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ERIC S. LANDER: All right.
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Well, welcome to 7.00x.
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This is introductory biology at MIT.
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Welcome to everybody who's watching on the web, as well.
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What I want to do today is tell us what the course is about.
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I'm going to try to cover everything in the entire course today,
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everything.
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And then, you know, we'll try to cover it a little more slowly next time.
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So if it doesn't all make perfect sense the first time out, that's kind
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of to be expected.
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But I think, as you'll see, the purpose of this course is to
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understand the fundamental principles of biology, the really unifying ideas
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of biology.
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It isn't to memorize all the details of biology.
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So I want to make sure that you have the whole picture of where we're going
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in this course first.
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And everything that we talk about is going to fit into
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one very simple framework.
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So, you know, you can't pick up a newspaper, you can't pick up The New
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York Times, without something about biology, something about medicine
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appearing in it.
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Wherever you are in the world, papers are constantly talking about biology.
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For example, let's just talk about section one, the revolution in
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biology, medicine.
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If you saw The New York Times Sunday Magazine just this weekend, there was
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this cover story, called, "Painless," about somebody who was utterly unable
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to feel pain.
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You might think that's a good thing.
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It's a very bad thing, not be able to feel pain, because if you put your
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hand on something hot, the only way you know that you're burning your hand
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is you start smelling burning flesh.
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It's a bad thing.
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Well, we know the gene that causes that.
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There's a particular genetic defect that caused it.
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It's extremely rare, but people have been able to figure that out.
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Cystic fibrosis--
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there is a genetic disease that's not so very rare-- about one in 2,000
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births in European population are babies with cystic fibrosis.
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Cystic fibrosis, particular genetic disease.
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The gene for cystic fibrosis was identified in 1989.
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But just in this past year, a drug was developed that treats the genetic
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defect in about 4% of the cases.
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Specific genetic spelling differences can be treated by a drug.
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So we've got examples here of hereditary inability to feel pain,
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inability to feel pain.
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We've got cystic fibrosis.
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We've got breast cancer.
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There is a gene that was discovered some time ago--
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in fact, two genes--
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one and another, both of which confer a very high risk for early onset
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breast cancer.
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And this has been a pretty important thing.
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While there's not a drug yet that treats that, there is early
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diagnostics, early mammography, that allows people to know that they should
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be getting mammographic exams much earlier in their life.
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Similarly, there's a couple of genes for colon cancer that allow people to
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do colon cancer screening earlier in their life and catch cancers before
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they become lethal.
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It happens to be a hot topic this spring, even as we're teaching this
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course, because whether that gene can be patented and exclusively licensed
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to a single company that could have a monopoly on screening that gene, is
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going to United States Supreme Court in the last week of April.
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And the United States Supreme Court, sometime this spring, is going to make
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a decision as to whether or not someone can have a
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monopoly on a human gene.
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Pretty cool.
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And I'll tell you more about that in the course at some point.
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Skin cancer, there's an amazing drug for skin cancer.
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Skin cancer used to be completely untreatable.
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But it was found that 50% of the people who have skin cancer, melanoma,
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have mutations in a particular gene, which goes by the funny name, BRAF.
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There is a drug against that BRAF protein.
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And in one sense, it is miraculous.
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You can take patients with cancerous lesions all over their body.
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And they can take this pill, and they utterly disappear.
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Except that nine months later, they completely come back.
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They completely come back.
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So we know that, in one sense, miraculous things are happening.
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We can make drugs, designed against particular mutations that give rise to
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the particular changes in cancers, and have a stunning effect on the cancer.
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And yet it's not quite good enough.
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It only gets nine months.
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But it tells us that if we were to put together two or three or four of those
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drugs, with low side effects and high potency, maybe the
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cancers won't come back.
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And that's what's going to be going on in the next couple of decades.
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It's an exciting time.
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But we can't overpromise that these sorts of things yet save the lives of
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people with skin cancer.
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They extend the lives of people with a skin cancer.
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That's the edge.
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That's the time.
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That's why it's worth teaching a course like this.
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Because it's going to be your generation that works through all of
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this biology and works through the therapeutics that eventually get us to
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the point where there's a combination pill where it doesn't come back.
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There are similar things going on with high cholesterol that
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causes heart attacks.
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And we'll talk about that in this course.
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Some people have extremely high cholesterol.
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Sometimes there's a genetic cause.
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Sometimes it's diet.
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In fact, this is becoming a huge epidemic in large portions of the
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world, particularly in Asia and India and China, and with epidemics of heart
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disease that are beginning to overtake the population.
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Well, about 15 years ago, some remarkable drugs became available that
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were able to treat high cholesterol and bring it down some but not
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completely.
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This year, there have been some remarkable new studies of drugs not
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yet approved from some totally different mechanism, that make it
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possible to lower cholesterol in other ways.
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But there also have been some stunning failures, some hypotheses, about other
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ways that you might be able to decrease the risk of heart attack.
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And, well, some companies blew several billion dollars each on what turned
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out to be a pretty bad scientific hypothesis.
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And we now know why it was a bad scientific hypothesis.
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And they could have saved a few billion bucks.
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I don't know about you, but saving a few billion bucks on any given day is
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a good thing.
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That's what we're living through right now.
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It is an amazing time.
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And the point of the course is to be able to understand this, as opposed,
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to say, cutting edge high physics or fancy, fancy chemistry.
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Where you might not, in an introductory course, be able to
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understand what's going on at the cutting edge, we can in biology be
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able to make sense of what is going on at the cutting edge.
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Maybe not all the little details, but the fundamental principles that are at
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work in all of this, in all of the medical applications that are going
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on, it's possible right now to understand.
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