Incoming links: Craig Venter
100 Greatest Discoveries by the Discovery Channel (2004-2005) Updated 2024-12-15 +Created 1970-01-01
Hosted by Bill Nye.
Physics topics:
- Galileo: objects of different masses fall at the same speed, hammer and feather experiment
- Newton: gravity, linking locally observed falls and the movement of celestial bodies
- TODO a few more
- superconductivity, talk only at Fermilab accelerator, no re-enactment even...
- quark, interview with Murray Gell-Mann, mentions it was "an off-beat field, one wasn't encouraged to work on that". High level blablabla obviously.
- fundamental interactions, notably weak interaction and strong interaction, interview with Michio Kaku. When asked "How do we know that the weak force is there?" the answer is: "We observe radioactive decay with a Geiger counter". Oh, come on!
biology topics:
- Leeuwenhoek microscope and the discovery of microorganisms, and how pond water is not dead, but teeming with life. No sample of course.
- 1831 Robert Brown cell nucleus in plants, and later Theodor Schwann in tadpoles. This prepared the path for the idea that "all cells come from other cells", and the there seemed to be an unifying theme to all life: the precursor to DNA discoveries. Re-enactment, yay.
- 1971 Carl Woese and the discovery of archaea
Genetics:
- Mendel. Reenactment.
- 1909 Thomas Hunt Morgan with Drosophila melanogaster. Reenactment. Genes are in Chromosomes. He observed that a trait was linked to sex, and it was already known that sex was related to chromosomes.
- 1935 George Beadle and the one gene one enzyme hypothesis by shooting X-rays at bread mold
- 1942 Barbara McClintock, at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
- 1952 Hershey–Chase experiment. Determined that DNA is what transmits genetic information, not protein, by radioactive labelling both protein and DNA in two sets of bacteriophages. They observed that only the DNA radioactive material was passed forward.
- Crick Watson
- messenger RNA, no specific scientist, too many people worked on it, done partially with bacteriophage experiments
- 1968 Nirenberg genetic code
- 1972 Hamilton O. Smith and the discovery of restriction enzymes by observing that they were part of anti bacteriophage immune-system present in bacteria
- alternative splicing
- RNA interference
- Human Genome Project, interview with Craig Venter.
Medicine:
- blood circulation
- anesthesia
- X-ray
- germ theory of disease, with examples from Ignaz Semmelweis and Pasteur
- 1796 Edward Jenner discovery of vaccination by noticing that cowpox cowpox infected subjects were immune
- vitamin by observing scurvy and beriberi in sailors, confirmed by Frederick Gowland Hopkins on mice experiments
- Fleming, Florey and Chain and the discovery of penicillin
- Prontosil
- diabetes and insulin
As mentioned by Craig Venter in 100 Greatest Discoveries by the Discovery Channel (2004-2005), the main outcomes of the project were:
- it established the ballpark number of human genes
- showed that human genomes are very similar across individuals.
Important predecessors:
Founded by Craig Venter by joining up other existing institutes.
Has some good mentions, but often leaves you wanting more details of how certain things happened, especially the early days stuff.
Does however paint a good picture of several notable employees, and non-search projects from the early 2000's including:
- the cook dude
- porn cookie guy
- the unusual IPO process
Paints a very positive picture of the founders. It is likely true. They gave shares generously to early employees. Tried to allow the more general public to buy from IPO, by using a bidding scheme, rather than focusing on the big bankers as was usual.
The introduction mentions that Google is very interested in molecular biology and mining genetics data, much like Ciro Santilli! Can't find external references however...
Two of the most compelling areas that Google and its founders are quietly working on are the promising fields of molecular biology and genetics. Millions of genes in combination with massive amounts of biological and scientific data are an excellent match for the Google search engine, the tremendous database the company has in place, and its immense computing power. Already, Google has downloaded a map of the human genome and is working closely with biologist Dr. Craig Venter and other leaders in genetics on scientific projects that may lead to important breakthroughs in science, medicine, and health. In other words, we may be heading toward a time when people can google their own genes.
The book gives good highlight as to why Google became big: search was just an incredibly computationally intensive task. From very early days, Largey were already making up their own somewhat custom compute systems from very early days, which naturally led into Google custom hardware later on. Google just managed to pull ahead on the reinvest revenue into hardware loop, and no one ever caught them back. This feels more the case than e.g. with Amazon, which notoriously had to buy off dozens of competitors to clear the way.
Cover of The Google Story
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