We are starting a series regarding the covid-19 mRNA vaccine. In this episode we are going to be covering the brief history of vaccination.

Before vaccines were developed, people used various methods to protect themselves and their children from different bacterial and viral infections! These early observations laid the foundation for sophisticated vaccines a few hundred years later.

Check out our website for more details and the sources we used.

https://notjustrna.wixsite.com/notjustrna

In 2006 when Dr. Shinya Yamanaka and Dr. Kazutoshi Takahashi at the Kyoto University in Japan, asked if they could create stem cells from ordinary skin cells. They discovered four genes when turned on in skin cells reverts it back to a stem cell-like state. Today we will the scientific exploration that lead to this discovery, why this is critical to human health and the ethical implications of creating stems cells in a laboratory. Check out our website for the sources we used, and additional information: https://notjustrna.wixsite.com/notjustrna

Let us now if you have any questions about this episode, and if you're interested and want more details in topics we covered.

What role does RNA play during embryogenesis, puberty and death? These are some of the questions we will answer during today's episode.

Keep in mind that many of these subjects have been studied for decades so we are just going to be surfing the waves of a deep ocean of research. And we will be mostly focused on the life of mammals, but many of these processes are highly conserved, meaning they are the same in many forms of life from plants to insects to us.