Gene Machine: The Race to Decipher the Secrets of the Ribosome

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What raised this book to four stars for me was the mention of a possible other reason the third codon in DNA is usually redundant is the flexibilty it gives in toggling molecule parts. PreviouslyI had just latched onto the redundancy being protective of mutations, given most mutations occur at the third codon.

Ramakrishnan never bragged about his abilities and always spoke very respectfully of his fellow scientists. However, some chapters did feel a bit long-stretched, particularly when mentioning many of his graduate students and postdocs throughout the years and then referring to them by their first name, which might confuse some readers. Jonathan was born in 1963 in New Haven, Connecticut, to a family of entrepreneurs. He earned a B.S. in chemical engineering from Carnegie Mellon and an M.S., M.Phil, and Ph.D. in biology from Yale. Rothberg is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, the Connecticut Academy of Science and Engineering, is a trustee of Carnegie Mellon. and an Adjunct Professor of Genetics at the Yale. This book presents some valid advice to novices in scientific research. The author asks them not to be hesitant to ask questions, however basic it might be. He justifies it by claiming that no question is too stupid to ask if you want to know the answer. It is also a bare necessity for present-day researchers to belong to the top-line institutes and laboratories. Advanced science has now become a team effort transcending national frontiers and continental boundaries. The members of the theoretical and testing facilities should be known to each other, otherwise it would be difficult to obtain and manage precious time allocated for using sophisticated machines. Because electron microscopy was in its infancy during most of this work, this meant that an older technique, x-ray crystallography, was the main tool used to decipher the structure of the ribosome. But x-ray crystallography created fuzzier, less detailed images than electron microscopy, so this led to the field being informally known as “blobology”.We are recruiting for a Machine Learning specialist to join our Oxford Martin School funded project on rapid detection of antimicrobial resistance. More information here and here. The ribosome, as you put it, lies at the crossroads of life itself because it forms a crucial link between genes and proteins. But since the double helix was discovered, it’s taken several decades for us to understand the ribosome and how it works. Is it merely because of the molecule’s complexity? While still at Curagen Rothberg realized that better technology was needed to make genetic medicine a reality. When Noah, his second child, was born in 1999, he had to be sent to the neonatal intensive care unit because of breathing troubles. Noah turned out to be fine, but Rothberg was frustrated that doctors didn't have a rapid test to ensure his son didn't have an inherited disease. Sitting in the hospital waiting room, he thought about the similarities between gene sequencing and microelectronics. Existing DNA sequencers, he reasoned, used clunky technology akin to computers based on vacuum tubes. He thought he could do better. He infuriated his wife by spending most of his paternity leave working on the new technology that used firefly enzymes to read DNA with light.

Rothberg's machine could change all that through speed of analysis and wider dissemination of tools. He says that only 400 labs are currently doing this sort of genomics, and he wants the PGM to open the field to 4,000 research groups that are not participating. That will multiply the number of minds working on genetics problems and unleash lots of experiments that now languish on the sidelines. "I can create a fanatical user base, and people will start coming up with more and more applications for the technology," says Rothberg. "The demand is going to be enormous," predicts UC, Davis researcher Jonathan Eisen. "You're going to see a huge number of people buying it." George Church--a Harvard gene researcher, sequencing pioneer and Ion Torrent adviser--predicts the PGM will be "like an iPad" for geneticists. Everyone will want it "big-time, even if there are warts." Mirjam Kummerlin has won a prestigious Boehringer Ingelheim Fonds fellowship to join us for her PhD/DPhil. Congratulations, and welcome to the group! It is an absolutely beautiful machine," says Randy Scott, chairman of the cancer-gene tester Genomic Health. He adds that his company may switch to the Ion Torrent machines if they live up to their potential. "Jonathan has done a great job at staying ahead of the curve."Like Ditlev, the other Scandinavian I’ve had in the lab, she was intelligent, organized, pleasant, and cheerful and just generally well rounded. It made me wonder if Scandinavians are doing something right in the way they bring up their children, or whether taking them from dark Scandinavia and placing them farther south, even if only as far south as Cambridge, made them particularly cheerful and free of any Bergman-like angst." What Malvolio said in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night equally applies to Nobels: some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them."

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Personally, I analyzed that Venki had three things working for him in his path for Nobel. 1. He made some really good decisions, sometimes completely outside the box. 2. He had excellent team- from his lab’s director to his students and they worked relentlessly. 3. He was at the right place at right time. Sometimes, the simplest questions are the most difficult to answer. One such is that of how many Indians have won the Nobel Prize so far. The figure can be as high as twelve, if you count Ronald Ross, Rudyard Kipling, Dalai Lama, V S Naipaul and Mother Teresa. Some or of Indian origin, or been born in India or left India too early in their career. Venkatraman Ramakrishnan was a graduate of Physics from Baroda but immediately migrated to the US for further studies. He won the Nobel in Chemistry in 2009 for ribosome research along with two others. Ramakrishnan’s research strengthened our understanding of the fundamental processes of life and provided a clue to the evolution of modern species of life. This book is a combination of popular science and an autobiography with a seamless blending of the two. His life is devoted to research and learning. evaluate evidence showing correlations between genetic and environmental factors and various forms of cancer Venki Ramakrishnan shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for solving the structure of the ribosome. He is a senior scientist at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, UK, and is the current president of the Royal Society, London. The book is written almost like a thriller involving a race with fierce competitors, where the personal story is interwoven with the scientific story. That’s not the most obvious way to write a popular science book. Why did you choose this narrative? And when did you arrive at it – was it something you always wanted to do or did it evolve?