Friday, July 30, 2004

"The teleporter insists on inner pure. I was not pure."

Found an interesting article on acne through Boing Boing this morning, about a type of bacteria that produces an enzyme that degrades human skin, making it susceptible to zits. I know there are a lot of people out there who would be very pleased to hear the news that there might be a cure for their acne, one that worked better than the ones they saw on television for only three payments of $29.99. But for me, the more interesting part of the article was the fact that one of the bacterium's genes was mistakenly included in the human genome:
"The genome also reveals a P. acnes gene mistakenly annotated as a human gene in the international Genbank database . . . However, after investigating this, JulianParkhill at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, near Cambridge, UK, told NewScientist that the gene “has never been part of the human sequencing effort, it’s part of another effort to randomly sequence fragments of DNA from human tissue"."
For a second, the only thing I could think of was:
Brundlefly.

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