20 - 012 Wuhan-Hu-1 Complete Genome

I think for any author like me trying to establish some new way of thinking or paradigm it is often some unexpected event that gives credibility to your idea. Now I am not a biological expert but I am a digital expert. I am attempting to apply my digital expertise to a biological subject. It’s a fact that the experts in the biological field have understood this concept of a digital human over the last 20 years or so if not before. Through their research and research papers running throughout their community, which with the internet, is both global and instantaneous they understand only too well what I am writing about. This is not the audience for this book. My reader audience is everybody outside this what I have termed biological community. It is getting the message across to everybody else.

When I have sat face to face and tried to explain what I mean by being a digital human with me often saying we are “no different to a smartphone” the listener more often than not goes blank and soon loses interest. They know a smartphone is inorganic. It is not living so the comparison seems futile. Now if I qualify it with the fact that the digital has to be run through a process that converts it into organic chemicals before it can live the digital human concept sounds a bit more plausible. So the digital human is really just a complex set of instructions for the making of a real human. But seeing it this way is very different from looking at electron microscope images of living organisms. The conversion is no different to the digital code that is converted to become a YouTube video. It is just in this case the conversion is through biological processes something that most of us that have not worked in a modern biological laboratory would not have witnessed. The nearest we would have come to it is cooking from a recipe in the kitchen. Being particularly relevant when the cooking involves the use of yeast.

So what was this significant event? On the 10^th January 2020 probably one of the most significant emails in respect of saving the world from the Coronavirus virus landed in the biological communities email inboxes via an open community contacts list. It was what is termed an open access paper for the use of everybody. It was titled “Wuhan seafood market pneumonia virus isolate Wuhan-HU-1, complete genome.” To an outsider it contained 30,000 apparently jumbled letters but this was the digital design of the virus. Within this paper was the whole genome with all the secrets of the virus there to decode so experts could start working on the design of the best immediate anti-bodies to treat it and then for the design of a vaccine for use in immunisation programmes.

As someone who has had his career in the digital industries very much in the corporate world using expensive paid for software and now in retirement dependant on the free open systems software so readily available and I have to say now well supported this was a triumph in the powers of digital technology. In the Sars. outbreak scientists were secretive with their data and withheld research papers concerned about getting due credit for their work. Also the journal research paper distribution industry was concerned about exclusivity and the avoidance of plagiarism. All built in vast time delays With Coronavirus all publishers have agreed to the immediate publication of all papers and that such papers would not jeopardise any future work of the author should the contents be less credible under longer term scrutiny. This is a true open systems approach very much adopted from way the computer open systems community has operated for many years. This change in approach is needed since there could be worse to come.

To the south of Wuhan in China chickens are densely packed wing to wing and a avian flu called H5N1 has incubated in these conditions. It has transferred to humans and has a 60% chance of causing death. It has not transferred human to human yet but we all know the speed at which viruses mutate.