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A comparative recombination analysis of human coronaviruses and implications for the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic | Scientific Reports - Nature.com

Meet the life sciences, physical sciences and mathematics faculty joining USC Dornsife this fall. [3 min read]

Scholars in the natural sciences and mathematics join USC Dornsife this fall to teach and conduct research. (Composite: Dennis Lan.)

Four new faculty members join the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences life sciences, physical sciences and mathematics divisions for the fall 2021 semester. They recently shared their academic work and personal interests.

Michael Campbell | Assistant Professor of Biological Sciences

Academic focus:Current genetic and paleontological evidence tells us that anatomically modern humans evolved in Africa about 300,000 years ago and then migrated around the globe within the last 100,000 years. Demographic events along with natural selection, have shaped the patterns of genetic diversity in contemporary populations.

One of the grand challenges now that weve sequenced the human genome is to better understand the interplay between evolutionary history, genomic variation and the development of human traits. My research explores the use of statistical, computational and field-based approaches to identify polymorphisms places where DNA on one chromosome differs from the matching spot on another chromosome favored by evolution but that contribute to variable traits, including disease susceptibility, in diverse human populations.

What do you like to do in your spare time? Although I dont have a lot of spare time these days, whenever it arises, I like to play trivia games. Im a die-hardJeopardy!fan.

If you could invite one person to dinner, living or dead, who would you select? What would be on the menu? While technically not one person, I would invite former President Barack Obama and former First Lady Michelle Obama. (I consider them an inseparable marital unit.) This would be a very informal dinner with barbecue chicken and steak on the menu.

What food or condiments will we always find in your kitchen? Avocados, bread and ketchup (not necessarily eaten together).

Derrick Morton | Assistant Professor of Biological Sciences

Academic focus:My research focuses on incorporating genetic approaches to understand key pathways that control an organisms growth and development, and how alterations in gene expression contribute to neurological disease.

What inspires you? The greats of the civil rights movement inspire me. I stand on the shoulders of giants, and their collective sacrifices are a constant reminder of what it took for me to achieve. There are no words to adequately express my gratitude.

If you could invite one person to dinner, living or dead, who would you select? What would be on the menu? This is a tough one. I would likely choose to have Barack Obama over for dinner for the obvious reasons hes the former President of the U.S. and seems to be a pretty cool guy. I am a southern guy; my dinner menu would likely include a southern dish with dessert old fashioned banana pudding!

What food or condiments will we always find in your kitchen? Chicken, seafood (ingredients for a seafood boil: snow crab legs, shrimp, potatoes, sausage and corn my husband is from Florida), unsweetened tea (I know, not very southern of me) and wine.

Morton is teachingBISC 502a: Molecular Genetics and Biochemistrythis fall.

Cris Negron| Assistant Professor of Mathematics

In my work, I focus on the intersections between abstract algebra and mathematical physics.

What do you like to do in your spare time?Skateboard.

Where is your favorite place to travel?Oaxaca, Mexico.

Favorite book youve read lately?Noopimingby Leanne Betasamosake Simpson

Negron is teaching the graduate courseMATH 510a: Algebrathis fall.

Kate White| Assistant Professor (Research) ofChemistry

Academic focus:My labs goal is to help bridge the gap between structural biology how biological molecules are built, function and interact and physiology by pioneering new experimental and computational tools for multi-scale structural biology, from the atomic scale up to the level of cells. Our lab is investigating insulin chemistry and multiscale organization of pancreatic beta cells and applying new approaches to modeling entire cells.

If you could invite one person to dinner, living or dead, who would you select? What would be on the menu?Elon Musk. I wouldnt care what we ate, just interested in the discussion.

Where is your favorite place to travel?Yosemite.

What inspires you? The unknown.

Learn about other faculty joining USC Dornsife this fall here >>

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New faculty bring expertise in abstract algebra, insulin chemistry and more to USC > News > USC Dornsife - USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts...

Beinghappy is not a competition.Or at least, I thought it wasnt. But Google tells me there is a man who has won this race and been named the happiest person in the world. In fact, there has been scientific research done to prove this claim.

RELATED:10 Items To Stop Counting If You Want To Be Truly Happy

The scans showed that when meditating on compassion, Ricards brain produces a level of gamma waves those linked to consciousness, attention, learning, and memory never reported before in the neuroscience literature, said Richard Davidson, the neuroscientist from the University of Wisconsin.

