The writers, editors, and staff of theBillyLeePontificator.com are on vacation until July 15, 2016. Please hold all calls. We forgot you already, so don’t bother.
This woman is at work (she’s a swimsuit model); she has nothing to do with Billy Lee or anyone on his staff. She is not on vacation.
Readers may continue to visit and peruse the website free of charge, no questions asked.
Third-shift parking-lot attendant and janitor, Billy Lee JUNIOR, will review and approve all incoming comments and emails during the absence of our top executives.
Click here to read Billy Lee’sofficial vacation policy, which applies equally to all employees — except for Billy Lee JUNIOR, who is considered ”disruptive” and not a ”team player” by every member of the Editorial Board.
JUNIOR holds Pontificator Editorial Board member Ebenezer Hartless by his shirt during wage negotiations last year. JUNIOR demanded $8 per hour, which the Board rejected as outrageous and divisive.
Subscriber Alert:
Two days ago, on June 17,while TheBillyLeePontificator higher-ups (including Billy Lee) spent their yearly six-week sabbatical at the abandoned Trump Casino in New Jersey’s Atlantic City, JUNIOR took full advantage (we can scarcely believe it ourselves) to actually go and vent on FOX NEWS, where he ”exposed” the Pontificator for ”advocating tolerance of all races, religions, orientations, and sexual positions.”
JUNIOR told FOX(falsely) that our website places subversive messages inside purposely overly-long essays to better conceal them.
JUNIOR informed Fox News females (whose short skirts and long legs are supposed to convince morons they have press credentials) that Billy Lee’s essays are long too; too long, actually; and ”really, really boring.”
JUNIOR claimed that it’s not possible for anyone to read Billy Lee’s essays thoroughly; not carefully, anyway; not carefully enough to notice the ”hidden persuaders” he has strewn like so many grenades among the rocks of each essay’s thousands-of-words, which he cleverly rigs to flip anyone who stumble on them into becoming Communists, or worse.
JUNIOR accused Billy Lee of advocating for an amendment to the Second Amendment, which would effectively deny 90% of preschoolers the right to receive as gifts military-style assault rifles at Christmas and birthday parties; Billy Lee, he droned, supports 20 million-dollar limits on annual incomes; he pushes 400 million-dollar caps on the size of private estates; and on and so on.
The Editorial Board does not like to air its dirty laundry in public; not normally. But after this attack on our organization by one of our own, Billy Lee requested that we remind our subscribers that JUNIOR has a complicated history; he sometimes says crazy things he doesn’t mean and makes unreasonable demands that can’t be met — like the time he groveled during a performance-review for a ”fair” wage — $8 per hour — exactly $8 more than he agreed to when first he started working for us, more than two years ago.
Why can’t Billy Lee understand what’s going on? Why can’t he see the obvious? Doesn’t he get how JUNIOR diminishes us; how he undercuts the good work we are all trying to do, together, as one unified team?
How did Billy Lee not notice? — we turned down JUNIOR’S pay raise last year after the dude threatened to commit hari-kari in the parking lot with one of those plastic toothpick swords he always carries in his lunch-pail.
Despite numerous media leaks and vile rumors about JUNIOR spread by disgruntled co-workers, Billy Lee insists, ”JUNIOR is normal — an everyday employee like any other.”
”I have legal documents to prove it,” BillyLee likes to say. Old DNA test-results stuffed in a rusty file cabinet he’s kept in his basement for well-nigh twenty-five years prove that the 99.97% probability of paternity is far less than the 100% required for certainty.
”Billy LeeJUNIOR is not my son,” Billy Lee is always mumbling — often to no one in particular — while he nods alone late at night on his front-porch swing, neighbors claim.
Billy Lee continues to resist the Board’s demands that JUNIOR be fired; he seems to protect JUNIOR from the consequences of every incompetent and crazy thing he does; he even lets him sleep on a cot in his basement.
The Editorial Board categorically denies JUNIOR’S repeated requests for a pay raise. His demands are petty, insulting, stupid, silly, exorbitant, disruptive, offensive, frivolous, and foolish. JUNIOR has a choice; it’s time he made it: love our website or leave.
It’s that simple.
We are asking readers to ignore posts that might appear in the Pontificator between now and 15 July 2016, because it is likely JUNIOR will have typed them — slowly of course — he strikes the keys with one finger; he can’t type. He can’t spell his own name, for crying-out-loud.
We, the Editorial Board, intend to return from vacation to once-and-for-all end this dispute with Billy Lee’s favorite custodian and car-parker — JUNIOR; or as Billy Lee calls him: Billy Lee JUNIOR; usually followed by a little butt-tap and squeeze on the shoulder. Gag us with a spoon — seriously.
The mission of our website is to advocate for a progressive approach to the shaping of culture and social policy in America. We won’t allow a miscreant named JUNIOR, who happens to share some of his DNA with our founder, Billy Lee, to unravel our vision for the future.
The heart and soul of our favorite blog site, theBillyLeePontificator.com, is at stake, people. Nepotism between employees who share nothing except their first and last names and 99.97% of their DNA cannot be allowed to distract us from our noble work.
Listen up, JUNIOR: when we get back from our six-week vacation, YOU’RE FIRED!
The Billy Lee Pontificator Editorial Board
Lisen up, doods:
Ur late. I hirred a neu bord alredy. I emaled daddy. He dont like u neether. The nue bord calls me MR. JUNIUR.
Hillary Clinton sometimes shares stories with people about her late mother Dorothy Rodham who was born on 4 June 1919 — the same day that the women’s voting rights amendment cleared its final legislative hurdle in the US Congress.
People have a difficult time grasping a simple truth: every time the right of women to vote in national elections has come before the Supreme Court, the Court has voted against it. Despite a national movement that started in 1848 at Seneca Falls and continued with annual meetings of National Women’s Rights Conventions from 1850 onward, courts in America have rarely ruled in favor of women’s rights; the Supreme Court has never ruled in favor of a woman’s right to vote; never.
Even when women were arrested and imprisoned; when they went on hunger strikes and guards force-fed them like modern day prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, the courts remained harsh and unforgiving.
It took a constitutional amendment (the 19th) passed by the votes of loving brothers, fathers, grandfathers, husbands, sons, and boyfriends in state legislatures across the country for women to make their successful end-run around the opposition to female voting that infused the Supreme Court; it wasn’t until 1920 that every woman in America secured the right to walk into polling places to vote in national elections. They never looked back.
Voting rights for women became a settled legal matter in 1922 when the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the procedures demanded by the Constitution were properly followed. The 19th amendment would never be reversed — short of another constitutional amendment. That amendment can never come now that women are voters.
It’s been ninety-six years. There are women walking around today who were alive when their right to vote was granted. It wasn’t that long ago. Hillary Clinton has sometimes reminded us that her late mother was born on June 4, 1919 — the same day the voting amendment passed its final legislative hurdle in the United States Congress.
Before I explain just what it was that Hillary did, here’s some background; a little history, Billy Lee-style:
Union soldier Alfred Stratton lost both arms to cannon fire at age 19. One of every thirteen soldiers lost limbs in the Civil War. After his discharge Sgt. Stratton sold pictures of his wounds to support his family. He died at age 29 leaving behind his wife and two children. For me his eyes convey the heartache of a soldier who won at war and lost everything.
After the end of the Civil War, which traumatized the nation with its toll of 750,000 deaths and millions maimed and wounded — 1 of every 13 soldiers who served became an amputee — something worse happened. The men in America who survived but lost their way of life to war, many of them, became demoralized and angry; they spiraled downward. Some who managed to keep their limbs continued to fight; they went to war against the ”redskins” in genocidal campaigns that decimated our native populations.
But other men — I would say most of the survivors — went on a drinking binge. The binge lasted decades. Some men drank themselves to death. The tranquilizers and antidepressants that might have saved many hadn’t yet been invented.
Opiates were available, yes, and many ex-soldiers purchased them in bottled elixirs sold by traveling salesmen. But alcohol was the remedy of choice for men whose minds and missing limbs exuded the chronic, excruciating pain of amputations and the memories of horrors. Alcoholic spirits were cheap and easy to buy. The excessive use of alcohol and the inevitable abuse of women that always seemed to follow became a national epidemic; a cultural disgrace. It lasted decades; some say it has never really ended.
The bullying of minorities, native people, and women — cruelty often directed against the weak and defenseless — became a way of life for many veterans who suffered post-traumatic-stress-disorder, which no one understood at the time. The vocabulary folks needed to even discuss the dynamics of this personal degradation by war was not available like it is today. For southern soldiers, the trauma of a lost way of life; the shock of watching former slaves ascend to leadership positions once reserved for whites-only became too much to bear.
Violence against women — their vulnerability in the face of drunk husbands and boyfriends — reached a level that women simply couldn’t take anymore. Many women believed that if they could just get their husbands to stop drinking, the abuse they experienced at home might come to an end.
No one understood at the time that the drinking and abuse were symptoms of an underlying psychological distress, not the cause. A hundred-and-fifty years of fear and paranoia was erupting out of the guilt and shame of seizing lands that belonged to others; of kidnapping, enslaving, and vilifying millions of Africans; murdering tens-of-thousands of women and children during wars with the Indians; and blood-letting in the war between north and south where brothers killed their own brothers.
Americans wasted the lives of other Americans in the Civil War at a rate that has never been equaled since by any external enemy or foe. Americans suffered more casualties during the Civil War than in all other wars combined.
All this evil bubbled up out of the badlands of America — America was arguably the world’s largest and most isolated island at the time. The men who witnessed war; who lived it; who perpetuated it and became its victims held onto their minds and emotions by clinging to desperately delicate threads. Many lost their grip — emotionally and physically — and died early; some took their own lives.
By the beginning of the twentieth century, most women had had enough. By 1914 (the start of World War I) they were fed up, vulnerable, and powerless. Their men were going off to fight another senseless war where a third of the dead would expire by poison gas while hiding helpless in the muck of trenches. The government passed the Selective Service Act of 1917 (the draft) because in this war young men, many of them, lost their will to fight.
Women had a big stake in the new war. Most women, despite the abuse, had male friends and relatives. They were mothers; sisters; daughters; grandmothers; even great-grandmothers. They nurtured the men in their lives who weren’t coping well with the nightmare-world into which the USA morphed after terrible decades of slavery, endless war, cruel repression that followed Reconstruction, and the extermination of the native peoples (who they called Indians).
Men, some of them, began to see that women might be right. As a country, what we were doing wasn’t working. People were going to have to change the way they lived and conducted the nation’s affairs.
Most folks know what happened. Women — who couldn’t vote — organized. Men joined them. Everyone seemed to agree on the underlying problem: it wasn’t so much the wars or racial violence or even the rise of robber barons and corrupt governance; what was wrong with America — it was so plain to see for anyone who made the effort to open their eyes — was the alcohol.
Get rid of alcohol, the Devil’s drink, and God would heal our land. God would make right the terrible things we had done. Citizens would all enjoy together at long last the peace of mind that comes with the forgiveness of sin and the love that only Jesus brings to every man who murders and rapes because he can’t stop drinking.
In January 1919 — led by women from the suffrage and temperance movements among others — the 18th amendment passed, which put commercial restrictions on the manufacture and sale of alcohol. The amendment took full effect in January 1920. The public consumption of alcohol — with all its problems — was now in the past.
Emboldened and buoyed by their power to pass almost simultaneously — and in the face of judicial opposition — two constitutional amendments: one that allowed women to participate in the nation’s democracy; the other that corralled the wicked impulses unleashed by alcohol in their war-weary men (World War I ended in November 1918), the women of 1920 felt the stirrings of a new optimism about life in the United States and their future.
With the help of the men who leaned on them for comfort and emotional support, 75% of the states agreed to ratify the two amendments certain to set things right; amendments that would most assuredly lead the way forward to the salvation of America.
Thus began the walk on the pathway toward righteousness. Citizens basked in the light of greatness; they had won the war in Europe; men marched home in the glow of favor that comes to every repentant people by the forgiveness of Almighty God.
The nation was being transformed into a people; a united people, a nation of both men and women who turned their backs on the devil; who put behind them his corrupting spirits and ales.
Americans — all of us together — at last embraced liberty and freedom and voting-rights for women. After all was said and done — campaign posters explained it beautifully — it was women who brought every single voter into the world.
