[Verath]

During the first part of the pandemic I watched the lectures for the Introductory Biology course [1] from MIT OpenCourseWare. I cannot recommend those highly enough!

Almost every lecture brought up and highlighted something really cool and fascinating. Like how RNA sequencing over the last couple of years has gone from expensive to almost free, and what its uses are. Or time-lapse of bacteria adapting to antibiotics. Or just the first lecture showing a video of someone sticking a syringe into a cell. There were even some labs that could be done via a normal web browser.

For me this was so much more engaging than the biology I was thought in high school, where we mostly learned things from outdated books.

[1]: https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/7-016-introductory-biology-fall-...

[nextos]

> [...] where we mostly learned things from outdated books

I can recommend 3 really good books, SICP-level good:

1. Biological Sequence Analysis by Durbin et al.

How to model DNA, RNA and proteins as probabilistic languages / generative models. There is also a companion book with all exercises solved.

2. Physical Biology of the Cell by Phillips et al.

A massive amount of quantitative cell biology models that use simple undergrad physics.

Originated from a Caltech course. After reading this book, all other intro to biology books look like a bag of tricks.

3. An Introduction to Systems Biology: Design Principles of Biological Circuits by Alon.

Bacterial circuits from the perspective of an electrical engineer.

Sadly, NSF discontinued funding for a totally epic Cold Spring Harbor Summer school for postdocs that taught [2,3].

A shame, we need more quantitative biology and less bags of tricks.

[greymalik]

What are the prerequisites to handling these books? Would they be good for someone who never took Bio in college or even AP Bio in high school? Or would some remedial work be needed first?

[steakknife]

Anything with Dr. Eric Lander from MIT (e.g. https://www.edx.org/course/introduction-to-biology-the-secre...). Hands down the best lecturer I've ever encountered.

[feet]

To anyone who watches these, watch the basic chemistry series and organic chemistry lectures if you can find them. Follow that up with biochemistry to get a deeper understanding of the mechanisms of life