Jan Klein and Big Science
| 8 July, 2010 | Richard P. Grant |
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I always have been against big science. I think it’s mostly a waste of money and all the history of science shows us that it never leads to the attempted goal.
Jan Klein, the Czech-American immunologist, co-founded the modern science of immunogenetics. He is the author or co-author of over 560 scientific publications and of seven books, including
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No doubt he is also talking about the waste of time and money on searching for those many elusive autism genes.
maurineM
Here’s a question that may be answerable: Since biological systems generally have direct feedback, why should protein synthesis be an exception? Why DNA>RNA>Protein and never the other way back as it was first stated by Crick and Watkins? (the “Central Dogma”). It became DNARNA>protein with Temin and Baltimore and has remained so since 1970. Why not DNARNAProtein? Is it as one person replied,”We don’t believe in that”.
I’m not sure I understand your question, Dolores. Protein synthesis is (obviously) controlled by the cell, and retroviruses take RNA and make DNA from it.
Whoops! That was supposed to be- Why not DNARNAProtein?
Maybe I need to add spaces. Why not DNA RNA Protein? I hope that works. I put it in as arrows facing back to DNA and forth To RNA, back to RNA, and forth to Protein. I hope it works this time.
I think I see what you mean, but the arrows aren’t showing up. You mean DNA <> RNA > Protein ? Or DNA <> RNA <> Protein? If you’re talking about flow of information, then there isn’t a natural way to get sequence information from protein to DNA (we can do reverse translation ourselves, sure). If you’re talking about control, then yes, proteins themselves control translation/translation.
In response to Dr Klein’s comment on the video – very valid point raised indeed.
KL
Hi
Yes, the idea of reversibility is intriguing. We know that DNA and RNA originally came from simple chemicals and the work of Prusiner and his Nobel Prize is based on proteins causing harm.
This simple idea of reversibility would call into question the use of man made molecules with no connection to those in nature.
To be blunt although it is accepted that very few chemicals destroy our DNA and cause cancer it is abundantly clear that very many chemicals do destroy our DNA but modern science has not any idea which ones except that where likely candidate molecules are found we seem to just accept the benefits without concern that cancer now accounts for more than half the population.
Big Science and molecular size brains perhaps?