{"id":240,"date":"2006-03-07T18:46:23","date_gmt":"2006-03-07T08:46:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/?p=240"},"modified":"2006-03-07T18:46:23","modified_gmt":"2006-03-07T08:46:23","slug":"junk-dna-and-the-design-of-living-things","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/junk-dna-and-the-design-of-living-things\/","title":{"rendered":"Junk DNA and the design of living things"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This is a plug for a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.brisscience.org\/\">free public lecture (with free drinks and nibblies after)<\/a> about junk DNA and the role it plays in biology, by Professor John Mattick of the University of Queensland.  It&#8217;s to be held 6:30 pm, Monday March 13 in the Judith Wright Center, Fortitude Valley, Brisbane.<\/p>\n<p> (The lecture is the first of a monthly series to be known as <a href=\"http:\/\/www.brisscience.org\/\">BrisScience<\/a>.  My partner, Jen Dodd, is running the series.)<\/p>\n<p>The topic of the talk is really interesting.  One of the biggest problem in modern biology is how we go from DNA to fully fledged living beings.  It&#8217;s pretty well understood how we go from DNA to the proteins which form the building blocks for living beings.  But that&#8217;s a far cry from a full understanding: knowing how to put together a steel girder doesn&#8217;t imply that you can build the Eiffel tower or the Empire State building.  Figuring out the link between DNA and the large-scale structure (the architectural design, if you like) seems to be very poorly understood.<\/p>\n<p>The speaker, John Mattick, has some really interesting (and controversial) ideas about how this happens.  He thinks the so-called junk DNA in the human genome (pieces of the DNA which don&#8217;t code for proteins) carries the information about the design.    As an outsider it&#8217;s hard for me to judge how successful the ideas are, but they&#8217;re certainly getting some attention: his work was named by <em>Science<\/em> magazine in its list of the ten most significant breakthroughs of 2004, and he had an article about it in <em>Scientific American<\/em> a couple of years back. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This is a plug for a free public lecture (with free drinks and nibblies after) about junk DNA and the role it plays in biology, by Professor John Mattick of the University of Queensland. It&#8217;s to be held 6:30 pm, Monday March 13 in the Judith Wright Center, Fortitude Valley, Brisbane. (The lecture is the&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/junk-dna-and-the-design-of-living-things\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Junk DNA and the design of living things<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-240","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-3","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/240","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=240"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/240\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=240"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=240"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=240"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}