And indeed alcohol related crimes fell fast after 1920.
There was a little problem, though.
Despite widespread support for the right of women to vote and for the prohibition of the public consumption of alcohol, it turned out that not everyone in America wanted to climb on board the choo-choo train of righteous-living.
Again, we know what happened. Men formed gangs from which they drew the power to circumvent Prohibition. They continued manufacturing and distributing alcohol, which they sold in clubs they called speakeasies and blind pigs.
Although the 18th amendment did not forbid drinking by private individuals in their own homes, the Constitution of the United States now forbade the commercial production and sale of spirits and ales in public spaces like clubs and liquor stores.
Like the forbidden fruit of a modern Garden of Eden, blind pigs became the rage in every major city in America. By the 1930s, the revenues generated by illegal clubs were so enormous that the gangs who merchandized alcohol were able to wrest control over whatever businesses or local and state governments they chose.
Inequality is never good. Neither is packing a family into a car with no seat belts.
What happened? Crime cartels took over and basically ran our country into the ground. By 1930 our economy collapsed. The Great Depression began. By 1933 ordinary people had enough. Voters — women and men — repealed Prohibition. Voters hoped repeal would stimulate the economy, emasculate the crime-bosses, and reverse the rot that was infesting like a plague of sewer-rats every city and municipality.
It wasn’t to be. By 1933 the iron grip of organized crime was entrenched and intractable. It wasn’t going to let go. Despite massive government spending, new social programs, and numerous public-works projects, unemployment, poverty, and despair continued to demoralize society. The USA spiraled downward; it seemed to never end; maybe it would last forever.
World War II changed everything. The cartels went into the munitions business. They took control of the factories that built bombers and guns. We’ve been at war ever since. We’ve waged war against one out of every four countries on Earth during the past 75 years. Business has been good.
In the 1980s the cartels decided to try their hand at pharmaceuticals; medical care would come later. It was challenging; pharma was technical; it was hard to understand. What they learned was this: Americans were open, even eager, to try new drugs; to adopt new treatments. The treatments and drugs offered hope. It didn’t seem to matter if they worked all that well.
The drug cartels lobbied Congress for regulatory relief so they could advertise their ”medicines” on television. The rest as they say is history. The people of the United States are now the most drug dependent civilization ever. We may not be that healthy compared to people in a lot of other countries but with the right medications we sort of feel like we might be.
We all know the results. Americans spend more on heath care and drugs than on their houses and food. USA health care is a mess — who will argue with me? But it’s lucrative.
Health care is today the biggest cash cow for the most heartless group of wise-guys ever to take control of American institutions; let’s give this group of con-artists some respect and refer to them as “the medical profession“.
Why not?
Even if folks were able find out the address of their local hospital administrator and a few of his surgeons, they would never be able to visit to drop-off their complaints because these high-rollers live in a hidden world behind gates, most of them. They live like the heads of caliphates, many of them. Yes, these individuals are clever. But Americans are paying too high a price for cleverness.
So… readers who’ve read this far might be asking,
Well… are you going to tell us what Hillary did?
Of course I am. Would I let readers down?
Never!
Hillary’s husband, Bill Clinton, became president of the United States in January 1993. One of the first things he did was appoint his wife to help create a healthcare plan to cover every American — detractors would come to call it HillaryCare.
First Lady Hillary Clinton testifies for the final day before the Senate Finance Committee on Health Care 30 September 1993. REUTERS/Mike Theiler
The techniques used by the healthcare industry to crush universal health care are a case-study in Evil — for anyone who has the stomach to examine what its leaders did. Anyone can click on links in this essay to learn more if they want.
I don’t really care to get into it; the details, that is. The whole episode disgusts me as it should any fair-minded person who cares about ordinary people and their health.
The bottom-line is this: Hillary walked into a snake pit, then hit a brick wall. The healthcare industry chose to demolish the wife of a sitting president in the first year of his first term. They made an example of her.
People would think twice before pulling a stunt like healthcare reform again. It worked — for 15 years anyway — until the Kenyan usurper with no birth certificate, President Barack Hussein Obama, showed up.
The bad-actors who administer the health delivery system in America today consider Hillary Clinton a clear and present danger to their trillion-dollar cash cow. They intend to regain control of Health Care as soon as the GOP wins the presidency this fall. That’s their plan, anyway.
After defeating Hillary’s efforts in 1993, the industry and their buddies began a CIA-style disinformation campaign against her which has continued for the past 23 years — in case she might rise from the ashes of defeat to come after them one more time.
Guess what? She’s on her way. This time she is not one person — the eager-to-please wife of a new president. This time she is 120 million voters strong and counting. If current polling holds, she will be the next president.
Look at what these yahoos said about President Obama after he tried to fix our casino-style healthcare system during his first term. Does anyone think these folks are not able to discredit others while maximizing their own considerable advantages?
They’ve thrown up roadblock after roadblock. They’ve arranged things so that the new healthcare options can’t be fully implemented until Obama has left the White House. With the election of a Republican president, they plan to dismember and discard ObamaCare — quickly. Most Americans will never fully understand what they missed or what was taken from them.
Before ObamaCare, when people got sick, insurance administrators sometimes kicked them out of the healthcare casino, altogether. People were on their own. Good luck, and God bless.
The people who enforced these heinous policies are the same people who call Obama incompetent and a failed president. These are the people who have inflicted the nightmare of the current Republican contender on America; who are willing to scare the whole world to prove they are serious.
These insurance folks and their allies aren’t the government; they are civilians with the money to hire experts; they believe themselves fully capable of discrediting even the Crucifixion of Jesus should it ever become necessary.
During the next six months they are going to use every technique in the army psyche manual to convince voters that Hillary Clinton is a witch who deserves to be burned on a phallic stake.
Watch and learn. They don’t want ObamaCare fixed. They want it wrecked.
Character assassination is just another way to kill someone, to my way of thinking. It’s murder. The Bible says it is, anyway. I’m intrigued by the possibility that when Jesus said anything at all — even in a Book as discredited by the wealthy and powerful as the Bible apparently is — it might actually be God who is doing the talking.
Our self-described healers of broken bodies (I’m not going to name them because I don’t want them showing up at my house) cooperated with insurance company executives and drug company titans to destroy Hillary Clinton’s reputation. Their lavish lifestyles give them away.
People believe crazy stuff because they’ve listened to these creeps — sometimes on Fox News, the GOP propaganda mill. One guy on my Twitter feed called Secretary Clinton, Killary. He wasn’t smart enough to make up this epithet on his own, believe me. If this guy is the Christian he claims to be, Jesus is going to ask him someday why he would say such a thing. It could get awkward.
People on the right seem to believe that if they hate somebody, they can make stuff up to tear them down. It’s the way the game is played.
There is an irony of wickedness here that almost defies explanation. It’s all because when she was young and naive Hillary believed that even the bad guys would do the right things when given the right opportunities; she dared to challenge the way health care is delivered in America — to make it fair and accessible to the 80% of Americans who could not afford it.
She learned the hard lesson many Americans now know is true. It isn’t about health care. It’s about protecting the golden cash-cow.
Who wants to work for $25 per month? they are always telling us about Cuban doctors. People who feel called to help the suffering multitudes will be the only takers in a system like that. People who value money will find something else to occupy their time.
Anyway, with a Hillary Clinton win this fall — should the Democrats take majorities in the House and Senate — our citizens will finally have a government with the right people in place to better defend us against being used for prey by the predators who presently plunder us.
Victims of Sandy Hook massacre Christmas Season 2012. CBS News reported that the shooter’s parents were NRA members because NRA certificates and pamphlets were found in their homes. The NRA forced CBS to retract the story. (Photo by Reuters / Andrees Latif — 2012)
Hillary has also taken on the NRA, in case anyone forgot; it’s another (some would argue) bad-boy organization that scares the daylights out of its opposition because a lot of crazy people with guns seem to be among its members. They defend the Second Amendment, which they think permits them to scare the crap out of people by carrying their guns into churches, hospitals, libraries, and schools.
NRA family members are numbered among the crowd of people who have ”gone postal” during the past few years; people who massacred politicians, children, and theater-goers. Hillary challenged this monster-cult. Its a group of men mostly who intimidate congressional leaders to vote against their own common sense.
Children die every week because the gun-makers sell unsafe firearms to an irresponsible public. It’s not right. It’s not safe. It’s not freedom. It’s manufactured fear, plain and simple.
The right to bear arms described in our Second Amendment was included to keep Americans safe and free, not scared and intimidated. It was written to save time when raising an army should foreigners like France or England choose to invade. The NRA has turned the amendment on its head into a money-making scheme for gun panderers who play to people’s paranoia and hate. It’s that simple, at least to me.
So yes, Hillary is a threat to people who are used to getting their way while they live like the cold-hard oligarchs they have become. Do these bad people have nice smiles? Do they wear beautiful clothes? Of course they do. They are billionaires. Their smiles cost hundreds-of-thousands of dollars, some of them. Their clothes cost more.
Hillary is not a billionaire. She never will be. For those readers not good at numbers, let me remind everyone: a billion is 1,000 millions. The man who is running against her; who calls her crookedHillary — claims to possess 14,000 piles of a million dollars each.
Is it possible to earn and keep billions while working honestly and playing fair? I might believe him if someone I trust analyzed his tax returns, his company balance sheets, and income statements. Until he agrees to release them like everyone else who runs for president, I’m more than skeptical; I’m incredulous.
In any event, it is the policy of theBillyLeePontificator.com to advocate for income and estate maximums based on agreed-upon and reasonable ratios tied to the minimum wage. These maximums can be very high and do no harm. Please read my essay, Capitalism and Income Inequality, to learn more.
We at theBillyLeePontificator.com do not believe we need a revolution to achieve simple changes to our tax codes that will impact less than one-hundred thousand privileged people.
We are 324 million people living in a democratic republic. It can’t be that hard to raise taxes on the greedy who are distorting our democracy and driving our country off a cliff to protect their power and privilege. Please read my essay Is Something Wrong With America? to learn more.
Something else Hillary did this week while challenging some of the most powerful people on Earth: she clinched the Democratic nomination for president; she’s the first woman of a major political party to do it.
What Hillary achieved cannot be overstated. It’s pretty darn incredible given the negative attitudes toward women-in-leadership espoused by many church and corporate leaders — behind closed doors, of course.
Here are the election results; they might amaze some readers. The numbers say that mama Clinton has a fighting chance to win this election. My wife prays for her safety and success every single day.
So do I.
Billy Lee
These results are from the 35 states where both parties held a popular vote contest. DC Democrats vote on June 14. Bold black ink indicates the winner. Blue ink indicates a second place finish.
These results are from the 11 states and 4 territories where both parties held caucus contests; and the 5 mixed primaries where one party held a popular vote, the other a caucus.
Editors Note: In the November election of 2016, Hillary Clinton beat Donald Trump in popular votes by nearly 3 million. Third-party candidates polled 8 million more. Donald Trump lost the popular count by 11 million votes — one of the largest popular defeats in the nation’s history. Manipulation of vote counts in Michigan and a few other states secured his win in the Electoral College. All courts everywhere refused to hear a single challenge to the results, which were razor thin in three states.
There is no genetic code. Not really. Not in the way most people think. Seasoned, sensible geneticists know it’s true.
Unfortunately, a few immature biologists don’t believe it. They are developing “gene drive” technologies that they hope will enable them to reliably and permanently alter a fragment of “the code” in any life-form that reproduces sexually — to guarantee that the altered piece of “code” will be transmitted to the next generation 100% of the time into perpetuity.
NOTE TO READERS:November 22, 2019: This essay is the longest on the website. To help readers navigate, The Editors asked Billy Lee to add links to important subtopics. Don’t forget to click the up arrow on the right side of the page to return to top.
Deployment of gene-drive technology means that an altered fragment of genetic code can be “injected” into a species, for good or ill, which is permanent and will over a few generations become universal — unable to be suppressed or removed regardless of any natural selection pressures whatsoever — until the end of time.
The changes caused by gene drivers takeover every individual in any species that has been targeted for modification. It takes about 10 generations, give or take. With insects, we’re talking a couple of years; plants, a decade maybe; humans, 300 years or so.
Gene drivers are all about changing an entire species forever and permanently — not just one individual with a genetic disorder, for example, or one generation of plants for another. It’s a higher level of intervention than conventional gene therapies and modifications.
