biology

Emily Whitehead was dying. She was seven years old, diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia at age five. Two rounds of chemotherapy had failed. The cancer kept coming back. Her doctors at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia had run out of conventional options. In the language of oncology, she

In 2005, Katalin Karikó was demoted. She'd been working on mRNA therapeutics at the University of Pennsylvania for years—decades, really. The idea was simple: if you could deliver mRNA to cells, you could get them to produce any protein you wanted. Medicine would become programmable. You'

In 1958, Francis Crick declared what he called the "Central Dogma" of molecular biology. Information flows in one direction: DNA makes RNA makes protein. That's it. The blueprint encodes the messenger, the messenger directs the factory, the factory builds the parts. Clean, elegant, hierarchical. For about

For fifty years, RNA was the middle child of molecular biology. DNA got the glory—the double helix, the blueprint of life. Proteins got the action—the enzymes, the structure, the machinery that makes cells work. RNA? RNA was the messenger. It carried instructions from DNA to the protein-making factories,

In 2012, a massive genomics consortium called ENCODE published its results. They'd spent years cataloging every functional element in the human genome—every piece of DNA that actually does something, not just the protein-coding genes. The headline finding: about 75-80% of the human genome gets transcribed into RNA.

In 1998, two scientists published a paper that would win them a Nobel Prize and launch an entire industry. Andrew Fire and Craig Mello had been studying gene expression in C. elegans—the tiny nematode worm that molecular biologists love because it's transparent, genetically tractable, and dies quickly.