AA: If I hear you right, you're talking about genes that not only control, say, the production of tissues and that kind of thing, but genes that turn on other genes.

	"Everything we do here goes out on the Internet every night."

LANDER: The remarkable thing about the genes is, they don't just make the physical components. They have to make all the instructions. The genes have to flip the switches, be the switches, and then be the things that are finally constructed. Some genes have primarily regulatory roles. Their job is to turn on other genes. There are some genes that just make a structural protein, a collagen in your skin, or something like that, but it's some elaborate Rube Goldberg machine.

AA: Are you going to actually understand before too long how it all breaks down?

LANDER: Well, I tend to be pretty realistic about this stuff. I'm incredibly excited about it, but we now have the parts list of the Boeing 777. It doesn't mean we know how to put all the parts together. It doesn't mean we know how the airplane flies. That said, having the parts list transforms your whole picture. People are going way beyond sequencing to start asking questions like, "tell me every gene that's turned on in a lung cell, or in a lung cell when you've abused it in some way." People are beginning to build catalogues of when each part is getting used, and inferring what's connected to what - the thigh bone's connected to the knee bone - on a molecular level.

Information Explosion

AA: Sometimes you think, wouldn't it be interesting to go back 500 years when they didn't know such and such? You only had to go back to this morning. It's happening so fast.

	"Evolution has spent 3.5 billion years getting this code together- who am I to say it's not worth reading the end of chromosome 16?"

LANDER: Oh yeah. Molecular biologists are very tempted to say, "let me just take a vacation for a year and come back when the tools are going to be so much better." But of course, that's been true every single year for the last 30 years of molecular biology. And there's no sign of it stopping.

AA: Is there a communication problem if you're going this fast and somebody else is going equally fast? How do you keep each other up to date?

LANDER: Well, it's a very lucky thing that at the same time there's been an explosion in molecular biological information, there's also been an explosion in computing and communications. Because in fact, everything we do here goes out on the Internet every night.

AA: Even the transfer of information is being automated.

LANDER: You need all of that. But the great part about it isn't the technology and the robots and then the computers. The great part about it is it takes things that used to be megaprojects and brings them down so that a single young scientist, a graduate student or a post doc can do it. This is all about empowering the single great creative scientist to do what he or she really wants to do.

AA: In a way, this is democratizing science. Some scientist in sub-Saharan Africa, who barely has a university to work out of, if that scientist has access to the Internet and to your data, he or she can do the same kind of advanced work that anybody in this country can. Is that right?

	"This is all about empowering the single great creative scientist to do what he or she really wants to do."

LANDER: Oh, yeah, and that happens. We get e-mails from scientists from South America who we've never met who say, "we just downloaded some of your sequence, and used it in some experiment, and we thought you might be interested to know." The whole point of this is to democratize science by getting the information out to everybody. We take the hard laborious steps and do them once and share the results so other scientists then can concentrate on the creative steps of figuring out how each gene really works, rather than spending years finding the gene, which is really not the interesting part. We all work together to figure out how to do it once. But what's tremendous is that everybody else gets to concentrate on the particular scientific problems of interest. And that's what I'm proud of. It really does make a difference.

AA: Don't you have trouble sleeping at night, from excitement?

LANDER: I do, actually.... The whole thing is moving so fast that I do wake up each morning and say, 'What can we do with human genetics, medical genetics today that we couldn't do last week?'.

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