Wendy Zuckerman
speaker
3,034 appearances
14 recordings
3 series
first heard May 2020
last heard 2 Jul
Wendy Zuckerman’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 10 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 3.
Appearances
And if you need some biology 101, genes are instructions that tell your body to make proteins.
Proteins like hemoglobin or collagen.
And Hassi remembers finding out just how many genes there are in the human body.
Hussey figured that humans are so complicated.
Some 20,000 genes to make everything in your muscles, bones, brain, eyeballs, sphincters.
Even at the time, one headline said this was unexpectedly low.
And back then, there were clues that there's more to us than that.
So when you look at our entire DNA, you roll it out like toilet paper.
Those 20,000 genes are a tiny fraction of the role.
For years, that so-called junk DNA, and more generally, the parts of our DNA that didn't code for proteins, it was like a cipher that many scientists, including Hassi, were trying to decode.
And over the years, they worked out that these mysterious chunks of DNA do loads of important stuff.
Including, get this, coding for not big, complicated proteins, but little baby proteins.
Peptides.
But fast forward to today, and Hassi's team has found a bunch of peptides hanging out in weird parts of our DNA.
His lab likes to give them Yiddish names.
Please tell me there's one called chutzpah.
Mensch.
Hasse's lab has found these peptides in what's called our mitochondrial DNA.
Mitochondria are known as the powerhouses of our cells.
They kind of look like carpet beetle larvae, but what they do is pump out fuel for our body to use for energy.
Showing 1041–1060 of 3,034 · page 53 of 152
← Previous
Next →