Question: What do you find interesting about Biology?

Elliot Jokl answered on 10 Jun 2016:

That’s a great question, and there are probably a few answers I could go with!

I think the area of Biology that I find most interesting is how we start off as a single, fertilised egg and develop into a complex human being (this is known as Developmental Biology). Think about it: to make a human being a single cell has to divide into millions of cells and change and organise itself into all the different types of tissue – bone, muscle, brain, lungs, liver. This is a very complex and highly organised process, and there is quite a bit we know about it, but much, much more that we don’t. It is really incredible to think about and it is a big puzzle that thousands of scientists are researching.

The Biology of genetic diseases is also very interesting to me. So this isn’t stuff you catch like colds and flu or stomach bugs (which are called infectious diseases) but genetic diseases people have because there is an error in their DNA which causes something bad to happen. The DNA code is like a blueprint for making the proteins and molecules that keep you going. So that error in the DNA means one/some of those molecules will be missing, or won’t work properly. Figuring out how the error in the DNA code causes a disease to happen is both very interesting from a scientific standpoint, and it can also help us to develop therapies and cures to help the people with those diseases.

I could probably go on for a long while, but I will leave it there for now! Feel free to ask more questions if you are interested!