Genetic engineering has produced some amazing species. One type of corn has a gene from bacteria. The corn is safe for people to eat, but the plant poisons caterpillars that try to attack it.There’s also a salmon that grows to market weight in less than half the usual time of three years. It’s an Atlantic salmon with genes from a Pacific chinook salmon.
Aging is a fact of life. Even if you avoid bad accidents, injuries, and infections, you won’t stay healthy forever. Your body will break down as you get older. You’ll get wrinkles and achy joints. Your vision and hearing will fade. Your chance of developing cancer, heart disease, and many other ailments will greatly increase. Aging “bedevils us all,” writes Steven N. Austad in his book, Methuselah’s Zoo. He defines aging as “the progressive deterioration over time of bodily functions and defenses along with increasing susceptibility to diseases.”
关于衰老，动物教会了我们什么 Continue reading »
Inside a living cell, something remarkable is happening. A very tiny machine cuts the cell’s DNA. Next, the cell repairs the broken DNA, but the segment where the cut happened no longer works the same way. The tiny machine has edited the DNA—the code of life.
基因编辑技术—合成生物学的基本工具 Continue reading »
You wake up and open your eyes, your head is pounding. Maybe a little breakfast will help. You try a few bites of an egg on toast, but your head hurts too much to eat. Maybe you’re getting sick? With a groan, you walk to the medicine cabinet. You find a bottle of Tylenol. (The technical name of this medicine is acetaminophen). You pop a pill in your mouth, take a gulp of water and swallow. Then you lie down and wait. As the medicine starts to work, your headache will go away.
药物之旅：药理学的奥秘 Continue reading »
The surface of our planet is populated by living things. Despite their apparent diversity, living things are fundamentally similar inside. Cells are the fundamental units of life. As emphasized by the cell biologist Edmund Beecher Wilson, “The key to every biological problem must finally be sought in the cell; for every living organism is, or at some time has been, a cell.”
“One bug burger, please,” you say. “With lettuce and tomato.” Your meal tastes a lot like a hamburger made from beef. But the patty contains ground up mealworms, which are even more nutritious. The pale green bun was baked with algae instead of flour. And the lettuce and tomato are special varieties created to thrive inside vertical farms. You might be saying “eww” now, but twenty or fifty years from now, you could be saying “yum” instead. In the future, bugs and algae and genetically modified foods might seem normal and delicious, not gross or weird.
Everyone can see that, from birth through adolescence, humans get taller and their bones get longer. And then all th at stops around the end of the teen years. In the past, the mechanism of growth was a mystery. In the fourth century, there was a common belief that children’s natural character was hot and liquid, partly because of the blood that went into their creation. Thus, a physician to the Roman emperor believed that children grew because of their excessive heat. Twelve hundred years later, it was understood that food provided the material that allowed growth. A French physician, however, pointed out that even when sick children didn’t eat, they continued to grow.
Do you drink sports drinks or energy drinks? As well as being favorite beverages for sportspeople, they are particularly popular refreshments for young people. But do you really know what you are drinking and whether these drinks are doing what they claim to do?
运动饮料和能量饮料管用吗 Continue reading »
Compared to eukaryotic cells, bacteria may seem much smaller and simpler—yet, their way of living provides insights into fundamental metabolic processes that have implications far greater than their size suggests. While the vast majority of bacteria that cluster in the human body are necessary for our existence and survival, certain types of bacteria are disease-causing organisms, or pathogens, and pose a danger to humans due to their ability to infect our cells.
