biology

How to read a clinical trial result with discipline — the difference between absolute and relative risk reduction, what number-needed-to-treat captures, what confidence intervals actually mean, the hierarchy of evidence quality, and why statistical significance is not the same as clinical importance.

The phased structure of drug development from preclinical work through phase IV surveillance, what each phase actually establishes, the 90% attrition rate and where it lives, the difference between surrogate and hard clinical endpoints, and what regulatory approval pathways guarantee.

What the GLP-1 hormone does in normal physiology, why agonists of its receptor produce effects on glucose, gastric emptying, satiety, and weight, how peptide engineering achieves week-long duration, and what the clinical trial evidence shows beyond glycemic control.

How base editors convert one base to another by chemistry rather than by cutting, how prime editors use a programmable template and reverse transcription to make arbitrary small edits, and the structural trade-offs between scope, efficiency, and off-target activity.

How CRISPR/Cas9 cuts a specific DNA sequence using a programmable guide RNA, the two cellular repair pathways that determine whether the edit is a disruption or a correction, the structural problem of off-target effects, and what delivery into human cells actually requires.

The flow of information from DNA through mRNA to protein, what mutations actually change, why single-base changes can have outsized consequences, and the structural reason genome editing aims at DNA specifically.