The complexity of being and the beauty of matter, life and mind, has interested mankind since we can remember. This fascinating curiosity about to be, i.e. its self reflectivity knocking to understand and explain the own reason of existence, might be the highest elevation of the self-organized holistic evolution from the big-bang, to cognitive beings and beyond the even more complex ecology of human culture. Although we might lack the ability to resolve the underlying basis and the mysterious principle origin totally, we already started to reveal considerable parts of the puzzle with remarkable success, despite increasingly negative consequences to earth and mankind. This is mainly owed to the reductionistic knowledge creation without backintegration and internalization into cultural practice, which naturally gets the harder, the higher the considered complexity and thus its increased impact is.

Genomes - and especially the human genome - are certainly one of the most striking and central features in cells, regarding their role within the biological evolution and life, i.e. their specialized function to store and access genetic information. As on all evolutionary levels, the genetic information contained in genomes is interwoven with its carrier inseparably, thus its sequential and three-dimensional organization are equally important for a genomic understanding. With growing complexity of life the genetic information and its functionality increased rapidly. Although, the discovery of several compaction levels of information and organizational genomic coding as well as the complete sequencing of the human base pair order, reveal a tremendous scientific success, it has yet been hardly more than a purely reductionistic breakdown of genomic complexity from nuclear morphology to the single atom of genetic information, the gene. Only the DNA and its compaction into nucleosomes is known to atomic resolution, but the following 5 compaction levels are increasingly speculative in the human genome. Without an integration not only the beauty of genomes in their evolutionary frame disappears but also the manipulative use of genomes seems questionable or even irresponsible considering the impacts from gene therapy to the creation of new beings for live and culture.

For a full overview of the work that let to this project, the following book has been made available:

• Knoch, T. A. Approaching the three-dimensional organization of the human genome: structural-, scaling- and dynamic properties in the simulation of interphase chromosomes and cell nuclei, vilong-range correlations in complete genomes, in vivo quantification of the chromatin distribution, construct conversions in simultaneous co-transfections. Dissertation, Ruperto-Carola University, Heidelberg, Germany, and TAK Press, Tobias A. Knoch, Mannheim, Germany, ISBN 3-00-009959-X, ISBN 3-00-009960-3, 2002.

News is available as an RSS feed