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<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial><SPAN class=750281905-27102010>Hey, cool. A
local researcher claims he has a software simulation of a cell. He is
giving a free lecture on it Thursday afternoon in Palo Alto. If anyone is
in the hood and wants to meet up there, we can go make a sooooooshi run
afterwards, brutally devour the raw beasts to the brink of extinction.
Here's the write-up:</SPAN></FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV>The target of our research is a fundamental milestone in biology: to build
a computational model that can simulate a complete life cycle of a single cell,
taking into account all genes. We will describe our recent efforts to build a
model which can track all biological processes, including for example DNA
replication, RNA transcription and regulation, protein synthesis, metabolism and
cell division, in the smallest known free-living organism, Mycoplasma
genitalium. We will demonstrate that this whole-cell model can be used to
determine the effect of genomic and environmental perturbations on cell
behavior, and therefore to pursue critically important questions which have
never been addressed before. We are currently creating a web-based platform
which will be open-access and open-source, in order to enable these tools and
methods to be broadly applied.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial><SPAN class=750281905-27102010>And here's his
street cred:</SPAN></FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV>Dr. Covert is an Assistant Professor of Bioengineering at Stanford
University. He has a Ph.D., Bioengineering with specialization in
Bioinformatics, from the University of California, San Diego (2003) and a B.S.,
Chemical Engineering, Brigham Young University (1997). In 2004-2006, Dr. Covert
held a Postdoctoral Fellowship with the Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation,
and in 2003 was First Graduate of the Bioinformatics Program, University of
California, San Diego. In 1991 - 1997 he had the Ezra Taft Benson Presidential
Scholarship at Brigham Young University.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><SPAN class=750281905-27102010><FONT size=2 face=Arial>So this Mormon guy
with the secretive sounding name will see if he can convince us he has found the
holy grail of computational biology. I sure hope he has done
it. If so, we can write sims that work on other cells, and then can create
networks to simulate multicelled beasts, then, given enough computing power,
perhaps provided by harnessing the idle processor cycles that YOU are so
egregiously WASTING right now, we can eventually simulate evolution, which
would sim us from protobonobos to humans and right on past the present day,
and lead eventually to a singularity.</FONT></SPAN></DIV>
<DIV><SPAN class=750281905-27102010><FONT size=2
face=Arial></FONT></SPAN> </DIV>
<DIV><SPAN class=750281905-27102010><FONT size=2
face=Arial>spike</FONT></SPAN></DIV>
<DIV><SPAN class=750281905-27102010><FONT size=2
face=Arial></FONT></SPAN> </DIV>
<DIV><SPAN class=750281905-27102010><FONT size=2
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