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HAZEL SIVE: I'm Professor Hazel Sive,
and I'd like to welcome you to "Getting Up
to Speed in Biology."
What is this course about?
This is for you if you are trying
to fill in a sparse or distant background in biology.
It's been a while since you studied biology
and you'd like to get up into a more modern time.
This is for you if you're preparing
to take a college level introductory biology
course, for example at MIT or another college.
And this is for you if you're trying
to get insights into life sciences
for your own interests.
Let's talk a little bit about biology today,
which is really fantastic.
The thing you may know is that everything
is made of these tiny building blocks called cells.
This is a video from my own research group.
It's a picture or a video of the developing brain in a fish.
You can see the red dots, which are
the nuclei of the cells where all the genetic material lives.
And you can see that every cell is surrounded
by a green region, a membrane that keeps everything intact.
Everything is made of cells.
And everything comes from a single cell.
It's amazing.
You can look at a beautiful bird or a creepy spider, a family
of polar bears or sea creature.
And everything has come from a single cell.
Really fantastic.
Here's some other things to think about in biology.
There are some animals that can regenerate their body parts.
If they are cut in half or a limb is severed,
they can grow one back or they can grow back a new body.
Planeria, flatworms, are like this.
Professor Reddian at MIT studies these
and has made some real insights into thinking
about or into understanding how flatworms regenerate
their bodies.
Maybe this has got something to do
with helping humans regenerate body parts when there
is an accident or a disease.
We can think about life in the oceans.
Prochlorococcus is the world's most abundant bacterium
in the seas.
The oceans are full of the small bacterium.
And the function is really not understood
but likely has something very important
to do with the health of our waters.
Professor Chisholm at MIT has discovered
and has studied this bacterium, most recently finding
that it is making thousands of different tiny proteins
that it is secreting into the water.
And the function, again, is unknown at this frontier
of biology.
There is huge interest in the diseases that we get,
and what causes them, and how to use state of the art techniques
to cure diseases.
In this example, Professor Yilmaz at MIT
has been thinking about what we eat
and how that influences the types of cancer,
for example colon cancer, that we get
and what we might do to address cures
that use brand new breaking technologies to make people
better.
And we can think about life as part of the engineering
spectrum, how to make new things.
In this example, Professor Bathe uses
DNA constructed into particular scaffolds of particular shapes
to do interesting engineering things.
Here this scaffold can harvest the energy
from light a completely new way to get light sensitive energy
sources.
All of this adds up to the excitement
that is the background for this course and for biology today.
So let's go back to the question of whether this course will
be useful for you.
It will be if you have never had high school biology since you
were a freshman, let's say.
It will be if you need a refresher class before you
can go and take an introductory level biology class at college.
Are you still not sure?
We have a quiz that you can take.
And you'll figure out whether or not
what we would teach you in this class will be useful to you.
Welcome back to getting up to speed in biology.
Now that you have taken the quiz and have decided
that this course will be useful to you,
let me tell you a little bit more about it.
What's the content of this particular course?
It is a short course that comprises five lectures that
are arranged in a modular form.
After a few minutes, the lecture will break
and there will be some practice problems
that you'll be able to access and work with the concepts
and the ideas that have been introduced to you
so you'll get plenty of expertise
in each of the things in each of the modules
that you go through in every lecture.
The topics of the lectures cover some
of the greatest and most important concepts in biology
today.
They're titled molecules of life, the cell
and how it works, information transfer
in biology, inheritance and genetics,
and building with DNA.
Welcome to "Getting Up to Speed in Biology."
I look forward to working with you as we go
through this material together.