Some of the most significant advances in molecular biology have relied upon the methodology of genetics. The same statement may be made concerning our understanding of immunological phenomena.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
What attracted me to immunology was that the whole thing seemed to revolve around a very simple experiment: take two different antibody molecules and compare their primary sequences.
It is particularly pleasing to see how purely basic research, originally aimed at testing the genetic identity of different cell types in the body, has turned out to have clear human health prospects.
Investigating rare diseases gives researchers more clues about how the healthy immune system functions.
And of course, identifying all human genes and proteins will have great medical significance.
We found out that, contrary to what many people thought, in the immune system, genes can change during the life cycle of the individual.
Immunologists agreed that an individual vertebrate synthesizes many millions of structurally different forms of antibody molecules even before it encounters an antigen.
The immune system constantly creates genes on the fly that are specific to the things that show up in the body. It's amazing.
Today we try to identify a gene and then study its properties.
If you wanted to dissect the structure of living cells, genetic analysis was an extremely powerful method, so my interest turned to that.
We have 200 trillion cells, and the outcome of each of them is almost 100 percent genetically determined. And that's what our experiment with the first synthetic genome proves, at least in the case of really simple bacteria. It's the interactions of all those separate genetic units that give us the physiology that we see.
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