Incoming links: Human Genome Project
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
Most of these are going to be Whole-genome sequencing of some model organism:
- 2003: Human Genome Project (3 Gbp)en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole_genome_sequencing#History lists them all. Basically th big "firsts" all happened in the 1990s and early 2000s.
This is the most plausible way of obtaining a full connectome looking from 2020 forward. Then you'd observe the slices with an electron microscope + appropriate Staining. Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom (2014) really opened Ciro Santilli's eyes to this possibility.
Once this is done for a human, it will be one of the greatest milestone of humanities, coparable perhaps to the Human Genome Project. BUt of course, privacy issues are incrediby pressing in this case, even more than in the human genome project, as we would essentially be able to read the brain of the person after their death.
As of 2022, the Drosophila connectome had been almost fully extracted.
This is also a possible path towards post-mortem brain reading.
The premise that "we can't make AGI, but we know enough about the human brain to upload on to a computer" is flawed. Edit: after reading Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom (2014), Ciro Santilli was convinced otherwise. What is flawed is of course just the "extracting connectome with macroscopic probes part". A post mortem connectome extraction with microtome is much more believable. But of course they weren't going to show fake slices of Jonny Depp's brain, are they? Famous actor bodies are sacred! What a huge lost opportunity. On the other hand however, the scale of the first connectome extraction would be arguably too huge to be undertaken by a random pair of rogue researchers. The same would also likely apply to any first time human brain connectome. It would much more likely be a huge public effort, much like the Human Genome Project.
But this film does have the merit of exploring how an AGI might act to take over the AGI might act to take over the world once created, notably by creating its own physical research laboratory. Though it doesn't feel likely that it could go under the radar for 2 years given the energetic requirements of the research. Even the terrorists find it before the FBI!
I also wish they had shown the dildo (or more likely, direct stimulation!) computerized Jonny Depp used to use with his wife before he managed to re-synthesized his body. But you know, 18+ would cut too much profits. Ah, what a shame.
Can You Prove You're Self Aware? in the big lab scene from Transcendence (2014)
. Source.