Molecular Biology Applied to Real Life
I have now seen molecular biology applied to Real Life.
I live in a graduate student dorm (for now), and just yesterday, the bathroom I share with other students on my floor was broken. Mainly, when water went down the sink, black, dirty water would bubble up from the shower floor drain. Gross. Luckily, flushing the toilet didn’t cause any similar problems. But by that serendipitous sewage problem, I learned that the drain of the sink fed directly into the same pipe system that the shower drain did, while the toilet drained into a separate pipe system (or it tied in further downstream of the drainage problem).
In summary, I found one way that the system broke (a mutation) that led to interesting behaviors (a phenotype), and by characterizing these behaviors, I gained a better understanding of how that system worked (a mechanism).
Molecular biology! In the real world!
