James Stewart
speaker
4,118 appearances
21 recordings
2 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard 16 Sep
James Stewart’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 16 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 2.
Appearances
What the DNA says, the RNA delivers.
Cephalopods, though, do something different.
They edit the copy.
Not randomly, not accidentally, but in response to whatever conditions they're currently facing, whether that's freezing temperatures, crushing pressure, or total darkness.
No matter what it is, the RNA gets adjusted and the protein it builds changes with it.
In humans, less than 1% of the brain's genetic instructions are rewritten before the cell acts on them.
In cephalopods, over 60% are.
Whether the colossal squid uses this same trick to drive its explosive growth rate is one of the big questions scientists still don't have the answer to.
But one day, I'm sure they will.
And I, for one, can't wait to find out.
So why does this all matter?
Well, firstly, it's cool to look at weird and wonderful creatures, yeah, but secondly, because every single one of us is in a race against time.
Our cells divide, our telomeres, the tiny protective caps on our DNA, like the sort of plastic tips on your shoelaces, are slowly wearing down.
Damage builds as we age, and eventually systems fail, whether through cancer or other diseases.
And for all the brilliance of modern medicine, we are still largely fighting these battles with tools developed from organisms that live, as we do, at the surface.
But down in the deep, evolution has been running different experiments for hundreds of millions of years, and we're only just starting to read the results.
Take the squid's RNA editing.
Cancer is, at its core, a disease of uncontrolled cell division, cells receiving corrupted instructions and then acting on them.
So an animal that can edit those instructions in real time, switching protein structures on and off in response to its environment, points to a completely new way of thinking about cellular control.
Scientists right now are actively investigating whether similar RNA editing mechanisms could be harnessed to correct the corrupted molecular signs that drive tumor growth.
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