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PROFESSOR: All right, welcome back for lecture six, genetics.
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Oh, the wave.
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Very good.
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I like it.
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Let's go back to our code of arms and see where we are.
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You remember the code of arms is biological function was studied in two
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different ways, one of which, biochemistry.
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Grind up things and purify individual components away from the cell based on
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some kind of an assay, some kind of a test to purify the
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components you want.
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And the most interesting components turned out to be these amazingly
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diverse proteins that we've spent the beginning of the course studying.
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Now, the complementary way, complementary way to study biology is
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instead of looking at one component away from the rest of the organism, to
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look at the organism minus one component.
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And that's genetics.
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We look at mutants.
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We don't grind things up and try to purify things.
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We look at mutant organisms that have one particular defect.
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And we try to understand how it is that an organism
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has this weird defect.
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And the answer is it's due to these things called genes.
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Of course, when people said that, they had no idea what a gene was.
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It was just a name for whatever it was that explained the properties of these
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mutant organisms.
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So we're going to turn today to the study of genetics.
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And that'll be what we're going to do for the next several days.
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Of course, life had these two amazing properties.
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Life carried out these transformations, like fermentation.
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They could take fruit juice and turn it into alcohol and carbon dioxide.
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Chemical reactions that you couldn't do otherwise in the lab,
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certainly not like that.
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Life had these amazing transformations.
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But life had this other amazing property.
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It reproduced itself faithfully.
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It could transmit information to the next generation, plant the
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carrot, get a carrot.
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Not a Brussels sprout, right?
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Bees give bees and birds give birds.
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And even more than that, not just the things giving the same species, but
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within a species you saw strong resemblances.
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Particular types of noses, for example.
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Particularly tall people.
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People who might be predisposed to a certain type of a cancer.
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It would transmit in a family.
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So people knew somehow there was something very important about the
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information that was transmitted, and you couldn't help but notice familial
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resemblance.
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So for thousands of years, people wondered about familial resemblance.
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Folks being folks would make up explanations for it.
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The ancient Greeks were very big on philosophizing, not so much on doing
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experiments.
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And so they had all sorts of philosophical explanations for this,
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that particles from all over the body would come together
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into the seminal fluid.
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Sort of some kind of pulling operation and collecting information from the
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body that would somehow go into the seminal fluid.
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Most of the Greek theories were relatively sexist because it was the
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male that was transmitting the information, and the female was
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permissive to all of that.
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Indeed at some point, people could later, many hundreds of years later,
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looked at microscopes and even thought they could see little people in the
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head of the sperm, little homunculi.
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It's amazing what you can convince yourself you can see.
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Broadly speaking, since heredity didn't follow incredibly simple laws,
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the general view was somehow information was
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combined from both parents.
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Eventually the female parent ends up getting involved in this too, even if
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not in the early Greek theories.
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Information was combined from both parents and blended in some way, and
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it was kind of mushy beyond that, exactly what that meant, by blending
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inheritance.
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So today, what we're going to do is talk about the origins of a real
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understanding of heredity.
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But it's important to know that for 2,000 or more years, people were just
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completely confused about this thing.
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And to understand that, we need to know the origins of Mendel.
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Now, in biochemistry, we started by meeting Buchner.
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Buchner, I bet most of you have never heard of before.
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Amazing biochemist, you haven't heard of him before.
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So my job with Buchner was to teach you about him and
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what his problem was.
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With Mendel I have exactly the opposite problem.
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You've all heard of Mendel.
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You learned about Mendel in high school, and probably kindergarten, and
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things like that with the peas and the big As and the little As.
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And everybody's been exposed to Mendel.
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And I have to unteach you about Mendel first.
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Mendel, I've got to say, I'm a geneticist.
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Mendel is one of my real heroes.
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Mendel is not who you think he is.
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You think, it's always told that Mendel is this lone monk off in a
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monastery in Brno in what is today the present Czech Republic.
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And you're wondering, what is a monk doing performing scientific
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experiments in the city of Brno in the middle of the Habsburg Empire?
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And like, what's going on, cooking these peas for his fellow monks for
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long periods of time?
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You have to understand the origins of Mendel.
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The origins of Mendel go back to the age of exploration.
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They go back to the 1500s, when Europe sends out ships across the world.
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And people come back with all sorts of strange new plants and animals.
