SIO458: How Eye Color Reveals the Complexity of Genetics
Serious Inquiries Only
Thomas Smith
4.6 • 1K Ratings
🗓️ 11 September 2024
⏱️ 51 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Dr. Eric Jaffe is back! This time, he's going to teach us about CRISPR. But, in order to do that, he first needs to lay a foundation about genetics more broadly, and how complex it actually is. Why is it that mapping the human genome didn't instantly give us the ability to change whatever we want about ourselves?
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to serious inquiries only this is episode 458 and I'm |
| 0:17.1 | excited to bring you two parts now this is everyone's favorite dinosaur |
| 0:22.0 | ologist no dinosaur This is everyone's favorite dinosaurologist. |
| 0:23.6 | No, dinosaur constructor, builder of genetic dinosaurs, |
| 0:27.7 | Dr. Eric Jaffey. |
| 0:29.2 | And one thing Eric was really keen on explaining to us all a subject he was really excited about |
| 0:35.3 | is teaching us about CRISPR but in a more detailed way than perhaps might have been in the kind of the popular coverage |
| 0:42.4 | and that's hard to do in a |
| 0:44.1 | podcast so first he wanted to lay a little foundation here by talking about |
| 0:47.5 | genetics RNA some other stuff and so this first part is how we get our eye color and how eye color can teach us about a lot of other things in genetics and what the hell is going on with all that I guess. |
| 0:59.7 | But along the way there's some really interesting stuff. |
| 1:01.8 | Eric talks about why there really are no |
| 1:04.4 | binaries in genetics and it's very silly to call sex for example a binary in genetics it's just |
| 1:12.0 | so much more complicated. Like if I were to summarize the kind of the |
| 1:16.9 | tension that I think this episode helps explain, it's like, okay, on one hand, as a layperson. I know there's the genetic code. I know we cracked that human genome sometime in like I don't know what was it 2000s early 2000s or something and that would seem to a lay person like, oh, okay, so we should have the answer to like, you know, everything. Like we should just know how everything works in the human body, where everything comes from what you know like you would think |
| 1:43.6 | that's it like we should have everything but obviously that's not true and |
| 1:48.0 | obviously even with a technology like CRISPR which we'll get to in part two |
| 1:51.9 | it's still really complicated. |
| 1:53.9 | It's still incredibly hard to figure out what exactly is happening. |
| 1:57.8 | And so this episode really helps to illustrate why. |
| 2:00.2 | Like why is it so much more complex than just like oh gatica we got those letters gat c c and then if you know the right code of them then you can just do anything there's so much more going on and this episode really helps elucidate that. |
| 2:15.8 | This is absolutely a tricky topic, especially for me, it's not one of my strong suits. |
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