Open course ware

ADAM MARTIN: So to start out, I just wanted to mention we talk a lot about dogma in the lab. So we talk about dogma, right? There's the central dogma, which is DNA. Information flows from DNA to RNA to protein. I'm going to describe another dogma, if you will, which is that life starts as sort of a fertilized egg. So you get a fertilized egg. And this fertilized egg, which you see in the video up here, undergoes development. And as part of that development there is what is known as differentiation, where cells acquire more specialized cell types. So there's development and differentiation. And this results in adult cell types that are known as differentiated. So it results in differentiated/adult cell types with specialized functions. And you see just a few of them up on the slide above. There are, in fact, thousands of different sort of cell types that humans have. But the dogma, at least up until fairly recently-- in the past couple of decades or so or at le...

ADAM MARTIN: And today, we're going to talk about immunity, which is important, especially at this time of the year. So immunity is the resistance to disease based on a prior exposure. Based on prior exposure. And of course, this is the principle behind vaccination. So humans have been sort of using the properties of the immune system to prevent themselves from getting disease for centuries. One of the first very clear examples of this is back in the 18th century with the English physician, Edward Jenner, and Edward Jenner found out or came to the realization that farm hands on farms, specifically milk maids, that were exposed to a variant of smallpox from cows, which is known as cow pox, could become immune to smallpox. So cow pox is a less severe form of the disease. And what Jenner did was to take pustules from individuals who had the cow pox disease and inject them into an eight-year-old boy, and then infect that boy with smallpox to show that the boy was immune t...

ADAM MARTIN: OK. So I'm going to start out today's lecture on the wrong foot by quoting somebody that you guys probably don't know and who was a New York Yankee. So Yogi Berra, the famous Yankee catcher once said, "You can observe a lot by watching," OK? And that is very appropriate for biology because a lot of things in biology have been discovered simply by watching for them in cells or watching for them to happen at the molecular level. And so our ability to visualize and see what's going on inside cells and at the molecular level is really critical for the process of biological discovery. So today I'm going to tell you about tools, both sort of older tools but also kind of the cutting edge, for how biologists are really observing what's going on in living cells and in life in general. OK. So let me start by just having you guys think a little bit. What do you require of me to see what I write on the board? Yeah, Rachel. AUDIENCE: Ligh...

ADAM MARTIN: So I guess I will start by, first of all, congratulating you all. Since the last time I've seen you, you've all regenerated your intestine. So it's like you're a brand new person. So there's that. I want to start the lecture by talking about something I've been putting off telling you about, which is the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine that was awarded this year. And it was awarded to James Allison and Tasuku Honjo for their discovery of a way to harness the immune system to fight cancer. And we're going to talk about the immune system later in the course, and it turns out, I will lecture on it. And I've actually had immunology, and in fact, I had immunology with James Allison. So I will do my best to channel James Allison when I talk about the immune system. But what they won the prize for is, they figured out a way to essentially release the brake on the immune system in order to allow the immune system to better fight ...