diversity
In a previous post/comment I suggested that the genetic information about nowadays people and animals may be an important information to store on a long term basis.
In the comment I gave a rough estimation on how much computers would cost to capture DNA sequences, I did not include maintanance etc., i.e. the computation was only intended to give an faint idea about the costs. And of course one could also think about storing e.g. bones or the easy available hair, from which the DNA can be recovered.
The option should be voluntarily, but easily accessible to everyone, so that diversity is maintained. it should contain extra information, like geographical and birth/death-date and so on.
I put the suggestion here in a blog post in case people want to discuss.
November 7th, 2013 at 8:09 pm
merkwürdiges bild. da bekommt man eine ahnung was “beinstellen” bedeutet.
May 16th, 2015 at 10:16 am
Keep discussing Nad – other people make facts!
June 8th, 2015 at 5:46 pm
Bibi wrote:
There is not really a discussion here :) but anyways I am not sure wether such a DNA storage facility is a helpful thing per se, that is I could imagine that it could be helpful, but this depends also on the concrete realization, like storage for how long, what access policy, how well guarded, etc., etc. – a discussion might eventually sort out some of the questions.
In particular I think there are a lot of questions connected with how to deal with human DNA and the world is certainly only at the begin of this discussion and DNA storage is only a part of it and as you can see alone with storage a lot of questions arise. But I still think it is definitely necessary to discuss storage, last but not least because of all that DNA applications which are popping out everywhere.
Concerning the company you mentioned in your link: As far as I understood, they are (sofar) not sequencing the full genome, moreover I didn’t know about the company at the time of writing otherwise I very probably would have mentioned it. I have to say that I still don’t know much about the company. So like I have no real idea what their policies are for long-term storage and usage of the genomic data. It is clear though that providing people with their genetic information on a large scale will have an influence on the distribution of human genes. And like for the case of Genome engineering like with CRISPR/Cas this may get even faster and even more questionable. Thats by the way also why I wrote above “how well guarded” because I thought of the facility more as a kind of fallback option for the case of bad catastrophies (A bit like the undo button in many programming applications.) But of course it is not really clear how future generations might deal with the data. I guess I am not really up to having part of my genomic data build into some Frankensteinzombie.