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HAZEL SIVE: I'm
Professor Hazel Sive,
and I'd like to welcome
you to "Getting Up
to Speed in Biology."
What is this course about?
This is for you
if you are trying
to fill in a sparse or
distant background in biology.
It's been a while since
you studied biology
and you'd like to get up
into a more modern time.
This is for you if
you're preparing
to take a college level
introductory biology
course, for example at
MIT or another college.
And this is for you
if you're trying
to get insights
into life sciences
for your own interests.
Let's talk a little bit
about biology today,
which is really fantastic.
The thing you may know
is that everything
is made of these tiny
building blocks called cells.
This is a video from
my own research group.
It's a picture or a video of
the developing brain in a fish.
You can see the
red dots, which are
the nuclei of the cells where
all the genetic material lives.
And you can see that
every cell is surrounded
by a green region, a membrane
that keeps everything intact.
Everything is made of cells.
And everything comes
from a single cell.
It's amazing.
You can look at a beautiful bird
or a creepy spider, a family
of polar bears or sea creature.
And everything has come
from a single cell.
Really fantastic.
Here's some other things
to think about in biology.
There are some animals that can
regenerate their body parts.
If they are cut in half
or a limb is severed,
they can grow one back or
they can grow back a new body.
Planeria, flatworms,
are like this.
Professor Reddian
at MIT studies these
and has made some real
insights into thinking
about or into understanding
how flatworms regenerate
their bodies.
Maybe this has got
something to do
with helping humans regenerate
body parts when there
is an accident or a disease.
We can think about
life in the oceans.
Prochlorococcus is the world's
most abundant bacterium
in the seas.
The oceans are full of
the small bacterium.
And the function is
really not understood
but likely has
something very important
to do with the
health of our waters.
Professor Chisholm
at MIT has discovered
and has studied this bacterium,
most recently finding
that it is making thousands
of different tiny proteins
that it is secreting
into the water.
And the function, again,
is unknown at this frontier
of biology.
There is huge interest in
the diseases that we get,
and what causes them, and how to
use state of the art techniques
to cure diseases.
In this example,
Professor Yilmaz at MIT
has been thinking
about what we eat
and how that influences
the types of cancer,
for example colon
cancer, that we get
and what we might
do to address cures
that use brand new breaking
technologies to make people
better.
And we can think about life
as part of the engineering
spectrum, how to
make new things.
In this example,
Professor Bathe uses
DNA constructed into particular
scaffolds of particular shapes
to do interesting
engineering things.
Here this scaffold
can harvest the energy
from light a completely new way
to get light sensitive energy
sources.
All of this adds up
to the excitement
that is the background for this
course and for biology today.
So let's go back to the question
of whether this course will
be useful for you.
It will be if you have never had
high school biology since you
were a freshman, let's say.
It will be if you need a
refresher class before you
can go and take an introductory
level biology class at college.
Are you still not sure?
We have a quiz
that you can take.
And you'll figure
out whether or not
what we would teach you in this
class will be useful to you.
Welcome back to getting
up to speed in biology.
Now that you have taken
the quiz and have decided
that this course will
be useful to you,
let me tell you a little
bit more about it.
What's the content of
this particular course?
It is a short course that
comprises five lectures that
are arranged in a modular form.
After a few minutes,
the lecture will break
and there will be
some practice problems
that you'll be able to access
and work with the concepts
and the ideas that have
been introduced to you
so you'll get
plenty of expertise
in each of the things
in each of the modules
that you go through
in every lecture.
The topics of the
lectures cover some
of the greatest and most
important concepts in biology
today.
They're titled molecules
of life, the cell
and how it works,
information transfer
in biology, inheritance
and genetics,
and building with DNA.
Welcome to "Getting Up
to Speed in Biology."
I look forward to
working with you as we go
through this material together.
