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HAZEL SIVE: From your class exercise about restriction endonucleases, you should now be able to manipulate a piece of DNA to reveal blunt ends or sticky ends. You should know whether or not it's a 5-prime overhang or a 3-prime overhang. And this will set us up for the next topic I want to discuss, which is the question of the vector and ligation. Let's set the stage for this topic by looking back at the overall view that I gave you on cloning and using a gene of interest. We've talked about cutting the DNA now. And we haven't talked about how you exactly isolate your gene of interest. But we'll not worry about that for the moment. What we need to talk about now is the next step, how you're going to put your gene of interest into some kind of carrier DNA molecule that will allow it to replicate to high copy number. And the reason that this can occur is because of these things called vectors. A vector is really a virus that grows in bacteria. It may ...

Today is my last class with you. Awe, I'm sorry, too. You guys are a lot of fun. This has actually been the most interactive 7. 1 I've ever had. Usually there are a couple of people who perk up and say things, but you guys are great because all sorts of people are willing to contribute. So, I've had a wonderful time and it certainly seems like you guys have learned a lot. What I'd like to do for my last lecture is pick up again a little bit like I did with genomics and try to give you a sense of where things are going. I always like doing this because I get to talk about things that are in none of the textbooks that, well, I mean, it's just stuff that many people working in the field don't necessarily know. And that's what's so much fun about teaching introductory biology is because it only takes a semester for you guys to get up to the point of at least being able to understand what's getting done ...

class -- In the last we lecture traditionally we bring in a guest lecturer to tell us of their perspective on complex systems and it is with great pleasure to welcome Hal Albelson. A professor here at MIT for many years, some of you might have already taken classes from him. And what he is going to talk about is a topic we've touched upon, but not in particular detail, in the first two lectures. In particular the interaction of technology and complex systems with law and social issues. Hal: Ok, thanks. Okay hi. Hari asked me to talk about complex systems, which is kind of what you've been studying all semester. Today I want to give you of a hint of another kind of complexity. You have been doing the technical infrastructure for essentially what has become the information age. But the information age... You gotta turn off the mic. But the information age has just changed the world immensely over the last 20 years and has run smack into another kind of complexity. A...

PROFESSOR: Welcome to class again. This time it's not Professor Forney it's me, so my name is Ralf Koetter. You guys have some substantial chalk here at MIT. And I'm visiting here from the University of Illinois, so Professor Forney thought I could teach this class here. All right, let's see. So I understand that last time, last Wednesday, you went through all the finite field stuff, meaning, so you know what that would mean, the finite field. There's p elements, p to the m elements. Whatever q you have here, is a power of a prime in order to be a field. So this one, as a notation, is a ring of polynomials. You've seen that too. So I assume you know everything about finite fields that you will need to know here, at least, except for one more theorem which Professor Forney told me he did not cover. And this is the fundamental theorem of algebra. I have to write a little bit smaller with this thing here, otherwise I'll run out. AUDIENCE: [UNINTEL...