A screw-up can extinguish a species in a relatively short period of time is how I see the danger. Worse, according to the scientists cited by the NYTimes, these genes will migrate into ecological niches, where they will force unintended consequences to the biosphere; worse still, given sufficient time “good” genes are likely to jump species, where they will wreak havoc.
EDITORS NOTE: On 18 September 2020 the website science-news service phys.org published an article titled Biologists Create New Genetic Systems toNeutralize Gene Drives.
According to the article:
The first neutralizing system, called e-CHACR (erasing Constructs Hitchhiking on the Autocatalytic Chain Reaction) is designed to halt the spread of a gene drive by “shooting it with its own gun.” e-CHACRs use the CRISPR enzyme Cas9 carried on a gene drive to copy itself, while simultaneously mutating and inactivating the Cas9 gene.
The system can in principle be placed anywhere in the genome.
The second neutralizing system, called ERACR (Element Reversing the Autocatalytic Chain Reaction), is designed to eliminate the gene drive altogether. ERACRs are designed to be inserted at the site of the gene drive, where they use the Cas9 from the gene drive to attack either side of the Cas9, cutting it out. Once the gene drive is deleted, the ERACR copies itself and replaces the gene-drive.
Both systems have been tested in the lab at a molecular level. The developers have not yet demonstrated that a gene drive screw-up gone wild can be pulled back and eliminated by these systems.
The good news is that scientists are working on the problem. The bad news is that the existence of infant, untested technologies might tempt some to release a gene drive into the wild that will ultimately prove intractable.
EDITORS NOTE: On 6 March 2021 the website science-news service phys.org published an article titled New ‘split-drive’ system puts scientists in the (gene) driver seat. The piece describes new split-gene-drive technology that promises to degrade over several generations to permit engineered genomes to evolve under the rules of natural selection. Such a system, if safely deployed, would help to prevent collapse-of-species and other bad consequences when mistakes are made.
If anybody doesn’t understand what they just read, they shouldn’t worry. By the end of this essay, they will fully grasp why the scientists pursuing this course might be dangerously eager to unleash genetic pollutants that may kill us all — because their love of science makes it difficult to restrain themselves.
Virus stands on cell surface. It will soon inject it’s RNA payload into the cell to take control of its genetic machinery.
These smart people (some might be prodigies for all I know) plan to use gene drivers to exterminate vermin and eradicate insect-borne disease, for starters. They plan to make it impossible for agricultural pests to develop resistance to pesticides.
It all sounds great. But so did using the by-products of nuclear bombs as an energy source for our cities. Ask Japan how their state-of-the-art nuclear energy program turned out. Ask about Fukushima.
Gene-drive technologies are an existential threat to the long-term survival of life on Earth — like those tens-of-thousands of plutonium-loaded thermonuclear missiles, which a number of countries have buried a few hundred feet below the surface of the earth.
The warheads on these missiles are going to rot someday, because no one can take care of them forever, and we can’t get rid of them. Their poisons — the most lethal known; a speck of plutonium dust can kill any human who ingests it — will leach into the soils; over thousands of years percolating plutonium will kill everything.
Genes — bad ones (or very good ones that turn out bad; oops!) — genes that can never die; genes that can’t be suppressed by natural selection; genes that are always passed on to the next generation under every conceivable scenario and every possible pairing of mates (no matter how mismatched) present potential nightmare scenarios for any species that possess them. Errant gene drivers can extinguish some species in a matter of a few years.
It is distressing to think that smart, young adults — I can imagine some younger than 35 who possibly lack basic common-sense — does it matter how smart they are? — might right now be playing around with molecules of DNA they can’t possibly understand fully, because the molecules have a quantum side to their nature that can make their behavior unpredictable; even unknowable.
Young adults are messing around with very complicated structures and processes inside both molecules and cells that they can’t see, even with the best microscopes and the most sophisticated instruments. It’s possible that they might — even with the best intentions; the best lab protocols — screw things up big-time and possibly forever. We need maximum oversight over these researchers and the labs who employ them, now — not tomorrow or next year.
Click on this link to an essay in the science journal Nature, which addresses the issue of gene-driver risk and its management. It is written by someone who seems, at least to my mind, to suggest remedies that are insufficiently robust.
Every biologist knows that “genes” have a mysterious way of migrating between species, crossing boundaries, and behaving unpredictably. They have a way of escaping confinement structures. If folks don’t understand why, what are they doing playing around and calling it research?
Editors Note (May 27, 2017):Here is a link to a May 17, 2017 article in Science News about the role of jumping genes in the expression of genomes, which may be of interest to some readers.
People have claimed for years that recombinant DNA pathogens, retro-viruses and yes, AIDS, escaped from rogue laboratories. Does anyone know for sure? If they do, they aren’t saying.
Anyway, I urge readers to relax for now in the knowledge that they are about to learn some amazing things. I did, writing this essay. And please remember: I am a pontificator, not a scientist.
Links are provided to verify anything written in the essays that people may question. My pledge to readers is, as always, to be as accurate as possible and to correct mistakes should I discover them or find myself corrected by others.
Yes, I can be smart and write good too. Well, I’m trying anyway. Getting it right is important. It’s my highest priority. But sometimes I screw up — usually on some arcane technical detail in an essay about science.
Sometimes the science changes and new facts emerge. When I first published this essay in May 2016 everyone thought the galaxies in the universe numbered 200 billion. As I add this note in May 2018, analysis of the latest pics from telescopes in space suggests that the number of galaxies is closer to two-trillion.
My pledge is to keep my essays up-to-date and to learn enough to fix screw-ups that might be caused by simple ignorance. Readers can help fix errors by sending corrections in comments. Errors in the text will be fixed immediately.
So far, we’ve been lucky. The number of errors identified is amazingly few. In one doozy, I published the picture of a well-known British actress (well-known in Britain) and said it was Rosalind Franklin, the X-ray crystallographer famous for making the images that hinted at the spiral staircase structure of DNA.
Celebrities in Europe (that is, in England) were kind enough to take the time to inform me how wrong I was. I appreciated the feedback and was grateful they didn’t kill me.
I’m joking. The Brits are the kindest and best-behaved people on Earth. I’ve spent enough time in London to know.
The genetic code that everyone talks about lives inside tiny spaces; one way to think about it is to imagine that it lives inside little rooms packed to the ceiling with sacks — bitty-bags stuffed full of strung-together bases — hiding in the center of every cell of every plant and animal (or disbursed throughout the cell in the case of most one-celled microbes).
It isn’t a code at all. It’s a reservoir; an inventory; a collection of templates — most broken into pieces; separated and scattered among the dozens of spiral tentacles in the vast aperiodic-crystal known as DNA.
DNA isn’t exactly a crystal either; not really. Crystals are structures made from regular (periodic) arrangements of molecules. DNA, on the other hand,isa molecule, and it is constructed from strings of chemical bases. It’s found in bundles alongside other DNA molecules. These bundles are called chromosomes.
During part of a cell’s life cycle these DNA strings can sometimes be found tightly wound around little pieces of protein like fishing lines around spinning-reels. It’s a configuration that makes them compact; less intrusive — but easier to see under a microscope when they have been stained.
Inside any particular cell each chromosome of DNA is in some ways a little like a snowflake; within a single cell, no two chromosomes are the same; no two are alike, not even close. But every cell in the body contains the same group of chromosomes; the chromosomes in each body-cell are identical to the chromosomes in every other body-cell, right? It’s not hard to understand.
Bases, by the way, (in case someone might be wondering) are chemical substances that turn into salts when acids are poured over them. Many bases exist in nature, but only four (nucleobases) are found in DNA.
These four bases are essentially one or two rings of nitrogen and carbon atoms with ammonia and vinegar-like side chains attached. Here are links for anyone who wants to look them up: adenine – thymine ; and cytosine – guanine.
A fifth base, uracil substitutes for thymine in RNA, which is a vast assortment of short, single-stranded, DNA-like segments — the cell’s worker-ants who enable cells to perform their many functions. RNA builds genes, moves stuff around, and dramatically speeds up cell chemistry by catalyzing thousands of processes.
Not to digress, but NASA found uracil on the surface of Saturn’s moon Titan in 2012 during a fly-by. It’s something to wonder about.
Caffeine is molecularly similar to the bases adenine and guanine. Bases taste bitter — like the caffeine in coffee. Acids, on the other hand, taste sour — like vinegar. Combine bases and acids (bitter and sour) chemically to make salts, which are substances that taste like the ocean.
This tangled mess is one-celled life, highly magnified. It is varied, imprecise, and invisible to humans. It takes about ten of these microbes (which are about the size of human red-blood cells) to span the width of a human hair; 30 to circumnavigate it. DNA is far smaller. It requires 8,000 tightly wound DNA bundles to span a human hair; 800 to span the length of one of these microbes.
Forgive me for starting simple. Life-sciences are the most complicated sciences of all.
What adds to the difficulty is that in most animals (and all people) the DNA involved in sexual reproduction is configured differently than the DNA in body-cells. It exhibits behaviors a little less like those found in other cells.
In this essay we are talking about animal DNA, usually human, in body-cells — somatic cells; and we are talking about protein production.
A single DNA group inside certain humanbody-cells like liver cells and stem cells (while they undergo the process of replicating and dividing) is composed of ninety-two large molecules called DNA strands, which together warehouse the six billion base-pairs that will populate the genomes of two daughter cells.
During the short-lived interval when cells divide and replicate, dozens of molecules and billions of bases gather themselves into the configuration of chromosome-pairs peculiar to people, which some of us learned about in high school biology.
Most of the time (90% of it anyway) DNA doesn’t divide and multiply; it doesn’t organize itself into easy to recognize chromosomes; in all body-cells except stem cells and liver cells, DNA is the starting material for the making of proteins instead.
Making proteins is the only thing most body-cells do; it starts in the DNA molecules and is the subject of this essay. Cell division and replication is what stem cells do. Links will lead to those subjects for any who might want to learn more.
This essay is not about stem cells, which develop into any and every kind of somatic (body) cell and germ (reproductive) cell. As a pontificator who is not an expert on stem cells, my understanding is that — except for liver cells — somatic cells in mature adults don’t generally divide and reproduce themselves. That function is performed by stem cells, which start at conception and continue through life to replenish the human body.
Stem cells live inside the tissues of adults like seasonings inside cooked beef, is how I imagine it. Check me on this one, experts. Correct me in the comments section. All others read this link on cell differentiation first.
The main point is that human body-cells house 46 chromosomes (called chromatids when they are organized into 23 connected pairs), which contain six billion base-pairs. Reproductive (germination or germ) cells contain 23 unpaired chromosomes that store three billion base-pairs.
Confusing terminology constructed from the Greek language can create stumbling blocks for non-scientists, so I’m reluctant to go there. Terms like diploid, haploid, gamete, and zygote folks can look up and explore on their own. There’s enough that’s fascinating in English. Only tiny, digestible Greek lessons — sparsely sprinkled — will appear in this essay.
Besides unfamiliar vocabulary, another hard concept to grasp is this: inside every animal cell (and plant cell) are hundreds of DNA packed bundles (called mitochondria), where the DNA is not like the DNA in sex-cells or in body-cells either. The DNA in mitochondria matches what one might expect to find in another as yet undiscovered species of bacteria. It’s “coded” differently.
Yes, it’s weird, but there are explanations.
Most scientists today believe that a long time ago cells engulfed bacteria; these foreign migrants from another world (in terms of scale) were simply unable to escape.
Bacteria are small. A thimble-full of dirt can contain 50,000 species. It is amazing to learn that millions of species of bacteria exist in the soils and on the surfaces of plants on the earth.
Thirty-percent of cells in the human body are bacteria. They don’t weigh much, because they are small. It would require as many as 10,000 individuals of some strains to match in size just one of the microbes displayed in the illustration a few paragraphs above.
On average, though, a typical cell in an animal or plant can be visualized as having about 4,000 times the volume of a typical bacterium. The range of volume ratios varies widely, of course. Nothing is simple, especially in biology. Enough said.
Scientists named the trapped bacteria-like life-forms inside cells, mitochondria, afterthe Greek words for threaded granules; these granulesmake the cells they inhabit more robust, because they act like little batteries, boosting the energy in their adopted homes to help power the many tasks that cells do. Click the video link above for an animation by Harvard University that shows how it works.
