Biology's Big Bang

Two pieces on the same topic from The Economist of June 14, 2007.

• "The RNA revolution: Biology's Big Bang"

What physics was to the 20th century, biology will be to the 21st—and RNA will be a vital part of it

• "RNA: Really New Advances"

  Molecular biology is undergoing its biggest shake-up in 50 years, as a hitherto little-regarded chemical called RNA acquires an unsuspected significance

The Economist suggests that molecular biology is undergoing a paradigm shift, especially since biologists have discovered over the past few years that RNA plays a much more extensive and important role in cells than had been previously understood, and that a lot of DNA codes for RNA that is not used in producing proteins but rather plays roles in the modification of gene activity and metabolism. Further, it suggests that the economic and social impact of advances in biology in the 21st century will be comparable to that in the 20th century from advances in physics (electification, radio communication, electronics, telephony, internal combustion engines, atomic energy, etc.).

It occurs to me how important the development of computers and computer control is in the new biology. Gene sequencers would not be practical were they not computer controlled. So too, the techniques for gene sequencing depend heavily of massive computing power to discover how the tens of thousands of sequenced pieces of the genes fit together to form chromosomes. We now know there are more than 20,000 protein encoding genes in man, and comparable numbers in other species. There appear to be even more RNA molecules that are coded in the DNA. Just keeping track of 50,000 coding units in the DNA requires computers. Experiments to screen the activity of the many alleles of each gene in thousand of subjects to implicate genetic causes of disease and behavior also is only possible due to computer power.

Comparably, brain scanning seems to be opening extremely important windows on cognition, but tomography too is computation intensive.

Bio-informatics may be among the most important technological bases of the newly evolving paradigms in biology!