#329 overall
Biology
Khan Academy
2 recommenders · 2 threads · recommended in 2 years, 2017–2019 · score 1.5
Khan Academy's free introductory Biology course, a set of video-based lessons covering core biology topics. Commenters point to specific units such as genetics, cell signaling, and human biology, including immunology.
Commenters call the just-plain-Biology course a surprisingly useful overview, and recommend its genetics and cell signaling units as accessible starting points.
Science & Engineeringbeginnerfreevideo lectures#biology#genetics#cell signaling#immunology#introductory
Recommendations by year
20062026
It depends on how big a commitment you want to make. I quit my job to go study biology and it worked out pretty well for me. Programming opens doors for you because the majority of biology grad students can't do it. You get good work and an accelerated path through classes, TAships, research and other university business. If you want to work in IT, the experience you get is perfect for applying for prestige places like Google, Facebook or Amazon. Mostly I've spent the last year writing pattern matchers to extract subtle patterns from huge data files.
If you're not ready for a big commitment (and even if you are), I'd recommend taking some classes too get a feel for the subject. Khan Academy has two (or you can google around for more) that look pretty good. The just-plain-Biology one covers a surprising amount of useful information. The one on Genetics is useful too, although you might want to skip past some of the stuff about cross-breeding animals and whatnot.
Another thing you can look at is Synthetic Biology, which is biology plus design, biology for hackers. Synbio says biology has been too interested in describing and cataloguing, and not interested enough in building. So even though what we can do is pathetically simple next to the evolutionary process that designs new organisms, we can still do little things like making human beings immune to all viruses and designing cyanobacteria that produce crude oil from air, water and sunlight. If you're interested in Synbio you should check out the iGEM competition, which is a major event and an organizing site for useful information.
If you don't feel like crawling around the iGEM database of standardized biological parts (it's like the library docs for Life) you could look at these videos instead: https://www.ibiology.org/playlists/synthetic-biology/
Email's in my profile. Don't be a stranger if you have questions.
The standard way to learn this stuff is a course/textbook followed by reading the important papers. I recommend https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/biology/7-28-molecular-biology-s...: it is well-organized and a great use of time, even though it doesn't get into the latest most exciting topics.
If you just want an overview of what's going on, I curated these links for you. For each, focus on the main idea and why it is significant for accomplishing biological goals.
https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Human_Physiology/Homeostasis#O...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molecular_biology section 1-2
Skim https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_dogma_of_molecular_bio...
https://www.khanacademy.org/science/biology/classical-geneti... watch 2x speed
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetics#Research_methods
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellular_communication_(biolog...
https://www.khanacademy.org/science/biology/cell-signaling
https://mcb.berkeley.edu/courses/mcb110spring/nogales/mcb110...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epigenetics intro and diagram only
http://www.zymoresearch.com/learning-center/epigenetics/what... all pages
https://www.jove.com/science-education-database/2/basic-meth... understand basic research methods
https://www.khanacademy.org/science/biology/human-biology#im...
skim https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_pluripotent_stem_cell
https://www.cancerquest.org/cancer-biology/ is awesome. I recommend angiogenesis, metastasis, and tumor-host interactions