September 30, 2003
Is Science Going to the Dogs?... Let's take five with Moira Gunn. This is "Five Minutes".
By now you've heard that J. Craig Venter has decoded the genes of his dog, Shadow, and so you get a glimpse of why it can be so much fun to be a scientist. We get first crack at all the niftiest technology, and if we can make any argument at all that it's beneficial to anyone, we'll actually make it public.
I can think of a few pranks I've personally been involved with. There was the time my boss at Lockheed fractured his leg and was walking around in a cast. He had to go to Europe to give a speech at a conference, so he got his doctor to give him the x-ray. We hijacked all manner of advanced equipment normally used to detect problems with solid rocket fuel or jet engine turbine blades.
His fracture, which only a trained eye could discern from the x-ray, popped right out like we had taken a pen and drawn it in by hand.
Needless to say, he was the hit of his session.
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But back to Dr. Venter, he's the Chairman of the Center for Advancement of Genomics in Rockville, Maryland, and if you go out to its web site and read all the other press releases, you'll realize they really are hard at work out there on what might be considered more worthy science: chlamydial pathogens, potential bio-terrorism agents and their antidotes, an analysis of the mobile elements of a genome where "segments of DNA can jump between organisms," perhaps a clue on how we develop drug resistance.
Buried in this plethora of scientific effort is one very simple announcement: The J. Craig Venter Science Foundation, a separate but related non-profit, has announced a one-time $500,000 prize "to significantly advance automated DNA sequencing so that a human genome can be sequenced for $1,000 or less."
To put this in perspective, the current state of medical technology requires a genome to be decoded about eight times to get it exactly right, and the cost comes in around $50 million. When we can do it for under a grand, that's moves modern medicine from the realm of general treatments to specific treatments - in other words, to you.
Shadow aside, I'd say these folks are very serious about our collective future.
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I do feel obliged here to note that the center didn't throw away $50 million for comic relief. They only did a pass and a half at Shadow's genes, which ran in the neighborhood of $7 million, and Venter and his wife picked up the tab. Besides, it turns out they did learn a thing or two.
While mice are sufficiently similar to humans that they have been the natural choice for animal experiments, it turns out we share far more genes with dogs - some 75%. That means dogs are more like us, than not, which might possibly explain why we like them so.
Mice, on the other hand, don't really seem to take hankerings to any one of us in particular. Turns out, mice, like humans, employ airborne hormones called pheromones, which play a big part in mutual attraction and mating behavior.
Not so with dogs - they just don't have the genes for it. They don't care what we look like, they sure don't care what pheromones we give off, and they know exactly who we are from how we smell.
Don't look now, but I think science just told us what dog-lovers have known for ages. Now if we can only figure out cats ...
I'm Moira Gunn. This is Five Minutes.