His name is Matthieu Ricard. He is 75 years old and lives in Nepal in a Buddhist monastery. Prior to becoming a monk, he was a scientist and received his Ph.D. in molecular genetics.

So, how did he do it? Well, Ricard himself has said that anyone can be the happiest person in the world if they look for happiness in the right place. The problem is that we tend not to.

As a Buddhist monk, he meditates a lot. According to him, by sitting and cultivating compassion, our mind will change, our brain will change, and then our lives will change. All by dedicating a few minutes a day, every day. Ricard also talks about spending a few minutes thinking happy thoughts every morning.

Can simply meditatingmake someone a happier person? I decided to try this for myself.

I made myself meditate for ten minutes every day for a month. Now, I am sure Matthieu Ricard meditates way more than this but since I am a beginner, this was a good place for me to start.

The first day I looked foraguided meditation videoon YouTube and sat alone in a room with my legs crossed and eyes closed. I wont lie. It was difficult and I dont think I did a very good job. I kept getting distracted. But by the end of the ten minutes, there were tears on my cheeks!

What? I didnt understand. I wasnt sad but I was crying. Why? A quick online search told me it was quite common for people to cry after a meditation session. I also felt much lighter. Earlier that day I was stressed about an upcoming project but after that meditation session, I was calm. I knew I had enough time to complete that project and I didnt have anything to worry about.

I continued doing this every day for the whole month. I cried again a few more times but every time I meditated, I felt so good. Was this the happiness Ricard talks about? Maybe.

Now, of course, Id feel distracted sometimes. Those 10 minutes werent flawless by any means. Id get bored or feel like I wanted to do something else, which is normal because just sitting in silence isnt exactly the norm for most people.

But I didnt go into this thinking I was going to come out on the other end feeling like a much happier version of myself. I dont even know what that means or what that would look like. I went into it with an open mind, curious to how I would feel being in a state of mind where Im devoting 10 minutes straight, every day, wishing love and compassion upon others and upon myself.

And quite frankly, it felt really good.

However, those positive emotions didnt really last for very long once I was done with the 10 minutes. I believe for any lasting change, Ill have to meditate a lot longer than ten minutes a day for a month.

RELATED:What Buddhists Believe & 20 Buddha Quotes On Healthy Living

I highly recommend everyone to try meditation at least once. But not because meditation holds the secret key to happiness. In fact, I learned that meditation isnt where happiness is the happiness already exists within you, meditation helps dig it out.

In fact, happiness looks different for different people. Here are some popular personalities describing what happiness means to them.

Paulo Coelho wrote in The Alchemist, If you can concentrate always on the present, youll be a happy man.

Join now for YourTango's trending articles, top expert advice and personal horoscopes delivered straight to your inbox each morning.

Helen Keller said, A happy life consists not in the absence, but in the mastery of hardships.

I hope everybody could get rich and famous and will have everything they ever dreamed of so they will know that is not the answer to happiness, said Jim Carrey.

Jane Austen wrote, A large income is the best recipe for happiness I ever heard of.

Meditation helps us understand what happiness means to each of us. For some its getting 10k views on an article, for some, its eating ice cream on a hot summer day.

Ricard says that the feelings of love and happiness are often fleeting because once they occur, were quick to move on to the next thought. So rather than doing that, one should concentrate on not letting your mind get distracted and keep focused on the positive emotions for an extended period of time.

After following Ricards advice for 30 days, I learned that our thoughts hold way more power over us than we realize. And just by changing the way we think, we can truly change our lives.

RELATED:What Is Buddhism? + 6 Meditations To Find Your Inner Zen

Vidhipssa Mohan is a writer who focuses on love and mental health. She has been featured in Medium, Notion Press, The Startup, and more. Follow her on Twitter.

This article was originally published at Medium. Reprinted with permission from the author.

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What I Learnt From The Happiest Person In The World - YourTango

NUTLEY, N.J., Aug. 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ --Hackensack Meridian Healthis proud to announce that David S. Perlin, Ph.D., chief scientific officer and senior vice president of the Hackensack Meridian Center for Discovery and Innovation (CDI), has been recognized by Modern Healthcare as one of this year's Top 25 Innovators.

