All language subtitles for 17031x_MH_Overview_01_Central_Topics_v2-en

MICHAEL HEMANN: So genetics represents, essentially,

a diverse class of interests and speaks

to a lot of different areas of study.

So what does genetics tell us about?

Well, genetics tells us, obviously, about heredity.

It tells us why we look like our parents

and why our children will likely look like us,

those things that we pass on, those things that we inherit,

those things that are characteristic of the people

or the communities that we grow up in.

But they also tell us a lot about medicine.

So they tell us about predisposition

towards particular conditions, they talk about--

tell us about biological diversity

and medical diversity.

They speak to potential therapeutics,

things that we can do or be careful of in thinking

about to improve our own health, or the health of our community

members.

So it tells us a lot about us as people.

But it tells us also about our connection with other species

and how things evolve, how different organisms evolve,

how we evolved and what our connections are

with a broad range of other organisms.

And of course genetics informs basic biology.

We learn about molecular circuits.

We learn about the connections between a gene and resulting

phenotypes, resulting biological systems, networks,

tissue architecture.

So it speaks to a broad biological community.

But of course, these days, genetics actually is enabling.

It allows us to do things.

So we can actually engineer things using genetics in ways

that we never have before.

So we have really unique capabilities now

to actually engineer genomes.

There are technologies like CRISPR

that we'll talk a lot about that allows one to manipulate cells

so we can create things like genetically modified organisms.

I mean, this has been going on for a long time.

But we can manipulate plants, we can manipulate cells.

So we can introduce new cell therapies

to try to treat particular conditions.

And in fact, we can actually generate modified embryos.

Now whether we should do these things,

I think, are important questions,

and the ethics of doing these things

are really important issues, and things

that we should think about.

But these are the decisions that you are all

going to make in the long run as people that understand

this technology and use this technology

and weigh what we ought to do, and what we can do.

But right now, we exist in an era, essentially,

of enabling technology.

We have the ability to modify, using a broad toolset

to alter biological systems.

So in essence, we're in an age of genome engineering.

Now of course in a biology that you're now all

very familiar with, we can also create.

So on the right, we're looking at an entity

that you're all really familiar with.

So this is COVID-19.

And on the left is a schematized diagram

of a COVID vaccine, the kinds that

are made at Moderna and Pfizer, Moderna

very close to where I'm sitting right now, and close to many

of you.

This is a piece of RNA.

So it's an engineered nucleic acid sequence

that is now a prevailing vaccine, a prevailing

technology that is used front-line

in the treatment or the preventative treatment

of COVID.

So again, this technology is here as well.

And so we're going to learn about all of these things

in the context of this current course.

We're going to look about the-- look at the interface

between genetics and biology, we're

going to look at the things that you can do with genetics,

and the things that are already being done.

Essentially, what are the possibilities

and how can we engineer using genetics

in more sophisticated ways?