Moosh:] wrote:
On 31 Jul 2003 01:42:57 GMT, Brian Sandle
posted:

Gordon Couger wrote:

"Brian Sandle" wrote in message
...
In sci.med.nutrition Moosh:] wrote:
On 24 Jul 2003 05:04:37 GMT, Brian Sandle
wrote:

So you don't read Moosh:]'s articles, I have to economize somehwe
****
From: "Moosh:]"
Newsgroups: sci.med.nutrition,nz.general,sci.agriculture
Subject: Paying to find non-GE wild corn?
Message-ID:
Lines: 89
Date: Sat, 19 Jul 2003 11:54:52 GMT
[...]
In the junk DNA there is just about
everything that has been tried, if it hasn't been harmlessly corrupted
over the aeons.
[...]
****

That doesn't mean that it is a "memory bank" Just a repository for
turned off sequences. What turns them on again is a moot point.
Evolution isn't using these if needed, it is being lucky enough to
have a random mutation that confers a survival benefit. And when all
your non-mutated peers are dying from some environmental change
(antibiotics) , you will outcompete them.

But what if a mutation in the past had developed an ability to access the
junk DNA under stress? Would that be as complex as developing eyes
ears and advanced emotions by mutation?

What if some thing that are now blue turn green on August 5th, 2005 and we
have a new color bleen, blue that turns to green.

You stabbing in the dark about thing you have no knowledge of. Do you trust
propaganda machines more than scientist that spend their lives working in a
field?

I am not stabbing in the dark, I am trying to get Moosh:] thinking.

You're not going to convince anyone with propaganda and fringe
science, and wild speculation. You must become far more
discriminating.


Linkname: The Spurious Foundation of Genetic Engineering
URL: http://www.commondreams.org/views02/0209-01.htm
size: 723 lines

[...]
Why, then, has the central dogma continued to stand? To some
degree the theory has been protected from criticism by a device
more common to religion than science; dissent, or merely the
discovery of a discordant fact, is a punishable offense, a
heresy that might easily lead to professional ostracism. Much of
this bias can be attributed to institutional inertia, a failure
of rigor, but there are other, more insidious, reasons why
molecular geneticists might be satisfied with the status quo;
the central dogma has given them such a satisfying, seductively
simplistic explanation of heredity that it seemed sacrilegious
to entertain doubts. The central dogma was simply too good not
to be true.

As a result, funding for molecular genetics has rapidly
increased over the last twenty years, new academic institutions,
many of them "genomic" variants of more mundane professions,
such as public health, have proliferated. At Harvard and other
universities, the biology curriculum has become centered on the
genome. But beyond the traditional scientific economy of
prestige and the generous funding that follows it as night
follows day, money has distorted the scientific process as a
once purely academic pursuit has been commercialized to an
astonishing degree by the researchers themselves. Biology has
become a glittering target for venture capital; each new
discovery brings new patents, new partnerships, and new
corporate affiliations. But as the growing opposition to
transgenic crops clearly shows, there is persistent public
concern not only with the safety of genetically engineered foods
but also with the inherent dangers in arbitrarily overriding
patterns of inheritance that are embedded in the natural world
through long evolutionary experience. Too often those concerns
have been derided by industry scientists as the "irrational"
fears of an uneducated public. The irony, of course, is that the
biotechnology industry is based on science that is forty years
old and conveniently devoid of more recent results, which show
that there are strong reasons to fear the potential consequences
of transferring a DNA gene between species. What the public
fears is not the experimental science but the fundamentally
irrational decision to let it out of the laboratory into the
real world before we truly understand it.

Barry Commoner is senior scientist at the Center for Biology of
Natural Systems at Queen's College, City University of New York
where he directs the Critical Genetics Project. Readers can
obtain a list of references used as sources for this article by
sending a request to [see http for email address and
fair use notice]


Linkname: Molecular Genetic Engineers in Junk DNA?
URL: http://www.i-sis.org.uk/MGEJ.php
size: 183 lines
[...]
Perhaps only 1% of the human genome codes for genes, and that's what
the human genome map contains. The rest is mainly repetitive DNA,
commonly known as `junk DNA'.

However, evidence has been emerging that lurking within junk DNA are
armies of transposons (mobile genetic elements) that play an
indispensable role in `natural genetic engineering' the genome. They
make up nearly half of the human genome, and serve as `recombination
hotspots' for cutting and splicing, and hence reshuffling the genome.
They are also a source of ready to use motifs for gene expression, as
well as new protein-coding sequences.