The complete ranking is featured in the August 16 issue of MH magazine, and profiles of the honorees are available at ModernHealthcare.com/awards/top-25-innovators-2021.

The nomination of Perlin focused on the CDI's achievements during the COVID-19 era, which included testing, tracking, and therapeutic breakthroughs to benefit patients across Hackensack Meridian Health, New Jersey's largest and most comprehensive health network.

"Dr. David Perlin and the CDI have been a crucial resource for our health network during the pandemic," said Robert C. Garrett, FACHE, CEO, Hackensack Meridian Health. "Dr. Perlin's clear-eyed vision, and his experience with previous infectious disease outbreaks, has saved lives. This latest award is just further validation of his leadership."

"This award is a great honor," said Dr. Perlin. "The CDI aims to improve lives through real-time application of science, and I believe this distinction shows that our whole team here is making that difference, by responding to unmet needs."

The award nomination focused on the CDI's COVID-19 response, which played a critical role by impacting clinical care through development of novel diagnostics, improved antiviral therapy, and support of numerous clinical trial regimens.

The achievements include:

CDI scientists are also studying the biology of the virus, host factors that impact disease progression, and discovery and development of novel drug candidates.

"Dr. Perlin and his colleagues at the CDI have brought a new dimension of science to our research programs at Hackensack Meridian Health," said Ihor Sawczuk, M.D., FACS, the chief research officer and president of the Northern Region of Hackensack Meridian Health. "The future for our patients is bright."

Dr. Perlin joined the Center for Discovery and Innovation in January 2019. In May 2020, he received a $33.3 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to develop new antibiotics to overcome deadly bacteria in hospitals that have become resistant to current treatments.

One of Perlin's chief areas of expertise is drug resistant fungal pathogens, which includes Candida auris, a deadly fungal infection that is currently one of the most high-profile emerging threats in health care. Dr. Perlin and his colleagues developed one of the first comprehensive rapid diagnostic test for this pathogen and helped elucidate the principal mechanisms of drug resistance. His group has worked closely with the CDC on this epidemic in New York and New Jersey, and other global health departments.

Over a period of about 30 years, Dr. Perlin has been at the forefront of scientific research into combatting high-threat bacterial, viral and fungal pathogens. He helped develop a number of novel therapeutics and diagnostics, some of which are now commercial products. He also developed a wide range of domestic and global programs addressing both hospital- and community-associated drug resistance. His team of researchers has developed molecular diagnostic products for the CDC and local hospitals for multidrug resistant outbreak pathogens including drug-resistance determinants. He has worked with numerous device manufacturers and pharmaceutical companies, as well as with the FDA and EMA. He also serves as an advisory board member to numerous pharmaceutical, biotech and diagnostic companies for development of novel therapeutics and diagnostics targeting drug-resistant pathogens.

Prior to joining the Center for Discovery and Innovation, Dr. Perlin spent nearly 20 years as executive director of the Rutgers New Jersey Medical School's Public Health Research Institute (PHRI), an 80-year-old specialized center for global infectious diseases. He was also director of the Rutgers Regional Biocontainment Laboratory (RBL), one of 13 NIH-designated national centers for high-threat pathogen research, and was also a professor of microbiology, biochemistry and molecular genetics at the school. At PHRI, he oversaw programs to address multidrug resistant bacterial and fungal pathogens, both locally and abroad. He has published more than 300 papers and book chapters and co-authored two books.Dr. Perlin's awards include being named a Fellow of the New York Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology.

This year's Top 25 Innovators for Modern Healthcare championed solutions to reshape the industry in big and small ways, pushing boundaries to help solve healthcare's greatest challenges.

"There's never been a more urgent time for the industry to experiment with innovations that can reshape how care is delivered. The members of this year's class of Top 25 Innovators have introduced ideas that engage consumers in new ways, lower healthcare costs and take unique approaches to managing population health. The honorees were selected for their work in one of four areas: consumerism, cost reduction, population health and quality/safety. They were selected from nearly 200 nominations. We congratulate this class of honorees and look forward to following their careers," said Aurora Aguilar, editor of Modern Healthcare.

ABOUT HACKENSACK MERIDIAN HEALTHHackensack MeridianHealthis a leading not-for-profit health care organization that is the largest, most comprehensive and truly integrated health care network in New Jersey, offering a complete range of medical services, innovative research and life-enhancing care.

