[Lilug] LILUG meeting tomorrow

[Lee Wilbur]

A friend of mine who was written up in the Wall Street Journal earlier this year.  He’s passionate about the science and should be a good speaker.

He did just confirm with me and said he’d confirm with Matt later today.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/instead-of-computer-code-plant-hackers-tinker-with-genetics-1453254509

(Apparently, the WSJ has a paywall once the article reaches 6 months – it was free when I looked it up in July and sent it to the LILUG gov, if memory serves… now we’re beyond the 6 month mark and you can only read it if you subscribe).

-Lee



From: Lilug [mailto:lilug-bounces at lists.lilug.org] On Behalf Of Robert Phelps
Sent: Monday, August 8, 2016 12:17 PM
To: LILUG Mailing List <lilug at lists.lilug.org>
Subject: Re: [Lilug] LILUG meeting tomorrow

Good topic.  Who's the speaker?

Wanted to follow up my last post with a perhaps entirely bogus overview of the developmental aspects that relate to your interest.

You now understand that the map from DNA-IN-ONE-CELL => DNA-IN-NEXT-CELL-GENERATED-BY-THAT-CELL is controlled (in part, there's much more that we're learning) by histone-related exposure of regions of DNA in the parent cell.

There appears to be a lot of significant signaling that goes on that determines what is exposed or what is not exposed, and from there, what happens with other parts of the machinery that encodes protein that, among other things, determines whether a particular cell will divide.

You understand that some cells somehow wind up in an environment that will make a finger, some cells in an environment that will make T-Cells.  Some things are remarkably durable in organisms - the number of six fingered humans that are born that way is quite small - the number of humans who develop six fingers having been born with five fingers is, I speculate, likely much smaller.  T-Cells and other parts of the immune system differ from fingers in many ways - they do change quite remarkably based on their "environment."

If you get a chance, you may want to read about a recent paper where some people (I think a group in Texas and a group in Europe, Germany perhaps) did a very careful mapping of brain "regions" - where they were looking at large numbers of 'assayable' - things that could define regions.  Their approach dramatically up-numbered the count for brain regions.

This becomes helpful-useful in understanding sociopathy or psychopathological behavior.  You are aware that some heritable traits involve large numbers of "genes" - possibly coming into play and "expressing" at different times during development, where development and expression is known to involve chemical changes of all kinds that  can be responses to events that initiate outside the organism.

I haven't looked directly for genetic/epigenetic literature on the pathological anti-social behavior that interest you.  I tend to want to think things through on my own before wading in.  My excuse is that I'm more likely to appreciate the work, etc.  It's also possible that I'm just lazy.

I'm really very pleased that you've taken an interest in this subject.  More CS and engineering people should be exposed to science and scientific research - for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is that you and may other people are very talented and can make contributions to the science if you have the time, patience and get lucky (luck is a big part of life, for better or worse).

It's a shame that the Saopolsky lecture series is gone from the Internet Archive.  That because some of what he talks about apropos the relationship between the endocrine system and the nervous system is something that you would enjoy and something that I think would broaden your understanding of the exciting challenge you've set for yourself.

More later.  I'm repeating myself.  If you've gone this far, who is the speaker and how'd you find him?

On Mon, Aug 8, 2016 at 11:01 AM, odinson <odinson at warcloud.net<mailto:odinson at warcloud.net>> wrote:
Hi All

        Next LILUG meeting is tomorrow, 8/9 at 8pm at CSHL Woodbury campus.  Topic is open source genetics, BUT, our guest speaker has not confirmed with me.  Soooo, it's possibly lightning talks.  No worries, I think we're ready for anything right?

        I'll post here if anything changes.  See you tomorrow.

Matt

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Matthew Newhall, M.A.Newhall at warcloud.net<mailto:M.A.Newhall at warcloud.net>
A.S. in Computer Science, SUNY Farmingdale
President and founder of LILUG;  president at lilug.org<mailto:president at lilug.org>, http://www.lilug.org
My theory; Psychopaths precede the conscience, http://civgene.matthewnewhall.com
My maker blog; "The modness", http://themodness.wordpress.com
Scifi book; "Thicker Than Blood"  http://www.thickerthanbloodthebook.com
Giselle's husband, Sebastian and Maxximus's father.
http://www.warcloud.net/~odinson/us/
"If we win another such battle against the Romans, we will be completely lost."
        -- King Pyrrhus of Epirus
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