Part One interweaves the present-day story of the Rosens, a young family on an odyssey to find a cure for their four-year old daughter’s rare genetic disease, with stories of the exciting discoveries of the early pioneers in genetics — Gregor Mendel, Thomas Hunt Morgan, Francis Crick and James Watson. This episode also tracks the dark period in human history when a little genetic knowledge was used to justify terrifying human experiments that culminated in the Holocaust.
Part Two begins with the story of the signature scientific achievement of our time: the mapping of the human genome. As scientists learn to read the genetic code, they grapple with the dangers inherent in increasingly sophisticated and easily available methods of intervening in the very essence of what makes us human, our DNA.
We know that genes are the instructions that make us who we are, but how do genes do that? This episode gives a quick glance into how those mysterious instructions buried in a gene become the actual nose on a face.
Computer code is finicky. If one line, or if one character is off, then the whole program can go sideways. Genetic code isn't much different. In this episode, we see what happens if code gets deleted, put in the wrong place, or switched with other code.
In this episode, we visit Liver Town to see how a few over-active cells can ruin a perfectly good neighborhood. We look at the causes for this disease, commonly known as cancer, and mention a couple of ways to calm down those good genes that have gone bad.
DNA spells the instructions for every living thing we know about with just four letters. In this episode, we'll see how scientists are expanding the DNA alphabet that could show us what to look for in the search for E.T.
In this episode, we take you into the war room during the heat of battle with cancer to see what options we have in our arsenal and how they work.
If you're curious about the origin of boys, look no further than the Y chromosome and how it contributes not only to making a boy in utero but regulates brain functions and heart health for that boy's whole life.
