Utilisation of Digital Technology – Analyse Humans
Venter’s team at Human Longevity is leading in efforts in the utilisation of digital technology in order to analyse humans in ways which we have never had before and the outcome of it will have a great consequence on society. The latest observations described by him are presently being written for scientific publication.
Venter did not want to assume the publication and hence did not plunge into wide details on how his team had make the breakthrough but shared a concerning and exciting overview of what lay ahead for the human race. To begin considering, there are social, legal as well as ethical implications. Some of the examples of how digitizing DNA could alter human experience are:
1. Solving Crime
Venter defines the forensic implication of DNA as being `massive’ and state that there is a likelihood of developing related product due to the opportunity. His team at Human Longevity had also been capable of predicting the faces of individuals from only their DNA. Should a suspect tend to leave their DNA at the scene of the crime, they could as well be leaving a picture of their face.
This is possible since Venter had built a big database of genetic information together with related body measurements. From the 3D photographs taken in his lab, the human face is cut down to 30,000 distinctive measurements and the computers running sophisticated programs then tends to head the information, recognizing patterns which a human may never see.
As the database tends to grow bigger, the machines have more examples to learn from and their predictions growmuch better. Presently Venter has 20,000 genomes though speaks of over a million by 2020. However, the facial predictions seem to be blurry presently and Venter hopes on some improvement. Venter explained taking the facial images produced from DNA and also double-checking them against each photo on the internet could hasten the pace of tracking down a suspect. While recommending probable advantage for law enforcement and national security, he cautioned of privacy implications as well as the negative implications for closed dictatorship wherein these services could be utilised for good or bad.
2. Predicating your child’s look
Venter had informed that there had been discussion on screening foetal cells from maternal bloodstream in order to predict the look of the child at the age of 18. However, he stated that the team is concerned on unmasking non-paternity which the biological father may not be who it is believed to be. He informed that he would not desire to be the one conveying the news to the couple.
3. Find Missing persons
Should a person tend to be missing as a child and the search seems to continue for years with no present image being available, it could hinder the search. However, with the images projected from DNA, improved images could be generated.
4. Age and Height can be predicted from voice recording
Someone could only need to have brief recordings of your speech in order to identify traits in the future and this ability could be of great interest to college sports recruiters or singles on dating sites. This is because individuals tend to have reasons in describing their attributes in the most positive light. Venter has commented that his group could predict a person’s gender, age as well as height from voice recording and also saw a connection with voice and the shape of the face. This was done by enabling 1,000 persons speak for some minutes and also took extensive body measurements like throat and jaw size with MRI machines. Thereafter the team sequenced the persons’ genomes.
With this information the machines were provided with the opportunity of learning and making predictions. Venter informed that the ability of predicting height was a wonder. What is effective here is turning the biological data into digital information in order that the innovative software is applied to it and interpret more than what could done on their own by a human. At Human Longevity, the machine learning team is led by Franz Och who had earlier built the Translate software of Google. The genome is viewed as the software of life which tends to code us all and attempt to predict as much as possible from the genome.
5. Reveal secrets that may be Private
Venter with his sequenced genome on the Internet had commented that he could rethink that decision if he intends redoing the process, considering the rapid growth in what can be already predicted.The task has now been shifted on how he sees a classic argument in psychology – nature against nurture and is our environment or heredity more dominant.Venter who had shifted toward nature since then had commented that he had started out in the 50-50 camp when he did not know anything. The DNA software encodes for who you are though it also tends to decode for the variability as well as the plasticity. A main part of human development is how adaptable it is and those are the strictures which are built in the genetic codes.
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