Comments by "roidroid" (@roidroid) on "What happens when your DNA is damaged? - Monica Menesini" video.

  1. +Detective Shaft Yes that, but multiplied by generations. Each scientist standing on the shoulders of the giants that came before them, further adding to the knowledge discovered by their scientific predecessors, so that someone in the future may stand on their shoulders too and continue the work. The generations go by, each taking another further stab at the immortal beast that we call Ignorance, it gets constantly weaker but it will never truly die.
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  2. +Troy Milton errr, well the paraphrased answer is: because Science. A slightly longer answer might be: Via various observations & iterative experiments in biology, chemistry, physics, etc. Gradually increasing our knowledge until we get to the level of understanding & confidence that we enjoy today. Your question is very vague, it's sortof like a "To make an apple pie, one must first create the universe" thing. In Science, any new knowledge generally builds on existing knowledge, so to answer your question i'd need to know what you already believe - so i can build on that. I'd rather not explain the whole universe to you from first principles, it might take a while. So what do you already believe? ie: Are you asking how we know that evolution exists? or how we know that enzymes exist? or how we know that cells exist? or how we know that organs exist? or how we know that the material world exists? etc etc To answer the question all the way back, would be to study the history of science & philosophy (ie: logic, rhetoric, etc).
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  3. +Troy Milton one way is that they can first have an number of ideas of how it might work, and then they devise relevant experiments to test the ideas individually. For instance, they can introduce a specially shaped molecule* which they imagine should block or interact with one of the processes. If it has absolutely no effect on the cell in an experiment, then it would heavily imply that their ideas on how that process works were wrong. They can keep doing this until they find things which do have effects, then they analyse all of these things to build up a picture of what could (or definitely couldn't) be happening inside the cell. Over many experiments and testing of ideas, the picture becomes clearer. It's sortof like being in the dark, trying to figure out what an object is by repeatedly poking it with a stick from different angles, and keeping notes of when you hit something and when you don't. It can take a while, but over time this data paints an increasingly clear picture of the shape of what you're poking. It's like a game of connect the dots, each experiment gives you more dots, and marks some other places as "definitely no dots here". Every time they do an experiment and get more dots, and more "no dots here" areas (i think i'll call these "anti-dots"), they then can have another round of brainstorming to try to figure out what the picture could be. They take the best ideas from this brainstorming, and then devise new experiments to test the ideas, ie: "if this idea is correct, then there MUST be dots right around here and here." Even if the experiment fails to reveal dots there, it will instead reveal a "no dots here" area, and this data will still add to their picture. So even if an experiment fails to prove a hypothesis, it's still a win win situation. I guess the boardgame of "Battleship" is another which can be used as a metaphor. Each single shot you take gives you very little data, but over time it builds an increasingly clearer picture of things you couldn't previously see. It only takes a very little experiment, repeated slightly differently time & time again, to build up great amounts of knowledge. *Thesedays we have such a huge amount of knowledge about chemistry, that we use computer simulations to model what we know. This makes it easy to find new things we can experiment with, because it's sortof like "the computer simulation shows that the shape of this molecule should effect this thing", and then we test it in the real world to see if it's true. Remember all the poking with a stick we've previously done, by now we have a really good idea of the shape of various things, we even have a whole bag of specially shaped poking sticks to speed up the process. Thesedays we're super confident about the shape of most things, we only really poke specific areas we're not sure about.
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