Click the link above for an easy-to-understand animation of the overall structure of cells; or this link for a YouTube Video designed to transport viewers through an imaginary, animated world that makes real the complexity of a working, living cell.
And here is a link from Wikipedia, if anyone is confused about the numbers of bases and chromosomes in humans, as many folks seem to be, including myself, sometimes.
It’s confusing, because there are different “codes”, different cell-cycle phases, different collections of DNA molecules in body, germ, and stem cells — and I haven’t even mentioned enzyme catalysis or polymerases (and I’m not going to, either — not just yet anyway — because it will open a big can of worms I don’t want to deal with right now).
Don’t worry, we’ll get to some of it later after I’ve laid a little scaffolding.
But let me say this: without all this complexity, life forms as complicated as human beings would be impossible — codes or no codes.
The tools most people use to do science, especially physics, generally depend on mathematics and rigid, predictable rules. The life-sciences aren’t like that; not at all.
Should my essay devolve into complexity, readers are free to bail. I’m going to try to keep the mysteries of DNA understandable to non-technical people. Who knows if I’ll succeed or not?
DNA can be thought of as a collection of pouches or bags stuffed with billions of copies of four basic substances, called bases. DNA is like a roomful of holiday bags, each filled to the brim with four different kinds of unfinished toys like the ones in Santa’s workshops before Christmas.
Each of the four kinds of toys are strung together in-line, one after the other — in no discernible order — in long, tangled spirals. These spirals are unimaginably long, and there are many dozens of them.
The toys in the DNA sacks are unfinished, unpainted, and undecorated. They really don’t look much like toys at all. In this analogy, the four bases might be imagined as four simple blocks of wood, each a different shape and size. And like I said, there are billions of these blocks, at least in human cells.
Is DNA a big molecule? Yes, I already said that it was. It’s huge. But good luck to anyone who tries to find one. Good luck to anyone who tries to look at one. No one has ever seen any molecule. No matter how large, molecules are too small to see, even with microscopes; and that includes DNA molecules, the largest and most complex molecules in biology.
It takes a combination of high-energy light, amplification, and computer-generated algorithms to produce useful pictures of what scientists think molecules look like. A computer-generated image is not the same as a brain-generated image stimulated by the act of looking at reflected light with a pair of human eyes.
X-ray crystallography was the technique used first to unravel clues to the structure of DNA. From the data collected by crystallography, Linus Pauling shared in 1951 compelling ideas about what he thought the structure was, but he turned out to be wrong. He got protein structure right, but his description of DNA had subtle errors. A few years later, others came up with a structure that has thus far stood the test of time.
In soma (body) cells, forty-six molecules (strands or bags or sacks) of DNA contain the six billion base-pairs (or blocks) of the human genome. Most of the time these strands are loose and disorganized; a diffuse mass of hard-to-see chromatin. (Their form depends on what part of its period the cell cycle is in.)
It has to be this way for the worker elves of the cell to gain access to the bases (the unfinished toy blocks) upon which they will do their work. Only during the process of cell division do these forty-six molecules bind together and curl-up into the twenty-three chromosome-pairs that some readers may have learned about in high school biology class.
Researchers have technologies that can amplify what DNA molecules reveal, which they manipulate with computer algorithms to form fuzzy pictures that are helpful to highly trained analysts; but it’s the best they can do, visually.
An early theorist, Erwin Schrödinger, (one of my heroes) said in 1944 — before anyone knew what DNA was — that it must be an aperiodic-crystal. He gave a series of lectures, which later became the famous booklet, What is Life? It can be purchased for fifteen bucks on Amazon.com.
Schrödinger’s booklet changed the world — it’s one of the most prophetic works I’ve ever read. The tract changed my world view anyway; my view of life certainly.
It turns out, Schrödinger was right. DNA bundles store billions of bases in more-or-less random — but frozen — sequences much like crystals.
Just as molecules arrange themselves inside crystals, the bases inside DNA molecules also have an order, yes, an arrangement for sure, but it’s not a code; it’s not even a cipher; it’s merely a starting point for the most chaotic, complex, and messed-up process in nature — the creation of thinking, speaking, conscious-life (and less capable life) — all formed from a relatively few not-so-simple materials.
Here’s another assertion that might be difficult for some readers to accept. Genes don’t really exist. There are no free-standing genes; certainly not in human DNA, anyway. What scientists call genes must be constructed; they must be built; they must be put together; they must be fabricated, collected, and transported by molecules called RNA and by other processes known collectively as epigenetics. More on epigenetics later.
(Click on this old graphic (from 2004) to get a clearer view.) This illustration is a simplified representation of the chaos going on during arguably one of the simplest of the processes (transcription), which is the starting point for encoding other processes (called translation) that will ultimately lead to the fabrication and folding of proteins.
Most graphics and videos on the Internet seem to buy into a tidy notion that DNA is a code (not a reservoir and a starting point for the fabrication of templates). This notion seems to demand laser-precision and machine-like twelve-sigma reliability during protein synthesis.
Don’t believe it.
Yes, there is no argument; we can improve our chances for healthier lives by cleaning up less-than-optimal base-sequences — which are, as often as not, scattered, scrambled hodgepodges — using, hopefully, gene therapies like CRISPR. (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats)
But until technicians create tools to deal with other processes; until biologists can manipulate RNA itself and learn to change the ”weather” patterns (discussed later) inside cells, physicians will not be able to eliminate many of pathologies that plague our species and lead to diminished health and, for some, death.
RNA in all its forms (and there are many) is itself constructed from scattered templates that are hidden haphazardly like Easter eggs within the billions of bases strewn along the dozens of spirals inside a DNA bundle. RNA first builds itself up by interacting with various sections of base sequences in the DNA and then copies those sequences by borrowing matching freebases, which are floating everywhere in the medium of the cell’s nucleus.
RNA is much shorter in length and less stable than the DNA it models. But it doesn’t mutate as much as folks might expect, because it is also shorter-lived and reproduces less often. It’s more versatile too; more agile, because it is single-stranded; DNA is double-stranded.
RNA, in all its forms, is the workhorse of cell functions; it is both the building material and the construction machinery used in many important cell structures, which perform the yeoman’s task of protein building inside cells.
It seems plausible to me that over a few hundreds-of-millions of years the possibly self-generated RNA sequences may have acquired — through accident, luck, or trial-and-error — the ability to select, copy, paste, and assemble short sections of random DNA bases, which every-once-in-a-great-while actually worked to help build useful proteins that added survival advantages to their evolving hosts.
Maybe RNA designed and built DNA in the first place, which it learned to copy and manipulate. We may never know exactly how.
One thing scientists agree on: one-celled life was already highly developed, complex, and flourishing by the time the new planet, Earth, reached its first billionth year. Earth is four-and-a-half billion years old. Life came on fast during extreme conditions vastly different than now. This fact is amazing. No one understands how.
It has taken an additional three-and-a-half billion years to get to humans and the space-traveling civilizations that seem to dominate the earth today.
Thinking about RNA and DNA can be a frustrating circular process, much like the chicken or the egg problem; which came first? My sense is that most scientists today believe RNA came first, DNA later. Inside our cells, it is impossible to tell, but there is no denying that RNA’s diversity and flexibility make it a most likely candidate.
Many kinds of RNA live inside cells. Some run around doing nothing. They simply try to survive inside the complicated universe that is the typical living cell in every animal, plant, and microbe. They are called selfish RNA.
Most RNA sequences are much less selfish. They are like Christmas elves who work day and night; some to open Santa’s bags to gain access to their contents; others to copy various sections from the strands of blocks inside; others to move the copied sections to an assembly area, where other elves glue the copied segments together to form new sequences — many of which, by the way, are very different from the original sequences that the RNA elves found inside Santa’s gift bags; inside the DNA.
Eventually, messenger elves transport the long strands of little blocks they copied and assembled; they move them away from the center of the cell; out to the gooey regions of the cell beyond its center where other transfer elves are busy assembling (by threes) free-floating blocks (called bases, remember) and attaching these triplet-blocks (called anticodons) to single amino acids. The resulting structures are called transfer RNA (or tRNA, for short).
An amino acid is simply a configuration of carbon atoms with amine (ammonia) stuck to one side and carboxylic acid (vinegar) stuck to another — plus some other simple stuff attached here and there to make each amino acid unique among all the others. Think of an amino acid as a colored necklace bead. Out of the five-hundred or so differently colored beads in nature, transfer elves in humans work with only twenty or so.
Stay with me now. You just read the most difficult sentence in the essay. These amino acids attach themselves like colorized necklace beads to triplet-blocks (called anticodons) according to which of the three blocks (or bases) the transfer-RNA (tRNA) is made from. Watch the video ”From DNA to protein” above to better understand.
In the meantime, while all this other stuff is going on, the messenger elves are directing their long strands of copied-and-pasted blocks (bases) away from the cell’s tiny nucleus (center) toward little triplet-body-handling factories (called ribosomes; ribo for triplet, soma for body), which live in the inner goo (the cytoplasm) of the cell.
Many ribosomes are attached to a winding ribbon-like structure called the rough endoplasmic reticulum. Endo is Greek for inner; plasma is goo; reticulum means network.
At the same time, transfer elves in the goo (cytoplasm) steer their three-blocks-plus-a-colored-beadassemblies — in humans these “three-base” combos and twenty or so colored beads can be arranged forty-eight ways — into the ribosome factories, where they are matched-up to the blocks (bases) in the long strands that are being delivered from the cell’s nucleus (like cars in a choo-choo train) by the messenger elves.
Inside the ribosome factories, the triplet-blocks-plus-one-colored-bead assemblies, which have been constructed and collected by the transfer elves in the cytoplasm, are paired block for block (that is, base for base) to the long train of blocks that were collected, arranged, and carried by the messenger elves from the cell’s center (its nucleus).
As each transfer assembly triplet is matched-up three bases at a time to the blocks in the long messenger train, the single amino-acid bead that the three-block transfer assembly carries is ejected out of the ribosome factory.
Assembly elves — think of them as molecular forces — secure each ejected amino acid bead to the next bead, one after the other — in the exact order demanded by the order (in threes, called codons when located in the messenger RNA) of the bases (blocks) in the messenger sequence — creating as they go an amino-acid-chain, or necklace.
Once the amino acid chain (necklace) is long enough (and remember: there can be as many as twenty-three different colors of amino-acid beads in each necklace, and each necklace can be almost any length at all — up to hundreds or even tens-of-thousands of beads long) elves (molecular forces that work through the micro-scaffolding of the cell) go to work; they transfer the chains to Golgi structures, where they are bundled and folded into the twisted shapes that make them proteins. Like an Amazon distribution center, the Golgi apparatuses deliver the proteins to their destinations.
Like holiday elves, they deliver protein toys to every child’s bedroom in the cell, which in this analogy lie inside the abyss of the cell’s cytoplasm (cyto means cell; plasm means goo).
Some elves might feel compelled to deliver their proteins down the street to other homes (cells) in other neighborhoods by way of certain processes known as cell migrations.
These migrations can bring healing to injured tissues in other parts of the body, among other benefits. However, as I wrote earlier, stem cells that live inside the tissues of the body do the heavy lifting of cell replacement and healing.
Here is a way to visualize a human cell: think of cytoplasm (the cell goo) as the yolk of an idealized egg. A chicken egg is nothing like a human body-cell, but it makes a good model for explanations.
(Click on pic to enlarge.) This drawing is an idealized view of a typical eukaryotic cell, which in this essay is compared to the yolk of a chicken egg. The egg-white is the thin plasma membrane.
The nucleolus (at the epicenter) is a tiny, hard to find collection of proteins, RNA, and DNA at the very center of the nucleus where ribosomes are fabricated, if anyone wonders.
Ribosomes are made entirely from RNA; they are, in fact, one of the most ancient structures in cells; they are essential players in both prokaryotic and eukaryotic (ancient and modern) cells, which I will discuss in more detail soon.
Chromatin (the usually unorganized mess of DNA) lies in the nuclear goo of the nucleus that surrounds the nucleolus.
Remember that ribosomes are the tiny factories, where proteins get their start. Ribosomes themselves move between the nucleolus and the surrounding nuclear goo until they are ejected out of the pores of the nucleus into the goo of the yolk (which in this analogy is the cytoplasm) where many will float freely in an ocean filled with a dozen or more other structures important to cell functions. Many ribosomes attach themselves to the endoplasmic reticulum.
