Dr.Francis Collins, Director of the NIH
Former lead guitar for the Rolling Stones
(No, I made that part up)
Dr. Collins is one of my current heroes.
Along with Russell Wilson
Now this sort of scares me.
People at Scripps have created what can only be called “frankenproteins”. They are excited. So was Dr. Frankenstein when he zapped his
monster into life. We all know how that
turned out.
Not to insult your intelligence, but I want you to recall
that our entire heredity is “written” in a code consisting of only four
letters: A, T, C, and G. The “book”
containing these letters is the DNA double helix. Baring errors, in the DNA molecule A always
bonds with T, and C with G. It is the
sequence of these A-T and C-G parings that tells a creature to develop into,
say, a tadpole, rather than, say, Donald
Trump.
A, T, C, and G are known as nucleotides. They “code”
for the proteins, upon which all life depends.
Well, some adventurous folks at Scripps in San Diego have
created two new nucleotides, which they call X and Y (pitiful lake of
originality). X pairs with Y, just like
A-T and C-G. Furthermore, they have
inserted the X-Y pair into the bacterium E.
coli, and then run the resulting (man-made!) genetic material through the
normal DNA-to-protein assembly process.
And - Voila! – A new, totally unnatural, man-made protein walks
(slithers, actually) the face of the earth!
The Scripps folk are jubilant, and forecast all sorts of
uses for these frankenproteins. Dr.
Collins, Director of NIH and the author of many learned publications,
enthusiastically agrees. So maybe I
should be happy with this development.
After all, it is a promising tool, right? And the Scripps people assure us that it can’t
get out of hand: they have to feed it
just to keep it alive. Yeah, sure. The original Frankenstein creation learned to
go get its own food. We don’t want to
see globs of frankenprotein slithering around the lab, eating the lab rats!
Seriously, this stuff disturbs me a bit. I think we must proceed very carefully.
By the way, Dr Francis Collins not only runs NIH, which has
a budget similar in size to, say, the U.S. Navy – he also has time to author a
series of highly informative blogs. You
should get on his mailing list.
The Economist provides a much more valuable discussion of this issue.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21731808-biologists-expand-lifes-alphabet-include-two-new-letters-bacterium-can