Time: 7-9 p.m., Wednesday, October 11th Location: Armenise Amphitheater at Harvard Medical School, 200 Longwood Avenue, Boston (link to directions) Speakers: Ali Rudolph and Maximilien Baas-Thomas Every living thing interprets its DNA using the same genetic code, so if you want to build life, create new abilities, and ensure we do it all safely, we’ll need to learn everything there is about the language of life. GMOs … Continue reading The Genetic Engineering Toolbox: A whirlwind tour of GMO technology

Time: 7-9 p.m., Wednesday, October 4th Location: Armenise Amphitheater at Harvard Medical School, 200 Longwood Avenue, Boston (link to directions) Speakers: Maddy Jennewein, Kate Lachance, and Jacob Shenker What does a scientist look like? If a group of children are asked this question, they all have similar answers – a middle-aged Caucasian man wearing glasses and a white lab coat. Indeed, in reality, nearly 50% of all … Continue reading Politics and Prejudice: How Diversity Shapes Scientific Progress

Time: 7-9 p.m., Wednesday, September 27th Location: Armenise Amphitheater at Harvard Medical School, 200 Longwood Avenue, Boston (link to directions) People: Michael Raspuzzi and Neeti Nayak A healthy choice for you may not be good for the health of the environment. With the pressures of feeding a growing population within constrained resources, this talk takes a top-down approach to understand how to be “sustainable” at the … Continue reading What’s the Catch? Diving into the sustainability of eating fish

Time: 7-9 p.m., Wednesday, September 20th Location: Armenise Amphitheater at Harvard Medical School, 200 Longwood Avenue, Boston (link to directions) There’s no question that infectious diseases have a huge impact on our lives and our societies. But did you know that these infections have also shaped our very biology? In this talk, we will explore the influence that infectious diseases have had on human evolution. In … Continue reading History’s Greatest Arms Race: How infectious diseases have changed human evolution

Antibiotic resistance is an important public health problem. In this lecture, we will learn about what antibiotic resistance is and how it arises. Ultimately, antibiotic resistance occurs through a process of natural selection and evolution. In complex organisms such as humans, evolution takes place in thousands to millions of years. However, bacteria grow very quickly, have relatively high mutation rates, and outnumber us by the … Continue reading One in a Million: The Battle Against Antibiotic Resistance

Will we be the first generation that cures cancer? The answer is complicated. Curing cancer remains a steep task despite the hopeful rhetoric and heavy investment put forward by new initiatives like the Cancer Moonshot. Treating cancer is not possible with a ‘one size fits all’ approach as each tumor requires a precise strategy to be defeated. These game plans must combat key offensive plays … Continue reading The Cancer Treatment Playbook: Why we still don’t have a cure

We’ve all heard of autism, and most of us know someone who is autistic. However, the cause of autism has eluded doctors and scientists, and there are as of yet no definitive treatments. In this lecture, we will talk about neurogenetics – the science of using the tools of genetics to understand the brain – and look at what this emerging field can teach us … Continue reading The Befuddling Brain: Neurogenetics and the mysteries of autism

The intricate process of reading genes in our DNA to make proteins is arguably the most fundamental part of life. In this talk, we will dive into one critical step within this process, called RNA splicing. We will discuss what RNA splicing is, how splicing alternative forms of RNA leads to more protein diversity, and what happens when RNA splicing goes wrong.   Continue reading The Splice of Life: Cutting and pasting RNA in medicine and disease

Come learn about the role of genetics in obesity risk and appetite! Along the way, we’ll learn about the fundamentals of modern genetic research and the genomics revolution. We’ll discuss what “big data” in genetics has taught us about obesity and the challenges that remain.     Continue reading Trimming the Fat: What genomics can tell us about obesity

Infectious disease outbreaks are not a new phenomenon and remain a major public health concern. Since the turn of the 21st century, we have dealt with several infectious disease epidemics, including the 2014-2015 Ebola epidemic, and most recently the emergence of Zika virus in the Americas. We will discuss the representation of these outbreaks in popular culture, explain the social and scientific challenges associated with … Continue reading From Ebola to Zika: Combating myths and controlling mosquitoes