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What’s up y'all, welcome to this week's episode of teachers unlimited, the show for educators all about education. I'm your host Mr. Kam and on today’s episode I will be discussing three different videos I watched for my Child ecology class. The first video is from national geographic and what genetics are. The next video is a tedtalk by Keolu Fox and why he believes genetic research needs to be more diverse. And lastly another tedtalk about epigenetics and the influence of our genes by Courtney Griffin.
Genetics only began to be understood in the mid 19th century. Around 1865, Gregor Mendel, an Austrian monk and botanist published the results of his hybridization studies of pea plants. He noticed the role of factors that influence the expression of traits. These factors later became known as genes. It was later found that each human has 20-25,000 genes that determine our traits.
In February of 2016, Keolu Fox did a tedtalk on why he believes that genetic research needs to be more diverse. He discussed how the human genome project was a 2.7 billion dollar project that believed it would begin a new era of preventive health care. He believed that such a project needed to sequence a diverse cohort of people to obtain the full spectrum of variation on the planet. He discovered that 96% of the genome studies were of people of european descent. He also discovered that far less than one percent has been done of indigenous communities. Fox then discussed the story of how Arizona State University took blood samples from a local tribe to study type 2 diabetes that were plaguing their community. They instead used the samples without their consent to study schizophrenia, inbreeding, and challenged the origin story of the tribe. This led to a lawsuit and a history of distrust. Fox still believes that indigenous people can benefit from genetic studies and if not soon the gap in health disparities is going to widen. He has a vision of indigenomics, which is genetic research to improve minority health through methods that respect indigenous knowledge.
Courtney Griffin’s tedtalk discusses how identical twins have had an impact on how scientists understand nature vs nurture. Now nature is our genetic code and nurture is the environment we grew up in. She talks about how twins separated at birth also have an impact on scientists' understanding of nature vs nurture. Griffin talks about how our IQ and criminal tendencies are more nature and depression and political parties are more nurture. She then talks about how twins that are raised in the same household can be entirely different personalities. This has to do with epigenetics. ‘Epi’ means on top of and genetics are our genes. They refer to a set of instructions that sit down on top of our dna. Those instructions can then affect how the cell reads the genes encoded in our DNA. Epigenetic marks can be influenced by the environment around. This includes the environment the mother experiences during pregnancy. The diet consumed by the mother is a part of the environment and can affect the health and appearance of her offspring. Epigenetics doesn’t just happen during pregnancy, they can also accumulate after birth. Griffin discusses how in rats, after birth there is a gene in the brain that affects how they cope in a stressful situation. This gene is called the glucocorticoid receptor and how when the pups are born the gene is surrounded by a number of silencing epigenetic marks. And if the mother takes good care of the pups those silencing marks can be removed and allows the glucocorticoid receptor to be turned on and stays on. But if the pups are ignored the silencing marks will remain in their brains. And they will grow up to be anxious in stressful situations.
Now these videos don’t have a lot to do with teaching, but they do help us understand why our students might be the way they are. This can help us teach our students to be the best they can. In Courtney Griffin’s video, she discusses a lot about how environments have an impact on how we are as people. Understanding a student’s environment will help us teach them and understand them. This can also help us build a trusting relationship as keolu fox discussed in his video, there is a history of mistrust for genetic studies and if we can understand their background we can help build that trust. Thank you all so much for tuning into this week’s episode of teachers unlimited and on the next episode, I will be discussing prenatal development and birth. If you want to support Teachers Unlimited more, head to my website which is included in the show description. Thank you all so much again for listening and as always, I've been Kameron.