Hackensack MeridianHealthcomprises 17 hospitals from Bergen to Ocean counties, which includes three academic medical centers Hackensack University Medical Center in Hackensack, Jersey Shore University Medical Center in Neptune, JFK Medical Center in Edison; two children's hospitals - Joseph M. Sanzari Children's Hospital in Hackensack, K. Hovnanian Children's Hospital in Neptune; nine community hospitals Bayshore Medical Center in Holmdel, Mountainside Medical Center in Montclair, Ocean Medical Center in Brick, Palisades Medical Center in North Bergen, Pascack Valley Medical Center in Westwood, Raritan Bay Medical Center in Old Bridge, Raritan Bay Medical Center in Perth Amboy, Riverview Medical Center in Red Bank, and Southern Ocean Medical Center in Manahawkin; a behavioral health hospital Carrier Clinic in Belle Mead; and two rehabilitation hospitals - JFK Johnson Rehabilitation Institute in Edison and Johnson Rehabilitation Institute in Brick.

Additionally, the network has more than 500 patient care locations throughout the state which include ambulatory care centers, surgery centers, home health services, long-term care and assisted living communities, ambulance services, lifesaving air medical transportation, fitness and wellness center, rehabilitation centers, urgent care centers and physician practice locations. Hackensack MeridianHealthhas more than 36,000 team members, and 7,000 physicians and is a distinguished leader in health care philanthropy, committed to the health and well-being of the communities it serves.

The network's notable distinctions include havingmore top-ranked hospitals than anyone in New Jersey, as recognized byU.S. News & World Report. Hackensack University Medical Center is the only hospital in New Jersey with the #1 adult and children's hospital rankings.

John Theurer Cancer Center at Hackensack University Medical Center is New Jersey's best cancer center, as recognized by U.S. News & World Report. This premier cancer center is also the largest and most comprehensive center dedicated to the diagnosis, treatment, management, research, screenings, and preventive care as well as survivorship of patients with all types of cancers. John Theurer Cancer Center is part of Georgetown Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center, an NCI designated comprehensive cancer center.

Additionally, the network partnered with Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center to ensure that patients have access to the highest quality, most individualized cancer care when and where they need it.

The Hackensack Meridian School of Medicine, the first private medical school in New Jersey in more than 50 years, welcomed its first class of students in 2018 to its campus in Nutley and Clifton. The Hackensack Meridian Center for Discovery and Innovation (CDI), housed in a fully renovated state-of-the-art facility, seeks to translate current innovations in science to improve clinical outcomes for patients with cancer, infectious diseases and other life-threatening and disabling conditions.

Hackensack MeridianHealthis a member of AllSpire Health Partners, an interstate consortium of leading health systems, to focus on the sharing of best practices in clinical care and achieving efficiencies. To learn more, visitwww.hackensackmeridianhealth.org.

About the Center for Discovery and InnovationThe Center for Discovery and Innovation, a newly established member of Hackensack MeridianHealth, seeks to translate current innovations in science to improve clinical outcomes for patients with cancer, infectious diseases and other life-threatening and disabling conditions. The CDI, housed in a fully renovated state-of-the-art facility, offers world-class researchers a support infrastructure and culture of discovery that promotes science innovation and rapid translation to the clinic.

For additional information, please visitwww.hmh-cdi.org.

View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/cdi-director-perlin-named-to-modern-healthcares-class-of-top-25-innovators-301361851.html

SOURCE Hackensack Meridian Health

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There are people who argue, persuasively, that Hollywood films are worse than they used to be. Or that novels have turned inward, away from the form-breaking gestures of decades past. In fact, almost anything can be slotted into a narrative of declinethe planet, most obviously, but also (per our former president) toilets and refrigerators. One of the few arenas immune to this criticism is science: I doubt there are very many people nostalgic for the days before the theory of relativity or the invention of penicillin. Over the centuries, science has just kept racking up the wins. But which of these winslimiting ourselves to the last half-centurymattered most? What is the most important scientific development of the last 50 years? For this weeks Giz Asks, we reached out to a number of experts to find out.

