About TeachDNA - the minds behind the models:

TeachDNA exists to help show and tell about the intricate and dynamic molecular structures that make all life on Earth happen.

We think: if you could hold these shapes in your hands, put their parts together, and play with them, you would be amazed, delighted, intrigued - and a little wiser. To make this possible, we magnify the shapes about seventy million times, simplify them as cartoons (still faithfully simulating all the major working parts), and offer them to you, with some hints and prompts.

This venture grew out of the public education outreach efforts of Mahlon Hoagland, MD (1921-2009). Son of a neurophysiologist, the ‘not very scholarly youth’ was disinclined toward a career in science. Nonetheless he wound up joining a biochemistry lab where, one day in the middle of the1950s, he stumbled across evidence for Francis Crick’s postulated ‘adaptor molecules’ relating the DNA sequence of genes to the amino acid sequence of proteins. He discovered the activity of aminoacyl-tRNA synthetases - the twenty special enzymes that crucially connect each kind of amino acid onto a specific tRNA. He further helped to discover the tRNAs themselves. These and other adventures are narrated in his 1990 memoir, Toward the Habit of Truth: A Life in Science.

Speaking plainly about scientific discoveries to the general public became a main pursuit in Hoagland’s later career, with books including The Roots of Life: A Layman’s Guide to Genes, Evolution and the Way of Cells (1978); Discovery: The Search for DNA’s Secrets (1981); and, with illustrator Bert Dodson (1938-2021), The Way Life Works (1995).

The Way Life Works — which Stewart Brand selected, along with the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Tao Te Ching and about seventy other books, for inclusion in the Long Now Foundation’s ‘Manual for Civilization’ library — is a picture-book, with many cartoons. The cartoon images of DNA and RNA are the basis of a modular kinetic sculpture devised by Hoagland and Dodson, at the urging of Hoagland’s daughter Judy Hauck.

I first encountered this DNA-modeling DIY sculpture in 2014, while teaching Essentials of Biology at a regional college in rural Tennessee. I soon made the acquaintance of Judy, and offered my help. With her blessing, I launched TeachDNA, LLC, early 2023, in Seattle. With help from injection-molding experts at Sea-Lect Plastics, I re-engineered the model to make it stronger, prettier, and cheaper, and PlayDNA! was reincarnated.

About me: I grew up making cartoons and sculptures, exploring woods and waters, reading books, and avoiding schoolwork. Then I found out about science. Ever since, I have been deeply interested in embryos — primarily snail embryos. I am especially fascinated by the spatiotemporal pattern of cell division that generates an ordered array of precociously specified cells in the early embryos of snails. Two major lessons learned from a career in developmental biology: (1) life is amazingly beautiful, intelligent, robust, and flexible; and (2) what we currently know about life is vastly outweighed by what we don’t know. I think we should keep exploring, experimenting, and learning!

Some more new designs are incubating… sign up for emails and you’ll be notified when they hatch.

Have fun learning!

(signed)

Morgan Q Goulding

“Science does not watch the world, it tackles it.”

—Jacob Bronowski