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Based almost entirely on something Tomer Ullman told me, and I hereby nominate him as First Dean of Shenanigans.
Today's News:
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Today's News:
Lafayette, LA, USA
J Craig Venter, the grit that delivered the pearl of the human genome in 2000 rather than 2010, has blinked out at a hospital in San Diego from side-effects of his treatment for cancer. In another world, with different players, he'd have been a candidate for a Nobel gong from any of three different projects ESTs, HGP, or GOS – so fight me.
He first came annoyingly across my horizon in 1991 when he increased the number of known human gene sequences by 50% through the invention of ESTs expressed sequence tags: crap-quality, partial gene sequences that turned out to be, not noise as I complained, but giving a very informative insight into the where, when and wherefore of gene function. The EST Patent created a huge ethical and financial shit-storm at the time. In the late 1990s, tired of the glacial progress of the Human Genome Project, CV scared up some VC and founded Celera Genomics to use whole genome shotgun sequencing to generate a 'good enough' human genome that could be mined for therapeutic targets. The Wellcome Trust and NIH? (I forget) counter-funded the HGP so that the public project wouldn't get scooped by commerce. Game On! Bill Clinton and Tony Blair would like us to believe that they delivered the human genome at a trans-Atlantic press conference in early 2000. 2½ years later, Venter's subsidiary The Institute for Genomic Research TIGR took, without informed consent, a blood sample from Venter's poodle Shadow and delivered The Dog Genome. Single genomes being insufficient of a challenge in 2003 he sent his yacht Sorcerer II round the world on a Global Ocean Sampling Expedition GOS sampling the microbial diversity as the went. Shock: despite being continually stirred by ocean currents up, down and around, microbial communities are different in different locations despite similar salinity and T°C profiles. And indicated again how much genetic activity, wherever you look, is due to viruses. MetaPrev In 2010, he reported the first bacterial genome whose mother was a computer. They created a complete Mycobacterium + genome sequence from clagged-together nucleotides. "+" because, for japes, the team included 4 mystery cassettes which could be decoded to reveal the authors of the paper and various deep statements incl "To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life." by James Joyce. The way in which codons coded for English alphabet letters was left as a challenge to the reader. MetaPrev on copyright. Also MetaPrev 2007. in 2016, Venter was back in minimal instruction set land, knocking out genes from an already tiny genome to generate an organism with only 473 genes (about 10% of the complement for Escherichia "Bloatware" coli) of which a third had no known function . . . except that they were essential to life. It's been a long journey for a carefree California surfer who was so traumatized as a 21 y.o. Navy corpsman during the Tet Offensive (1968) that he swam out to sea to end it all -- but then reckoned he was more useful alive than dead.
He first came annoyingly across my horizon in 1991 when he increased the number of known human gene sequences by 50% through the invention of ESTs expressed sequence tags: crap-quality, partial gene sequences that turned out to be, not noise as I complained, but giving a very informative insight into the where, when and wherefore of gene function. The EST Patent created a huge ethical and financial shit-storm at the time. In the late 1990s, tired of the glacial progress of the Human Genome Project, CV scared up some VC and founded Celera Genomics to use whole genome shotgun sequencing to generate a 'good enough' human genome that could be mined for therapeutic targets. The Wellcome Trust and NIH? (I forget) counter-funded the HGP so that the public project wouldn't get scooped by commerce. Game On! Bill Clinton and Tony Blair would like us to believe that they delivered the human genome at a trans-Atlantic press conference in early 2000. 2½ years later, Venter's subsidiary The Institute for Genomic Research TIGR took, without informed consent, a blood sample from Venter's poodle Shadow and delivered The Dog Genome. Single genomes being insufficient of a challenge in 2003 he sent his yacht Sorcerer II round the world on a Global Ocean Sampling Expedition GOS sampling the microbial diversity as the went. Shock: despite being continually stirred by ocean currents up, down and around, microbial communities are different in different locations despite similar salinity and T°C profiles. And indicated again how much genetic activity, wherever you look, is due to viruses. MetaPrev In 2010, he reported the first bacterial genome whose mother was a computer. They created a complete Mycobacterium + genome sequence from clagged-together nucleotides. "+" because, for japes, the team included 4 mystery cassettes which could be decoded to reveal the authors of the paper and various deep statements incl "To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life." by James Joyce. The way in which codons coded for English alphabet letters was left as a challenge to the reader. MetaPrev on copyright. Also MetaPrev 2007. in 2016, Venter was back in minimal instruction set land, knocking out genes from an already tiny genome to generate an organism with only 473 genes (about 10% of the complement for Escherichia "Bloatware" coli) of which a third had no known function . . . except that they were essential to life. It's been a long journey for a carefree California surfer who was so traumatized as a 21 y.o. Navy corpsman during the Tet Offensive (1968) that he swam out to sea to end it all -- but then reckoned he was more useful alive than dead.
This is a nice little obit in itself
On the home stretch of their nine-day mission, the four astronauts flying aboard NASA's Orion spacecraft are just beginning to reflect on their experience of flying beyond the Moon.
Their memories of Monday's encounter with the Moon are still fresh as they return to Earth, heading for reentry and splashdown in the Pacific Ocean on Friday evening.
"I'm actually getting chills right now just thinking about it. My palms are sweating," said Reid Wiseman, commander of the Artemis II mission. "But it is amazing to watch your home planet disappear behind the Moon. You can see the atmosphere. You could actually see the terrain on the Moon projected across the Earth as the Earth was eclipsing behind the Moon. It was just an unbelievable sight, and then it was gone. It was out of sight."
Trying the social features