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Indeed. The whole "One Gene, One Protein [One Phenotype]" [1] dogma went out quite some time ago. ... But people and genetic testing companies seem to want to

• dboreham 7y ago
  We will eventually find that there's the equivalent of JPEG encoding (plus SSL and ECC) and that today we're doing the equivalent of someone with no knowledge of SSL or JPEG staring at a tcpdump trace of a browser loading an image over https, trying to make sense of the resulting hex dump.
  • q6467655 7y ago
    Can you elaborate - I’ve always been fascinated hearing CS interpretations of biological processes.
    • kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
      DNA methylation acts as a form of error correction analogous to parity.
      • wjn0 7y ago
        If genes are the data, then methylation is more like an additional piece of metadata directing the cell (potentially different across cells) how to use the data. One possible use for this metadata is potentially error correction, but it does much more than that.
      • JohnBerea 7y ago
        And alternate splicing is a form of compression, where exons store the repetitive parts of genes only once, to be combined to make many proteins.
  • theLotusGambit 7y ago
    Trying to figure out how a single compressed/encrypted buffer works given only it and its resulting image is certainly an unwinnable task, but increase the sample size to a few million or billion and I don't see why the algorithm couldn't eventually be cracked.
  • meowface 7y ago
    Great analogy. This might be the case with some of physics, too.
• wahern 7y ago
  > But people and genetic testing companies seem to want to keep it going. You can still get alot of mileage out of a simplified, inaccurate model. If you just say to yourself, "well, this whole gene thing is hopelessly complex", then you'll never get anywhere outside of a lab or personal project. Applied biology especially, and medicine in particular, seems to require grossly simplifying assumptions in order to make any problem tractable. I would think that would be understood by people on HN. One of the biggest impediments to smart people starting companies is an inability to set aside the inherent, irreducible complexity that they, alone, see and appreciate. The people who succeed in business tend to be those ignorant of the complexity[1], or those able to come to terms with the reality that any practical, marketable solution is necessarily built on an inaccurate model of the world and is doomed to eventually crumble for its inherent flaws. The old adage that ignorance is bliss is more insightful and meaningful than people give it credit for. Knowledge, especially epistemic knowledge, can be debilitating. [1] Which doesn't imply being stupid or incurious. Willful ignorance seems like a potentially useful strategy.
  • navaati 7y ago
    You are basically saying "lying to people can make you some money". Indeed…