Disqus - Latest Comments for John C

Re: Scientists successfully create human-bear-pig chimera (manbearpig)

John C — Wed, 07 May 2008 04:53:34 -0000

But on National Public Radio yesturday, there was a sober report on a sheep-goat chimera! It was called a geep.

Re: Why Evolution is Wrong According to GodTube

John C — Thu, 22 May 2008 03:41:17 -0000

That video is so bad that it has to be a good parody for the enjoyment by all.

However, this video, and the discussion of it is not worthy of this very interesting site about genetics...even as an item of levity. Not only that, the propagation of this video only serves the interests of the organization that had the video produced.

Re: Why Evolution is Wrong According to GodTube

John C — Thu, 22 May 2008 03:49:55 -0000

BTW: Hmmm...an old fashion film projector being used and only one student in the class...are we sure that this is not a neat, tounge-in-cheek parody?

Re: Absence of “High Penetrance” in SNP Genomic Services

John C — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 15:19:26 -0000

Kevin speaks of those pesky sequences that are patented which makes the genomic information services seem so worthless. But...faith....one just may glean some certainity of data by comparing it with data that is certiain such as the SNPs for blue eyes and the person has blue eyes; this could be a baseline however crude. Also a disorder would have more than one SNP associated with it such as a possibility for a defective neuron being combined with something that would suggest Autism would make the possibility for a disorder in the Autism family to be more certain than not (note, I did not say probability, that is another matter).

Re: Resveratrol found effective in small doses

John C — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 02:02:37 -0000

Pure, not from concentrate, cranberry and pomogranate juices in the half gallon sizes have been flying off the grocery store shelfs for the past few years. These 'fixes' come at a steep $9.
It is not known as to how much has to be drunk daily to achieve the desired effects which include the abaiting of urinary track infections.

Re: Evolution on Televison

John C — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 02:23:30 -0000

In the State of Oregon, this 'matter' was solved in a different way. The science was taught on school property and the religeous view was presented off of school property. At my grade school in Eugene, there was a bus parked across the street that was connected to electrical power from the pole. This bus served as a class room for the religeous (usually a small segment of Christianity) view.

Re: Origins of the brain

John C — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 04:46:05 -0000

Now this saga continues on and along the lines that what could currently be a disorder could (gasp!) be a new normal somewhare down the evolutionary trail:
"The New Genetics of Mental Illness", Scientific American Mind, June/July 2008, p40.

Also while you are wading through this article, learn all about the new phrase: "epigenetics" which takes enviromental factors and could cause translation into proteins to go differently than it should. And, WHOO!, it effects offspring!

Right next to this article is "Unmasking Memory Genes" on p49.

Keep an eye out as to what is happening in Canadian universities, especially McGill in Montreal: Lots of reeel interesting stuff happening.

(Then of casual interest is an article about how we may well be various shades of bisexual; it ain't all "black and white": "Bisexual Species", p68. I was suspecting this for a long time.)

Re: “Tweaking” Experimental Data

John C — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 04:49:44 -0000

While working at a Stanford genome lab, I discovered with amazement what Labview image processing tools can do do micro array data.

I had at that time seen a lot of very nice micro array data done using open air spotters as opposed to using the then more expensive lab-on-a-chip type closed system Affymetrix chip.

I just simply brought things to a sharp focus and presented the God's truth at an instrumentation conference, dust fibers connecting the micro array dots and all. I exhorted that if anyone want to do things on the cheap, it better be in clean rooms of the quality being used by computer chip manufacturers (quite expensive).

This made Affymetrix happy, but for a short while. Two physicists, who developed a better lab on a chip scheme than Affymetrics finally got their startup funding right after this conference!
They were happier, especially when this all brought the cost of Affymetrix micro arraying down; their idea used some of Affymetrix technology which in turn cut their costs.

As for all that other nice looking data ... oh! Never mind!

