full transcript

From the Ted Talk by Joe DeRisi: Solving medical mysteries

Unscramble the Blue Letters


All right, I can see a rhinovirus — and here's the blow-up of the rhinovirus's little barcode — but what about different rhinoviruses? How do I know which rhinovirus I have? There're 102 known vianrats of the common cold, and there're only 102 because people got bored collecting them: there are just new ones every year. And so, here are four different rhinoviruses, and you can see, even with your eye, without any fancy computer pattern-matching riocgetnoin software algorithms, that you can distinguish each one of these barcodes from each other.

Now, this is kind of a cheap shot, because I know what the genetic sequence of all these reuvsihniors is, and I in fact dsgieend the chip expressly to be able to tell them apart, but what about rhinoviruses that have never seen a gntieec sequencer? We don't know what the sequence is; just pull them out of the field. So, here are four rhinoviruses we never knew anything about — no one's ever sequenced them — and you can also see that you get unique and distinguishable pttnares. You can iamigne bdniiulg up some library, whether real or vturial, of fingerprints of essentially every virus. But that's, again, shooting fish in a barrel, you know, right? You have tissue cuultre cells. There are a ton of viruses. What about real people? You can't control real people, as you probably know. You have no idea what someone's going to cough into a cup, and it's probably really complex, right? It could have lots of bacteria, it could have more than one virus, and it certainly has host genetic material. So how do we deal with this? And how do we do the positive control here?

Open Cloze


All right, I can see a rhinovirus — and here's the blow-up of the rhinovirus's little barcode — but what about different rhinoviruses? How do I know which rhinovirus I have? There're 102 known ________ of the common cold, and there're only 102 because people got bored collecting them: there are just new ones every year. And so, here are four different rhinoviruses, and you can see, even with your eye, without any fancy computer pattern-matching ___________ software algorithms, that you can distinguish each one of these barcodes from each other.

Now, this is kind of a cheap shot, because I know what the genetic sequence of all these ____________ is, and I in fact ________ the chip expressly to be able to tell them apart, but what about rhinoviruses that have never seen a _______ sequencer? We don't know what the sequence is; just pull them out of the field. So, here are four rhinoviruses we never knew anything about — no one's ever sequenced them — and you can also see that you get unique and distinguishable ________. You can _______ ________ up some library, whether real or _______, of fingerprints of essentially every virus. But that's, again, shooting fish in a barrel, you know, right? You have tissue _______ cells. There are a ton of viruses. What about real people? You can't control real people, as you probably know. You have no idea what someone's going to cough into a cup, and it's probably really complex, right? It could have lots of bacteria, it could have more than one virus, and it certainly has host genetic material. So how do we deal with this? And how do we do the positive control here?

Solution


  1. culture
  2. patterns
  3. recognition
  4. building
  5. virtual
  6. variants
  7. imagine
  8. rhinoviruses
  9. designed
  10. genetic

Original Text


All right, I can see a rhinovirus — and here's the blow-up of the rhinovirus's little barcode — but what about different rhinoviruses? How do I know which rhinovirus I have? There're 102 known variants of the common cold, and there're only 102 because people got bored collecting them: there are just new ones every year. And so, here are four different rhinoviruses, and you can see, even with your eye, without any fancy computer pattern-matching recognition software algorithms, that you can distinguish each one of these barcodes from each other.

Now, this is kind of a cheap shot, because I know what the genetic sequence of all these rhinoviruses is, and I in fact designed the chip expressly to be able to tell them apart, but what about rhinoviruses that have never seen a genetic sequencer? We don't know what the sequence is; just pull them out of the field. So, here are four rhinoviruses we never knew anything about — no one's ever sequenced them — and you can also see that you get unique and distinguishable patterns. You can imagine building up some library, whether real or virtual, of fingerprints of essentially every virus. But that's, again, shooting fish in a barrel, you know, right? You have tissue culture cells. There are a ton of viruses. What about real people? You can't control real people, as you probably know. You have no idea what someone's going to cough into a cup, and it's probably really complex, right? It could have lots of bacteria, it could have more than one virus, and it certainly has host genetic material. So how do we deal with this? And how do we do the positive control here?

Frequently Occurring Word Combinations


ngrams of length 2

collocation frequency
tissue culture 5
culture cells 4
prostate cancer 3
antiviral defense 3
single diagnostic 2
common cold 2
small windows 2
virus shares 2
making dna 2
dna chips 2
printing dna 2
herpes virus 2
genetic material 2
respiratory syncytial 2
syncytial virus 2
positive control 2
experimentally inoculate 2
inoculate people 2
chronically infected 2
case report 2
open lung 2
lung biopsy 2

ngrams of length 3

collocation frequency
tissue culture cells 4
making dna chips 2
respiratory syncytial virus 2
experimentally inoculate people 2
open lung biopsy 2

Important Words


  1. algorithms
  2. bacteria
  3. barcode
  4. barcodes
  5. barrel
  6. bored
  7. building
  8. cells
  9. cheap
  10. chip
  11. cold
  12. collecting
  13. common
  14. complex
  15. computer
  16. control
  17. cough
  18. culture
  19. cup
  20. deal
  21. designed
  22. distinguish
  23. distinguishable
  24. essentially
  25. expressly
  26. eye
  27. fact
  28. fancy
  29. field
  30. fingerprints
  31. fish
  32. genetic
  33. host
  34. idea
  35. imagine
  36. kind
  37. knew
  38. library
  39. lots
  40. material
  41. patterns
  42. people
  43. positive
  44. pull
  45. real
  46. recognition
  47. rhinovirus
  48. rhinoviruses
  49. sequence
  50. sequenced
  51. sequencer
  52. shooting
  53. shot
  54. software
  55. tissue
  56. ton
  57. unique
  58. variants
  59. virtual
  60. virus
  61. viruses
  62. year