Dr. Marc Breedlove

And that there might be a heterozygote advantage.

I mean, you know, the classic example of sickle cell anemia, right, where being a heterozygote for that gene confers an advantage.

If there's malaria in the area, you'll be less likely to succumb.

Things go wrong when two copies come together in one individual, and that's when the

The blood cells are especially affected.

And things go wrong when an offspring gets two such copies, which is relatively rare, but it does happen.

And in that case, then the offspring is very sick.

I'm certainly looking like the mad scientist.

In fact, people do those sorts of transplants in birds.

So a very famous neuroscientist from France, Nicole Le Duran, did these experiments where she would open up chick embryos and quail embryos, and she could scoop out part of the nervous system from one and implant it in the other.

And she'd know when she had done it right that she had a way of

telling the cells apart under a microscope.

Plus when they grew up, here you'd have this white leghorn chicken with a streak of brown feathers right where she... Was it called a quicken?

Sorry, couldn't help myself.

Here you'd have this white leghorn chicken with a streak of brown feathers in the middle that were derived from the quail.

And so it is possible to do those sorts of swaps.

And of course, this is what's so great about working with birds is their embryos are...

you know, easy to get to for the first 21 days or so.

So people had done those sorts of experiments.

There was a question about sexual differentiation of the brain in birds because the, and I'll tell you why it turned out I didn't need to do that experiment and it wouldn't have shown what we wanted.