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me this was so much more engaging than the biology I was thought in high school, where we mostly learned things from outdated books.
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?
They are self-contained. [1] discusses very little biology, it is mostly about biological sequences as formal languages. [2] is meant as an introduction to biology. [3] is self-contained, but to appreciate its content probably it would help to skim through Molecular Biology of the Gene by Watson et al.
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
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me this was so much more engaging than the biology I was thought in high school, where we mostly learned things from outdated books.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-...