Ignorance and Genomics

I’ve had sometimes the thought that in this era we are almost on the edge of science and there will be no ground shaking discoveries in the future because we almost understood most of the core stuff. I know it’s illogical and that most of the people in most eras thought the same. But still I know this and I cannot deny that these thought have crossed my mind.

What happened is that I’m studying genomics and I have a project as well that after finding some important genes in “Glioblastoma Multiforme” a type of brain cancers we try to see the functionality of these genes. And then I was shocked that the majority of genes we don’t know really what they do. They are just named and we have some statistical data that they are more active or less active with certain types of diseases and nothing more. Moreover the named genes (around 20,000) ones constitute just around 2% of the human genome. Even the biggest efforts that are happening these days to understand more what’s happening in the those 2% or even the rest of DNA are shorthanded in terms of our present capabilities. I think we will need a radically different methodology to be able to understand the complex machinery of DNA.

Imagine this is in our core. This is in our core understanding of ourselves and we are still facing difficulties to get a simple understanding of how it works. We didn’t even ask the question why yet. Let’s end simply with Einstein’s saying: “As our circle of knowledge expands, so does the circumference of darkness surrounding it.”