| 2004-07-13 18:00:03
| #virus from 2004-07-13 18:00:00 (showing messages 1-30) Bookmark the permanent url.
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| 18:00:03 | prometheus | :) |
| 18:00:09 | localroger | That's the USPTO for you. |
| 18:00:31 | Lucifer | First, does biotech have a future? |
| 18:01:04 | Lucifer | Are we now in the Century of Biotech? |
| 18:01:45 | WW | We can hope so. Once the smirking chimp is gone that is. |
| 18:01:47 | Lucifer | Can we expect a biotech bubble in the market? |
| 18:02:06 | WW | absolutely |
| 18:02:11 | prometheus | There have been a few in the past. |
| 18:02:16 | Lucifer | Are the cures for all the major diseases just around the corner? |
| 18:02:18 | localroger | Lots of really exciting stuff is happening in interdisciplinary fields. Biology plus physics, biology plus information science. Traditional medicine alone is yesterday's news. |
| 18:02:35 | Eliezer | Eliezer (~sentience@[death to spam].c-24-99-110-71.atl.client2.attbi.com) has joined #virus |
| 18:02:56 | prometheus | The integration of biotech and information technology is creating powerful tools. |
| 18:03:15 | Lucifer | * Lucifer welcomes Eliezer |
| 18:03:24 | WW | More likely just around our kids' corner's -- " Are the cures for all the major diseases just around the corner?" |
| 18:03:26 | prometheus | You have your -omics disciplines genomics, proteomics, transcriptonomics.... |
| 18:03:48 | localroger | Prometheus, I see all that merging into one big uber-field. |
| 18:04:16 | Lucifer | Biology is certainly impacting information science (along the lines of genetic algorithms and the like), but it appears now that info science is impacting biology to an ever greater degree |
| 18:04:33 | prometheus | That is quite likely, localroger. |
| 18:04:50 | Lucifer | How would the merged field be different? |
| 18:04:59 | localroger | Lucifer, yes, originally people conceived of computers as a way to duplicate what living things do but they actually do something very different. Now computers are informing us how living things operate. |
| 18:05:14 | prometheus | Without information technology biology would be proceeding at a snail's pace. |
| 18:05:54 | Lucifer | Any hope of the protein folding problem being solved computationally? |
| 18:06:00 | prometheus | It is difficult enough to marshal the current information with available algorithms. |
| 18:06:05 | localroger | And living things turn out to be as much huge information processing systems as they are chemical factories. |
| 18:06:39 | prometheus | Protein folding is a difficult problem. Presumably with enough crystal structures being solved we will have the data to help us along. |
| 18:07:01 | WW | protein folding (receptor-key) problems will probably be solved in the interim with LOTS of transgenic lab rats, THEN computationally |
| 18:07:10 | Lucifer | Would you say that everything interesting can be viewed as an information processing system? |
| 18:07:28 | localroger | Well you can argue that the universe is an information processing system...I'd call the universe pretty interesting :-) |
| 18:07:37 | prometheus | DNA is the code of life. I work the code. |
| 18:08:12 | prometheus | Except I am debugging evolutions endproducts with no documentation. |
