Genetics

Rough Notes I am studying genetics and these are just my rough notes. If your interested, you may find some nuggets here, but these may be a bit sloppy for a while until I start to understand this stuff better. Why am I studying genetics? I'm a software architect. How can I not be enthralled by the source code and architecture for life itself? What might it teach us about software systems?

Enter the Genetic Age

"Hold on lady, we going for a ride!" - Short Round, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom

We are now entering a significant new period in history where two factors promise to play a deciding role in the progress or demise of the human race. The first factor is the rapid increase in the total number of living humans on the earth. As of June 21, 2008, the world's population is believed to be 6,704,845,726 (Wikipedia, June 2008). In comparison to the whole of human history, the recent rates of population increase are astonishing - increased by roughly four billion in the last fifty years alone.

The following diagram puts this into perspective. Notice how the population increase goes nearly vertical as we approach the year 2000!

According to th United States Census bureau (June 18, 2008) population is projected to increase further to beyond 9.5 billion in 2050. These dramatic increases present relevant concerns about the real carrying capacity of our planet - the sustainability of economic systems, environmental degradation, and our ecological footprint.

The second factor is technology. Technology, advanced and used by such an overwhelming population, whether for good or for bad, will determine our fate. In short, whether we become a memory - a blip - on the radar of earth-time or whether we make it forward to realize our potential (to eventually become a space-faring people, for example - surviving the inevitable demise of our sun and the earth).

Both of these factors have several related factors that are important to consideration, but that are not within the scope of this text. This text will focus most specifically on one particular field of technology and its potential to transform our planet and even our own species. The field is Genetics.

Atoms

It is not possible to properly understand genetics without a basic understanding of atoms - those tiny little particles that comprise all matter in our universe. There are 117 different types of atoms (elements) and some have a natural tendency to want to bond to one another. Of course, they do not really want anything; the nature of their electrons gives them this property - it's sort of an electrical thing (quantum electrodynamics, to be precise, but we will not go there). When they bond and become electrically neutral they are together known as a molecule.

Molecules and Organic Chemistry

In chemistry, a molecule is defined as a sufficiently stable electrically neutral group of at least two atoms in a definite arrangement held together by very strong chemical bonds. In other words, a molecule is a group of happy atoms all stuck together. They aren't really happy, of course. They are more like...electrically satisfied. Much like the atoms can stick together to make molecules, molecules can also stick to other molecules. It's all based on basic laws of physics, or quantum physics, or electrodynamics, or whatever. Anyway - it is at this point that things get interesting because over the course of a gazillion years, these atoms and molecules have found the most amazing ways to stick together. They've literally become like little machines that can replicate themselves and build things like proteins that make up tissue and muscle. And they do this all based on those basic laws. The complexity increases into systems and the systems become life. But we're getting ahead of ourselves here. We won't really get it unless we understand more about organic chemistry (the carbon atom in particular).

Resources

National Center for Biotechnology Information
Established in 1988 as a national resource for molecular biology information, NCBI creates public databases, conducts research in computational biology, develops software tools for analyzing genome data, and disseminates biomedical information - all for the better understanding of molecular processes affecting human health and disease.

PubMed Central
The U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) free digital archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature.

Microbes make up one half of the earth's biomass. Interesting.

http://hilaroad.com/camp/projects/DNA/dna2.html

http://www.accessexcellence.org/AE/AEPC/WWC/1993/moving.php