Michael Regilio
speaker
2,071 appearances
9 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard 12 Jul
Michael Regilio’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 — 3 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
If I may lay a quick compliment on you, you seem quite healthy and smart. Thank you. I do what I can. Sure, it's important to stay fit and sharp, but the fact of the matter is you had little to do with being healthy and smart. In fact, you had no say in the matter at all. You were predetermined to be those things. You just made the most of it.
So you're talking about my genetic predisposition, right?
Okay, sure. DNA, or deoxyribonucleic acid, is a molecule, and a molecule is a bunch of atoms stuck together. This particular molecule, DNA, is coiled up in the nucleus of every cell in our body, and each coiled-up strand of DNA is the complete blueprint to make, uh...
Cells are really small, and to illustrate this, let me hit you with this fact. Every time you scratch your nose or rub your arm, dead skin cells fall off your body. Humans shed about 600,000 skin cells per day.
So, we're talking tiny here, and the DNA strand in each cell isn't just coiled up in the cell, it's actually coiled up in a much smaller part of the cell, the nucleus.
If uncoiled, a single strand of DNA would stretch to about 6 feet 5 inches long. So it sounds like we're packed pretty tight up in there. Right, right. Now consider that there are about 50 trillion cells in your body. So if you laid end to end all the DNA strands in your body, that would stretch to the sun, and not just once, but 600 times.
Look, science and reality do not care what makes sense to you and I, or even to scientists. Put it in modern parlance, facts don't care about your feelings. The function of DNA is to tell amino acids how to line up into the correct protein shapes. Proteins combine to make cells. Cells combine to make up tissues. Tissues make up organs. And organs make up living creatures.
The entire process, as magical as it seems, is all just chemistry. It can be studied. It can be understood. And that understanding took many people over 100 years since we first spotted DNA to really figure out. And of course, there's still a lot to be explored.
DNA was first discovered in 1869 by a Swiss biologist named Friedrich Miescher. Miescher was studying white blood cells, and he had a nice supply of white blood cells because he would collect all the used bandages from a nearby hospital.
Oh man, that is super gross. Okay, well it's about to get grosser because Misha was studying white blood cells, which were hard to extract from a healthy person, but were in great abundance in the pus on used bandages.
So he wasn't really collecting used bandages as much as he was collecting the pus on used bandages. And in studying the pus, he experimented and isolated a new molecule he called nuclein and studied it using now from pus to salmon sperm, which might not be exactly as gross as the pussy bandages. Puss caviar, anyone? And so today we call nuclein nucleic acid.
This is one of the building blocks of life. Almost 100 years later in London, a scientist named Rosalind Franklin discovered the double helix shape that we're so familiar with of DNA.
Franklin, although she was appreciated, her day was largely overlooked for her contributions to the understanding of DNA. And most of the credit went to Watson and Crick because men.
Before DNA, law enforcement had a few tools at their disposal, but they were actually pretty imprecise. Starting in the 1920s with blood typing, scientists identified four different types of blood. A, A, B, B, and O. This was huge for doctors because they could now safely perform blood transfusions, but it also came in handy for law enforcement. So to catch the bad guys, yeah?
No, actually just the opposite, to free the good guys. You could prove somebody definitely was not the crook if there was a blood sample and the suspect did not have that type of blood, but law enforcement could not use it to help identify a suspect beyond a reasonable doubt.
And that's far from enough evidence to convict somebody of a crime. But DNA testing has turned that percentage up, like way up, like 99% accurate and higher.
In fact, the first use of DNA evidence in a crime did both. It all started with Alec Jeffries, a professor and geneticist in the UK in the 1980s. In his research, Jeffries' study of the human family revealed that children had a composite of both their mother and father's DNA. And this finding was widely reported in the press.
A lawyer read about it and he was working on an immigration case and saw the story and he thought it would be helpful with a client who was having trouble proving his identity. Professor Jeffries, using the mother's DNA, was able to prove his client was who he said he was. And police took note of this. So that was, at the time, quite a breakthrough, I'm guessing.
Yeah, and it opened the doors for criminal investigations. So in 1986, investigators asked Jeffries to help with a murder case. Two 15-year-old girls had been sexually assaulted and murdered. A teenage boy with learning disabilities had been arrested and had confessed to one of the murders, but not the other. The police wanted help pinning both murders on the boy and went to Jeffries.
And guess what happened?
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