#38 overallEvergreen
Introduction to Biology - The Secret of Life
edX
10 recommenders · 10 threads · recommended in 6 years, 2015–2023 · score 14.4
An introductory biology course taught by Eric Lander through edX (MIT). It covers biochemistry, genetics, molecular biology, recombinant DNA, genomics, and rational medicine, tracing how key discoveries were made up to recent work such as CRISPR/Cas9.
Commenters call it one of the best MOOCs they have taken, praising Eric Lander's lectures and its clear, well-explained approach to how biology's discoveries were made.
Recommendations by year
20062026
I would recommend Eric Lander's introduction to biology course at MITx as the perfect counter-example. It is about as good as Feynman's lectures, whether one chooses to refer to it as "Lander's lectures".
By far the single best MOOC I've ever taken is edX's Introduction to Biology taught by Eric Lander at MIT. https://www.edx.org/course/introduction-to-biology-the-secre...
And it's 100% free! Great lectures and the simluated "TA sessions" and esp. online quizzes did a great job reinforcing my knowledge.
I have an undergrad degree in biology from a top research university from many years ago and this course was so informative, effective, and inspiring, that i considered dropping out of tech to go to grad school in biology. Truly excellent.
I've been working professional jobs for more than a decade. Despite my full-time jobs, I've dedicated hundreds (maybe thousands?) of hours of personal time over the last 6 years teaching myself vector calculus, linear algebra, abstract algebra, molecular biology, organic chemistry, and other nerdy topics. Mostly, I use textbooks and work on problem sets. I sometimes watch videos which can be super-helpful. But the best single course I've taken in that time is the MIT edX course.
Eric Lander was the President's science advisor? That dude's Intro to Biology course on MitX is outstanding!
https://www.edx.org/course/introduction-to-biology-the-secre...
I am currently self-learning biology and I just completed MIT's 7.00x introduction to biology on edX [1].
The course is outstanding and anything but a "lifeless recitation of names". Prof Eric Lander (key researcher on the Human Genome Project) goes through two centuries of research and takes the time to explain how and why discoveries came into existence. It goes from the early days of biochemistry to recent major advancement such as CRISPR/Cas9.
I'm looking to apply my ML expertise to the field of biology and this course was a real windfall, I highly recommend it.
[1] https://www.edx.org/course/introduction-to-biology-the-secre...
That's about how I feel about most of Coursera's offerings. Check out some other MOOC providers, there are other players like EdX, Udacity, Udemy.
I've had good results with EdX, but my one positive experience with them ('Introduction to Biology - The Secret of Life') is much more anecdotal than my multiple very poor experiences with Coursera. It's gotten me excited about the potential of online classes again, though!
Eric Lander's incredible 'Introduction to Biology - The Secret of Life' was my first step away from data analysis for online marketing clients (which I didn't love) to bioinformatics (which I do very much love)
https://www.edx.org/course/introduction-biology-secret-life-...
A Fantastic course from a legendary educator.
Actually, I would throw this into the ring instead:
https://www.edx.org/course/introduction-to-biology-the-secre...
by Professor Eric Lander
It's really well done and genomics is the focus. I took many dozens of edX and Coursra courses over the years, this is one of the top 5% of the courses there I would say.
I don't understand the phrase "from a programmer's perspective", or "for Engineers" in the title on top.
As a programmer whos studied CS but also took numerous life science courses throughout my life. You want to learn biology you study biology, what does a "programmer's view", or an engineer's, have to do with it? You use the correct tool for the job, and having a background in both, I don't see this working out well, more like the opposite actually.
The point of looking at biology for an engineer or programmer should be to broaden ones horizons, not to use ones internal models build for a completely different field in another one that really is not like that at all. IMO it's best to forget all computer metaphors here.
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By the way, since there was something about this yesterday, there also is this course: https://www.edx.org/course/principles-of-biochemistry - it too is very good. A good knowledge of organic chemistry is a prerequisite, but there are plenty of equally interesting course resources for that available too, including even Khan Academy (https://www.khanacademy.org/science/organic-chemistry), or to give a(nother) random link, https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/5-12-organic-chemistry-i-spring-...
Biology becomes a lot more fun with this foundation already established in ones head.
