Synthetic life. Biochemistry. Genomics. And my ignorance of it all!

"Life's like a box of chocolates, you never know what you're gonna get" said the philosopher Forrest Gump.  Well, I never know what I will get on the television.

I flicked to ABC.  It was the last quarter of the USC-Stanford game.  With the Cardinal's football ranking competing with the university's academic status, and the Trojans still reeling from the NCAA sanctions, it was a surprise that the game was tied at 17.  Every once in a while, a match is that way--it still has to be played out for the win, and the higher ranked player or team is not guaranteed a victory.  For a while, it appeared that neither team was able to breakthrough, until USC played for it all with a gamble on a fourth down. The rest, as they say, now belongs to the fabled Trojan history.

Oh, did I mention that I earned my graduate degrees at USC? ;)

After pottering around for a while, I returned to my favorite weekend channel: BookTV.  One of the best channels ever in the lineup.  The number of hours that I have logged in front of BookTV!

It was Craig Venter talking about his research work.  I watched it as if I was a registered student in a course that Venter was teaching.  I made mental notes to myself. I learnt a lot.  I thought about them.  And then went to the BookTV website and even extracted a 15-minute video clip and tweeted about it.  I was that pumped up!

Here is a clip from the Book Discussion on #Venter's "Life at the Speed of Light" that I watched thanks to @BookTV http://t.co/3USBLw2ItH
— sriram khe (@congoboy) November 17, 2013

It was only thanks to Venter's lecture that I understood how urea, and synthesizing it--back in 1828--was itself an important and revolutionary step.  In the slide that Venter put up was this sentence:

The Wohler synthesis is of historical significance because for the first time an organic compound was produced from inorganic reactants.  

I am confident that we never got to know this from high school chemistry, when we spent those couple of months on organic chemistry.  What is worse is this: we lived in a town where a fertilizer factory produced urea; how could they have missed out on conveying to us the significance of urea synthesis from such a perspective too!

Venter and his team of researchers, and other scientists all over the world, have now come a long, long way from that first step of organic chemistry.  His talk was mostly about the key steps over the years, which finally led to the publication of their research in Science, on "providing proof of principle for the production of cells from digitized sequence information," which was the cover story as well in July 2010:

Source

When Venter got into talking about the applications, it felt like it was science fiction.  But, some are already underway.  Some are already happening--like creating vaccines from the digitized sequence information.  Essentially to cook up the vaccine based on a recipe.  No need to wait for months for the egg-based vaccine production process that we now have!

The futuristic scenarios were impressive, and a tad scary as well.

Similar to how in 3D printing we can send the details as electronic ones and zeros and then print the object wherever, Venter offers the possibility of vaccine production labs spread all across the world, which will produce the vaccine from the digital information that will be delivered to them.

Even better was his description of the possibility (though it might be highly regulated) of us sitting at home by our computers and medical dispensing machines--like how we have printers now--and prescriptions like insulin or vaccines will then be sent over to the machine, which will then create them for us at our homes.  (Check out this video clip from his talk)

Or how it might be possible for something like a Curiosity Rover to digitize a life form on Mars (should it find one there) send across the sequence to the ground-station here on Earth and we then assemble it--a biological teleportation!

Even more reasons for me to wonder what it means to be human.

Those were all over the weekend.  This morning, I read this in the news:

Frederick Sanger, the British biochemist who twice won the Nobel Prize, has died at the age of 95.

My first thought was this: there was a British scientist who was awarded the Nobel twice?  In the same field? How come he is not a highly celebrated figure?  Why isn't he a household name?  Ballplayers get venerated as gods, and this scientist was condemned to obscurity among the public?

Turns out that his work is intimately connected to the Venter research stories; what a coincidence!

The first came in 1958 for developing techniques to work out the precise chemical structure of proteins.
Proteins are made up of amino-acids. Dr Sanger was able to determine which amino-acids and in what order were used to build the hormone insulin.
He then turned to DNA and its building blocks, bases.
Dr Sanger's group produced the first whole genome sequence, made up of more than 5,000 pairs of bases, in a virus.
He was awarded his second Nobel Prize in 1980 for developing "Sanger sequencing" - a technique which is still used today. 

How fascinating!

But, even more impressive was this:

"He remains the only person to have won two Nobel Prizes in Chemistry - recognising his unique contribution to the modern world.
"Yet he was a disarmingly modest man, who once said: 'I was just a chap who messed about in his lab'.

What an old-fashioned virtue--modesty!