31 MAY 2015 by ideonexus
Genetic Language is Abstract and Flexible
The awesome power that genetic engineering will
one day place in our hands was foreshadowed recently
by some experimenters at the University of Basel in
Switzerland. Walter Gehring and his students were
studying the effects of the eyeless gene in fruit flies. The
gene is called eyeless because its absence causes flies to
grow without eyes. The gene actually causes eyes to grow. Gehring and the students inserted the gene into
various tissues of embryonic flies, and the embryos
grew into flies ... 1 
notes
notes20 JAN 2014 by ideonexus
Star Trek is About Diversity
Moses Maimonides, who lived nearly 900 years ago, wrote a book called The Guide for the Perplexed. In it, he said: "The human race contains such a variety of individuals that we cannot discover two persons exactly alike in any moral quality or external appearance. This great variety and necessity of social life are essential elements in man's nature." These are the same principles, the same philosophies, which are inherent in "Star Trek." But let's go back to what "Star Trek" really is. It...
1 Rodenberry's philosophy was to respect and cherish diversity.
17 MAR 2012 by ideonexus
Chance Favors, but Ambition is Crucial
The major credit I think Jim and I deserve ... is for selecting the right problem and sticking to it. It's true that by blundering about we stumbled on gold, but the fact remains that we were looking for gold. Both of us had decided, quite independently of each other, that the central problem in molecular biology was the chemical structure of the gene. ... We could not see what the answer was, but we considered it so important that we were determined to think about it long and hard, from any ...Folksonomies: discovery
Folksonomies: discovery
1 notes
notesFrancis Crick admits his discovery was something of chance, but emphasizes the fact that he was looking for the discovery in the first place and willing to dedicate a great deal of time to it.
20 SEP 2011 by ideonexus
Bacteria Evolve to Process Lactose in a Test Tube
But “laboratory” adaptations can also be more complex, involving
the evolution of whole new biochemical systems. Perhaps the ultimate
challenge is simply to take away a gene that a microbe needs to survive
in a particular environment, and see how it responds. Can it evolve
a way around this problem? The answer is usually yes. In a dramatic
experiment, Barry Hall and his colleagues at the University of Rochester
began a study by deleting a gene from E. coli. This gene produces an
enzyme th...Folksonomies: evolution experiment
Folksonomies: evolution experiment
1 notes
notesScientists blocked a gene for digesting lactose in bacteria, which then mutated to have the digestive function taken over by another gene producing an enzyme, which then got progressively selected for efficiency.
08 SEP 2011 by ideonexus
WORD Became the GENE
In the beginning was the word
WORD
WORE
GORE
GONE
GENE
and by the mutations came the gene.Folksonomies: evolution creationism
Folksonomies: evolution creationism
1 notes
notesA clever play on religion vs science in Evolution.
03 MAY 2011 by ideonexus
Cooperation VS Capitalism
Finding the right balance between cooperation and competition has been the goal and bane of Western politics for centuries. Adam Smith recognized that the economic needs of the individual are better met by unleashing the ambitions of all individuals than by planning to meet those needs in advance. But even Adam Smith could not claim that free markets produce Utopia. Even the most libertarian politician today believes in the need to regulate, oversee, and tax the efforts of ambitious individua...
1 Human intelligence has yet to design a society where free competition among the members works for the good of the whole.