I would suggest taking MIT's Secret of Life course on EdX. Its taught by Eric Lander who was a key figure in the human genome project and was a mathematician beforehand, so he follows an axiomatic approach that is much different than the way other schools teach biology
https://www.edx.org/course/introduction-to-biology-the-secre...
Alternatively, Harvard Extension School has some great biology courses you can sign up and get credit for. Though those are mostly for pre-med career changers
I would recommend the edX Introduction to Biology course [0].
It is a simplified version of the introductory biology course at MIT, that doesn't _focus_ on naming/defining things in biology. Instead, it uses the lenses of genetics and biochemistry to explore how the core machinery of life works, and how we got to our current understanding. That said, there is some amount of memorization that is unavoidable.
[0] https://www.edx.org/course/introduction-to-biology-the-secre...
Well, it very much depends on ones goals and ones context, doesn't it? Which impacts what ones brain pays wants and what it focuses its attention on, and what it filters out no matter how much you attempt to cram it in.
What I found a revelation and a bug eye opener - yes as a (CS degree) programmer - was: medicine, chemistry (and org. chem and bio.chem), biology. From Coursera and edx.org. When I did this it was all completely free, now they put some restrictions on some courses (Coursera more so than edX), for example that as a non-payer you cannot do all the exercises.
Even when/if the linked courses are over, accessing there content should still be possible. The courses are free, a certificate is not necessary. Some homework or exams may not be available for non-payers.
Best (university level introductory) course for biology: https://www.edx.org/course/introduction-to-biology-the-secre...
Bio-chemistry: https://www.edx.org/course/principles-of-biochemistry
Physiology: I actually found a lot of lectures on Google better than any of the online courses, start from https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=physiology+
Fundamentals of neuro-science: https://www.mcb80x.org/ followed by "Medical Neuroscience" on Coursera: https://www.coursera.org/learn/medical-neuroscience -- easily one of the best courses out there
A very simple course combining (very simple, beginner level) programming and (basic) biology: https://www.edx.org/course/nature-in-code-biology-in-javascr... -- what's interesting here for a programmer definitely isn't the Javascript code, but asking biology questions that can be answered with (even simple) code.
Staticstics is a huge part of medicine and biology - plenty of good courses on probability, statistics (all levels) and courses using R or Python, here a random example course: https://www.edx.org/course/statistical-analysis-in-bioinform...
On so many more levels than I can briefly write down here this "field trip" into bio-sciences felt soooo much better than learning yet another programming language. Let's keep in mind, regardless of C++, Haskell, Javascript, and/or whatever framework, the hardware underneath all of it is all the exact same architecture. Looking at differences between the programming languages now seems to me like looking at a surface that to a naked eye looks completely smooth, but if you zoom in far enough with an electron microscope it looks like a messy mountain area. But when you do that you lose sight of the big(ger) picture. The excourse into (organic and bio-) chemistry and biology helped me get a better sense of where we are, at least it feels that way. The neuroscience helps remaining grounded (and getting more cynical) when reading popular headlines about "neural network" and "AI" and the like.
um some parts are more high-level than others, but a lot would be gibberish. Familiarity with the contents of e.g "Molecular Biology Of The Cell" would greatly increase your experience. -- That book is big and exhaustive (and expensive), a focused intro to the same material is MIT "Introduction To Biology" on EDx! It's an amazing course!
The book and MIT course also give a good enough conceptual intro to the chemistry concepts you need too. Obviously the rabbit hole goes deeep tho... people spend lifetimes scratching the surface.
When we developed antibiotics we thought we solved the problem. Now we are looking at more and more strains of bacteria resistant to all we got. We have to keep going, turns out we are not done developing antibiotics, forever.
So, as I see it, this might show that once we "cured cancer" (I know, there is not "one cancer", and that there won't be that one drug, it's more a dynamic equilibrium), when we think we made it we might find out that the threat develops too and cancerous cells may come up with completely new ideas. Red Queen hypothesis, in a way. I know the article says they have not seen any such thing in humans, but when we developed antibiotics the ones we see now weren't there either.
A little OT:
The new public release version of that new cancer like thing will be open source, as always, and also as always that is of little use because the code is a mess and deciphering it takes as much time as writing it new from scratch... on the other hand, whenever I looked at source code of major projects it reminded me a lot of what biological processes would come up with, just as messy, you can only patch the immediate problem, probably introducing 10 new ones in the process. Especially when they rely on automated testing to replace understanding - patches that pass the tests are accepted (keep fiddling until they do), until nobody understands the code any more a hundred developers and years later.
