Genes Videos

Jonathan Eisen is a professor at the University of California, Davis Genome Center. Over the course of his career, he has pioneered new ways of sequencing microbial genomes and analyzing them. I talked to Eisen about some of the weirdest creatures he's studied, such as bacteria that only live on the bellies of worms at the bottom of the ocean, and how we may be able to exploit their genomes for our own benefit. We also discussed the new movement for open access to scientific literature, a subject that's a particular passion of Eisen, who is academic editor in chief at the open-access journal PLOS Biology.

The ACLU recently filed a lawsuit with the Public Patent Foundation, charging that two patents on human genes associated with breast cancer and ovarian cancer are unconstitutional and invalid. Most of us probably think of our genetic code as something natural, part of us, certainly not "intellectual property" in the traditional sense. Yet corporations doing medical research use the patents on these genes to prevent anyone else "from studying, testing or even looking at a gene," calling into question the whole idea of where property begins and ends. David Koepsell, author of Who Owns You: The Corporate Gold Rush to Patent Your Genes, and Gene Quinn, patent attorney and founder of IPWatchdog.com, debate whether granting corporations the right to patent genes provides financial incentive to invest in further research, or whether certain natural phenomena should be outside the reach of profits.

Hazel Barton is the Ashland Professor of Integrative Science at Northern Kentucky. She explores some of the world's most remote caves to study the remarkable diversity of microbes that thrive in their dark recesses. I spoke to Barton about how she first became captivated by these bizarre organisms, what it's like to do delicate microbiology when you're hip-deep in mud, and why she wants to explore caves on Mars in search of Martians.

Should egg and sperm donors be genetically tested?

Dennis Bray is an active professor emeritus in both the Department of Physiology and Department of Neuroscience at the University of Cambridge. He studies the behavior of microbes--how they "decide" where to swim, when to divide, and how best to manage the millions of chemical reactions taking place inside their membranes. For Bray, microbes are tiny, living computers, with genes and proteins serving the roles of microprocessors. In this interview, I talked with Bray about his provocative new book, Wetware: A Living Computer Inside Every Cell.

La Matr z de la Vida es una pel cula que presenta la nueva visi n de la medicina tomando en cuenta el campo unificado y los campos morfogen ticos alrededor del cuerpo siendo invisible a nuestros sentidos; regulan y controlan todo el organismo, siendo el campo de la CONcienCIA. Muchos cient ficos comunican la falta de razonamientos para entender las veloces reacciones del sistema nervioso y los millones de cambios metab licos del organismo humano. El Bi logo Dr. Bruce Lipton, Fritz Popp Phd, Rupert Sheldrake Phd. entre otros, nos hablan de que la f sica cu ntica y la gen tica no explica c mo funciona un ser biops quico como el ser humano. El ADN y los genes son potencialidades que se pueden modificar con las creencias y la adaptaci n al entorno. El campo unificado alrededor del cuerpo y los Biofotones es lo nico que explicar a la velocidad en que se rige nuestro organismo. El coraz n emite sonido y ondas electromagn ticas para imprimir en el campo del cuerpo la informaci n y trasmitirla por todo el cuerpo. La coherencia de los ritmos del coraz n con el cerebro explica el orden y la armon a para aumentar el sistema de sanaci n natural. Esto representa una revoluci n en el campo de la medicina, donde se proponen estudiar m s c mo sanamos que c mo enfermamos, para ayudar a la auto-regeneraci n natural en vez de clasificar tantas variantes de las enfermedades.

We are using RFID technology to link personal videos, photos, and memories together in time. These tagged collages are joined together on personalized postcards that we call Bulacards. The integration of art, science, and music allows us to create and share our personalized impressions of the world. We used a Nokia 6212 to read and display a video about interactions between art and biology from a tagged postcard (Bulacard). This film was submitted to www.ChloroFilms.org for use in education and plant biology.

NOVA scienceNOW producer Chad Cohen describes a new study that may link longevity to a gene controlling a certain type of cholesterol. Produced by Chad Cohen and Lexi Krock. Audio editing by David Levin. Interviews conducted by Chad Cohen. NOVA is produced by WGBH in Boston. Major funding for NOVA scienceNOW is provided by Pfizer, the National Science Foundation, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and public television viewers. This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0229297. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. For more fun science stories, visit our Web site at http://www.pbs.org/nova/sciencenow