[extropy-chat] Genome: A great wave of knowledge is soon to crash our shores

[Giu1i0 Pri5c0]

National Review: The human genome has about three billion "base pairs"
of these fundamental chemicals. (An example of a base pair would be
GT. The G lives on one side of the "double helix" you have heard
about, the T on the other, connected by one of the bonds that hold the
helix together.) Even a humble bacterium has about four million or so
base pairs. That is a lot of data. To get any sense out of it, in
fact, you need to engage in a newish discipline called "data mining."
This wave of knowledge, this great wave, is building up in
laboratories and research institutes all around the world. Sooner or
later the wave will come roaring in to crash on our beach. When that
happens, a lot of stuff will get swept away -  a lot of social dogma,
a lot of wishful thinking, a lot of ignorant punditry and
self-righteous posturing, and probably some law and tradition and
religion and social cohesion as well. There is, however, no stopping
the wave.
Or rather, we might stop it here in the USA, but then it would just go
crashing ashore somewhere else - in China, or Japan, or India -
somewhere with a different set of attitudes, a quite different kind of
wishful thinking.
Dragged forward by cold science, which doesn't care what we think or
wish for, we are headed into some interesting times.
http://www.nationalreview.com/derbyshire/derbyshire200411220823.asp