In 1951, two years before the double-helical structure of DNA was discovered, Barbara McClintock gave a lecture on her newest research into maize genetics, which revealed something truly surprising—certain genes were able to jump from one region of the genome to another. These jumping genes appeared to have a pronounced effect on the regions where they landed, disrupting and inactivating nearby genes. In maize (i.e., corn), these effects were easily visualized as changes in the color pattern of kernels over generations. Despite compelling evidence, McClintock’s lecture was met with confusion and open hostility from the scientific community because it conflicted…
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The last couple of months, we’ve talked a lot about the biopsychosocial model and how it explains some of the more complicated expressions of the brain. But biopsychosocial influences affect much more than just our brains. In fact, in the past few decades, there has been growing evidence that factors like environment and behavior can affect our bodies on a molecular level—through epigenetic markers. The term epigenetic refers to all of the molecular markers and modifications that change the way your DNA is read and interpreted. If DNA is the blueprint of life, then epigenetic markers are the labels and…
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Up next in our series on women who reshaped science is Marie Maynard Daly—the first Black woman in America to earn a PhD in Chemistry. At a time when scientists were only just discovering the function of DNA as hereditary material, Daly made many foundational discoveries about the chemical structure of nucleic acids and histones—the proteins that DNA wraps around. Perhaps even more influential though are Daly’s studies investigating the health impacts of cholesterol and sugar. Daly was one of the first scientists to discover the link between cholesterol and hypertension, which can lead to heart attacks. Her work as…
Continue readingThe Ghosts of Science Past: Part 2—Marie Maynard Daly and the Dangers of Cholesterol
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Last week, I wrote about the potential of personalized medicine, and I briefly mentioned the role of genetic sequencing and the Human Genome Project (HGP) in making personalized medicine possible. This week, I want to delve a little deeper into what exactly goes into sequencing a genome. The HGP, which took 13 years to complete, was performed using a process known as Sanger sequencing. Sanger sequencing, invented in 1977 by Fred Sanger, is a laborious and costly process of sequencing. In the HGP, relatively tiny fragments of the human genome were sequenced multiple times and aligned together, piece by piece,…
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