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[swelling violins lead deep woodwind arrangement]
♪
(male professor) The idea of this kind of mapping
is to take the DNA from the parents, take the DNA from the children,
characterize the DNA from those individuals
for polymorphisms,
and ask, "When you look at an individual
"that shows the defect,
is there a pattern?"
[voice-over] I was just teaching Molecular Biology 101,
the class we've developed
for undergraduates who are not science majors
but who want to learn something
about molecular biology.
My lecture today was about human behavior--
about as complex as anything else you can think of.
How is it that the variations in DNA and in the genes that all of us have
affect our behavior?
Having the ability to work with DNA
has opened up abilities to ask all kind of questions
that we never really associated
with genetics or genes or DNA before.
These things aren't just intellectually beautiful.
They're important for us in society.
I won the Nobel Prize
in medicine/physiology in 1995.
The specific experiments that I and a colleague,
Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard, did
was to say, "Let's look at a fly embryo."
Things happen; the fly embryo makes a head; it makes muscles.
If there are genes involved in that
and if we were to knock out those genes--
make mutations in those genes--
do you think something should go wrong?
It worked in a way that really allowed us
for the first time to describe
how this little fruit fly embryo developed
and identify all the genes.
Everyone was surprised to find
that those same mutations
could be identified in humans,
and when those genes were mutant in humans,
they caused birth defects
and defects in human embryos.
When those discoveries were made,
the similarity between fly genes and human genes
was astounding and not predicted.
We were incredibly lucky.
I take great pleasure
in the day-to-day successes--
as much pleasure in the day-to-day successes
as winning a Nobel Prize.
[off-screen] Can you blow this up?
Can you like--there must be--
These are fruit fly embryos,
and one little place in the DNA is one little gene.
(female student) There's also one interesting one I took.
(Eric, voice-over) One of my pleasures as a professor here
has been to work
with really remarkable undergraduates.
(female student, voice-over) I'm studying the formation
of the nucleolus during fruit fly embryogenesis,
and the nucleolus
is a structure within the nucleus,
and it has the ribosomal RNA
which gets processed to make the ribosome.
Working with Eric is great.
He's a fantastic thesis adviser.
He loves science so much
that you can't help but be excited
about anything that he's excited about.