DNA seen through the eyes of a coder

Bert Hubert:

It is far harder to ‘patch the running executable’, as any programmer can attest. It is just like that with the genome. To change a running copy (‘a human’), you need to edit each and every relevant copy of the gene you want to patch.

For many years, medical science has tried to patch people with SCID, or ‘Severe Combined Immunodefeciency’, which is a very nasty disease which in effect disables the immune system - leading to very ill patients. It has been clear for quite a while now which letters in the DNA need to be fixed in order to cure these people.

Many attempts where made to patch running people, using viruses that insert new DNA into living organisms, but this proved to be very hard. The genome is guarded far too well for such a simple approach to work - cells guard their code better than Microsoft!

Fascinating piece.

(via news.yc)