Through A Scientist's Eyes: Recent Episodes
Chris Wynder
How does "science" get done? What does that word mean? For the average person how do we trust vaccines, drugs and public health? As a scientist I spend a lot of time obsessing about how do explain to friends what "the science" means.
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.
When we discuss Genes, cells and disease- what does a scientist mean? This episode I will try and explain through what the experiments "did" to allow scientists to come up with a model- such as what you can see on the "Through Scientists Eyes" on Instagram or the blog (the link for the Podcast).
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