Climate Change

This planet is an extremely complex and dynamic system of uncountable interacting elements.

There is a game called as "Life" which is most commonly implemented in C language. It basically creates a 2 dimensional array and "lights" up cells according to some few simple basic rules. However once the code is run, after some time extraordinarily complex patterns are seen and new patterns emerge. As if the code is living, the lit up cells are termed to be alive, hence the name Life.

Its the same with Earth, except that this planet is an infinite dimensional array, and a large number of incredibly complex rules govern interactions between the variables which light up the cells.

One feature of the game was that when the initial pattern changed the subsequent patterns changed drastically. Also the initial pattern decided whether the lit up cells will spread apart, dilute in concentration and die, or they will form other patterns which will be sustained.

Life appeared/arrived/started on this planet 3.2 billion years ago. Then around 2.4 billions years back photosynthesis appeared. And the sheer number of the cyanobacteria was enough to change the composition of the whole damn atmophere of this planet. The air turned poisonous with a new oxidising agent. Level of CO2 fell drastically, temperatures dropped. Climate Changed.

Present day Earth, same process is happening, inhabitants of the biosphere are playing with patterns and the outcome is bound to change the state of this planet and problem is we don't know where these changed pattern will lead to.

But my stand, as it has always been, on climate change is as follows: Cyanobacteria utilized the nutrients available to them to the fullest, in the process excreting Oxygen, which was at that time an extremely poisonous gas to other life forms, which were predominantly Anaerobes. This phenomena pushed anaerobes, which ruled the earth into such places such as seafloor, intestines and bottom of marshes. Today we are also utilizing the resources available to us to the fullest, and in the process we are excreting poisonous waste which is bound to affect the abiosphere and other life forms. However if cyanobacteria didn't stop why should we. This planet has always adjusted to whatever perturbations it encountered, that's how the system works, by simply following the rules. If the changed patterns cause some populations (maybe/hopefully Humans) to die off, well thats how this game of Life works. The rules just cant be changed.

P.s. This is my post as a contribution for the Blog Action Day cause of this year Climate Change. Cant say it furthers the cause, but i registered and so i blogged!! :)

The Computational Biologist Arrives.

Biology started off as a descriptive science. There was a lot of observation involved and description of observed data. That was the day of the Naturalist. He/She went afield with telescopes in hand or a magnifying lens perhaps and waited hours patiently for the glimpse of that rare species. With the classification of life into kingdom animalia and plantae, evolved the Botanist, concerned chiefly with plants, and the Zoologist, concerned chiefly with animals. Then one day Antonie van Leeuwenhoek directed his microscope to a spoiled food item and a whole new world of the microorganisms was discovered. As understanding about the variety of flora and fauna increased interest grew in the behavior of these organisms. This was still a descriptive science.

Observation of behavior lead to observation of other phenomena and Mendel was the first to explain the concept of heredity. I consider the time between the early 1900s to mid 1900s the golden age for biology. Not only was the structure of DNA, which by then was proven to be the information carrier, elucidated but also the mechanism of coding this information found out. This period saw the birth of the experimental biologist. No longer did the biologist have to roam about in the fields, he explained fundamental biological phenomena in the laboratory. However unlike the experimental physicist who first builds a hypothesis, and then designs experiments to verify it, the experimental biologist has no hypothesis. Instead the experimental biologist asks objective questions about a particular phenomena and then designs experiments which will give him the answers. He uses these answers to then explain the phenomena. However the tricks and tools of his trade were not refined and were unwieldy.

Then came the revolution called molecular biology. This science is predominantly tool and technology based. The molecular biologist again works differently than the experimental biologist. The molecular biologist generates data which he then analyses to come to his answers. As the technology of molecular biology matured, the molecular biologist soon started drowning in the flood of data, in stepped the Bioinformatician to the rescue.

The main job of the bioinformatician was to arrange the data in meaningful structures which could be made sense of by other biologists. Bioinformaticians soon became indispensable, especially with the advent of the Internet and its associated services. With the Human Genome Project and the subsequent easy availability of data in public databases, understanding of biology progressed by leaps and bounds.

However even with the advances in molecular biology techniques many questions remain unanswered. A new school of thought has emerged which argues that further understanding of biology will only take place if the whole organism is studied as a single system rather than understanding different phenomena independently. The Systems Biologist tries to take a broader view of the problem at hand. Unfortunately with the level of detail known today, multiple phenomena can be analysed only by the modern day computers. The number of variables involved is so high that the human brain cant analyse it.

This is when the computational biologist arrives. He is an expert in handling computers. The Computational biologist not only needs to understand the softwares being run on his machine but also the hardware that his machine is made up of. The computational biologist, infact, uses his machine as an extension of his own mental capacity to solve a problem. He is an expert in programming and biology at the same time. Computational Biology is the future of Biology which will solve problems of a global nature, where the whole organism is involved. This revolution might not come about overnight. The level of complexity known today is so much that even superfast computers take a lot of time to simulate a protein-protein interaction for a small time interval, as much as 1 day of computation to calculate a time interval of 1 pico sec. None the less trying to solve these problems experimentally is, in some cases impossible, and in other cases, not financially feasible, especially now that funding is so hard to come by. The Computational Biologist has definitely arrived on the scene and with advancement in computer hardware and software, tough biological problems will be tackled only by the Computational Biologist.

The inspiration for this article comes from:
http://www.geocities.com/letapk/physics3.html