at exactly the same spot in their DNA," the professor said.
"From this we can conclude that all blue-eyed individuals are linked to the same ancestor."

So it seems that my green eyes are actually a slight variation on the original human eye color -- brown -- while the rest of my family have this much newer trait that only showed up 500 generations or so ago.

Not that it matters, of course, it's just interesting. It has been established that there is a mitochondrial Eve who is the ancestor of every human being alive on the planet. That is, we all inherited the unique mitochondria that she carried. Variations on that trait have been eliminated from the species.

So maybe there a was blue-eyed Eve? (or Adam?) The mitochondrial Eve lived some 130,000 years before the blue-eyed ancestor. It's possible that that individual, too, is a common ancestor for much of the world's population. But since blue eyes are a recessive gene, many of the blue-eyed ancestor's descendant's (like me) don't have blue eyes.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 09:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Preparing for the Foresight Vision Weekend in Sunnyvale, I've been doing a lot of thinking about my map of the development space for nanotechnology which we revisited in a recent edition of FasftForward Radio.

I've never been completely satisfied with the axes of that diagram. I wanted to show how some developments have this immediate overwhelming impact, while others set the stage to allow for further developments that ultimately have that kind of impact. Still others look like there's something major happening, but it's less than meets the eye. In its new iteration, I am replacing the vertical axis with disruption and the horizontal axis with transformation. Here's my new draft version:

Continue reading "Disruption and Transformation" »

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 08:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Following my super-long post on "The Genetic Debate," Phil got right to the point with a brief comment:

Parents want to protect their children from risk. Society generally looks favorably upon this predisposition. The first "augmentations" that are practiced will likely be protections from genetic predisposition to things like diabetes, heart disease, and various forms of cancer. Who would prevent parents from safeguarding their children's future in this way? Everything else will follow.

Today we learn that two couples in England are set to become the first people to have designer children:

Two couples whose families have been ravaged by breast cancer are to become the first to screen embryos to prevent them having children at risk of the disease, The Times has learnt.

Tests will allow the couples to take the unprecedented step of selecting embryos free from a gene that carries a heightened risk of the cancer but does not always cause it. The move will reignite controversy over the ethics of embryo screening.

An application to test for the BRCA1 gene was submitted yesterday by Paul Serhal, of University College Hospital, London. It is expected to be approved within months as the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) has already agreed in principle.

This isn't genetic engineering - it's selective implantation. But all the politics of the "genetic debate" are present. Again my point is that you don't have to desire genetic enhancement for yourself or your children to default, politically, into the transhumanist position. If you think that people should have reproductive freedom - which in this case means the freedom to protect their family from a deadly disease - then you will think that this procedure should be allowed.

It would be preferable if IVF didn't involve the creation of embroyos that are discarded. This routinely happens for reasons other than genetic sorting. Genetic engineering tech could potentially reduce this problem.

Posted by Stephen Gordon at 11:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Methuselah Mouse Prize co-founder Dave Gobel e-mails:

Peter Diamandis announces Archon X Prize for Genomics

$10,000,000 prize to sequence 100 human genomes in 10 days.

A global competition to develop breakthrough technology that dramatically reduces the time and cost of sequencing human genomes and accelerates a new era of personalized, predictive and preventive medicine.

Three teams have already signed up for the competition: VisiGen Biotechnologies Inc, 454 Life Sciences and Westheimer Biomolecular Sciences LLC.
www.xprize.org

NHGRI Director Francis Collins participated in the press confernence whereThe National Human Genome Research Institute of the NIH announced grants awards totalling more than $13 million to speed the development of innovative equencing technologies that reduce the cost of DNA sequencing and expand the use of genomics in medical research and heathcare. The new funds will be focused on supporting nine investigators to help bring about sequencing of a genome for $1,000.

In addtion to the Archon X Prize, after the prize is won, a group of 100 individuals will have their genomes sequenced, "The Genome 100" for $1,000,000...current announced members are...

Dr. Stephen Hawking
Larry King
Paul Allen
Michael Milken
Larry Page
Burt Rutan
Anoush Ansari

Anousha Ansari sees a sea change in philanthropy - venture philanthopy focused on prizes - as donors are looking for significantly improved leveraged returns on thier donations.

Exciting stuff. Randall Parker has more information, and some musings on the implications. More details here.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 06:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This sort of sounds like news...

Entrepreneurial skill may be in the genes

Wednesday June 7, 2006

Forget family influence and upbringing. When it comes to being an entrepreneur, genes seem to play an important role.

