Junk DNA Is "Dead as a doornail"?

 
I just received an email message from András Pellionisz informing me that in America the concept of junk DNA is "dead as a doornail." He "proves" his case in an article on his website [HoloGenomics].

A Eureka Moment concerning the fractal character of neurons led in turn to a novel picture of genomics where protein structures act back recursively upon their DNA code -- in outright contradiction to prevailing orthodoxy. A household name in neuroscience for his tensor network theory, Dr. András Pellionisz has recently had another far-reaching discovery borne out. This insight has now received striking confirmation in stunning results from the new field of epigenetics -- promising a whole raft of novel medical diagnoses and therapies.

Sunnyvale, Calif. (PRWEB) July 16, 2008 -- A landmark article on "The Principle of Recursive Genome Function" (received December 7, accepted December 18, 2007) by András J. Pellionisz appears online in Springer's e-Journal Cerebellum.

The paper marks the first anniversary of an historic event--the release of pilot results for ENCODE, the Encyclopedia of DNA Elements project. Building on the results of the Human Genome Project, the ENCODE effort revealed a far more complex DNA coding sequence than was ever previously imagined. "There's a lot more going on than we thought," said Collins, who was director of the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI). Dr. Collins issued a mandate a year ago "the scientific community will need to rethink some long-held views".

A happy few did not need to rethink either the "central dogma of molecular biology" (Crick, 1956) or the misnomer of "junk" DNA (Ohno 1972), since they never believed them in the first place. The dictum claiming that a flow of information from proteins back to DNA "never happens" or the idea that 98.7% of the human genome should be disregarded as junk was never very believable.

THEME

Genomes & Junk DNA
There are some interesting scientific debates about the role of noncoding DNA in large genomes. Much of it is junk but there's lot of other functions that we've known about for decades. Many respectable scientists dispute the notion that most of our genome is junk.

Unfortunately, very little of that interesting scientific debate can be seen on András Pellionisz's website. Instead, I direct you to the site in order to see a classic example of a modern kook in action. The site has all of the characteristics of kookdom (see crank) and serves as a self-evident answer to the question Is András Pellionisz a Kook?.

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