These important transposons are scattered throughout the genome. There
are two main categories: Long Interspersed Elements (LINEs) about 6.7
kilobasepairs in length and Short Interspersed Elements (SINEs) of
several hundred basepairs.

The most abundant SINEs are Alu elements, of which 1.4 million copies
exist, comprising 10% of the human genome, and are apparently only
found in primates.

[...]
There is increasing evidence that physical and chemical stresses to
the cell, such as heat shock, chemical poisons and viral infections,
tend to activate Alu elements. The resultant gene reshuffling may be
responsible for a variety of chronic diseases (see "Dynamic genomics
", this series).

Wild speculation. Perhaps a tiny truth here, but likely insignificant
in the washup.

[...]
Crick's theory includes a second doctrine, which he originally
called the "central dogma" (though this term is now generally
used to identify his theory as a whole). The hypothesis is
typical Crick: simple precise, and magisterial. "Once
(sequential) information has passed into protein it cannot get
out again." This means that genetic information originates in
the DNA nucleotide sequence and terminates, unchanged, in the
protein amino acid sequence. The pronouncement is crucial to the
explanatory power of the theory because it endows the gene with
undiluted control over the identity of the protein and the
inherited trait that the protein creates. To stress the
importance of their genetic taboo, Crick bet the future of the
entire enterprise on it, asserting that "the discovery of just
one type of present-day cell" in which genetic information
passed from protein to nucleic acid or from protein to protein
"would shake the whole intellectual basis of molecular biology."

Crick was aware of the brashness of his bet, for it was known
that in living cells proteins come into promiscuous molecular
contact with numerous other proteins and with molecules of DNA
and RNA. His insistence that these interactions are genetically
chaste was designed to protect the DNA's genetic message - the
gene's nucleotide sequence - from molecular intruders that might
change the sequence or add new ones as it was transferred, step
by step, from gene to protein and thus destroy the theory's
elegant simplicity.

Last February, Crick's gamble suffered a spectacular loss. In
the journals Nature and Science, and at joint press conferences
and television appearances, the two genome research teams
reported their results. The major result was "unexpected."
Instead of the 100,000 or more genes predicted by the estimated
number of human proteins, the gene count was only about 30,000.
By this measure, people are only about as gene-rich as a
mustardlike weed (which has 26,000 genes) and about twice as
genetically endowed as a fruit fly or a primitive worm - hardly
an adequate basis for distinguishing among "life as a fly, a
carrot, or a man." In fact, an inattentive reader of genomic CDs
might easily mistake Walter Gilbert for a mouse, 99 percent of
whose genes have human counterparts.

The surprising results contradicted the scientific premise on
which the genome project was undertaken and dethroned its
guiding theory, the central dogma. After all, if the human gene
count is too low to match the number of proteins and the
numerous inherited traits that they engender, and if it cannot
explain the vast inherited difference between a weed and a
person, there must be much more to the "ultimate description of
life" than the genes, on their own, can tell us.

Scientists and journalists somehow failed to notice what had
happened. The discovery that the human genome is not much
different from the roundworm's, led Dr. Eric Lander, one of the
leaders of the project, to declare that humanity should learn "a
lesson in humility."

[...]
The project's scientific reports offered little to explain the
shortfall in the gene count. One of the possible explanations
for why the gene count is "so discordant with our predictions"
was described, in full, last February in Science as follows:
"nearly 40% of human genes are alternatively spliced." Properly
understood, this modest, if esoteric, account fulfills Crick's
dire prophecy: it "shakes the whole intellectual basis of
molecular biology" and undermines the scientific validity of its
applications to genetic engineering.
[...]

Thus, in the living cell the gene's nucleotide code can by
replicated faithfully only because an array of specialized
proteins intervenes to prevent most of the errors - which DNA by
itself is prone to make - and to repair the few remaining ones.
Moreover, it has been known since the 1960s that the enzymes
that synthesize DNA influence its nucleotide sequence. In this
sense, genetic information arises not from DNA alone but through
its essential collaboration with protein enzymes - a
contradiction of the central dogma's precept that inheritance is
uniquely governed by the self-replication of the DNA double
helix.

[prions &c]