Sometimes software developers ask what new programming language to learn for self-improvement. Inevitably a lot of languages from Haskell to Python to whatever are mentioned. I think that's all aiming way too close to what those people already know. I would recommend - biology and neuroscience! It's easy and free these days, e.g. "Introduction to Biology" on edX, "Medical Neuroscience" on Coursera after the fundamentals from Harvard at https://www.mcb80x.org/ - plus probability and statistics (edX, Coursera - many very good courses).
Only some random musings triggered by reading that article.
This is not the end of the arms race.
At some point we will have AI designing and AI delivering ads, and while we may have AI designed to prevent us from having to watch ads we don't want we will also have AI that watches everything, gathering and filtering information that is too much for us to handle but tuned to our needs since it's "our AI". Then the race will be that one AI wants to trick the consumer AI into giving their information more weight and attention.
So instead of the race humans against humans we'll have a race humans => AI ("sellers" of anything, from goods to news) => AI (consumers) => human (us).
It's going to be a lot more complex: Right now all that people on both sides have to know is human psychology. In that future they'll have to understand the potentially far more varied world of possible AIs - and if that isn't enough the complex interactions between them and also between the AIs and the humans.
Are we creating the diversity and complexity that we remove from the biosphere (the ongoing mass extinction and/or reduction of many species) anew but in a completely different space? In addition to technical systems we are also getting much better (and better faster!) in controlling biological systems, creating our own ideas. At least some programmers of the future will write their code in DNA - or possibly even something more complex, something that can encode completely new proteins that the current code can't represent. And then there's combining biology and technology... an explosion of complexity and diversity?
I studied CS more than two decades ago. I kept up to date and continue to do the odd course in my field, but what I consider an amazing experience (for an IT guy) was when I spent the last few years taking hundreds of hours of courses in biology and medicine. Looking for new ideas? Take an introduction to biology and genetics course instead of learning an only very mildly different programming language, for example (free): https://www.edx.org/course/introduction-biology-secret-life-...
Usually yes - but it depends. Anything programming related I rarely like as a lecture and completely agree with you, unlike it's general concepts and then it depends, see below. I'm an avid reader, so historically I always favored reading and only the last few years did I get a more nuanced opinion with exposure to new subjects and lecturers.
On the other hand, when I took "Medical Neuroscience" [0], a pretty heavy course with 16 hrs/week ~25 hours (or was it 35?) lectures total (the 1st edition of that course - I have not checked if they made any changes to the edition online now, Coursera switched to a different course format), at least for the duration of the course I ignored the textbook [1] even though I had it. The lecturer was mesmerizing, I just started the videos and listened for hours - and actually learned. The fact that most of the time you do want to take that textbook (even for this exact same subject) is that it's exceedingly rare to find such a specimen of a teacher.
Similarly with basic physiology lectures, even though they were done cheaply and he has stopped making new ones Aaron Mullally's lectures are of the same kind, I could just listen and listen and learn stuff. I tried many different ones, all of them prepared more "professionally" (I don't like that word because the dirtiest and cheapest solution can still be more professional than the one with the best packaging, but you know what I mean, I hope).
Math, physics, chemistry, biology: It depends (so the same), I found lectures - I guess that actually means I found lecturers - that at least for me are better than learning the same from a book. Another example where given the choice between book and lecture I would take the lecture any time: [3] (and that is 100% because of the person giving the lecture).
[0] https://www.coursera.org/learn/medical-neuroscience
[1] http://www.sinauer.com/neuroscience-621.html
[2] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0JRvRB-VkJ3yeSEdXpe9ew
[3] https://www.edx.org/course/introduction-biology-secret-life-...
I recommend you browse through some of the lecture videos of this (free) Medical Neuroscience course: https://www.coursera.org/learn/medical-neuroscience
It's probably way too big a course for someone only casually interested, but it's probably the best (free, but maybe overall) course available on the Internet for an introduction into the subject. Mostly because the professor is great.
