Penn Science Spotlight: Learning how T cells manage the custom RNA business
Chris Yarosh This Science Spotlight focuses on the research I do here at Penn, the results of which are now in press at Nucleic Acids Research 1 . You can read the actual manuscript right now , if you would like, because NAR is “open access,” meaning all articles published there are available to anyone for free. We’ve talked about open access on this blog before, if you’re curious about how that works. First, a note about this type of science. The experiments done for this paper fall into the category of “basic research,” which means they were not designed to achieve an immediate practical end. That type of work is known as “applied” research. Basic research, on the other hand, is curiosity-driven science that aims to increase our understanding of something. That something could be cells, supernovas, factors influencing subjective well-being in adolescence, or anything else, really. This isn’t to say that basic research doesn’t lead to advances that impact people’s lives;