Patient Empowerment Program: A Rare Disease Podcast
May 20, 2026 · 34 min · 11 segments
In this episode of the n-Lorem Patient Empowerment Podcast, Stan Crooke explores the “RNA World” — the groundbreaking field of RNA biology that helped make modern genetic medicine possible. Drawing…
Stan CrookeHost
So when I, uh, chose to attend Baylor College of Medicine, or BCM as it's now called, I also chose to, to join a research lab led by an MD-PhD, Professor Harris Bush.
Harris was chairman of pharmacology at Baylor College of Medicine for more than four decades.
He was interested primarily in cancer, molecular and cellular biology, and he was an extraordinary scientist and hard worker.
When he died, he had almost a thousand publications, and he had won many, many awards.
It was a type of war that had been fought many, many times before, uh, I entered BCM, and has been fought several times since in the creation of the miracle of the RNA world.
Like politics and wars that come from politics, the causes of scientific wars can be classified, and one of the most common causes is this question: Is it the thing that you observed real or, and important, or is it just an artifact of perhaps sloppy scientific method? And that was the war that was going on in the RNA world about a new class of RNAs that had been discovered.
So the case in point that we're talking about is a war that focused on a class of RNA molecules that had been identified a few years earlier, and they're called small molecular weight nuclear RNAs or snRNAs.
Like most things in science, the, the issue being thought about sounds complex but is much, much simpler than it sounds.
The RNAs at the center of the controversy are RNAs that are small, uh, two to three hundred nucleotides, and never leave the nucleus.
So the protagonists argued that snRNAs are real, and they must be important because there are a lot of them and, and they're in the cell.
The antagonists sneered at the protagonists and said snRNAs were simply artifacts caused by sloppy experimental technique that caused the degradation of the RNAs that were known into these smaller fragments, and the debate was really intense.
So when I, uh, chose to attend Baylor College of Medicine, or BCM as it's now called, I also chose to, to join a research lab led by an MD-PhD, Professor Harris Bush.
Harris was chairman of pharmacology at Baylor College of Medicine for more than four decades.
He was interested primarily in cancer, molecular and cellular biology, and he was an extraordinary scientist and hard worker.
When he died, he had almost a thousand publications, and he had won many, many awards.
It was a type of war that had been fought many, many times before, uh, I entered BCM, and has been fought several times since in the creation of the miracle of the RNA world.
Like politics and wars that come from politics, the causes of scientific wars can be classified, and one of the most common causes is this question: Is it the thing that you observed real or, and important, or is it just an artifact of perhaps sloppy scientific method? And that was the war that was going on in the RNA world about a new class of RNAs that had been discovered.
So the case in point that we're talking about is a war that focused on a class of RNA molecules that had been identified a few years earlier, and they're called small molecular weight nuclear RNAs or snRNAs.
Like most things in science, the, the issue being thought about sounds complex but is much, much simpler than it sounds.
The RNAs at the center of the controversy are RNAs that are small, uh, two to three hundred nucleotides, and never leave the nucleus.
So the protagonists argued that snRNAs are real, and they must be important because there are a lot of them and, and they're in the cell.
The antagonists sneered at the protagonists and said snRNAs were simply artifacts caused by sloppy experimental technique that caused the degradation of the RNAs that were known into these smaller fragments, and the debate was really intense.
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