BIOL 218
DNA, Life, and Everything
Last Offered Spring 2009
Division III Writing Skills
This course is not offered in the current catalog

Since the molecular biology revolution of the 1960s, a view of biology has developed which regards living organisms as predictable products of their encoded DNA programs. A motto for this philosophy and scientific approach could be “To know my DNA is to know me.” In this tutorial we’ll examine the power and the limitations of DNA analysis and manipulation for understanding life. Students will read and discuss scientific articles that deal with creating artificial life (the field of synthetic biology), environmental DNA sampling (to deduce community structure; to discover new, uncultured species), human genome diversity surveys (to discover the basis for human phenotypic variation and human evolutionary history), comparative genomics to address evolutionary questions (ex., chimps compared to humans), reproductive cloning by nuclear transfer, and the genetic and non-genetic nature of stem cells.