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Channel: Comments on: Will we ever… decipher everything about a life form based just on its DNA?
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By: Ian Sample

Nicely done sir! Your piece reminded me of a classic paper from Phil Anderson. Worth a read, still. http://www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1142/9789812385123_others01

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By: Tim

Expanding on Hunter’s statements: If you take the view of computational biology, that the system of proteins, DNA and so on represents code and the processors which run that code, then you have a...

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By: DavidB

Not sure I’d call the urethra a ‘stable environment’. Every so often…

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By: Guy Plunkett III

On a lighter note, I am reminded of Dr. Margo Green’s Genetic Sequence Extrapolator “a computer program designed to describe the characteristics of a given species from a reading of its DNA … you can...

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By: Brian Too

In principle, yes. In practice, this could take a couple of centuries. Patience, Grasshopper.

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By: SteveW

The problem with the physics analogy is that physics works best for predicting properties of a single entity: the location of a ball moving at a certain velocity, say, is governed by a single equation....

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By: Nathan Myers

So far as we have any experience, chicken DNA only results in a chicken if it’s grown in chicken cells. Similarly, elephants have only arisen from DNA that was contained entirely within elephant cells....

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By: James Sweet

I was going to say something similar to Nathan Meyers… Let’s say that practicality is an issue. Could you even in principle predict an animal from the DNA alone? Quite possibly not, because you have a...

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By: Paul Knoepfler

What about the epigenome, which is basically the master of the genome? Cells literally do not know what to do with DNA without histones (which come in probably thousands of post-translationally...

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By: amphiox

The answer is no. Because not all the information needed to define a lifeform is contained within its genome. The initial conditions in which the genome finds itself, the intracellular environment,...

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