DNA and the Internet
This is a blogpost of a presentation I gave to a group of middle school kids about the ways that DNA, data, information theory, and the internet are related. This was a surprising one! When I was a young man, I loved James Burke’s “Connections” TV show. This is a love letter to Ada Lovelace, Rosalind Franklin and James Burke.
It Starts With Rabbits
Alice Cooper in my DNA Bow Tie
This class I am teaching is a 9-day class on sustainability at a local STEM school. Today’s lesson was on information theory and the truth that all information is physical. I decided I was going to express this to kids with my rabbit, Alice Cooper, who lives on the farm with me.
The sustainability class features a different animal and topic of applied STEM every day. Today was rabbits, genetics, epigenetics, fibonacci sequence, data theory, and the structure of DNA and the internet. It was very well received!
The humans share 92% of their DNA with the rabbit, but 99.2% with each other.
The Double Helix, the Transistor, and the DOM
A Typical Transistor on the left, a DNA Amino Acid Pathway on the right.
The kids were startled to hear that DNA codes only for proteins, hormones, enzymes, and catalysts, not body parts or whole animals. Then they were told that the internet and HTML is all written in a simple code that uses “genes” and “alleles” called tags and attributes to create a Document Object Model (DOM) in an organism called “Browser” and that the DNA of the webpage was delivered in packets that built out the genotype of code into a phenotype they call a webpage or an app on their phone.
The DOM is like DNA for a browser, Every gene has a START and STOP Codon that signals the beginning and the end for a protein, similar to a objects in a browser.
That was pretty mind-blowing, but it got deeper. We explored epigenetics by creating a gene expression with 20 kids holding hands like nucleotides in DNA. Then the rest of the class decided that they were going to impart environmental and cortisol stress to that gene. in the pocket of each amino acid human was an epigenetic impact. The story was told by the way the DNA responded to the external manipulation. That was cool.
WiFi Outage and Genetic Mutation
Then the WIFI went out! The rest of the webpage would not load. The part of the webpage that did load could not be read completely, and if we refreshed the browser we lost everything. This was the analogy of a mutation in DNA. The students in the class found this scenario to be quite chilling. It seems they could deal with a mutation — but not losing WiFi! Lots of fun and learning today!