Re: Study shows male homosexuality can be explained through a specific model of Darwinian evolution

John C — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 00:41:33 -0000

This subject is also addressed in Scientific American Mind, June/July 2008,p68 and it titled: "Bisexual Species", by Emily Driscoll. Amongst discussion of other animals, the author quotes a researcher in saying that humans should be regarded as bisexual.

Re: Shortest Response: Why do scientific theories work?

John C — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 14:21:53 -0000

It's because they work mostly; that is good enough for most of us.

I got that little ditty from studying the uncertainity principle in a modern physics class. This taught me that statistics is important in the interpretation of nature.
And so...there you have it.

Re: Blue light used to harden tooth fillings stunts tumor growth

John C — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 20:36:56 -0000

I concurr with Steven. I attended many conferenced in micro-biology and the practice is that papers can be presented orally or in a poster session. Papers for this purpose are typically reviewed and approved in abstract form.

The formality depends on the type of conference. So an approved abstract could require the paper to be presented for peer review as if it were to be published....or not. The papers presented at a conference may be published in a journal which is called the proceedings for the given conference.

Re: 23andMe hosts first customer party!

John C — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 20:44:18 -0000

Rats!!!....and alas, you are not the only one that gets these maddening conflicts.

I guess they will have another one next year. Right? (Yuck!)

Re: Drug reverses mental retardation caused by genetic disorder

John C — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 20:55:32 -0000

From Josh...and that requires the professional and competent supervision of a therapist.

Re: How Much Data is a Human Genome? Not Much.

John C — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 20:23:58 -0000

As there are 4 bases. The base id could be represented in a 2-bit field for each base in a sequence. So, for storing, A G C T could be stored as 00 01 10 11 respectively and then retrieved and converted to human readable A G C T.
Drew's assumption would be what I would do for storing this kind of data as, of course, there is a lot of it.

Re: What it’s like to be a bat

John C — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 02:42:33 -0000

To the extent their hearing remains good, my blind friends use echolocation. I, myself have walked down sidewalks in residential areas at night when there is not much traffic of any kind with my eyes closed and was able to navigate with echolocation without running into trees that are along the way...I was able to sense their presence. This dabbling around was done in the 1960s so this concept is pretty well known by some of us for a very long time.

Re: Comp Sci Sins of Biologists

John C — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 03:34:55 -0000

Well folks, we can up the ante a bit: codons!!
On the way, we can note that in RNA, the nucleotide T is replaced by U. To represent all the codons (64 of them, 3 bases each) would require 6 bits, which is the same as for representing each of the 3 bases. So any effort to compress the representation stops here unless we are only going to look for the 20 amino acids; then we can take a bit off and we are down to five bits. The good stuff for what I write here is at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_code

In that article you will find this interesting quote: "A comparison may be made with computer science, where the codon is the equivalent of a word, which is the standard "chunk" for handling data (like one amino acid of a protein), and a nucleotide for a bit." Nooo...I am not going to defend this literally, because this communicates figuratively.

Re: Comp Sci Sins of Biologists

John C — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 18:02:38 -0000

So if we use the 20 amino acid trick (5-bits) then we have all we want, plus the start and stop codons for unprocessed sequence plus some room for a code representing an ambiguity (a codons worth).

I think that we are studying completed and processed genomes at this point which means that all of the ambiguities have beem resolved. Some of the other ideas mentioned are important for sequences that still are being assembled. So, except for the necessary start and end codon, everything else would have been corrected.

Re: Who Will Survive the “The Chasm”?

John C — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 12:28:16 -0000

This concept stems mainly from a book: "Crossing the Chasm" by Geoffrey A. Moore, Collins Business, 2002. This book is also available to be downloaded into the Kindle Book or similar reading devices.

Re: New DNA based assay rapidly identifies E. coli

John C — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 14:18:02 -0000

So...first author is the one who does most of the work and the write-up; at least that is the way at Stanford. The last author is usually the Principal Investigator (PI), also known in graduate school parliance as 'the slave master' or, as in Disney's film "Fantasia", 'the Sorcerer'. Good!