Tabula Rasa Promotion To Send Gamers' DNA to Space 90
Bridger tips news that NCSoft's Tabula Rasa, created in part by Richard Garriott, is running an unusual promotion right now. Garriott is going to the International Space Station on October 12th, and he'll take with him a digital record of the DNA of various players and celebrities. The basic plot of Tabula Rasa is that Earth was attacked and humans almost completely wiped out. Garriott's promotion is playing on that idea; the hard drive with the DNA data will be left in orbit "just in case" something happens to humanity on Earth. NCSoft has been running a variety of polls and contests to include further data about humans on the hard drive. The deadline for joining the project has recently been extended to September 29th.
Re:Silly (Score:4, Informative)
We know we can't. DNA is, if you like, a program; but in order to make sense of that program, you need an appropriate computer to run it on, which is a human womb.
Some combinations of animals are compatible with each other --- lions and tigers, for example --- but most animals aren't. Try to grow an embryo of the wrong species in an incompatible host and it'll crash; either it'll just die, or else the mother will abort it.
About the only thing you could do with a DNA sequence in isolation is poke through it looking for interesting protein sequences.
Sorry but he is being misleading (Score:5, Informative)
Current technology to COMPLETELY sequence a single person's DNA is still way too expensive to be practical. It cost billions of dollars for the NIH and Craig Venter's company to sequence the first human (in 2000). (Guess who's DNA they used!) Even after eight internet years It probably is still in the millions of dollars, I don't think Mr Garriot is going to fork over that kind of cash. He's probably going to pay for some people's genetic PROFILE to be sequenced, enough for certain genetic diseases to be exposed. (I think you can get this done for about $1000). Then again, aliens could also use it to pick out the (un)lucky human from a extra-terrestrial police line up! Still there certainly wouldn't be enough information to recreate the human "from scratch" even assuming the technology was available.
However, he could at least bring up Craig Venter's publicly available DNA and if stored digitally I'm sure that it could be encoded very very redundantly so that even a huge number of cosmic ray hits wouldn't effect it. Consider Voyager, with 30 year old tech., still can run its old programs.
As for bringing up the real stuff, I'm not sure that the NASA/ESA and other ISS partners would appreciate him bringing up little vials of other people's DNA for storage. (Of course some contamination has always been unavoidable, humans are basically walking bags of bacteria). Would he just take some hair samples or bring up DNA in more purified form? (Actually the previous poster's 2010: A Sperm Odyssey wouldn't be bringing up complete copies of the person's DNA because during reproduction the sperm cells only have half of the man's genes...). He could however get someone's DNA and using PCR (polymerase chain reaction) make as much of it as he wants. Milky white fluid, looks just like sperm.
Re:Nuclear DNA is not enough (Score:3, Informative)
Yeah, there's an unfortunate misconception that the DNA contains sufficient information to make the organism. In addition to what you said, there are also the beneficial microbial organisms [boston.com] throughout animals that are required for many functions to work. For example, the digestive tract in particular requires the help of many bacteria. Unfortunately, I couldn't remember or google the actual term for this kind of cell.
Re:False DNA Assumptions (Score:3, Informative)
Isn't DNA, by definition enough to recreate a human (or other carbon-based life-form)?
Just because we don't know how to do it, doesn't mean that all the information isn't there -
Nope, DNA doesn't define Mitochondria or Mitochondrial DNA. The theory goes that you create some artificial DNA, transplant it into a Mitochondria cell, and then it starts working. Of genetic ancestry interest, is that Mitochondrial DNA is only passed mother by mother, because fathers do not pass theirs on.
Re:Sorry but he is being misleading (Score:1, Informative)
Current technology to COMPLETELY sequence a single person's DNA is still way too expensive to be practical. It cost billions of dollars for the NIH and Craig Venter's company to sequence the first human (in 2000). (Guess who's DNA they used!) Even after eight internet years It probably is still in the millions of dollars,
While you're basically right, you're absolutely wrong about this. Full genome sequencing has become incredibly cheap, relatively speaking. You can get your entire genome sequenced for a "mere" $350,000 or so. Sure, out of the reach of you or I, but not even half a million bucks.
What's brought on this revolution in sequencing technology costs?
Well, first, we've already sequence the whole genome, and individuals don't vary so much, so it's relatively easier to sequence a similar individual rather than piecing the whole puzzle together from scratch.
Second, the advent of shotgun sequencing (powered by computer string matching algorithms, yay) greatly lowered the cost of sequencing entire genomes. It was truly revolutionary, which let Venter's group pretty much catch up with the massive HGP many years later.
As the technology has continued to be refined, sequencing has dropped dramatically in price. Sequencing whole genomes of various species for research purposes has become relatively routine these days.
The Archon X Prize seeks to bring the cost down of sequencing individual human genomes down to around $10,000. It certainly seems like an achievable goal.