Through A Scientist's Eyes

How do explore the question of how to make a brain? How did genomic sequencing and genetic manipulation change the nature and speed of the research. This episode goes through my journey as a brain scientist as the human genome project was just in its infancy.

There is an intimate relationship between gene expression, developmental biology and the environment. In this episode we will discuss how this plays out to shape humans using a thought experiment: getting the human species ready to survive on other planets.

It is the science behind an on-going SciFi short story that I have been writing for a few years now: Acchret's Children

How do you translate signals into action? How do you remember your actions? 

For the cell, similar to a computer, it is a series of additive changes- in this case to the packaging of DNA that make it either easier or more difficult for the DNA to be accessed by RNA polymerase, the ultimate control of gene expression.

How did normal cell biology let scientists come up with mRNA vaccines "so fast"...about 80 years of research went into these overnight vaccines.

These brand new vaccines are built an enormous amount of data on vaccines here are a few of the ones I read:

https://www.sciencefriday.com/articles/the-origin-of-the-word-vaccine/https://www.immunology.org/celebrate-vaccines/public-engagement/guide-childhood-vaccinations/how-vaccines-work

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3253346/

https://vk.ovg.ox.ac.uk/vk/how-do-vaccines-work

Video explanation of immunity and vaccines  and More detailed medical term one

NCBI- Pubmed findable science articles on the history of mRNA for vaccinces

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3597572/

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fimmu.2019.00594/full

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41541-020-0159-8

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMcibr2009737

CDC information on the current mRNA viruses for COVID19

https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/covid-19/hcp/mrna-vaccine-basics.html

https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/covid-19/info-by-product/pfizer/index.html

https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/covid-19/info-by-product/moderna/index.html

How do we regulate a gene? In this episode I'll go through some of the experimental biology that lead us to understand the "Who, What, When and Why" of a gene. This will be a deep dive that takes the basic question of how do DNA, RNA and Protein relate and provide some "meat" on the bones.

Some related videos and sites that visualize some of these concepts:

"Strawberry Experiment"

"Biology4Kids.com: Cell Structure" 

Videos on Gene Expression

Sci Eyes Blog

As we start our journey together, I think it's important to start with something that's topical and as you can imagine the most topical thing for most of us in 2021 is the pandemic. If want to dig deeper here are some resources

"mRNA vaccines — a new era in vaccinology | Nature Reviews Drug Discovery" https://www.nature.com/articles/nrd.2017.243

"Three decades of messenger RNA vaccine development - ScienceDirect" https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1748013219301483

Katalin Karikó spent the 1990s collecting rejections.

"Essentials of Cell Biology | Learn Science at Scitable" https://www.nature.com/scitable/ebooks/essentials-of-cell-biology-14749010/contents/

Lewis Thomas

Search for more videos on Cell Biology "search for Introduction to Cell Biology"

Specific YouTube channels me or my kids use for science learning:

https://youtube.com/c/inanutshell

Khan academy (website or Youtube channel)

Biology4kids (website or Youtube channel)

This episode is a quick introduction to who I am and what this series is about: 

A weekly exploration of the process of science, working back from something that the average person knows and exploring the Iceberg of facts, experiments and failure that went into shaping that Iceberg