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This blog is predominately about camera trapping in California. We camera trap to save our souls and to teach primary school students about biology and conservation. We will also touch on other camera trapping news and musings, sets from afar, mediocre herpetology, sucky birding, and other natural history discussions.

Thursday, April 25, 2013

Happy DNA Day


Today is DNA day. The anniversary of the publishing of the structure of DNA by Watson & Crick (& Wilkins & Franklin).

I celebrated by giving a guest lecture (the professor was out at a study section) in the upper division Genetics BIOL105 course here at UCSC. Enrollment is about 300 students, but being an 8AM class there was probably around 100 students who actually showed up. 100 was certainly less intimidating than 300 for my first large lecture ever. We covered some good ole' classical genetics: linkage, map units and three-point crosses.

Followed that up at the bench with some genomic DNA isolations. So yeah, not too many a day goes by that I am not celebrating DNA by working with it. The joys of working on a thesis whose main topic is DNA Structure and Organization.

Its before noon still, so the shot of rye to the godfathers (and very important godmother) of the field will have to wait a bit ... but not too long.


2 comments:

  1. Congratulations. I saw Watson and Crick's old lab in a humble shed at Cambridge many years ago. Hope you were wearing your tweed for the lecture.

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  2. Nice job getting that lecture under your bealt, JK! My first lecturing experience was in a Zoology class of about 180 students....I much prefer my student:intructor ratio these days (about 25:1). :)

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