Research Assistant, Social Sciences, Humboldt University of Berlin

A bit more than 50 years ago, but I would say the most influential were the related developments of the Journal Impact Factor and the Science Citation Index (precursor of todays Web of Science) by Eugene Garfield and Irving H. Sher between 1955 and 1961.

These developments laid the groundwork for current regimes of governance and evaluation in academia. Their influence on the structure of science as we know it can hardly be overestimated: Today, it is difficult to imagine any funding, hiring, or publication decision that does not draw in some way either directly on the JIF or data from the Web of Science, or at least on some other form of quantitative assessment and/or large-scale literature database. Additionally, the way we engage with academic literature and hence how we learn about and build on research results has also fundamentally been shaped by those databases.

As such, they influence which other scientific developments were made possible in the last 50 years. Some groundbreaking discoveries might have only been possible under this regime of evaluation of the JIF and the SCI, because those projects might not have been funded under a different regimebut also, its possible that we missed out on some amazing developments because they did not (promise to) perform well in terms of quantitative assessment and were discarded early on. Current debates also highlight the perverse and negative effects of quantitative evaluation regimes that place such a premium on publications: goal displacement, gaming of metrics, and increased pressure to publish for early career researchers, to name just a few. So while those two developments are extremely influential, they are neither the only nor necessarily the best possible option for academic governance.

Professor, History of Science, Stanford University, whose research focuses on 20th century science, technology, and medicine

That would surely be the discovery and proof of global warming. Of course, pieces of that puzzle were figured out more than a century ago: John Tyndall in the 1850s, for example, showed that certain gases trap rays from the sun, keeping our atmosphere in the toasty zone. Svante Arrhenius in 1896 then showed that a hypothetical doubling of CO2, one of the main greenhouse gases, would cause a predictable amount of warmingwhich for him, in Sweden, was a good thing.

It wasnt until the late 1950s, however, that we had good measurements of the rate at which carbon was entering our air. A chemist by the name of Charles Keeling set up a monitoring station atop the Mauna Loa volcano in Hawaii, and soon thereafter noticed a steady annual increase of atmospheric CO2. Keelings first measurements showed 315 parts per million and growing, at about 1.3 parts per million per year. Edward Teller, father of the H-bomb, in 1959 warned oil elites about a future of melting ice caps and Manhattan under water, and in 1979 the secret sect of scientists known as the Jasons confirmed the severity of the warming we could expect. A global scientific consensus on the reality of warming was achieved in 1990, when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change produced its first report.

Today we live with atmospheric CO2 in excess of 420 parts per million, a number that is still surging every year. Ice core and sea sediment studies have shown that we now have more carbon in our air than at any time in the last 4 million years: the last time CO2 was this high, most of Florida was underwater and 80-foot sharks with 8-inch teeth roamed the oceans.

Coincident with this proof of warming has been the recognition that the history of the earth is a history of upheaval. Weve learned that every few million years Africa rams up against Europe at the Straits of Gibraltar, causing the Mediterranean to desiccatewhich is why there are canyons under every river feeding that sea. We know that the bursting of great glacial lakes created the Scablands of eastern Washington State, but also the channel that now divides France from Great Britain. We know that the moon was formed when a Mars-sized planet crashed into the earth and that the dinosaurs were killed by an Everest-sized meteor that slammed into the Yucatan some 66 million years ago, pulverizing billions of tons of rock and strewing iridium all over the globe. All of these things have been only recently proven. Science-wise, we are living an era of neo-geocatastrophism.

Two things are different about our current climate crisis, however.

First is the fact that humans are driving the disaster. The burning of fossil fuels is a crime against all life on earth, or at least those parts we care most about. Pine bark beetles now overwinter without freezing, giving rise to yellowed trees of death. Coral reefs dissolve, as the oceans acidify. Biodisasters will multiply as storms rip ever harder, and climate fires burn hotter and for longer. Organisms large and small will migrate to escape the heat, with unknown consequences. The paradox is that all these maladies are entirely preventable: we cannot predict the next gamma-ray burst or solar storm, but we certainly know enough to fix the current climate crisis.

The second novelty is the killer, however. For unlike death-dealing asteroids or gamma rays, there is a cabal of conniving corporations laboring to ensure the continued burning of fossil fuels. Compliant governments are co-conspirators in this crime against the planetalong with think tanks like the American Petroleum Institute and a dozen-odd other bill-to-shill institutes. This makes the climate crisis different from most previous catastrophes or epidemics. It is as if the malaria mosquito had lobbyists in Congress, or Covid had an army of attorneys. Welcome to the Anthropocene, the Pyrocene, the Age of Agnotology!

