3 ms·
No one is talking about "throwing out billions of years of biochemistry". Rather, by changing a small part of biochemistry we will be better able to understand
by twanvl 8y ago
No one is talking about "throwing out billions of years of biochemistry". Rather, by changing a small part of biochemistry we will be better able to understand it. Not all research is about making something better.
Artificial bases might help us understand why live evolved the way it did. Maybe there is an interaction between the bases and the way DNA folds? Or were ACTG just an accident?
Artificial bases might be useful as part of other techniques, perhaps for tagging DNA sequences. Maybe they can one day be used to disrupt or alter certain biological processes.
I am not a biologists, so I have no idea if that makes any sense, but the research is interesting.
- astazangasta 8y agoI am a biologist. We already know many of the things you asked. For example, the stacking energy between bases: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1360284/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1360284/ All this can be studied with some chemistry. These people are engineering new organisms with a new genetic code and new amino acids. It goes far beyond mere study. It's as if someone suddenly said, "Yes, but imagine if pianos had 99 keys!"
- Pfhreak 8y agoThis seems analogous to: "No one will ever need a 100 megabyte drive!" "No one could ever use a 1 megabit network connection!" "No one will ever use more than 256 megabytes of RAM!" But I don't know enough biology to understand if that's the case.
- falsedan 8y agoThis is more like: "no one will need gold audio cables!" "No one could ever tell the display refresh rate was 1kHz!" "No one will ever use a mineral oil bath to cool their PC!"
- drilldrive 8y agoGold audio cables are useless, yes? I assume the other two are just as such then, if that is the analogy you are shooting for.