The TL;DW is that neuroscience is mostly about your "bio-electrical hardware". So nothing soft there at all. Do review it, this is such an interesting field. A good course for even more fundamental fundamentals is this (pretty big and still free) multimedia course from Harvard, which I'd say is aimed at high-school level students: https://www.mcb80x.org/
What you have to understand on the medical side is that there is not much they can do for brain conditions. Surgery is mostly about stopping bleedings and "cutting away stuff". I took a little clinical neuroscience course and it was mostly "we don't know where this comes from", "here we can only treat side-effects", and actually nothing about actually healing anything at least for the various disorders covered in that course. "Brain issues" have the disadvantages that it's harder to do anything since a) it's much more risky (compared to trying and failing fixing a skin condition), b) it's much harder to get drugs there, c) it's harder to do surgery in the brain.
So the science is pretty solid on the very low level, but on the scale of a full human brain there it gets way too complex. So the higher-level you go the more it's (interpretable) statistics, the lower you go the more it's (pretty solid) (cellular or molecular) biology, (bio-)chemistry and/or physics (electricity). They find new but essential things all the time even now, the field still feels "fresh" as in you have no difficulty finding things that need research and still are somewhat basic. The problem is that the really interesting stuff, the things that matter because it's needed for actually doing something about disease or malfunction, all are high-level, and knowing well what goes on in "a" (i.e. one) neuron (or even a group) does not help you that much in clinical practice.
So on a clinical level neuroscience is as much "science" as most of medicine as a whole.
It's also important to find the right doctor, and this can be very hard. I had always been extremely trusting and never cared about anything - when it came to health, go to the doctor, do what they tell you to the letter, no need to think about anything I have no clue about.
Until the doctor - a professor even - gave me advice in a strange crisis that made no sense. He wasn't wrong, he gave exactly the advice that is current "state of the art" for the condition he diagnosed. The problem was, where did that condition come from? The doc didn't care, his job was done. He had a diagnosis and he gave the recommended treatment suggestion (which consists of working on the symptoms, and very badly so, because they don't understand that condition even though it's quite common). Following his treatment I got a huge candida outbreak (and I don't have chemo or AIDS) the symptoms of which he completely ignored. I later got nystatin and then even got diflucan prescribed for three weeks (it wasn't a systemic infection and yet that stuff helped greatly), both those drugs with huge positive effect, but candida isn't a cause but itself a symptom.
I dug deeper and found the root cause. Then I went and found doctors who actually knew something about it. I got treated at a university clinic by a researcher doc with chelators against chronic mercury poisoning. 5 years later: miracles happened. The last one of many was that the endocrinologist put me back on the table to repeat his ultrasound of my right thyroid, which for over twenty years had been double-size and with a 4mm cold nodule - because the nodule was gone, and the thyroid was almost back to normal size. "I'm amazed" was all he could say several times. During chelation I had had "tissue pain" (can't describe it) for a few weeks right around the right thyroid. There is a lot more, like the psoriasis and the tinnitus and many of other long-term problems that just disappeared.
So I'm glad that I ignored the doctor(s), very, very few would find a chronic heavy metal poisoning. Ignoring a doctors opinion and going out on my own was the hardest thing I ever did in my life.
Internet forums, while indeed and truly often horrible, did help me find the problem. You have to filter out over 90%, but one doesn't even have to be an expert to detect the BS. The rest can be valuable when your doctor doesn't find anything. It's not like doctors couldn't find it - it's just that they don't have the time. The waiting room is full, how much time is it worth spending on the problems of any given patient? Especially "functional" problems where you can't actually see anything even with biomedical imaging.
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Completely unrelated to both the previous story and inside that story to the problem I had, I started learning about medical topics, actually out of boredom initially and then got drawn into it. Hundreds of lecture hours and courses later I now understand the basics of anatomy, physiology, had to learn lots of chemistry, org. chem., biochemistry, lots of statistics (never played any significant role in my CS study or in my life), and neuroscience, over 70 courses in total half of which were medical topics. It feels GOOD to know those things, I recommend it to anyone who has some time left for learning. Neuroscience especially should be a must for CS/IT folks, try https://www.mcb80x.org/ for a start and Medical Neuroscience (https://www.coursera.org/learn/medical-neuroscience) as a follow-up, one of the best courses out there mostly because the professor teaching it is wonderful. Don't just learn functional programming with Haskell or Scala, learn brain! :)