Genetics has always fascinated me and I found this interesting info to share it with you guys. For the next 5 minutes, I request you to lend your eyes so that I can explain the journey to understand the code of life – that is probably the dream of humanity! To begin with, lets start with the idea of 3d printing. A 3d printer needs 3 basic elements – a bit of information(basically the code sequence), some raw material and energy source. This can be analogous to human beings as well ! We are after all 3d creatures. And my mother produced me by taking three elements: a bit of information, which is between my father and my mom in this case, raw elements and energy in the same media, that is food. Sounds Interesting Right!
Yes, Genetics is indeed much more interesting. The code of life is the bit of information that was needed to generate us. It would be sarcastic enough to mention the information as a “bit” . It really isn’t. The amount of information required to produce us is really really astonishing. The number of atoms, the file that I will save in my thumb drive to assemble a little baby, will actually fill an entire Titanic of thumb drives — multiplied 2,000 times. This is the miracle of life. So, every time you see a pregnant lady, remember, she is assembling the greatest amount of information that you have ever encountered. Forget Big Data/Data Analytics!
DNA(Deoxyribonucleic Acid) is the container of this amazing code of life. This code is not a random permutation of strings/numbers. This is rather the most complicated code ever investigated by us. If you believe that this code is random and life is a result of an accident, then you ought to believe this – Imagine 1000’s of apes with laptops trying to type in something. The probability that the compilation of all the words they type will ever become the code of life is 1 in 100 billion( that is an estimate of the number of stars in our galaxy). Now listen, understanding and manipulating the genes is not going to be a sci-fi anymore. We are on the verge of understanding our own code.
The code of life is surprisingly made of four letters – A,T,C and G. These letters are responsible for what we are today. Dr.Craig Venter ( Founder of Human Longevity) has sequenced the human genome into 262,000 pages of information. And out of these, 500 million pages of information describe who you are. In short, those pages define you and the rest, we all share it. Next time, whenever you say you are completely unique, remember you are just 500 pages different than the other person ! And we need some cool technology to process this stuffs. And here comes Machine Learning. Scientists built huge cluster of ML algorithms , running them parallel in GPU’s. These algorithms help in translating the genome sequence into their respective phenotypes( the visual/physical characteristics of an organism). These can be used to predict the height, weight, skin color. And what more? Your exact face can be predicted by the genome sequence. Can you imagine the consequence of this ? Genome editing can indeed cause the arise of the era of designer babies. You can literally code to generate human beings – by changing their skin tone, fix heights and change physical characteristics. But this is just a theory of possibility. It would be enormously difficult to organize the information from these large piles of data and map it with the physical characteristics.
So, why do we do this? We certainly don’t do it for predicting height or taking a beautiful picture out of your blood. We do it because the same technology and the same approach, the machine learning of this code, is helping us to understand how we work, how your body works, how your body ages, how disease generates in your body, how your cancer grows and develops, how drugs work and if they work on your body. However, this project has several ethical consequences. Let’s wait and see how technology helps in understanding the code of life much better. If you are visual person, who can understand better by seeing things, then just watch this video. I bet, it’s definitely worth your precious time ! Hope you enjoyed reading this post 🙂