My nephew has a doctorate in "Studying all that Biological Stuff." After his mother's funeral at dinner I asked him how the human genome project was going and was he working on it. He is very quiet and uses short sentences if possible. He said, "We finished that." I changed the subject to Latent Hopes of Tibetan Monks, where I have more expertise. You don't want to look too stupid to your smart nephew. Anyway, it still nagged me that I knew so little about the Human Genome Project. After almost two years of this nagging I decided to look up Human Genome on Google, my favorite place to look up the strange and obvious. Well, that was a downright lie. That's not why I looked it up. The real reason was I learned that the Department of Energy was involved. (That was before I remembered that DOE has these gigantic computers that can handle complex projects like the HGP.) I decided there was another governmental conspiracy we had not learned about. It smelled like Vice President Dick Cheney's Cabal again. They were going to turn some of us humans into pillars of oil. At my friend's house, Mr. Google.com, I looked at the top entry which often is as far as I want to dive into 10 zillion submissions. It seems that everybody in the universe knows more about the human genome than I do and each one has written at least one article or web page for the Internet. Anyway, I went to: http://www.ornl.gov/sci/techresources/Human_Genome/home.shtml There I learned the goals of the project which was completed while I wasn't looking. The goals were and I quote: " "identify all the approximately 20,000-25,000 genes in human DNA, " determine the sequences of the 3 billion chemical base pairs that make up human DNA, " store this information in databases, " improve tools for data analysis, " transfer related technologies to the private sector, and " address the ethical, legal, and social issues (ELSI) that may arise from the project." Holy geewillikers! They did all that using only a few humongous computers! Maybe I shouldn't have used geewillikers because I don't know how to spell it. However, my wife spelled it for me and we agreed. She also said that I could spell it anyway I wanted. That was a great breakthrough usable with other dumb words. From now on I'm spelling stuff, stuf, and practically, pracly since that is how some folks say pracly here in Idaho. Anyway, I wanted to know more about what the Dick Cheney cabal was up to so my friend, Mr. Google, took me to: http://www.energy.gov/engine/content.do?PUBLIC_ID=18903&BT_CODE=PR_PRESSRELEASES&TT_CODE=PRESSRELEASE The press release was written by Jeff Sherwood and he sure knows what he is talking about. The title is "DOE Publishes Roadmap for New Biological Research for Energy and Environmental Needs." I would like to quote the first paragraph, hoping there is no law against it: "WASHINGTON, D.C. -- The Department of Energy (DOE) today issued a comprehensive plan for a new generation of biology research that builds on genome project investments to help solve national energy and environmental challenges. Microbial enzymes could, for example, be used to improve the manufacture of ethanol from cellulose by replacing the inefficient and expensive processes used today. They could enable smaller-scale and more cost-effective and energy-efficient distributed processing plants that could make ethanol cost competitive with oil-based gasoline. Thousands of microbial species have biochemical processes that are of potential use for this and other applications." That sounds innocent enough on the surface, so I borrowed by wife's large "looking glass" that she uses when she drops a cookie crumb. I scanned Jeff's press release from top to bottom for "Human Pillars of Oil to Solve Oil Crisis," but it was just not there. Therefore I must apologize to the diminished number of members of the Vice President's cabal. I'm very sorry! Please don't have me audited by the IRS! copyrightJohn T. Jones, Ph.D. 2005 |
