I was wondering about the human genome project
My nephew has a PhD in “Studying all that biological stuff.”
After his mother’s funeral over dinner, I asked him how the human genome project was going and if he was working on it.
He is very quiet and uses short sentences if possible. He said, “We finished that.”
I changed the theme to Latent hopes of Tibetan monks, where I have more experience. You don’t want to appear too stupid to your clever nephew.
Regardless, it still annoyed me that I knew so little about the Human Genome Project. After almost two years of this inconvenience, I decided to find Human genome on Google, my favorite place to look up the weird and the obvious.
Well, that was a complete lie. That’s not why I looked it up. The real reason was that I found out that the Department of Energy was involved. (That was before I remembered that the DOE has these giant computers that can handle complex projects like the HGP.) I decided there was another government conspiracy we hadn’t heard about. He smelled of Vice President Dick Cheney’s Cabal again. They were going to turn some of us humans into oil pillars.
At my friend Mr. Google.com’s house, I looked at the top entrance, which is often as far as I want to plunge into 10 trillion submissions. It seems that everyone in the universe knows more about the human genome than I do, and everyone has written at least one article or web page for the Internet.
Anyway, I went to: http://www.ornl.gov/sci/techresources/Human_Genome/home.shtml
There I learned the goals of the project that was completed while I wasn’t looking.
The objectives were and I quote:
or “identify all of the approximately 20,000-25,000 genes in human DNA,
o determine the sequences of the 3 billion chemical base pairs that make up human DNA,
or store this information in databases,
o improve tools for data analysis,
or transfer related technologies to the private sector, and
or address ethical, legal, and social (ELSI) issues that may arise from the project.”
Holy geewillikers! They did all of that using just a few huge computers!
Maybe I shouldn’t have used geewillikers because I don’t know how to spell it. However, my wife spelled it out for me and we agreed. She also said that she could spell it however she wanted. That was a usable breakthrough with other silly words. From now on I’m spelling stuff, stuff, and practically, practically since so say some practically here in Idaho.
Anyway, I wanted to know more about what the Dick Cheney cabal was up to, so my friend Mr. Google took me to: http://www.energy.gov/engine/content.do?PUBLIC_ID=18903&BT_CODE =PR_PRESSRELEASES&TT_CODE= PRESS RELEASES
The press release was written by Jeff Sherwood and I’m sure he knows what he’s talking about. The title is “DOE Publishes Roadmap for New Biological Research for Energy and Environmental Needs.”
I’d like to quote the first paragraph, hoping there’s no law against it:
“WASHINGTON, DC — The Department of Energy (DOE) today released a comprehensive plan for a new generation of biological research that builds on investments in genome projects to help solve the nation’s environmental and energy challenges. Microbial enzymes could, for example, be used to improve the manufacture of ethanol from cellulose by replacing the inefficient and expensive processes in use today, potentially enabling smaller-scale, more cost-effective and energy-efficient distributed processing plants. “That could make ethanol cost competitive with petroleum-based gasoline. The species have biochemical processes that are of potential use for this and other applications.”
That sounds pretty innocent on the surface, so I borrowed my wife’s big “mirror” that she uses when she drops a cookie crumb.
I scanned Jeff’s press release from top to bottom looking for “Human Pillars of Oil to Solve Oil Crisis,” but it just wasn’t there.
Therefore, I must apologize for the decrease in the number of members of the vice president’s cabal.
Very sorry! Please don’t let the IRS audit me!
copyright©John T. Jones, Ph.D. 2005