I caught a story awhile back about a man who had used a technique called RNAi to remove the gene responsible for making the compounds in an onion that make people tear up when cutting them. (Link)

After looking around I found this video that is good introductory example of RNAi in action. The basic idea is that you can trick a cell into treating a gene like a virus. Natural defenses (dicer proteins) will then remove all traces of the gene, which can have interesting effects (This is what I took from it. Feel free to correct/clarify as needed).

I also found a more in-depth video from the Google Tech Talks seminar. The lecturer is Craig Mello, one of the biologists who won a Nobel Prize for his work regarding RNAi in 2006.

This is a very good talk.

One thing that sticks in my mind, besides the topic, was the evolution aspect. That once upon a time, before the cambrian explosion, we and the c-elegance worm shared the same ancestor.

In the day of the dionosaurs our ancestor was some suirrel size primate, n if one of the dinosaurs had stepped on it.. we wouldn´t be talking on this board. Biology is a strange and huge thing.