But we’re not concerned about these other structures right now. Proteins are the most essential substances from which our bodies are made.
Some biologists believe that as many as 50,000 different proteins are required to construct a human being. Others say 100,000. The human body is capable of producing two million. Each cell type on its own is capable of making 5,000.
Ribosomes are very important, because it is inside the ribosomes where proteins get started, so we concentrate on them first.
Think of the cell’s membrane as the “white” of the egg. It surrounds and protects the vital cytoplasm, where the making of proteins takes place.
Of course, the chicken egg analogy had to break down. A chicken egg is surrounded by an oxygen-permeable calcium carbonate (CaCO3) shell. Forget about the shells of chicken eggs. Human soma-cells aren’t protected in quite the same way.
In a chicken egg the nucleus is a little white mass that sits on top of the yolk and feeds on it. The nucleolus is inside that little white mass. So the breakfast-egg analogy falls apart pretty darn fast. It might be more confusing than helpful. I hope not.
A lot more is going on. And — I have to say this — the cells of most microbes (one-celled life, like bacteria and archaea) don’t look like the sunny-side-up cells of humans or most other animals and plants. For one thing, they are a lot smaller.
Bacteria and archaea can be from 20 to 10,000 times smaller than the eukaryotic cells of animals and plants. They lack membrane-bound organelles; they lack a nucleus. They look more like little sandwich bags of loosely cooked, scrambled eggs. Scientists call them, prokaryotes. (It’s Greek, meaning before they became fully formed kernels.) They are the ancient cells.
As for the other structures that live inside our own eukaryotic cells (again, it’s Greek, meaning after they became kernels) — they make a fascinating study, but are beyond the scope of this essay.
Eukaryotes are the modern more advanced cells of all plants and animals. It took two billion years for ancient prokaryotic cells to evolve to the modern eukaryotic cells that first appeared 1.5 billion years ago; it is these cells that congregated and evolved to become the plants and animals of today. Click on the links in this essay — such as the links in nearby paragraphs — to access Wikipedia articles, YouTube videos, and other sources to learn more about them.
Phosphoric acid, which people have used for centuries to remove rust and to fertilize crops makes the DNA supports (or strands) on which hang the rungs of billions of bases. Phosphoric acid is the concentrated, clear syrup that makes Coca-Cola sting the tongue (carbon-dioxide bubbles make Coke sparkle). It’s the acid found inside the nucleus of every cell.
Apatite crystal from Mexico.
Hundreds of years ago phosphoric acid was made from the stone mineral apatite (calcium phosphate) and sulphuric acid — by-products of the mining and smelting of ores. Today the production process is more arcane and efficient.
Phosphorus is arguably one of the most important elements of life. Only magnesium is more important to viability, because the ATP that powers all cells will not work unless it is bound to it. Folks who aren’t eating whole wheat, spinach, black beans, almonds, and peanuts should probably be taking a daily magnesium supplement.
People who eat steak consume goodly amounts of phosphoric acid. Early researchers always found this acid in the center of cells, their nucleus. Scientists called it, nucleic acid.
Much later scientists discovered that the DNA sacks were full of bases, crammed together into tangled masses of long, curly chains they called chromosomes (Greek, for coloredbodies).
Chromosomes stained well during lab experiments, which was fortunate for researchers, because color made it easier to see the chromosomes during the short periods of time when the genetic material in the cell’s center took on its distinctive form from out of the shapeless, invisible chromatin, where it lived.
It is by a curious twist of chemical engineering — to my mind, at least — that the bases don’t react with the phosphoric acid that anchors them. The DNA molecules don’t collapse into little piles of salt, like one might expect. Maybe they should; but on Earth, they don’t.
In this sense — the sense in which our DNA is made from acids and bases — we are salt, or could be; we are potentially a very complicated salt, yes, but a salt nonetheless.
A strong argument can be made that proteins and the polypeptide chains that make them are in fact salts. For reasons known only to biochemists, naming conventions hide this reality.
Amino acids, polypeptides, and proteins are thought of as inner salts and given the name zwitterions, of all things. Salt is at the heart of what and who we might become were it not for idiosyncrasies of nomenclature and the miracle that makes life live.
But to get back to phosphoric acid…
Phosphoric acid (phosphate) sacks (or strands) are loaded with toy blocks (bases), so they need something sticky, like sugar, to keep the blocks from falling out. The D in DNA stands for the sticky stuff — deoxyribose, which means sugar.
This simplified graphic shows sticky sugar (deoxyribose) securing the phosphate rails of a DNA strand to the only two kinds of base-pairs found in DNA — thymine / adenine and guanine / cytosine. The sugar, deoxyribose, forms both a link and a buffer between the acid and the bases; otherwise, the molecule would collapse to become a salt. DNA breaks down completely at 374° Fahrenheit, which is just 72° above the melting point of table sugar. An interesting comparison is the melting point of table salt, which is 1474°F.
DNA is deoxyribonucleic acid.
The sugar and acid, together, form the rails of the famous spiral staircase, upon which the rungs of bases are hung. It’s the most incredible structure in nature. It’s called the double-helix. Some people named Watson, Wilkins, and Crick won a Nobel Prize for figuring it out.
To give readers a sense of scale: If someone were to take the longest strand of the double-helix in our DNA (it’s in chromosome-one) and somehow increased its diameter to one-inch (the thickness of a large garden hose), the DNA strand — when pulled straight — would increase in length to 567 miles (about 40 miles longer than the distance between Nashville and Detroit).
The bases (or toy blocks, as we’ve been calling them) would stack in pairs, eight-pairs-to-the-inch, along the entire 567-mile length of the hose. In this single chromosome, each of the nearly half-billion bases it contains (in 247,199,719 base-pairs) would be about the size of a Tic-Tac breath mint; maybe a bit smaller.
At normal scales, the dimensions are too fantastic to believe. A solitary strand of DNA can’t be seen, even with the aid of most microscopes, but if all the DNA in a single cell could be laid out end to end and flattened to remove the kinks, it would stretch to six-and-a-half feet. 6.5 feet is the length of all the DNA in a typical human cell.
According to Siri, 1E14 cells make a human. It’s “one” followed by 14 zeros. It’s 100 trillion. Other sources say no; the number of cells in a human being is between 15 and 70 trillion. A trillion has twelve zeroes, right?
Do the math. It will show that all the DNA in a single human is enough to spin a strand from the earth to the sun and back 99 to 662 times (which is somewhere between 198 and 1324 astronomical units, right?) depending on who is trusted to do the human cell-count. Does anyone believe it?
An astronomical unit (AU) is simply the distance from the Earth to the Sun. It is the distance traveled by light during 499 seconds, which is 8 minutes and 19 seconds. It’s close to 93 million miles, right?
The point is this: strands of DNA are too thin to see, but in humans their total length is on an astronomical scale that spans two-and-half to sixteen-and-a-half times the diameter of the solar system out to Pluto — a diametral orbital distance that is nearly 80 AU.
It’s a lot of DNA, even if the exact amount is uncertain.
Rosalind Franklin (1920-1958). Franklin received her PhD from Cambridge University at age 25. (Her thesis: The physical chemistry of solid organic colloids with special reference to coal.) Franklin spoke several languages, which opened opportunities for her to work in France, where she acquired the skills in X-ray crystallography that enabled her to advance the world to a new understanding of viruses and the molecules of life — DNA.
Rosalind Franklin, the gifted X-ray crystallographer, who did the experimental research that led to the discovery of the double helix, died of ovarian cancer at age 37. The Nobel Prize Committee has a long-standing policy of not awarding prizes to people who have died. It’s why Irish physicist and mathematician John Stewart Bell didn’t receive a prize for his civilization-changing work on quantum-entanglement, after he suffered a brain hemorrhage and perished in 1990.
In Franklin’s case it was doubly sad, because she was also doing important work on the molecular structure of viruses related to polio (funded by the United States Public Health Service) when cancer overtook her. Once again another scientist — this time her partner, Aaron Klug — received the Nobel Prize that she might have shared.
Had Rosalind Franklin survived to receive two Nobel Prizes — one for her work on the double helix and the other on the structure of polio virus — she would be a household name, like Albert Einstein or Francis Crick or Jonas Salk.
Rosalind lived in a generation and a culture that devalued her; she was a woman who competed with men, some of whom may have undercut her and wanted nothing to do with her, a few admitted. It was a different time, the 1950s. Who knows where the truth lies?
For Franklin, fame-and-fortune wasn’t to be. Blame cancer, a disease of the “genes”, which she sacrificed her life to understand by working daily with the deadly X-rays that helped her unlock the secrets of viruses and, most important of all, to finally pull aside the opaque curtain that was hiding the shape of the molecule of life: DNA.
Once the structure of the double-helix became known, the potential to store information in a molecular bundle constructed like DNA was immediately recognized — and it appeared to be unlimited. It is why everyone at first thought that the DNA molecule must be a code, like an old-fashioned computer tape.
I’ve suggested that DNA is not a code; neither is it a cipher. Some researchers view DNA more as a storage device and a starting point for processes — complicated processes — that have taken place inside every living cell for 3.5 billion years.
Yes, a group of three bases and an attached amino acid, properly transformed and manipulated by RNA elves inside little protein-making workshops called ribosomes, can help to fabricate and string together colored beads to make necklaces (chains). Chains of amino acids (polypeptides) — properly ordered and folded, again by RNA elves — can become proteins.
Scattered DNA base sequences inside a cell’s nucleus, its center, are a starting point for an involved and complicated process of selection, duplication, transformation, and fabrication before anything useful can happen; before proteins can be built and released for living.
To think realistically about life, especially human life, people should remind themselves that two-thirds of their bodies is water; two-thirds of what’s left is protein; the rest is mostly fat.
The interior of a cell is a complicated space. The space between cells is other-worldly.
The process that goes on inside cells, instead of being thought of as a precisely executed computer code, might better be compared to the process of weather found on every planet in the solar system.
Each planet can be identified by its surface weather, which starts from a kit of basic materials, and is amplified by an avalanche of environmental conditions and chemistries, much like the bases in chromosomes, which are selected, copied, shaped and reshaped, configured and reconfigured by RNA elves and other characters we have yet to meet (because the science of the evolving genome — the genetic material — and the phenome — what animals and plants look like — is still young, and scientists understand less than the little they think they know about the complete process, at least so far).
The processes used to construct life forms by starting with the bases in DNA are analogous to the processes astronomers observe on the planets of our solar system, where each planet creates its weather from the matrix of materials and thermal conditions that seems to define it. Each planet in the solar system has a characteristic weather profile that depends on a chaotic interplay of materials and environment unique to that planet.
Earth has weather; so does Mars and Jupiter. Those who study planets know immediately which planet is which, simply by observing its weather. From telescopes on Earth, each planet looks like its weather. Each has its characteristic colors and patterns. Weather is a planet’s phenotype; it’s what folks see when they look.
This mammoth storm on Jupiter looks eerily like structures that are found in living cells. The inset is planet Earth, shown for scale.
That’s how it is with life forms, too. Each life form is the result of weather patterns inside cells, which give each animal, plant, and microbe its unique essence; its physical presence in the larger world where it lives.
It becomes conventional wisdom to think this way about life forms, when one considers that identical twins — two humans who share exactly the same DNA — always display a variety of differences when examined closely.
Identical twins never have the same fingerprints, for example. There are systems of weather occurring around their genetic material in every protein-producing region in their bodies. Epigenetics is the technical term for the study of how it is that variations in phenomes occur in organisms that have identical genomes — that is, identical gene sequences.
Click pic for larger view in new window. (from Wikipedia article, Epigenetics)
The outcomes of these storms are never the same; two supposedly identical children do not always receive the same toys from the RNA elves who rummage through their shared bags (strands) of DNA for the bases they will copy and rework into proteins. Things get mixed up and turned around. One toy gets selected; another doesn’t; one is painted green; another purple.
What I find interesting is this: identical twins get less identical as they age. They are easier to distinguish.
How many of the differences are due to variations in the production of proteins, which occur at the molecular level?
How much of the variation is induced by external stresses on the genome caused by lifestyle differences? How much is driven by an unavoidable drift in the statistics of protein production, which emerge and diverge over time in each phenome of the twins regardless of their lifestyle choices?
