The weird history of the "sex chromosomes" | Molly Webster

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4.1 • 11.9K Ratings

🗓️ 23 March 2020

⏱️ 14 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The common thinking on biological sex goes like this: females have two X chromosomes in their cells, while males have one X and one Y. In this myth-busting talk, science writer and podcaster Molly Webster shows why the so-called "sex chromosomes" are more complicated than we may think -- and reveals why we should think about them differently.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This TED Talk features reporter and podcaster Molly Webster, recorded live at TED at NAS 2019.
0:09.8	Okay. So we are going to start in 1891 when a German scientist was looking through a microscope at insect cells.
0:19.6	And he saw something kind of funny.
0:21.7	At the center of the cells, there was this dark stuff. No one had ever seen it before.
0:27.4	And he noticed that as the cells would multiply and divide, it would go into some of the new cells,
0:33.5	but not the others. He didn't know what it was, so he gave it a really great name. He called it
0:38.0	the X element. And he was like, we'll just fill in that X later. And then fast forward 10 years
0:46.2	later. And there's an American scientist, and she is looking through her microscope, also at
0:52.8	insect cells.
0:55.6	And she sees something funny.
0:57.1	There's more of this dark stuff.
0:58.9	And it's kind of tiny.
1:01.3	It's hanging out near the X element.
1:05.3	And eventually someone was like, well, if that one thing's called X, like, should we call this other thing, why?
1:07.3	And like that, the sex chromosomes had been discovered.
1:11.9	So chromosomes, you probably all know what they are, but I will tell you anyways.
1:16.3	They're made up of DNA.
1:18.2	Everything has it.
1:19.4	It's the blueprint of life.
1:20.7	We've got rats.
1:21.4	We've got trees.
1:22.2	We've got insects.
	...

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