Fun with biology for weekend entertainment!

 We are often caught up in clips/news/forwards that are pushed by social as well as mainstream media that are mostly one or two minutes/pages long about things that are not going to matter much after a week or two To make sure our attention span is not monotonically getting atrophied, I nudge next gen youngsters in my circle to regularly read/listen/watch/focus on material related to ideas/research that span time & space, since that is what is going to have significant impact on societies in the longer term. I'd list the concepts behind mRNA vaccine or how High NA-EUV Lithography system works, as couple of such examples that took more than a decade to develop, with work spanning across a dozen countries/companies. 

To pull us back from the non-stop "Breaking News" cycle that mostly pumps out trivial stuff that is not going to matter next week, one approach suggests imagining a newspaper that gets published only once in 50 years. If you are the editor of that newspaper, what will you put out as the headlines (both good & bad) for the new issue going out next week?

Thinking along such slow lines, wanted to provide few good pointers I came across in the realm of biology.

Within the human body, we know blood flows all around, providing the needed nourishment for different body parts to function. Still there is a serious barrier at the brain that doesn't allow most things to get through. Here is an interesting article that nicely explains the blood-brain barrier.

Similarly, when a foreign body (e.g. a germ) enters our body, we know there is serious defense mechanism in place to fight it off. But when an expectant mother is carrying the baby, the fetus should normally be treated as a foreign body, as it has different blood type, DNA, etc. and so should be fought off by the mother's body. This doesn't happen. Why? It is because of the placenta, which is now understood to be a much more complicated organ than it was previously thought of. This Radiolab podcast does an excellent job of discussing this topic. A closely related article discusses discusses possibility of microbiome existing in human brain. 

On a somewhat related note, saw a nice video titled Post Human that talked about using our skin cells to create stem cells that can then be goaded to become egg & sperm cells, so that one can potentially have one's own baby without the need for another partner's sperm or egg. While this is one form of cloning, the documentary is not about cloning at all but about developments in biology (e.g. growing a baby outside the womb, developing a digital model that can be used to experiment drug or surgical procedures to see what will work for the real patient) in multiple areas that could be around the corner. https://youtu.be/88DPXE1thw4

If such things are possible, will it be possible to grow the human baby totally outside a woman's womb? That is the "What if?" question being explored in this Netflix movie, where in the near future, babies go through gestational development in a pod, provided by a private company. You can rent the pod, choose various options by paying for them, and use a crypto key to unlock the pod during the birthing process. While the concept is nicely explored, ending is just meh. https://youtu.be/rGMx_7oAeUM

Going back in time, Netflix also has a new movie titled Joy, that presents the development of IVF tech in the 1970's.

https://youtu.be/Ix8Hzwc81XA

Robert Edwards & Patrick Steptoe, the pioneers that brought Louisa Brown (the first test tube baby) to this world, have written a book titled "A Matter of Life". It is one of the first non-fiction book I read in English, way back in the 1980's and so vividly remember, which is what this movie is about. Just like the way we are worried about the unknown repercussions of CRISPR based editing of human genome today, in the 1970s, there was massive opposition to IVF, since church, public and even the scientific community (including James Watson of DNA fame) were all worried that this is going against nature, that may produce Frankenstein monsters! 

Let me know how many of these pointers you were able to explore and what you found interesting or if you have pointers for me.