Perfect Ratio

Why call a blog the "Perfect Ratio"? I don't know, maybe I'm talking about The golden ratio of Leornardo Da Vinci fame, or maybe it's a perfect drink recipe; two parts grapefruit juice, one part Vodka. My definition seeks to look at topics that interest me, this is a broad group mind you. Adam Smith would be quite upset with me as I seek to broaden my horizons by avoiding specialization. Blame it on attention deficit disorder, an overactive mind or simply a lack of focus, the topics covered here will seek to satisfy the reductionist in me and cover areas I am interested in. Computer Security, Economics, Entrepreneurship and a whole host of other areas that I have yet to find....

While this site is mainly for my own reflection, please feel free to comment and make suggestions or recommend something that I may find interesting.

Thank you, and enjoy!

The Genome War

This book caught my eye while I was reading Jurvetson's blog. It's a totally fascinating read. This story for those unaware is a battle between Venter's company Celera and the NIH for who could sequence the Genome first. The cast of characters were all new to me, and a quick google for some of the big players returned big results. Gene Myers, a computational biologist originally from the University of Arizona, and now at Berkeley, played a huge role in the design of the algorithms responsible for the "whole genome shotgun technique." This was Celera's competitve advantage against the NIH's slow and steady yet supposedly accurate. Celeras technique could be compared to dumping an entire puzzle on the ground and then immediately assembling the pieces(genes) back into the puzzle. The NIH, used a slower piecemeal approach - comparing each part of the puzzle to all the pieces until a match was found. This technique, while accurate, was impossibly slow to compete with the Celera model. Heated debate ensued as the NIH scientists dismissed the whole genome shotgun approach as "not real science." Too bad for them, it panned out. I find Gene to be the most interesting of the group, probably because my interest lie more in the technology than the science, but also because I really feel like none of the fame bestowed upon Venter would have happened without him.

Some important definitions gleaned from the book here, with some help from Wikipedia:

cDNA or complimentary DNA, this is synthesized from mature mRNA.
mRNA is RNA that encodes and carries information from DNA to sites of protein synthesis
SNP or single nucleotide polymorphism is a DNA sequence variation, occurring when a single nucleotide: adenine (A), thymine (T), cytosine (C) or guanine (G) - in the genome is altered