So forget the past fifty years: the discovery of this slow boil from oil could well become the most important scientific discovery in all of human history. What else even comes close?

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Professor and Chair, History of Science, The University of Oklahoma

Id say the best candidate is the set of ideas and techniques associated with sequencing genes and mapping genomes.

As with most revolutionary developments in science, the genetic sequencing and mapping revolution wasnt launched by a singular discovery; rather, a cluster of new ideas, tools, and techniques, all related to manipulating and mapping genetic material, emerged around the same time. These new ideas, tools, and techniques supported each other, enabling a cascade of continuing invention and discovery, laying the groundwork for feats such as the mapping of the human genome and the development of the CRISPR technique for genetic manipulation. Probably the most important of these foundational developments were those associated with recombinant DNA (which allow one to experiment with specific fragments of DNA), with PCR (the polymerase chain reaction, used to duplicate sections of DNA precisely, and in quantity), and with gene sequencing (used to determine the sequences of base pairs in a section of DNA, and thus to identify genes and locate them relative to one another). While each of these depended upon earlier ideas and techniques, they all took marked steps forward in the 1970s, laying the foundation for rapid growth in the ability to manipulate genetic material and to map genes within the larger genomes of individual organisms. The Human Genome Project, which officially ran from 1990-2003, invested enormous resources into this enterprise, spurring startling growth in the speed and accuracy of gene sequencing.

The ramifications of this cluster of developments, both intellectual and practical, have been enormous. One the practical side, the use of DNA evidence in criminal investigation (or in exonerating the wrongly convicted), is now routine, and the potential for precise, real-time genomic identification (and surveillance) is being realized at a startling pace. While gene therapies are still in their infancy, the potential they offer is tantalizing, and genomic medicine is growing rapidly. Pharmaceutical companies now request DNA samples from individual experimental subjects in clinical trials in order to correlate drug efficacy with aspects of their genomes. And, perhaps most important of all, the public health aspects of gene sequencing and mapping are stunning: the genome of the SARS-2 Coronavirus that causes Covid-19 was sequenced by the end of February 2020, within weeks of the realization that it could pose a serious public health threat, and whole-genome analysis of virus samples from around the world, over time, have enabled public health experts to map its spread and the emergence of variants in ways that would have been unthinkable even a decade ago. The unique aspects of the virus that make it so infectious were identified with startling speed, and work on an entirely new mode of vaccine development began, leading to the development, testing, and mass production of a new class of vaccines (mRNA vaccines) of remarkable efficacy, in unbelievably short timeless than a year from identification of the virus to approval and wide use. It is hard to overstate how amazing this novel form of vaccine development has been, and how large its potential is for future vaccines.

On the intellectual/cultural side, the collection of techniques for manipulating and mapping genetic material is challenging longstanding ideas about what is natural and about what makes us human. Organic, living things now can be plausibly described as technologies, and thats an unsettling thing. Aspects of our individual biological identities that once were givens are increasingly becoming choices, with implications we are just beginning to see. In addition, these same techniques are being deployed to reconstruct our understanding of evolutionary history, including our own evolution and dispersal across the globe, and perhaps nothing is more significant than changing how we understand ourselves and our history.

Professor, Science and Technology Studies, University College London, who researches the history of modern science and technology

My answer would be PCRPolymerase Chain Reaction. Invented by Kary Mullis at the Cetus Corporation in California in 1985, its as important to modern genetics and molecular biology as the triode and the transistor to modern electronics. Indeed it has the same role: its an amplifier. DNA can be multiplied. Its a DNA photocopier. Without it, especially once automated, much modern genetics would be extremely time-consuming, laborious handcraft, insanely expensive, and many of its applications would not be feasible. It enables sequencing and genetic fingerprinting, and we have it to thank for COVID tests and vaccine development. Plus, you can turn it into a fantastic song by adapting the lyrics to Sleaford Mods TCR. Singalong now: P! C! R! Polymerase! Chain! Reaction!

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What Is the Most Important Scientific Development of the Last 50 Years? - Gizmodo