BANGALORE: Delivering his keynote address at the Indian Institute of Science(IISc) centenary conference on Monday, Nobel prize winner Sydney Brenner asked scientists to start ‘reading’ the human genome. “Nobody has actually read the human genome. I mean, computers have processed the human genome, but we all know computers are stupid,” he said.
The human genome is a sequence of three billion chemical base pairs represented by the letters A, C, G and T, denoting the chemicals that make up the DNA, the building block of life. To get an idea, if the human genome is compiled in books, it would be equivalent to 200 volumes of books of 1000 pages each.
Dr Brenner revealed that he had started reading the human genome about a year back, and said: “It is a remarkable text. There are lots of things that computers have missed by just scanning the data.” Sequencing the genome, according to him, is like sending a man to the moon. “Sending man to the moon is the easy bit, getting him back is the tough one. Similarly, getting the sequence is the easy bit, understanding what the sequence means is the difficult bit,” he added.
He called upon the young students of the institute not to be seduced by fields such as systems biology, where producing data has become a ‘substitute for thinking.’ “There is a crisis in all sciences these days. We are drowning in a sea of data, and yet we are thirsty. Science today rewards only those who collect and distribute data. There is no reward for those who organise the data and theorise based on it,” he said.
Dr Brenner was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2002, along with H. Robert Horvitz and John E. Sulston for their discoveries concerning genetic regulation of organ development and programmed cell death.
QUOTE-UNQUOTE
* I once asked a Buddhist “what do you mean by mountains have life. I told him mountains don’t have a DNA, you can’t clone a mountain!”
* Mathematics is the art of the perfect, physics is the art of the optimal and biology is the art of the satisfactory.
* I once attended a conference of synthetic biologists. I have to tell you that the biologists were real.
* New kinds of biology such as systems biology or synthetics biology are emerging these days. These are what I would call a low-input, high- throughput, no-output biology.