"Kim Stanley Robinson - Forty Signs of Rain" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Kim Stanley)тАЬOkay,тАЭ he said now to Anna. тАЬIтАЩll put it in the hopper.тАЭ He closed the file and turned as if to check out something else. After Anna was gone, he pulled the jacket back up. тАЬMathematical and Algorithmic Analysis of Palindromic Codons as Predictors of a GeneтАЩs Protein Expression.тАЭ A proposal to fund continuing work on an algorithm for predicting which proteins any given gene would express. Very interesting. This was an assault on one of the fundamental mysteries, an unknown step in biology that presented a considerable blockage to any robust biotechnology. The three billion base pairs of the human genome encoded along their way some hundred thousand genes; and most of these genes contained instructions for the assembly of one or more proteins, the basic building blocks of organic chemistry and life itself. But which genes expressed which proteins, and how exactly they did it, and why certain genes would create more than one protein, or different proteins in different circumstancesтАФall these matters were very poorly understood, or completely mysterious. This ignorance made much of biotechnology an endless and very expensive matter of trial and error. A key to any part of the mystery could be very valuable. Frank scrolled down the pages of the application with practiced speed. Yann Pierzinski, Ph.D. in biomath, Caltech. Still doing postdoc work with his thesis advisor there, a man Frank had come to consider a bit of a credit hog, if not worse. It was interesting, then, that Pierzinski had gone down to Torrey Pines to work on a temporary contract, for a bioinformatics researcher whom Frank didnтАЩt know. Perhaps that had been a bid to escape the advisor. But now he was back. Frank dug into the substantive part of the proposal. The algorithm set was one Pierzinski had been algorithm, in effect. Frank considered the idea, operation by operation. This was his real expertise; this was what had interested him from childhood, when the puzzles solved had been simple ciphers. He had always loved this work, and now perhaps more than ever, offering as it did a complete escape from consciousness of himself. Why he might want to make that escape remained moot; howsoever it might be, when he came back he felt refreshed, as if finally he had been in a good place. He also liked to see patterns emerge from the apparent randomness of the world. This was why he had recently taken such an interest in sociobiology; he had hoped there might be algorithms to be found there which would crack the code of human behavior. So far that quest had not been very satisfactory, mostly because so little in human behavior was susceptible to a controlled experiment, so no theory could even be tested. That was a shame. He badly wanted some clarification in that realm. At the level of the four chemicals of the genome, howeverтАФin the long dance of cytosine, adenine, guanine, and thymineтАФmuch more seemed to be amenable to mathematical explanation and experiment, with results that could be conveyed to other scientists, and put to use. One could test PierzinskiтАЩs ideas, in other words, and find out if they worked. He came out of this trance of thought hungry, and with a full bladder. He felt quite sure there was some real potential in the work. And that was giving him some ideas. He got up stiffly, went to the bathroom, came back. It was midafternoon already. If he left soon he would be able to hack through the traffic to his apartment, eat quickly, then go out to Great Falls. By then |
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