Probably best not to try this on any systems you care about if the command is completely unknown. killall on Solaris might have some unintended consequences.
I believe they just have a patent on these particular cDNA types, namely cDNA created from BRCA1 or BRCA2, and not on the well-known lab techniques for creating them.
Justice Scalia's concurrence, reproduced here in full:
"I join the judgment of the Court, and all of its opinion
except Part I–A and some portions of the rest of the opinion going into fine details of molecular biology. I am unable to affirm those details on my own knowledge or even
my own belief. It suffices for me to affirm, having studied
the opinions below and the expert briefs presented here,
that the portion of DNA isolated from its natural state
sought to be patented is identical to that portion of the
DNA in its natural state; and that complementary DNA
(cDNA) is a synthetic creation not normally present in
nature."
I am unable to affirm those details on my own knowledge or even my own belief.
I wish more public officials would show this kind of honesty, esp. those voting on new laws and regulations. I am waiting for the first politician to come foward with a "I have no idea of this stuff, can anyone of my constituents explain to me how and why to vote on that" message.
> "I have no idea of this stuff, can anyone of my constituents explain to me how and why to vote on that"
That is precisely the primary function of lobbyists, as distasteful as it sounds when that word is used.
Many lobbyists also buy access, which is a separate problem.
Can you imagine the disastrous mess Congress would create if they knew even _less_ than they already know about the areas they're legislating? This is why regulating lobbying is hard; at root it's just citizens speaking to elected leaders (again, until money gets involved).
> I am waiting for the first politician to come foward with a "I have no idea of this stuff, can anyone of my constituents explain to me how and why to vote on that" message.
I suspect all too many of their constituents would be very happy to explain how they should vote on all sorts of matters. Getting peoples' opinions is the easy bit, working out which ones are worth listening to is the challenge.
Maybe we should just go with the most prevalent opinion on any issue. But, besides the practical issues, we can all probably think of at least one issue where we think the majority of people have got it wrong. We'd like our reasons to be considered, not just our numbers.
"Seldom has an opinion of this Court rested so obviously upon nothing but the personal views of its members", said Scalia when the court found it unconstitutional to execute the profoundly mentally disabled.
"If it were impossible for individual human beings (or groups of human beings) to act autonomously in effective pursuit of a common goal, the game of soccer would not exist", he said, when the court found it unconstitutional for the VMI to refuse admission to women.
"This ruling will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed [...] The nation will live to regret what the court has done today" he said when the court held that Guantanamo detainees have the right to appeal their captivity to federal courts.
"Is it really so easy to determine that smacking someone in the face to determine where he has hidden the bomb that is about to blow up Los Angeles is prohibited in the Constitution?" he said, under obvious circumstances.
"Today's opinion is the product of a Court, which is the product of a law-profession culture, that has largely signed on to the so-called homosexual agenda" he said, in attempting to retain a law that criminalized same-sex relationships in Texas.
In fact DNA intermediates with introns spliced can be reintegrated into the genome.
Further, faulty viruses can acquire oncogenes (intron-splicted, mtuated versions of growth factors, like EGF and HER2/neu) and transfer them to other cells via cDNA intermediates. It's not hard to believe that nature has in fact passed BRCA cDNAs around via retroviral intermediates.
RT doesn't work that way, it requires a specific site near its target gene in order to make the DNA strand. There is off-target activity, but it is almost certainly vanishingly rare.
anyway, if you're really so hung up on this, let's drop the viral intermediate and focus just on pseudogenes (instead of viral retropseudogenes), which are exactly the thing I described in my first comment.
so, if you want to demonstrate your claim, you would need to write a script that showed that there was no pseudogene that ever inserted at a nonspecific site. You can't show that. ergo, my proposal is more likely than yours. Further, it's support by evidence- for example, the genome is studded with p53 pseudogenes that reintegrated from cDNA nonspecifically.
Further, I'm not sure what the relationship of probabilities to the number of particles in the universe is. The probability of any given sequence emitted by hmmer as the "highest probability" is tiny (often 10e-50 or better, and for very good matches, 10e-138). So what's your point?
the work is mostly on okazaki fragments, but a major conclusion from my phd thesis was that B-RNA is stuck because of a very low probability event (the breaking of a large number of hbonds simultaneously).
Fine, then, a DNA-RNA base pair mismatch incurs approximately 1.5 kcal/mol penalty, which is a 1:10 less likelihood of matching. 3' UTRs of genes are what you need to reverse transcribe (by accident) the mRNA of interest to generate the cDNA you describe. On average they are around 700 bp, the odds of finding an exact match are about 700/4^18 - then a one bp mismatch is 700/4^17 times a 1:10 hit in terms of competitive binding. Two bp mismatch is 700/4^16 times 1:100. Then you have to consider that it's evolutionarily unlikely to have segments that exactly or inexactly match tRNAs because the resulting dsRNA is likely to engage in silencing via the DROSHA mechanism - probably because our bodies like to guess what - get rid of ssRNA viruses. So these numbers are probably at least on the order of 1:10 or even 1:100 or more in the wrong direction.
and yet, existence proofs demonstrate you are wrong. Again, re-read the section on virus tumor oncogenes in The Biology of Cancer; pretty much everythign we know about oncogenes came from this physical mechanism.
what? Most oncogene duplication comes from chromosomal abnormalities, or occasionally retrotransposon capture. Completely different mechanism from reverse transcriptase amplification. Occasionally retroviruses will incorporate themselves near or inside an oncogene and activate (and sometimes copy them) but again, that is not the same mechanism as nonspecific gene duplication, and will almost certainly not produce the same molecular product as a cDNA.
Remember, the patent is a MOLECULE patent, not a PROCESS patent.
Yes, and what I'm demonstrating is there is likely prior art in the form of cDNA molecules identical to the Myriad molecule that have existed in cells at some point in the past. That fact, which SCOTUS convenient ignored, is sufficient to override the idea that cDNA molecules can be patented.
Anyway, your comment about oncogenes again shows you haven't read Biology of Cancer. if you read the first four chapters, it works out the history through which we worked out the understand of oncogenes. And the history is different from what we know now to be the prevalent mechanisms. The use of tumor viruses, which is nicely explained, demonstrates that scientists had already described the phenomenon I'm cited in the mid-1970's. That phenomenon wasn't really followed up on after the mid-80s, when people got better mechanisms and a larger understanding of cancer. But if you go back to the tumor virus literature and really understand it at a fundamental level, you have to acknowledge that BRCA cDNAs identical to the Myriad patent have almost certainly existed in both free (nucleoplasm) and integrated forms in at least one cell in the past. Whether that cell survived, is irrelevant.
> The channel is the analog to the Unix shell’s | character.
This sentence was italicized, and rightfully so. I've written a few small Go programs, but I haven't run into a problem where I thought, "A channel is definitely the right solution here." Yet I love and feel quite comfortable with shuffling data through big shell pipelines. Perhaps I'll think of a channel next time I'm reaching for a pipeline.
http://mywiki.wooledge.org/ParsingLs