Before I splurge further into the joys of Sean Carrol’s “Endless Forms Most Beautiful”…a swift update on ideas for up coming events
I had a mutually enthusing meeting this morning with Jennifer Williams, who is the Traverse’s point person for this project, and we were exploring a number of possibilities for public events …including setting up a monthly series of public/invited “Genome Encounters” that I’ll host…maybe in the Trav Bar…maybe starting at the end of June.
We also talked over plans for events in the autumn…and indeed the Spring of next year…
Watch this space for the stuff of life…
Meanwhile…
There’s a poster up in the office the Genomics Forum have so kindly given me in which to type this gibberish….produced by the US Department of Energy (I don’t know why) that exemplifies the “classical” view of genetics…
This is it here: http://www.ornl.gov/sci/techresources/Human_Genome/posters/chromosome/chooser.shtml
It’s a chart of nicely coloured representations of 22 human chromosomes
(and the X and the Y chromosomes…the X we’ve all got one of…girls have two- and us boys have got the Y chromosome instead, dangling off the end of the chart rather unimpressively as it happens.)
Anyway, these stripey slugs of information are accompanied by wodges of text…and they’re mostly a list of the genes that activate or code to proteins (or fail to code) for stuff that goes WRONG…from breast cancer to red hair…that is the primary interest in genes as expressed by this poster is in stuff which we might be able to find a cure for…
(Is there a “career in the theatre” gene we can surgically remove from the unfortunate children of actors and such folk?)
What Sean Carroll and his chums do is start from what the whole thing DOES RIGHT as a constituent of an eco-system…in building embryos of chickens and butterflies as well as actors…
They suggest that we imaginatively leap to a genome’s eye view of making eyes…for example…
Just on eyes for a minute, one cool wee thing I learned from this book is that if you take some Hox Genes – the tool kit, Carroll calls them - from a mouse embryo that make eyes in a mouse…and inject them into a fly embryo (in the wrong place…the thorax, say) …you get an eye being expressed…but you get a FLY eye…which is as unlike a mammal eye in structure as you can imagine.
I don’t really know what that means yet…but it blows my tiny mind…
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