The following is a conversation with Manolis Kellis, his second time on the podcast. He's a professor at MIT and head of the MIT Computational Biology Group. He's one of the most brilliant, productive, and kind people I've had the fortune of talking to. |||||||| HIDDEN IN PREVIEW MODE ||||||| And I'm happy that he makes time in his insanely busy schedule to sit down and have a chat with me. |||||||| HIDDEN IN PREVIEW MODE ||||||| I also got a chance to record a separate conversation with Joe on this podcast. |||||||| HIDDEN IN PREVIEW MODE ||||||| It's tough since I'm naturally full of self doubt and anxiety, but I'm learning to let go and have fun, even if my monotone robotic voice sometimes sounds otherwise. |||||||| HIDDEN IN PREVIEW MODE ||||||| I also this time put a link in the description to a survey for this podcast on how I can improve and also an option if you like, I don't know why you would like to, but if you like to join an inner circle of people that help guide the direction of this podcast via email or occasional video chats. |||||||| HIDDEN IN PREVIEW MODE ||||||| It's the best way honestly to support this podcast. |||||||| HIDDEN IN PREVIEW MODE ||||||| To me, very few things are as inspiring as us humans reaching out into the unknown, the harsh challenges of space. Colonizing Mars may not have obvious near term benefits, but I believe it will challenge our scientists and our engineers to create technologies whose impact will be immeasurable for us humans here on Earth, or those of us who choose to stay here on Earth. |||||||| HIDDEN IN PREVIEW MODE ||||||| You might have heard on other videos that I eat keto mostly these days, so Magic Spoon is a delicious healthy treat on a hard workout day that fits into that crazy diet. |||||||| HIDDEN IN PREVIEW MODE ||||||| The deep heartfelt nature of that conversation and the silliness of the cereal captures my dad perfectly. |||||||| HIDDEN IN PREVIEW MODE ||||||| He hasn't bought the eight sleep mattress yet, though my mom wants to, but he's all about this Magic Spoon cereal. |||||||| HIDDEN IN PREVIEW MODE ||||||| This is like GPT3 suggesting to me how to be more human like, and I'll honestly take all the help I can get. |||||||| HIDDEN IN PREVIEW MODE ||||||| So secure your online activity by going to expressvpn.com slash Lex pod to get an extra three months free and to support this podcast. |||||||| HIDDEN IN PREVIEW MODE ||||||| So every single one of your cells contains two meters worth of DNA. |||||||| HIDDEN IN PREVIEW MODE ||||||| And if you put it all together, if you stretch the trillions of cells that we have, we have about 30 trillion cells in your body. |||||||| HIDDEN IN PREVIEW MODE ||||||| It's 30 trillion cells. |||||||| HIDDEN IN PREVIEW MODE ||||||| And that's sort of the structural part. |||||||| HIDDEN IN PREVIEW MODE ||||||| So functionally, what the human epigenome allows you to do is basically control the activity patterns of thousands of genes. |||||||| HIDDEN IN PREVIEW MODE ||||||| Now, can we draw a definition distinction between the genome and the epigenome? Again, being Greek, epi means on top of. So the genome is the DNA, and the epigenome is anything on top of the DNA. |||||||| HIDDEN IN PREVIEW MODE ||||||| C has a methyl form, which is sometimes referred to as the fifth base. |||||||| HIDDEN IN PREVIEW MODE ||||||| It's basically a sign of repression in a gene regulatory region. |||||||| HIDDEN IN PREVIEW MODE ||||||| And each of those pieces are all encoded in the same DNA. But what the epigenome allows you to do is effectively conduct the orchestra and sort of coordinate the pieces so that every instrument plays only the things that it needs to play.

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