The Century of the Gene: Crash Course History of Science #42 

ha ha ha! that was apt!

Congratulations!

This is release on April 1 too... it's almost a damn joke :P

Haha! Nope, gotta keep ourselves on schedule. :) - Nick J.

Did you see the Douglas Adams comment? It's basically an unintentional (or is it) joke.

Ikr? You see the first one and you're like "oh, you got me!" But after that you're expecting it and it just gets annoying -- especially if, like me, you watch a *lot* of RU-vid.

The work of the Human Genome Project has allowed researchers to begin to understand the blueprint for building a person. As researchers learn more about the functions of genes and proteins, this knowledge will have a major impact in the fields of medicine, biotechnology, and the life sciences. So the origins of genetics lie in the development of theories of evolution. It was in 1858 that the origin of species and how species variability was developed after the research work of Charles Darwin and Wallace. They described how new species arose via evolution and how natural selection occurred to evolve new forms.

Evelyn Fox Keller, one of our most gifted historians and philosophers of science, provides a powerful, profound analysis of the achievements of genetics and molecular biology in the twentieth century, the century of the gene. Not just a chronicle of biology’s progress from gene to genome in one hundred years, The Century of the Gene also calls our attention to the surprising ways these advances challenge the familiar picture of the gene most of us still entertain.Keller shows us that the very successes that have stirred our imagination have also radically undermined the primacy of the gene-word and object-as the core explanatory concept of heredity and development. But more than a new vocabulary, a new awareness is absolutely crucial: that understanding the components of a system (be they individual genes, proteins, or even molecules) may tell us little about the interactions among these components. With the Human Genome Project nearing its first and most publicized goal, biologists are coming to realize that they have reached not the end of biology but the beginning of a new era. Indeed, Keller predicts that in the new century we will witness another Cambrian era, this time in new forms of biological thought rather than in new forms of biological life.

DNA has a wide information to study and its really hard to understand in just a single lesson. But i think with the help of this video we can now understand the DNA is easily and how the scientist did the mapping to the human genome. And that's what really amaze me on how they did the mapping to the humane genome. Also when they studying the cells and DNA of human to understand the diveristy of human or any kind of species.

Why is studying genetics important? In the future, doctors and scientists hope to use ourgenetic information to diagnose, treat, prevent and cure many illnesses. Genes are instructions, which tell your body how to make all the proteins it needs to survive and grow.

Our DNA really is complicated, it even took them a lot of years to complete the draft of a human genome (i was three at that time). But i think it was worth it for the people behind this project for it wil help humanity in the long run. And it's relieving to know that the people who work with genetic sequencing are increasing. Which means that discoveries to treatments of illnessess may be a lot faster in the future. It's actually surreal to know that these events happened after i was born. I can actually trace now the progress they've made in their works. Incredible people!

+

Haebris Mass bird extinction

baby dont hurt me

Brian Hutzell yes yes!! The Organic Chemistry tutor is very good too :)

But that’s just a theory

If genes did exist, wouldn't they just roll off the edge of the Earth? 😁

It must be Soros!

Becky Mason a gene theory

But that's just a theory A game theory!

What do you mean?

@@jlupus8804 The explanation of Sanger sequencing is correct, but they should have said that the first method relied on Sanger sequencing with a genome walking approach, while Venter's method used Sanger sequencing with a shotgun approach.

It's is not correct. In Sanger the first step is not breaking the DNA is establishing a starting point with a primer. Then you add all the ingredients needed to make DNA in a dish including normal DNA bases and bases labeled with a fluorescent die (the method he invented was actually with radioactive dies and the reading was done manually). The fluorescent dies can get incorporated in the DNA but they block any new base from being added. You end up with many many copies of the piece of DNA of different length because they incorporated the fluorescent bases at different points in the copy making. Then you sort them out by length. For details see Wikipedia. Also 10000 bade pairs is a bit of a dream. Sanger becomes sloppy fast. With regular tools most people won't go past 1000

The breaking the DNA part was specific for genome analysis but is independent of Sanger method. I do Sanger in the lab to verify if I got the right mutation or the right gene inserted in a DNA vector, and there's no breaking of DNA involved. But the primer - that's vital

THERE IS NO RELATIONSHIP between the "genetic program" and quantum mechanics. DNA has long been characterized in term of organic chemistry, which is based on quantum physics. BUT that's it. Molecular biology (go check out the central dogma of molecular biology) didn't emerge from quantum physics in itself, except again through chemistry. DNA replication and expression are entirely explained by the action of enzymes. Besides chromosomes are at the scale of the micrometer, not nanometer. That gladdens me in a way, it is complex enough already!

@@agreencat3484 electrons and the likes are smaller than and are also inside the DNA, so at some point there maybe something that can explain the difference between life and non life from physics standpoint.

Napoleonic S yes I see what you mean. In the end everything can be reduced to electrons and nucleus, even planets, but that does not mean that they are govered by quantum physics at their scale. What i'm trying to say is that the expression of genes at a cellular level, tissue level, organ, system of organ and organism level isn't encoded in QM. Other than that you are absolutely right, of course there is a point where those molecules obey QM laws. I read somewhere that QM would give a better quantitative description and accuracy of molecular interaction, but that it is impractical because way to much computive intensive if you want to scale it at the level of a entire single cell for example. Even below that. Craig Venter has a project (something with minimal cell in it) trying to compute all the molecular interaction at atom resolution of the simplest cell we know, genitalium mycoplasma with only about 473 genes. In order to study "crowding" among other things. But the team have to make approximations to reduce computing ressources because we don't have near the required computing power. QM would be very useful to study confirmation dynamics of proteins though. I don't know much about it. I'm fairly sure that it is already used at least for some extent. Of course they put forces like ionic forces, hydrogen bridges and things like that, but do they track the variation in electron densities ? I'd also like to know

Genes always begin by a specific sequence of nucleotides (ATG): it is called a start codon. They similarly end with a stop codon. From that you can easily deduce where genes start and stop in the long chain of DNA.

@@sebm2767 Thank you so much 👍

no

Some things previously called junk DNA are now known to be useful, yes... but the issue isn't all that clear cut. It depends on how you define junk, for one thing. Large parts of the genome consist of things like selfish genetic elements or old retroviruses, and certainly have no function in the sense that you could overwrite them with random text without affecting your body.

@@OlleLindestad you are correct, of course. I did overstate myself. He's just usually very quick to point out any previously held beliefs that turned out to be even partially incorrect.

I hope this is a troll comment because anybody who follows this channel should know how fluid the way people have been categorized by race is. Tdlr many races today have probably been a bunch of other races in this country alone.