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And people begin cultivating them, and breeding them, and people get very
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interested in breeding experiments, in part because of all these new
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varieties, new species that are coming in from the new world.
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Then there's another incredibly powerful reason why people care about
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breeding at this time, and that is economics.
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Europe goes from being lots of isolated little villages, not really
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communicating much with each other, to building road networks.
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To building commerce across cities and villages, and countries.
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And it becomes more and more economically viable, economically
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rewarding to make a better apple.
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If you made a better apple in your own little village, you might sell it to a
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few other people.
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But in fact, if you could make better plants and better animals, and you had
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an economic distribution system, you could get returns on investment for
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improving agriculture.
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So there was a powerful positive force of economics at work there as well.
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So people begin to start thinking about these things.
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In England, there's a lot of work on breeding better and better fruit trees
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and better sheep.
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A guy called Blakewell produces the Dishley sheep, which
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produces great meat.
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And he becomes very famous for his sheep breeding skills.
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Now, on the continent of Europe, sheep were not about meat.
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That wasn't what you really wanted the sheep for.
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What the European continent wanted sheep for was wool.
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Everybody knew that the Spanish had the best wool sheep.
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Spanish sheep produced the best wool.
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But of course people who are growing sheep for wool across Europe, they
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wanted Spanish sheep.
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And so they imported Spanish sheep, but the Spanish sheep didn't do so
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well in some of these other environments.
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And so people began crossing the Spanish sheep with the local sheep to
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make sheep that still had good wool, but somehow survived better in the
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local environments.
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And there was breeding going on in France, and going on in Germany.
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But the place that perhaps cared most about wool, you might imagine, was the
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center of the textile industry, which was Moravia in the Habsburg Empire.
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And the capital of Moravia then was Brno.
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They cared a lot about wool.
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And so people in this area, in the city of Brno, began to organize
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scientific societies and discussion groups to talk about, how could we
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make breeding better?
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More scientific?
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There was a guy called Andre, Carl Andre in 1806, organized the Moravian
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Society for the Improvement of Agriculture, Natural Science, and the
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Knowledge of the Country.
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And he drew up a whole program of scientific development, emphasizing
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the importance of basic and applied research in the natural sciences.
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And in one of these kind of over the top civic booster kind of speeches, he
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writes in his program that the significance of this kind of work on
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better breeding may someday be as important as the work of Copernicus
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and Newton.
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And that some day the world may be as grateful to some son of Brno as they
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are to Newton and to Copernicus.
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Pretty kind of florid, over the top kind of prose.
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But Andre lays out this whole program there, and he gets other people
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interested in it.
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And this guy, Hempel, five years later, begins writing about these
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things and making programs.
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And he says, look, we've got to understand the laws of hybridization
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and how they really work.
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And we're going to have--
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he says we're going to need really scientific people to do it.
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He says--
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he even tries to characterize the kind of folk we're going to need.
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He says, "we're going to need a researcher with a profound knowledge
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of botany and sharply defined powers of observation who might with untiring
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and stubborn patience grasp the subtleties of the experiments, take a
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firm command with them and provide a clear explanation," he writes in 1820.
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Well, around this time, Andre had organized a group called the
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Enological and Pomological Society.
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The Enological and Pomological Society, right around this time there,
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very interested in plant breeding.
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It has its first president, who's the president of it for about the first
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seven years.
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When he dies, a new person takes over, CF Napp takes over the Enological and
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Pomological Society.
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Now, that's not a full time job, doing this.
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He has a full time job.
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His full time job is he's the abbot of the Augustinian Monastery in Brno.
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And he begins to decide to have his monastery work on breeding.
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So he goes off looking for scientifically trained monks.
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Looking for months with backgrounds in math and physics.
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He's looking for MIT kind of monks.
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And so he's off looking for these people, and who does he find?
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STUDENT: Mendel.
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PROFESSOR: Mendel.
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Mendel is no accident.
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Mendel is the result of economic forces and scientific forces, and
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civic planning and an understanding of scientific research that culminates in
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this monk that you think is this isolated guy standing in his garden in
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the monastery.
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No.
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He's the product of a biotech incubator.
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This was a biotech incubator going on in the middle of Moravia.
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That's Mendel.
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All right, so that's my Mendel.
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You've now got a handle on my Mendel.
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Let's talk about what he did.
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Before we go on, we'd like you to take a moment and describe the economic
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forces that drove genetics.
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