What the sugar coating on your cells is trying to tell you | Carolyn Bertozzi
Your cells are coated with sugars that store information and speak a secret language. What are they trying to tell us? Your blood type, for one -- and, potentially, ...
========== This is a talk about sugar and cancer. I became interested in sugar
when I was in college. Not this kind of sugar. It was the sugar that our biology
professors taught us about in the context of the coating
of your cells. Maybe you didn't know that your cells
are coated with sugar. And I didn't know that, either, until I took these courses in college, but back then -- and this was in, let's just
call it the 1980s -- people didn't know much about why
our cells are coated with sugar. And when I dug through my notes,
what I noticed I had written down is that the sugar coating on our cells
is like the sugar coating on a peanut M and M. And people thought
the sugar coating on our cells was like a protective coating that somehow made our cells
stronger or tougher. ...