TED Talks: Richard Resnick - Welcome to the genomic revolution (Video)
The world of science is changing fast. Fields like genetics and computer engineering change so quickly that textbooks are updated and rewritten regularly. What saddens me so much is that high school science classes (namely biology, chemistry, and physics) need to meet up with certain standards and content needs to be standardized. These kinds of classes haven't changed in centuries. It's not to say that the classes can change, but all the fundamentals have been tested (and retested) on numerous accounts. Laws and theorems can't change (otherwise, they would be laws or theorems anymore). And there are only so many ways to motivated, prove, and explain concepts. Many times, new editions of textbooks are created solely to rewrite examples that are unclear or change numbers around in exercises. I could guess that if science teachers could explore the ever so fast moving world of modern science, classes could be a lot more interesting to a whole bunch more people.
This is exactly what TED talks do. I have the ability to learn something different and new that I haven't the opportunity in class.
In this talk, RESNICK informs us about a new approach to analyzing and decoding the human genome. The fundamental instructions that code each of us humans are all tucked away in the combination of four proteins sequenced in a seemingly endless chain - a chain so long that it would take 5 boxes of paper to type out all the genetic code in a single human.
The process of decoding the genome was expensive and time consuming. The completion of the Human Genome Project spanned over thirteen years and billions of US Dollars. While genetic testing for medicinal and forensic use is limited to specific genomes, the HGP wanted to collect data from all 22,000 - 25,000 genes and map out their individual distinctions.
It seems now, however, that this entire process has changed.... What will scientists come up with next?
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