By comparing self-employment in 609 pairs of identical twins, who share all the same genes, and 657 pairs of non-identical twins, Spector and scientists at Imperial College London and Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland analysed the impact of genetics and environment on entrepreneurs.

The rate of entrepreneurs among twins is the same as in the general population. Spector's team found that being identical increased the odds of twins following the same path more than non-identical twins, suggesting genes are important.

...but let's think about it. Genes aren't fully determinative,of course, but there's no question that they have a strong impact on personality. One's temperament obviously has a lot to say about whether one would or would not be inclined to go out and start a business.

So what's the news here, exactly? That identical twins often choose similar career paths? We knew that. That certain personality types are more likely to tend towards entrepreneurial ventures than others? We knew that. That certain personality types are mapped to genetics? Yeah, I think we knew that, too.

Looks like more research funding spent on proving the obvious.

UPDATE: FuturePundit opines that there's more to this story than my snarky assessment would suggest. This gets interesting when we start identifying the specific genes that relate to being an entrepreneur. Randall speculates that parents might start looking to build such genes into their offspring, as part of an overall designer approach to parenting:

It is likely that entrepreneurship comes as a result of other qualities as mentioned above. Will parents choose those qualities based on a desire to make their kids self-employed? Or will they choose those qualities mainly for other reasons and will the effect on entrepreneurial behavior come as a side effect of choices made for other reasons?

People in different cultures, economic classes, occupations, religions, and with different genetically determined qualities for their own minds will make different choices on average. Will this tend to make the human race diverge? Or will there be a wide consensus on all the important genetically controlled qualities of the mind and will humanity tend to converge?

One split I expect: I predict some religious folks will choose genetic qualities that make their kids more inclined to have faith. Whereas more empirically minded folks will choose genetic qualities that make their kids highly skeptical, critical, and empirical. Though some of a more socialistic bent might choose qualities that make kids turn out more altruistic and group-oriented.

And let's not forget: the practically minded designer parents will want to have children with a built-in tendency to clean up their rooms, do the dishes, mow the lawn, etc.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 08:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Paul Boutin has a must-read report on the danger of biowar. He asked geneticist Roger Brent whether a layperson could learn the skills necessary to sequence a disease.

He got his answer by learning to do it himself.

Making DNA turns out to be easy if you have the right hardware. The critical piece of gear is a DNA synthesizer. Brent already has one, a yellowing plastic machine the size of an office printer, called an ABI 394. "So, what kind of authorization do I need to buy this equipment?" I ask.

"I suggest you start by typing "used DNA synthesizer" into Google," Brent says.

I hit eBay first, where ABI 394s go for about $5,000. Anything I can't score at an auction is available for a small markup at sites like usedlabequip.com. Two days later I have a total: $29,700—taxes and shipping not included. Nucleosides (the A, C, T, G genetic building blocks) and other chemicals for the synthesizer cost more than the hardware—in the end, a single base pair of DNA runs about a buck to make. Enough raw material to build, say, the smallpox genome would take just over $200,000.

The real cost of villainy is in overhead. Even with the ready availability of equipment, you still need space, staff, and time. Brent guesses he would need a couple million dollars to whip up a batch of smallpox from scratch. No need for state sponsors or stolen top-secret germ samples. "An advanced grad student could do it," Brent says.

$2 million dollars puts this out of the reach of the typical suburban mad scientist, but not Osama bin Laden. And we can expect this price to drop. Even now this is a very cheap and easily obtained weapon of mass destruction that's more dangerous than a nuke. No big labs or large infrastructure is required, and no suspicious purchases would set off alarm bells.

Paul Boutin's article makes it clear that industry insiders think that a bio-attack is inevitable and imminent.

Every hands-on gene hacker I polled during my project estimated they could synthesize smallpox in a month or two. I remember that game from my engineering days, so I mentally scale their estimates using the old software manager's formula: Double the length, then move up to the next increment of time. That gives us two to four years—assuming no one has already started working.

So, 2008-2010... if we're lucky. The West needs to get serious about counter-measures to such attacks. Fortunately there is reason to be optimistic.

Tara O'Toole, director of the University of Pittsburgh's Center for Biosecurity, says after-the-fact vaccines won't stop a plague; they take months to develop and deploy. She believes the only option is a general-purpose virus detector and destroyer, which has yet to be invented. The cost would be enormous, but don't think of it as just an antiterror tool. "If we do what we need to for biodefense, we're going to do an enormous amount of good for routine health care and global disease," says O'Toole. "We could, as a planet, eliminate large lethal epidemics of infectious disease in our lifetime."

Posted by Stephen Gordon at 10:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (7)