Craig Venter, rest in peace.

Craig Venter

Craig Venter died on April 29, less than six months shy of his 80th birthday. This biologist revolutionized genomics research with two major achievements:

·         Deciphering the human genome. The Human Genome Project, whose scientific director was Francis Collins, was launched in 1990 by a multinational consortium with huge funding and the support of several governments. Its goal was to decipher in 15 years all the genes in human DNA. In 1998, eight years later, Craig Venter founded Celera Corporation and decided to apply the shotgun sequencing method, which he had developed, to decipher the human genome in parallel with the Human Genome Project, but much faster and with far less funding. His efforts culminated successfully, as in 2000 Venter and Collins jointly announced the success of both projects, several years ahead of schedule, and presented partial results, which were completed in 2003.

The Fifth Level of Evolution

The theory of evolution is well established by scientific evidence, but is far from explaining everything. Some puzzles remain pending whose resolution does not seem to be immediate:

• The origin of life. We do not know how, when and where it happened. There are many theories, but none has been proven and are very difficult to prove, because the origin of life, rather than a scientific fact, is a historical fact. It is not enough if we were able to reproduce it in the laboratory, it’s necessary to find documentary evidence that this is how it happened, not otherwise. It’s very likely that these tests cannot be found, because the paleontological traces of the origin of life have surely been lost.
• The mystery of the change in level. Throughout the history of life on Earth, living things have gone through several successive levels:

The Library of Babel and the digits of Pi

One of the most famous stories by Jorge Luis Borges is The Library of Babel (La Biblioteca de Babel). This library contains all possible books. For this statement to make sense, we must specify the definition of a book. For Borges, each book is made of one million three hundred and twelve thousand characters, chosen among all the possible permutations of that length and built with a set of 25 basic characters (the space, 22 letters, and two punctuation marks).

The number of books in the Library is huge, for the number of permutations of a certain number of symbols grows according to the factorial of their length. The factorial of a number N is obtained by multiplying together all the natural numbers from 1 to N:

N!=1×2×3×...×N

The result of this operation grows disproportionately. Thus, 5! = 120; 10! = 3,628,800; 100!>9×10¹⁵⁷. The number of books in the Library of Babel does not grow so quickly, because each book contains many repetitions of the symbols, which decreases the number of possibilities, but consider what will be the factorial of 1,312,000, if the factorial of 100 is a number with 157 digits.

The number of books in the Library of Babel is huge, but it is not infinite. That set of books contains all the possible chains of that length, whether or not they make sense. But that means that it contains all the books that have ever been written; all that could ever be written; all translations of each book to all the existing or possible languages​​...

Has research on the human genome stopped?

We all know the Human Genome project, officially launched in 1990, although it had been working partially since 5 years earlier. Its purpose was to identify and decipher all the genes in human DNA in 15 years. The project was completed in 2003, within the foreseen term, although in the year 2000 partial results were published. From the scientific point of view, the project was a success, but perhaps for a part of the public it can look like a failure, as the exaggerated expectations aroused by some media have not been fulfilled.

The media hailed the project as the door to a new medical revolution. Among the revolutionary applications announced were: gene therapy to prevent or correct genetic diseases; premature diagnosis of actual or potential diseases, even from the embryonic stage; or personalized medicine, which would adapt treatments of diseases to the ailing person. Possible dangers were also discussed, such as the manipulation of human embryos to adapt their genes to the wishes of parents or dictatorial governments; or the use of genetic data to select personnel, or to grant or deny insurance and credit...