# Possible Implications of the neural retrotransposons to the future

[Retrotransposons](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retrotransposon) are small bits of genetic code than can copy themselves into other bits of the dna strand

[They have been found](http://www.genomeweb.com/sequencing/targeted-sequencing-reveals-somatic-retrotransposition-events-human-brain) to be active in brains, with different amounts of activity in different brain sections. The highest being in the hippocampus (an important region for long-term memory). Also they were active in coding regions.

> "Overall, L1, Alu, and, to a more limited extent, SVA mobilization produced a large number of insertions that affected protein-coding genes,"

This means that they are more likely to have some large effect, than if they were just in junk dna.

[One form of autism](http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=jumping-genes-brain-tied-autisim) is linked to a malfunctioning of retrotransposons. So it can have a drastic affect.

It makes a certain amount of sense. If there is information in the brain that needs to to be stored, but not directly in neural firing rates, why not store it in the DNA of neuron? There is lots of error correcting data storage there and the genome has lots of tools for manipulating itself. Time will tell if it is very important or not.

If it is important, what are the implications for the future?

Cryo is harder, scanning the genome is a lot harder than just doing some spectroscopy. but since we assume a certain amount of sufficiently advanced technology and don't have a timeline, our plans aren't impinged upon.

The [em scenario](http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/11/emulations-go-f.html) seems like it will take longer to happen or may have some gotchas. Being able to scan the genetic code of each neuron would require some serious breakthroughs in scanning technolgies.

To naively emulate the genetic code changes would take immense amounts of bandwidth and to crack things like the protein folding problem (for how the changes in ). Just for storage I think we might need on the order of 500 exabits to store the dna sequence for each neuron. You'ld need to update them as well, which is going to take lots of memory bandwidth. This is not to mention chemical emulation.

I think naive emulation of the brain is off the table before AI. We may well be able to do better with shortcuts in terms of ability. But there might be questions of whether the copy is "you" if short cuts are taken. Also if we understand the brain, we don't need to make copies of people, we could just create AIs that do the same thing.

Some even more blue sky speculation. If the changes in the genetic code are to do with changing how we learn, then it still might be possible to scan a brain at low res and get something that seems to act the same as someone else, but cannot learn in the same way. An interesting twist to the Turing test, someone might be behaviourally human and fool you in the short-term, but may seem odd when tasked with learning problems.

So call centre staff would be out of work, but scientists would be still in demand.

It also has implication on cloning attempts at intelligence amplification.  I'm guessing this can be answered somewhat by looking at twins and the differential in mental ability between them. Anyone know of any books on this field.

Also anyone interested in discussion on this kind of topic (neurobiological implication on the future)?