The Book Page: From One Cell, Ben Stanger -- August 12, 2024

Locator: 48389B.

Tag: forecast global consumption.

Global oil demand, link here.

Forecast:

• 2024: global consumption of liquid fuels will rise by 1.1 million bop;
• 2025: will then rise another 1.6 million bopd (0.5/1.1 = 45% increase in growth y/y)

So, what was the forecast in 2020, in the midst of a global Covid pandemic? Link here.

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The Book Page

From One Cell: A Journey Into Life's Origins And The Future Of Medicine, Ben Stanger, 2023.

Audience: should be summer reading for high school students -- juniors / seniors -- with plans to attend college to major in the life sciences.  

I'll be doing at least two posts on this book, maybe more. 

Right now, I'm reading the section in the book on "knockout mice."

 One can get caught up on "knockout mice" by starting with three links.

• the Nobel Prize, October 9, 2007: link here.
• Knockout mouse, wiki; link here.
• gene knockout, wiki: link here.

From the book:

In 1990, an Italian-born developmental biologist named Mario Capecchi made history by creating the world's first, "knockout mice."

The term may evoke images of rodents with prodigious boxing skills, but the recipient of the decisive blow in a knockout mouse is not an opposing mouse, it is a gene. Through a painstaking process of cellular engineering, Capecchi had worked out the conditions to alter the mammalian genome, and now he was telling the world how he had done it.

Capecchi had an unimaginably difficult childhood. Born in Italy to a single mother just before World War II, he became homeless at the age of four when the Nazis arrested his mother for anti-Fascist activities. The toddler was shuttled from one living situation to another, first to a farm, then an orphanage, and finally into the care of his estranged and abusive father.

After the war, Capecchi's mother found him in a Reggio Emilia hospital, close to death from typhoid and malnutrition.

From there, mother and son moved to the suburbs of Philadelphia, where his uncle a physicist and Quaker, took them in. The traumas of wartime dissipated slowly, as Capecchi immersed himself in sports and schoolwork.

He attended Antioch College, a small liberal arts school in Ohio, spending summers in MIT biology labs through the college's work-study program. From there, he attended graduate school at Harvard (under Jim Watson, of double-helix fame), and ultimately landed a job at the University of Utah.

Capecchi was awarded the 2007 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovering a method to create mice in which a specific gene is turned off, known as knockout mice.