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“When you go into the desert, beware of stepping on these plants. In the Atacama desert plants hide a lot of secrets that have to do with the mechanisms that nature uses, and possibly men, to improve the life,” said Alejandro Maass, researcher at the Center for Mathematical Modeling (CMM) at Universidad de Chile, while was showing a video to illustrate why it is necessary to continue sequencing genomes in Chile, especially in extreme environments: to see how living things shape their DNA structure in order to adapt them to extreme conditions, following strategies that could serve humans.
‘Human Species, walking toward a technological evolution?, Extension of life, Improving our Life’, by CMM deputy director, was a main talks of the Congreso del Futuro, organized by Commission on the Future of the Senate. The activity -which was held from 19 to 24 January- also attended by CMM director Alejandro Jofré who moderated forum ‘Artificial intelligence, The path to a super intelligence?’.
A.I.
On Wednesday 21, in the hall of honor of the former National Congress, Jofré shared stage with Miguel Nicolelis researcher at University of Duke; Rafael Yuste, Brain initiative leader, and Federico Faggin, a physicist who developed the first commercial microprocessor. The focus of the debate was on the limits of technology and artificial intelligence can not finally dominate its creator.
“It’s amazing the impact of this activity in science popularization. Imagine 25,000 people were watching the live streaming on the Internet,” Jofré said.
Prolonging Improving life
On Saturday 23 was the turn of Alejandro Maass, who started explaining how Math develops itself by impacting technological development and how other sciences and issues related to progress also state challenges to it.
“Possibly, Mathematics is one of the most beautiful inventions of man. And, as my colleague Servet Martínez said to me yesterday, possibly one of the eldest,” he stated and referred to the CMM researcher, who was in the audience that fulfilled at the hall of honor.
He explained how mathematical intuitions ended in technological applications. Google, for example, benefits directly from the consolidation of Probabilities in the twentieth century with, among others, the work of Andrey Kolmogorov, who formalized chance to solve technological and everyday problems. It also showed how information theory allowed to capture the imagination of geniuses like Mozart or Beethoven in technological devices such as smartphones and music players, so millions can hear them today as tens did in the eighteenth century.
However, the reality also stimulates scientists said Maass: “The mathematician is not a static human being put in an office with a paper and a blackboard, but he is interested in sophisticated theories that have impact. We work on it to improve life. The theories end up being applied in concrete objects.”
It happens with genomics, says the director of Bio CMM area: “The genome has a lot of structured compressed information and we ask questions to ourselves. Mainly, questions about how the objects inside them interact among themselves and with other objects that are introduced into the cell and even how signals are sent from one cell to another simply by encoding and compressing information.”
Technological progress has allowed more and more genomes sequenced. It has been done in Chile with salmon, copper bioleaching bacteria, sultana grapes, and other products.
“You can predict things. The mechanisms for prolonging life have to do with observing nature and analyzing how living beings have managed to survive,” said the researcher. He cited the bioleaching bacteria and how their genomes have adapted to live in environments with accumulation of metals, a fact that could be related to neural diseases such as Alzheimer’s and others. It also showed cases of the same animal that has changed its genomes in different environments.
“In a country of extremes, where extreme events occur, we have a natural field to find strategies. The same animal has different genomes to survive in different ecosystems. All these strategies are useful to us,” said Maass.
In that sense, he called to execute more ambitious sequencing projects. As Tara Oceans expedition, which collected samples of plankton in the ocean’s 200 points to sequence them and get clues about climate change. Or the Human Microbiome Project, which studies the stomach bacteria and their relationship with food. He recalled that further progress could be achieved by investigating new genomes of bacteria, plants and animals as well as Chilegenómico Project that sequenced first Chilean genomes.
He also invited to develop the initiative Mil Genomas Chile, to sequence genomes of Chileans in order to generate personalized medicine and better treatments.
“Nobody is going to take care of the genomes of Chileans,” he said. “There are unique genes that determine disease in the northern hemisphere and are not necessarily ours. In Chile, there are islands where the population has not been remastered from the beginning. All this must be taken into our own hands to improve our lives.”