An animal cannot be constructed from its DNA alone. RNA elves — millions of them, like colonies of ants — must do their work.
It’s a chaotic process that produces life on the earth. It’s a process that cannot be described or predicted by mathematics. If it could, scientists might take the DNA from prehistoric bones to create the original animals. Jurassic Park would be more than a Hollywood fantasy, which is what the book, movie, and sequels were and are.
An animal cannot be constructed from its DNA alone. A lot more is required than a simple collection of sequences formed from four bases and frozen in a molecule of DNA. A lot more of life’s machinery is required. The RNA elves — millions of them, like colonies of ants — must do their work.
When the work is done, and a protein has been made and delivered, the path back is lost, forever. No way exists — or is even possible — to reconstruct the sequence of bases in the DNA that started the process that built the protein. The process is not backward compatible, according to Matthew Cobb, the British zoologist and historian, in his latest book, Life’s Greatest Secret. Not only are the DNA sequences not reachable from knowledge of the proteins alone, but the processing steps that took place between the protein and the DNA are unknowable.
I don’t want to get too Mathy but think about this: sixty-four three-block (or three-base) sequences can in theory “code” for a mere twenty or so amino acids. It means that as many as three or four of those three-base sequences (the transfer elves we talked about earlier) can “code” for the same amino acid.
Reminder: four bases are all the choices DNA offers. Taken three at a time, they are more than enough to “code” for twenty or so amino acids. Get out the calculator, those who don’t believe it. 4 X 4 X 4 = 64. As mentioned earlier, humans have acquired over the eons 48 three-base combinations to work with. Bacteria, for another example, have 31 according to Matthew Cobb. We need less than two dozen.
Amino acid sequences long enough to form proteins can be hundreds to tens-of-thousands of acids long.
Forget about how amino acid chains get folded properly to make proteins. How can anyone work backwards from a protein formed from thousands of amino-acid beads — each one of which was secured to any one of three or four different 3-way combinations of bases (or blocks) — and then go about the task of reconstructing from all those possible combinations the exact sequence of bases (or blocks) in the original DNA, which more than a few random RNA sequences interacted with to make their choices from billions of bases in the first place?
Take a breath. There isn’t enough time in the history of the universe to figure it out for the tens-of-thousands of proteins that it takes to make a functioning animal or plant.
Raise the number “three” (or four, or five, or six, or two; it doesn’t matter) to the thousandth power on a calculator, those who may be having trouble accepting a possibly demoralizing fact. Most calculators will spit out the word, OVERFLOW. The number of possible sequences is impossibly large. It might as well be infinite.
This is the genetic code. I guess I should show it. (Click the pic for a clearer view.) A lot of folks worked on it; it was a pinch point; a roadblock that once slowed progress toward the understanding of what makes life live; how cells behave. Now that it’s known, is anyone sure it is the only code? The answer is, no. Variations have already been found in nature — at least 15 so far with more expected as researchers continue their work.
It seems likely that the ”code” has changed in dramatic ways since the first primitive cells formed 3.5 billion years ago. British zoologist, Matthew Cobb, has suggested that words like ”code” and ”information” might better be thought of as mere metaphors when applied to the machinations of complex molecules like DNA and RNA, which — can we admit? — operate on quantum scales for which we humans have no natural intuition.
There are thousands of chains of all different lengths and folding patterns. No one is going to reverse-engineer the DNA of a life-form as complex as a human being from its proteins; nor from its RNA elves; nor from its essential enzymes and catalysts; not anytime soon; not ever. It goes for dinosaurs, trees, or any other reasonably complex living thing — now or from the distant past.
Why do we have to reverse-engineer? Why not read the instructions right off the DNA itself? By now most readers must be starting to understand that the sequences necessary to build proteins are scattered among billions of bases. We can’t find the right ones in the right order. It’s not possible; not for creatures as complex as humans or dinosaurs.
Even if someone could reverse-engineer DNA sequences from proteins, how would they construct and organize the ant-like colonies of RNA elves that must sort through the DNA bases to select and build the right sequences; how do they identify and isolate the sequences necessary to build and orchestrate, for example, the tens-of-thousands of enzymes that are required to give researchers any chance at all to build a functioning human-being or even a prehistoric dinosaur?
It gets more complicated.
Those who don’t believe it might want to read about CNVs, or copy number variations, that disrupt the probabilities that certain base-sequences in genes can be fabricated in the same way time after time. Click the link.
It’s a form of change that has nothing to do with mutations or inheritance. It is more related to the untidy mess that three billion base pairs make whenever they get together to do anything at all. It’s a genetic Woodstock of variation, where almost anything can happen and sometimes does.
Now might be a good time to mention that there are virus infections that can alter the DNA in cells. These viruses are called retroviruses, because they reverse the DNA to RNA transcription process described earlier by introducing an enzyme into the cells they infect. This process is disease producing — it causes cancer — and destroys the host animal (or person) if left untreated.
The enzyme, reverse transcriptase, has become a tool that molecular engineers now use to modify organisms in experiments. Enough said. The weeds of molecular biology grow thick and deep.
This is the inverse genetic code. I might as well show it, too. (Click the pic for a clearer view.) Tables like this one make the ”code” appear to be comprehensive and far-reaching. Some readers might be surprised to learn that only one or two percent of the bases in human DNA are ever copied by RNA to make proteins.
Tables like the one above make the ”code” appear comprehensive and far-reaching. Some readers might be surprised to learn that only one or two percent of the bases in human DNA are ever copied by RNA to make proteins.
Added to 2% for protein synthesis is 8% to make little pieces of RNA that oversee and coordinate the process of protein-making — like colonies of swarming ants. The rest of the bases (90%) do other things; maybe — many of them — do nothing at all. No one is really sure what they do or don’t do.
Geneticists used to believe they could clone animals from their DNA sequences alone. Yes, there once was a cloned sheep named Dolly. Some readers may have read about her.
After many heart-breaking failures, researchers managed to take the DNA from the mammary gland of one sheep, inject it into the nucleus of an egg from a second sheep, and implant this DNA cocktail into the womb of a third. By some miracle, Dolly was conceived and born, on July 5, 1996.
Dolly (5 July 1996 – 14 Feb 2003). Pic by Tony Barros, Sao Paulo, Brazil.
Sheep live twelve years, on average. By Dolly’s fourth year arthritis crippled her. At year seven researchers euthanized her; she had developed a chronic and incurable lung disease.
Dolly was the recipient of arguably the best healthcare any sheep ever received in the history of veterinary medicine. She didn’t do well. Click this link for an update on the Dolly research.
For the sake of complete accuracy, permit me to admit that no one I know clones sheep anymore. There are too many failures. The failure rate for clones is right around 100%.
Some breeders claim to clone horses, which they sell to folks who hope to increase their odds of winning races. I can argue that their definition of cloning differs from science, and the proof is that the horses have noticeable differences which negatively impact their ability to win.
Clone researchers, as far as anyone knows, have never used DNA alone, anyway. All borrow the enzymes, RNA, ribosomes, and other cell structures of other life forms to incubate the DNA they play with to try to create “artificial” life.
Mitochondrial DNA is unreachable. It is produced only in the ovum of the female. Mitochondrial DNA carried by sperm is miniscule in amount and quickly identified and destroyed in the fertilized egg.
Any technique that involves in vitro fertilization can bypass this natural process and inadvertently scramble the DNA in mitochondria. It can be debilitating, even disease producing.
Any technique that swaps out nuclear DNA while avoiding mitochondrial DNA doesn’t get to the power source of cells — a major enabler of stamina and endurance. In racehorses, the role of mtDNA is probably crucial, it seems to me.
My point is that duplicating a DNA sequence is not enough to produce an identical copy of an animal as complex as a sheep, horse, or human. Too much other stuff is going on during reproduction that is not controllable or even known.
And speaking of enzymes, can we please not go there? I’m reminded of Chris Farley in the 1992 movie, Almost Heroes.
Does anyone remember?
His tutor asks him to learn the symbol for lowercase A. ”What do you want from me?” Chris bellows while rolling his eyes and clawing his hair. ”You want my head to explode?!”
Well, no, of course not. But for those who have to know more, why not push ourselves just a little bit harder? May I point out the obvious? Enzymes speed up chemical reactions. A chemical reaction that might under normal circumstances take years can be reduced to milliseconds by an optimally configured enzyme.
Some enzymes are made from RNA; most are proteins; in fact, most proteins are enzymes; they all get their start from sequences of bases hidden deep within the mountains of DNA inside our cells. These bases are selected, copied, and transformed into their many convoluted shapes for a very special reason: to help accelerate over 5,000 processes inside cells.
Without these highly specialized structures, metabolism would grind to a halt; DNA and RNA would acquire all the mobility of a conga-line of standing stones; cell processes would freeze into a petrified forest of non-living complexity. Life as we know it would be impossible, code or no code.
This is XNA. I’m told it’s less messy and easier to manipulate than DNA. It’s very good at being loaded with code and used as a storage device for information.
Here is a good question: Has any research team ever created artificial life in a laboratory?
Craig Venter, who has been interviewed on 60 Minutes and appeared in several Ted Talks videos, says that he has. He oversees a number of research labs funded by big oil and the government. His labs write computer code to generate base sequences, which they construct and then inject into yeast (among other techniques) to produce life-forms that they hope will someday lead to biofuels and greenhouse gas inhibitors.
Among other accomplishments, one of the labs, the Craig Venter Institute, is known to have introduced a gene from the bacteria, escherichia coli, into the earth’s toughest microbe, “Conan the Bacterium” (Deinococcus radiodurans), to create microbes that can detoxify radioactive wastes at nuclear facilities.
So, the answer to the question about whether anyone has ever created artificial life must be, probably not, not really — not from scratch, anyway. Yes, people have done amazing things. No one has created life without using existing life to do it, though. The process is too complex. On Earth, it has taken 4.5 billion years.
Many argue that life fell to Earth from the stars. Even Earth itself might not have been able to ignite the spark that led to humans and all the life we know.
In 2012 a different group of researchers did find a way to arrange a set of different bases inside DNA-like molecules called XNA. But it was a way of coding sequences only; it didn’t produce or even arrange proteins into anything that could be called, alive.
The “X” stands for the Greek word, Xeno, which means “other.” XNA is other nucleic acid.
An informed reader told me that in fact a protein was made from a sequence of XNA in 2015. If true, the future of genetics could get interesting in coming decades.
XNA is at the very least the precursor, many hope, for long-term storage of massive amounts of information in small, stable molecules — demanded now by data-churning behemoths such as CERN, home of the world’s most powerful particle-collider, located in Geneva, Switzerland.
Just because artificially constructed molecules like XNA can store useful information does not mean that DNA does the same. People have imagined meaning into the bases of DNA, which they simply don’t have — to help better understand their function and to more effectively manipulate them — for good or ill.
Another development in 2012, which some readers may remember, is that researchers learned to use a process known by the acronym CRISPR to change the sequence of bases in stretches of DNA. They adapted an immunization process that bacteria use to kill viruses and defend against subsequent attacks.
Click on the pic to open a more readable image in another tab.
Bacteria use CRISPR to suck the DNA out of an attacking virus, which they store in a kind of library for future reference. If a bacterium survives and the virus dies, somehow the bacteria is able to develop a quick-kill strategy that it will use whenever it is invaded by more DNA that matches a copy in its collection.
Researchers learned to create novel CRISPR DNA based on the system used by bacteria. They then attached RNA guides and cas9 protein shears to the sequences. They learned to deploy the assemblies to search and destroy bad DNA; and to insert designer DNA in its place in the cells of plants and animals; even humans.
These scientists insist that gene “therapies” are necessary, because the fact is: DNA is defective — most of it, anyway. Very few humans are symmetrical, attractive, disease-free, smart, emotionally stable, long-lived, or any other desirable trait anyone might want that is driven by how humans are built, or how they are “coded” at a molecular level.
Crisper video published October 25, 2019 on YouTube.
Gene drivers (mentioned in the first paragraphs of this article) are being developed in coordination with CRISPR techniques to enable changes to DNA molecules that will be permanent and transmittable 100% of the time. Their success will depend on how well lab technicians understand what is going on inside the molecules of life; and inside our cells.
