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Dr. Harry Burgess: The zebrafish is a really good way of understanding how humans work.
Although its brain is very simple, it has many of the same sorts of behaviors that humans
have. So the fish need to feed, they need to escape from predators [animal that naturally
hunts others], they need to find shelter.
So every animal has to have a special set of instructions that it carries around with
it and when we do genetic experiments we try to see exactly how those instructions are
then interpreted or carried out by the animal to create different patterns of behavior or
even different animal shapes. So one of the main types of experiments we carry out here
to try to modify [change] that set of instructions. So the animal might behave slightly differently
and that way we can understand something about how that set of instructions, which is genetic
part of the animal, controls how it behaves.
Seeing the results of the experiments is sometimes very exciting, but actually most of the time,
kind of disappointing. You know we learn about as much from our failed experiments as we
work out from the ones that succeed.
Usually you go to an aquarium and you see all kinds of cool different fish, different
shapes and sizes and maybe you see some sharks. All we have is the one kind of fish, the zebrafish.
And actually, unless you look really, really closely, they're all going to sort of look
the same. But what's very cool is that each one has a slightly different set of instructions,
which is the genes inside the animal. And so they may develop in a very slightly different
way, or they may have a very slightly different behavior.
The most important thing is to be very curious. You should be asking questions all the time
about, you know, how things work as they do. And also just to be sort of excited by the
basic science of it all. You know, it's cool to go outside and look at the world and
understand a little bit about how it works.
Narrator: To learn more about your genes, visit KidsHealth.org.
Play Michael's Genetics Game at CDC.gov/bam.
And for more health and science, visit Kids.gov