Made on a Mac: William Gilbert's Story

Volume 31, No. 132, Winter 2002, Page 26 - 27

www.apple.com/pro

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Apple Computer recently launched a new advertising campaign called "Apple Professionals." This campaign selected people who work with Macintosh computers and highlighted their creations in video, photography, science and music. Apple chose a handful of people with a story to tell in each category, including Newington's own Will Gilbert for the science category. The team of photojournalists who created the movie "A Day in the Life of Africa" were selected for the photography category. Danny Elfman, the musician who has composed music for Men in Black, Spiderman, and The Simpsons, shared the music category with Hans Zimmer, who composed pieces for Gladiator, Crimson Tide and As Good As It Gets.

Will's Story - Dr. Will Gilbert likes to carry the human genome around on his iPod. It's the easiest way, he says, to transfer the genome - 3 billion chemical "letters" that make up a person's genetic code, or DNA - to the computers of other researchers at the Hubbard Center for Genome Studies at the University of New Hampshire.

Gilbert had set up a research project involving the human genome on his Power Mac. "But," says Gilbert, "I wanted to run the project down the hall on another Mac. Rather than copy it across the network, I'd pull out my iPod. Plug it in, drag, drop, zip, boom, bang and walk it down the hall."

"We're the post-genomic era," Gilbert explains. "Scientists have already cracked the code of the human genome," the genetic book of life that contains instructions for building and running a human body. "So we're closer to understanding what makes us who we are. We also have pretty big chunks of genomes from fairly closely-related organisms, and we're just beginning to look at rice, pig, cow and chimpanzee. We need a way to line those up and to compare them."

"Actual DNA code," Gilbert explains, "has just four letters: A, G, C and T. "When you're doing comparative genomics, you don't compare one genetic letter at a time - a C or an A. You compare words composed of 20 genetic letters or 50 genetic letters - TACCTAGAC and so on - rarely more than 50 because conventional thinking is that you lose sensitivity when you use longer words."

Still, making comparisons 50 genetic letters at a time was slow going. "And that's just doing it once," Gilbert says. "You'd like to do it more than once because you want to tweak things and ask what-if questions."

"I got to thinking," Gilbert says. "So I hopped on my Mac, spent about an hour indexing the genome a different way. And I said 'This is either going to work or not going to work.' I tested a word size of 250 for my first shot. The test was done in two minutes, much to my disbelief. So I said, 'Well, that must not have worked,' Yet when I examined the output, the test had indeed found the right hunk of DNA. Things started getting very exciting at that point."

At the end of the test, Gilbert had identified five categories of possible genes that make humans human. "A large portion of those genes," he says, "are involved with neural/nerve development. That's not surprising; our brain development is one characteristic that sets us apart from other species."

Gilbert's work helps others in the field of comparative gene research. For researchers who are sequencing the chimpanzee genome, it provides a useful starting point. "Once we get the sequencing for the chimpanzee, we can begin comparing the sequences, and see where a gene is decrepit in one genome and finely tuned in the other. We're no longer saying 'I want to compare two organisms that are vastly different.' We're starting to look at 'Here's a chimpanzee. Here's a human. How close are they? What are their differences?'

"Or we can start to compare one bacteria with a relative to that bacteria. 'What makes one cause disease and the other not cause disease?' These discoveries promise a new era in medicine, where diseases are detected and treated long before symptoms occur, and where therapies are designed according to a person's genetic makeup."

Gilbert's project on Apple computers has helped to empower other scientists. Apple computer has the ad shown on this page for Will Gilbert's story in several recent science journals.

entered 2/4/03 by Ricky, Danny & Jamie