Editor’s note:In January 2018 some researchers admitted that problems related to positional locating have created a roadblock to success for CRISPR technologies. They hope to solve the difficulties soon to avoid a catastrophic failure in the application of this heralded gene-altering process. One process under development that seems to promise more precision and speed is to use electro-magnetic positioning in place of viruses.
I believe we need to slow down and learn more before we unleash immortal genes into the biosphere that no one can pull back and which may turn out to be harmful despite best intentions. Asilomar style conferences that lead to best-practice regulations with the force of international law behind them are desperately needed to control biotechnologies that are quickly getting out-of-hand and beyond the control or understanding of government and politicians.
It is quite certain that PCR technology (polymerase chain reactionamplification), which scientists use to amplify into a viewable goo the molecules of DNA-style life might be misleading folks into believing that DNA-style life is all there is.
Earth could be infested with non-DNA based life, but no one will know until other technologies capable of detecting and amplifying it are developed and perfected.
People need to remind themselves that we are talking about molecules here — molecules of life that can’t be seen — even with help of the most sophisticated microscopes. Everything science knows comes from amplification techniques and mathematical analyses. I hope someday to write an essay on the techniques scientists use to tease out what they know for sure about these next-to-impossible-to-observe molecules.
Serious scientists refer to the possibility for the existence of non-DNA style life as the “shadow biosphere.” If this non-DNA life interacts with our own in a symbiotic way, the potential for harm, it seems to me, increases the more lab technicians play around with molecules they don’t fully understand while they remain oblivious to life they can’t detect, because they lack appropriate laboratory tools and techniques.
An even messier problem is “dark DNA”. It’s DNA that can’t be found, though tests clearly show it must exist for certain cell processes to work right.
Some researchers argue that as many as twenty thousand proteins are manufactured in humans that, when they search the human genome, they can’t find the sequences that are required to be there, somewhere, to enable the proteins to be built. I urge readers to click this link to learn more about this potentially serious inability of sequencers to decode DNA accurately and completely.
No one knows what they don’t know; and what they don’t know can kill us all, if lab workers aren’t cautious. Researchers know they don’t know stuff — important stuff if they intend to play around with gene drivers and CRISPR induced gene sequencing.
Researchers might be walking through a genetic minefield but are so eager to cross that they ignore the dangers of amputated limbs; the loss of sight and hearing; the possibilities for disfigurement to the genomes and phenomes of species like our own, which all people may one day come to regret.
No human is perfect. Sometimes our imperfections are caused not by bad stretches of DNA but by naughty RNA elves who copy less than optimal sections of bases, which they hammer together into less-than-optimal genes, which can screw-up a sequence of amino acids. The RNA elves end up making defective proteins that pollute cells, damage our bodies, and make our lives miserable.
To the extent that these screw-ups are the result of a lousy sequence of bases in our DNA, perhaps these patterns will be able to be altered using CRISPR technology (if anyone can get it to work right), which is likely to increase the odds of inducing better outcomes. But many screw-ups, perhaps most, are not caused by poorly sequenced genes constructed from DNA.
Many problems result from bad choices made by some arbitrary RNA elf, for example, who might have decided, perhaps, to cut and paste a random mix of bad sections it rummaged from the DNA strands; its errors and mistakes might not always be able to be located, identified, and repaired successfully. Renegade RNA elves are hard to track down and kill; at least so far.
Some problems can be caused by all kinds of things not related to DNA, like temperature, quantum effects, and cosmic radiation, including sunlight. The number of things that can go wrong with the weather-environment inside cells is enormous. Copy number variations in gene sequencing is another problem area that I mentioned earlier.
Safety and reliability are probably the two most important reasons why our haystacks of six-billion DNA bases hide a mere twenty-one thousand so-called genes, most of which are scattered in pieces throughout our vast DNA bundled-network.
Those few sequences that are important for survival are less likely to be attacked and mutated if they are surrounded by sequences of little or no value to survival and good health. Base-sequences essential to life hide within chromatin like proverbial needles in a haystack.
Dolphins have noses but can’t smell; they lack olfactory lobes. Sequences in their DNA have been identified that resemble corrupted versions of sequences related to olfactory lobes in other mammals.
Big chunks of DNA are thought to be junk — relics left behind by billions of years of evolution and change. Junk DNA could be a legacy of screw-ups and obsolescence. Dolphins, for example, have noses, but can’t smell. They seem to have a lot of corrupt DNA sequences related to smell, which are broken and don’t work due to neglect and disuse.
Humans are no different. We have DNA we no longer use. Through disuse, our base sequences, some of them, get corrupted over time, some think, and become unusable. The base sequences don’t get up and go anywhere, though. They just hang around, paralyzed, doing nothing. They become unrecognizable to the RNA elves, who learn somehow to avoid them.
Mitochondria and bacteria don’t seem to have much, if any, junk DNA, but humans, like other animals and plants, have almost no nuclear DNA that isn’t junk. It’s kind of mysterious.
A Russian agronomist from the Soviet era, renown in his time as an expert on the cultivation of wheat, Trofim Denisovich Lysenko, believed that plants and animals which were unlucky enough to find themselves subject to environmental stresses could draw on reserves from a pool of what is today called junk DNA to change their hereditary direction and enhance their survival odds. His idea has yet to be discredited.
The simple onion has 16 billion base pairs in its DNA. The loblolly pine tree — it’s an important source of lumber, which thrives in southern swamps — houses 22 billion. Humans have 3 billion.
EDITORS NOTE:As of January 2018, a Mexican salamander that can regrow limbs (the axolotl) has been sequenced. It is known to have 32 billion base pairs.
What do all these bases code for? They code for nothing, apparently. Maybe they are a warehouse of survival tools left behind as the distant past of billions-of-years ago gradually transforms itself into now; our miraculous present.
Another compelling idea that occurred to me as I wrote this essay is that the tangled mess of unused DNA in every plant and animal might have grown both in volume and complexity during ancient times — quite apart from environmental pressures on the life-forms themselves.
Could massive DNA growth have preceded evolution to enable and accelerate biodiversity during unforeseen environmental catastrophes?
It’s important to find out, because statistical studies on the rate of mutations seem to support the idea that mutational frequency cannot be the primary driver of species differentiation. Mutation rates are too low; the process is a snail’s pace compared to what is needed to transform a chimpanzee for example into an orangutan; or primates of any kind into humans.
Is it possible that mammoth reservoirs of disorganized and unused bases grew and multiplied inside the nuclei of ancient cells — like molds in petri dishes — to fuel bio-explosions of diversity and complexity when conditions were right? It’s a thought.
An abundant supply of unused DNA combined with aggressive colonies of swarming RNA segments might help to explain rapid, diverse bio-blooms (and even account for absences in fossil records) that seem to have occurred during the Cambrian era — to cite one example out of many.
The world’s smartest people are just getting started in the field of molecular genetics. Despite all that others have learned, much remains to know; more, much more, remains to discover and understand. Secrets hide in the complexity that are certain to better explain how biodiversity bloomed on planet Earth.
DNA bases are not a code, it seems to me; they are simply a platform for departing mRNA trains that, when properly coupled, can become assembly templates for chains of amino acids — complex assemblies of molecules that depend on very many processes and structures to have even the remotest chance of being transfigured by ribosomes into a seeming infinity of unlikely proteins — matrices of proteins and other structures, which have risen from the dust and the seas like the miracles of angels; an endless froth of bubbles; a deluge of structures that have over eons shaped the messy, sometimes ugly, often beautiful human beings and all other life on our planet; our home; our beloved Earth.
Adam Rutherford, the British geneticist said, ”This is the definitive history of arguably the greatest of all scientific revolutions.”
Life’s Greatest Secret is a must read for anyone who is interested in the science and history of the human genome. We strongly advise our readers to buy and read this important book. Billy Lee has read it twice, marking it up each time with magic-marker and margin-notes. It is a science blockbuster; a fantastic book written in an engaging, easy-to-understand style.
As of May 4, 2016, 28 states have held popular-vote primaries; nine states and one territory have conducted caucus contests, where both parties participated. Two states held mixed elections, where one party conducted a popular vote; the other a caucus. Thus far, the Democrats have participated in 12 caucus contests; the Republicans, 10.
To summarize: A total of 39 states and one territory have completed their 2016 primary process.
After the Indiana primary, the popular vote totals in the 28 voting primaries are:
Clinton 12,242,884 14 wins / 7 seconds
Trump 10,329,397 6 wins / 11 seconds
Sanders 8,955,271 6 wins / 6 seconds
Cruz 6,673,520 1 win / 4 seconds
Kasich 3,649,845 1 win / 0 seconds
Rubio 3,168,147 0 wins / 0 seconds
Caucus state elections work differently than simple popular vote elections, which makes comparing the performance of GOP vs. Democrats in caucus states a little like comparing apples to oranges; the comparisons are not very useful and can be misleading.
As I suspend my campaign today, I have renewed faith, deeper faith, that the Lord will show me the way forward and fulfill the purpose of my life. John Kasich, May 4, 2016
After the Indiana primary yesterday, Ted Cruz and John Kasich dropped out of the race to make Donald Trump the lone candidate for the GOP nomination. Barring an unusual event, Trump will be the GOP candidate in November. He said today that he will pick a Washington insider with close ties to Congress for VP; he says he wants to be able to move legislation through Congress.
Hillary Clinton has not said who she will choose for VP. It is known that she likes Elizabeth Warren, who our Editorial Board has advocated for and endorsed.
Is Trump going to be president of the United States in January? The results so far say no, because Hillary Clinton has demonstrated that she can outperform Trump with those sectors of the electorate essential to victory in past elections.
Some people on the left hope that Bernie Sanders will overtake Clinton and become the nominee, but his numbers show that the electorate is not ready to elect a socialist over a business leader; he can’t win a general election against Donald Trump, not in the United States.
This liability is one reason why 522 of the 561 party-appointed delegates support Clinton. Another, perhaps more important reason, is that Bernie Sanders is a junior senator from a small state (Vermont) who didn’t join the Democratic Party until 2015; he was an independent in Congress, though he tended to vote with Democrats on most issues.
Some party leaders believe he joined the Party for the simple reason that he wanted to run for president; it may have been more personal ambition than love of Party that motivated him. Who knows? He may decide to run as a third party candidate to help Trump defeat Hillary, if he gets angry enough. Then again, he might think he can win a three-way race against the two of them. Stranger things have happened in politics.
Donald Trump married Melania Knaus of communist Yugoslavia, now called Slovenia, in 2005. They have one son. Trump has two previous marriages; one with Marla Maples of Dalton, Georgia, who he married after fathering a child out of wedlock; his first wife was Ivana Zelnickova of Communist Czechoslovakia. the marriage lasted 15 years; she bore him three children.
Anyway, Donald Trump is an extremely attractive candidate for an electorate that worships celebrity. He is like the poison apple in the garden of Eden. Many Americans—like Eve—may be unable to stop themselves from taking their first bite. As the story in Genesis reveals, that first bite can start a cascade of events, which could ruin America.
Billionaires, like the Bush family, already have too much influence; worse, they live in a bubble, which renders their decision-making into a game by blind-fools. The Bush family, for sure, loves America, but they nearly destroyed it; they certainly unraveled the Middle East and precipitated the financial collapse of 2008.
Trump is surrounded by yes-people; let’s admit the obvious; he doesn’t tolerate dissenting voices very well. When Trump starts making foolish decisions—as he most certainly will—he will have to suppress dissent to carry his asinine visions to fruition. It won’t be a good time for people who think for themselves; it won’t be a good time for diversity. Donald Trump strongly advocates the use of harsh techniques against enemies. Should he turn his contempt on free-speaking Americans who oppose him, we could be in for a rough ride.
If history serves as a reliable guide, one component of the electorate Donald Trump can count on will be the evangelicals. Since they became an organized voting block in the 1970s, right-wing evangelical voters seem to have voted against self-identified Christian candidates more times than not. They opposed Jimmy Carter; they united against Barack Obama; and they are fighting against Hillary Clinton, who stood by her husband after he betrayed her; she continued to love him—something Jesus admonished Christians to do.
Some evangelical voters tend to be legalists; many care nothing about love, forgiveness, charity, or non-violence. They pay lip-service to those qualities, but only when it serves their legalistic views; some could care less. And they will be voting for Trump in droves. Trump says he is honored by the evangelical support he is getting.
