Sigma BioBlogs

In collecting stories, we came across Tejas and loved how his enthusiasm for Biology was ignited by the first teaching many of us had in Genetics. He remembers being fascinated in high school by  ”Mendel and his Punnett squares, and his pea pods.”

It sparked our interest because when someone says “Genetics” now, the Where Bio Begins team immediately switches to the techniques of Next Gen Sequencing, the push for a “$1000 Genome“, and even Personalized Medicine.

If you search “#DNA” or “#genetics” on Twitter, you see that lay-tweeple (non-science twitter people) use the terms to reference traits, family quirks, and celebrity paternity cases.   Mendel’s work is so relevant and well accepted 130 years later, it’s just an accepted part of who we are…even for people who’ve never counted Maize kernels.

Which causes us to speculate…what Bio-terms will be adopted by mainstream culture a century from now?  Interactome? RNA interference? Gene silencing? Gene knockout?

How will they use them?