From where I’m sitting, Donald Trump seems to represent the New Confederacy. Some of his supporters who I’ve met paste Confederate flags on the back of their trucks and display Old Dixie in their living rooms. I can foresee a time under a Trump presidency (I would say it’s already started) when Americans aren’t going to see black faces on television anymore. We won’t be watching street demonstrations or riots or anything else that might threaten the social fabric on television, either. The technology of suppression is simply too advanced. Trump won’t hesitate to use it.
For people who aren’t directly involved; who watch television and live inside their own bubbles of safety, the world is going to seem like a pretty good place, at first, under a Trump presidency. The droning insects of right-wing media will stop flapping their angry wings; optimism will be projected from every billionaire-controlled media outlet; sighs of relief will be heard throughout the land; and once again the exhilarating drums of war will beat hypnotically as we take on the stragglers around the world who refuse to follow our vision; who refuse to dance in lock-step to our new tune.
It will be an exciting time to be alive, especially for those billionaires who own defense-industry businesses; for those who have a talent for building walls; for those who enjoy controlling and manipulating large groups of (sometimes non-cooperative) people. But will anyone permit me to interrupt this wonderful dream for a reality check?
Bad things happened under similar presidents, like Reagan and the Bushes. Reagan entrenched the power of billionaire families by changing the tax codes; he allowed the wealthy to earn unlimited incomes for the first time; the middle class hasn’t had a raise in pay since, because the wealthy keep the excess profits for themselves.
The wealthy have no tax write-off advantages or other financial incentives to encourage them to invest in their workers; in fact, it’s the opposite. Since the rich are no longer taxed at 92% on the unreasonable part of their unreasonably high incomes, they set aside their windfalls for their own families instead of upgrading their company infrastructures and raising the standard of living for their work-forces; neither do they pay the taxes that would solve so many of our internal problems—like the deterioration of our roads and bridges, our power grids, and the quality of education.
The Bush family took us into wars, which history shows were completely avoidable. The First Gulf War was a living nightmare, in case anyone has forgot. Remember the oil-well fires? They were terrifying. Remember our troops donning gas masks and hazmat suits during the Second Gulf War?
The wealthy refused to pay for these insane escapades, which is why our country can’t shake off its huge debt. We got into these predicaments, because our wealthy folks seem to be out of touch, arrogant, and financially tied to companies who do business with the military. It’s pretty simple, when anyone takes the time to think about it.
Donald Trump has devoted his life to building safe spaces where the wealthy can live large, play hard, gamble, and entertain their friends; nothing is so terribly wrong or unusual about that. But he lives in a part of America that 99.9% of Americans know little or nothing about. He isn’t one of us. He never will be.
Hillary Clinton is arguably the most qualified candidate to make the run for president, ever. A successful attorney, she married “Bill” who became Governor of Arkansas and a two-term president; she served two terms in the United States Senate for the state of New York. President Obama appointed her to lead the State Department as his Secretary of State.
We are a freedom loving people who can take care of ourselves. We don’t need billionaire baby-sitters to tell us where to sit and when to use the bathroom. We can fix our country by ourselves, thank you, and we have Mama Clinton to help us do it. She is one of us. She was raised poor and will never be a billionaire.
A billion is one-thousand millions, for anyone not good at math. It is a ridiculous amount of money. Were it a felony to possess a billion dollars, many of the problems caused by greed in this world would disappear over-night. Think about it.
I’m praying that the Good Lord will keep Hillary Clinton safe. I pray for all the candidates; that they and their families will be protected from all harm. It is a courageous act to run for president. Every single candidate has been threatened at one time or another.
Most qualified people won’t run for president. It’s good that a few capable people dare to step up to lead the fight for freedom and fairness. Hillary Clinton is one of those heroic people. She isn’t just another pretty face.
It’s a national disgrace that the ”fine-looking” Christian activist, ”Minty” Ross Harriet Tubman will not appear on the $20 bill until 2026 at the earliest. Some say it could be as late as 2030. The cynical say it will never happen. It’s certain that Minty was beautiful, because ”fine-looking” is how her owners described her on a Wanted Poster after she escaped at age twenty-seven.
Unfortunately, no pictures of Minty as a young woman have been found. She lived on to become a prominent administrator of the Underground Railroad; a friend of abolitionists Frederick Douglass and John Brown; a Civil War soldier and spy for the Union Army; and much, much more.
The Mint people say it takes a long time to retool the currency. In the case of Minty Ross, it will take at least ten years; maybe fifteen. I’m not sure I believe them.
With Ms. Tubman, it seems like one injustice followed another; she suffered abuse like no other heroine I’ve read about. A slave-owner crushed her skull with a hunk of iron he threw at another slave she was trying to protect. While traveling on a train, passengers broke her arms when she refused to move to another car. All her suffering came from haters, pure and simple. She will never get the credit she deserves.
Russian Professor, Igor Panarin, says the USA will look like this map, someday. Some folks think it already does.
Does anyone really think the USA will be around ten or fifteen years from now? It is likely to be divided into four countries, presumably under the control of the Russians or an international coalition of foreign powers, if leaked Russian intelligence assessments can be believed.
Sorry, but that’s what seems to be coming, according to Russian analysts. The world has had its fill; the earth’s power brokers are planning to take us down; they seem to be gathering the family of nations to make a grand, international intervention on our behalf — for our own good and for the well-being of the planet and its impoverished peoples.
Russia is deploying Nuclear Drone Submarines (NUDS) to overwhelm our defenses.
The Russian military is filling the oceans with drone subs armed with nuclear material; possibly missiles. Some sit in the sand at the bottom of the oceans on both coasts of the USA.
Hundreds of thousands of Russians live on the island of Cuba. They have submarine and air bases on the island.
The Chinese are building artificial islands in the Pacific and constructing military bases. During the past twenty years the Chinese have built the most modern Navy the world has ever seen.
The Koreans and several other hostile countries are building first strike nuclear capabilities. It’s not that they dislike the United States. It’s a matter of trust. They think our leaders are crazy, selfish, arrogant, and too powerful. It’s not good for other countries when one becomes disproportionately powerful.
It’s not enough for the USA to stop doing bad things. It must do good things. We don’t seem able to save ourselves, because the USA has a legacy of a country that has hated too many people; it has hurt and killed too many people.
The USA hasburned alive millions of people with diabolical weapons like napalm, Hellfire missiles, and atomic bombs. Most of the world outside the United States believes we dropped anthrax bombs on Chinese troops in North Korea in 1954. We placed a ”hospital” ship off the peninsula from which we spread a virulent strain of typhus that killed hundreds of thousands of North Koreans. We drew up plans to drop atomic munitions until a cessation of hostilities took hold and calmer heads prevailed.
The USA has inflicted too much injustice; ignored the cries of too many disadvantaged people; humiliated the weak and impoverished; and, since the end of WWII, has waged war against a quarter of all the countries on the earth.
We have crossed moral boundaries into the dark space of torture and drone-kills. A country that tortures and assassinates thousands of people by remote control is not worth defending or protecting, some say.
Modern Chinese Stealth Destroyer
The billionaires are having their parties; for them the world has never been better. In fact, many Americans, rich and poor, are ingesting daily cocktails of drugs, legal and illegal, to keep going; they are oblivious, uninformed, and asleep.
In our drug-induced stupor we are about to elect a mega-billionaire and his cronies to administer what is arguably the most militarized and corrupt nation on Earth. Like everything else we’ve done lately, it won’t go over well. The nations of the world are already preparing for this catastrophe; the outcome isn’t going to be good for any of us; no way.
The refusal of our military officers, our intelligence administrators, foreign service officials, and especially our elected political leaders to follow with enthusiasm the vision of our current president has not been lost on other nations.
South Carolina Republican Congressman, Joe Wilson, twice yelled You Lie! at President Obama during his speech before a joint session of Congress in 2009. Disrespect for the president is universal, open, and virulent among GOP congressmen, who make up the majority of our elected officials. The GOP’s unreasonable hatred for well-intentioned people is the main reason the community of nations fears the changes that will come with the election of a Republican president in 2016.
Our president’s capitulation to the world view of our bureaucratic cartels; his inability to get the simplest things done (like closing the Guantanamo torture chambers and returning the military base in Cuba to its rightful owner); his surrender to Wall Street thugs with Ivy League educations; his quiet suffering of disrespect by media and petty demagogues has convinced the powerful people abroad who both do and don’t like us that the United States won’t change; indeed, it cannot change.
Meanwhile, our citizens are tired of war. They don’t acknowledge basic facts; the Chinese Navy is the best in the world. Russian drone technology is the world’s best in the air, beneath the seas, and on land. And so on and on.
Yes, our government is spending two trillion dollars to upgrade our nuclear first-strike capabilities. We are spending our national treasure on a doomsday matrix designed to destroy planet Earth, should we get backed into a corner and face certain defeat.
We are so blind. The irony is that we are always looking deep into the heavens searching for advanced civilizations. We believe millions of hi-tech worlds are “out there”. Yet, we have found not a single one. Maybe the story of civilization is familiar; maybe it plays out across the universe on every inhabited planet in the same tragic way.
In every corner of our Milky Way galaxy, and in the trillion or more other galaxies that populate our unimaginably huge universe, intelligent life-forms fight to survive and prevail. They unlock the secrets of nature.
Somehow the technology gets control of them. The unnatural plutonium they create and store, even when it is not strewn in a fit of suicidal anger, leaches into their soils and poisons their planets, irreversibly.
Workers inspect chemical weapons barrels for leaks at a warehouse in Gorny, Syria. Stockpiles like this one exist in countries all over the world.
A slow death by poisoning might well be the future of every planet that has buried beneath its surface tens-of-thousands of thermo-nuclear bombs as well as biological and chemical weapons in every shade of depravity that super-intelligent life-forms can dream-up and build.
These weapons cannot be maintained forever. How many thousands of years can we go on pouring our treasure into poisons, until we have no more treasure, and the bombs begin to rot; the toxins soak into soil like turpentine into a sponge; the viruses and bacteria escape to breed and blow in the wind like dust and fall to the ground like drops of rain?
Armageddon is on its way. It may come fast; it may go slow. What every informed person knows is that Harriet Tubman’s face will never grace our currency. Time is too short, and making things right is not our nation’s highest priority. Not even close.
I believe, like my dad before me, that right makes might. Civilizations who dare to reverse the order — who use might to force others to believe that their abusers are right — play a fool’s game.
One important thing we can do as a country right now is to place Harriet Tubman’s portrait (and other freedom fighters like her) on our money, sooner rather than later. The plan, incredibly, is to put a slave-owner’s picture (Andrew Jackson, of all people) on the reverse side of the twenty-dollar bill opposite Ms. Tubman — to kind of balance out the message, I suppose.
No. That’s wrong. No way. Andrew Jackson owned the Hermitage Plantation of Tennessee and another plantation in Mississippi where, during his tenure, 150 slaves produced the cotton that made him wealthy.
As a General in the US army, Jackson fought genocidal wars against the Shawnee and Creek Indians of Georgia and Alabama; he warred against the Seminole Tribes of Florida. He had a reputation for ruthlessness. Native Americans referred to him as ”Sharp Knife.”
This 1905 photo of actors in Pawnee Bill’s Wild West Show portrays the killing of Custer by Sitting Bull. The Battle of Little Bighorn was unusual, because the native Americans actually won the battle. Some would argue that America’s war against its indigenous and kidnapped peoples has never really ended; apologies, forgiveness, and reparations are long overdue.
No slave holder, no human being who forced other human beings to work long hours for no pay under the threat of lash and beating; under the threat of death and loss of family should ever again have their likeness placed on any financial instrument, coin, or bill of the United States of America. What kind of people are we, anyway?
We are a people who stand for freedom and equality before the law, our schools teach us. Let’s behave like we believe it’s true. Crimes against people affect the generations of children who come after. Genocides against African slaves and native Americans can traumatize for centuries; ask any descendant of a victim of Hitler’sholocaust, if there is anyone who doesn’t believe it. The USA has not even begun to make things right, some argue.
Actions speak louder than words. The world watches, much of it in disgust and horror as we venerate the wicked and suppress our saints, like Araminta Ross Tubman. Time is running out. We have to make that change, as Michael Jackson once sung; sooner rather than later.
Loving others is a way to save our beloved America. Love will rescue us. Love is important; it’s powerful. It can sustain our civilization; it can preserve our freedoms; it can extinguish Armageddon.
