true test of intelligence
science legends
wet lab warriors
immuno stuff
maybe cs, maybe not?
100

This type of flower produces opium

What is Poppy?

100

This scientist is best known for playing harmonica in a band of immunologists called the CheckPoints. In his spare time, he also won the Nobel for discovering that inhibiting CTLA-4 could release the ‘brakes’ on the immune system, paving the way for checkpoint blockade therapy to treat cancer.

Who is Jim Allison?

100

What is the name of the pH indicator in DMEM?

What is Phenol Red?

100

An excision circle occurs when this immune cell type rearranges the genes coding for a receptor. 

What is a T cell?

100

This statistical test is used to assess whether two groups are significantly different. 

What is a T-test?

200

This orange-colored fruit ripens in the fall and comes in two varieties: fuyu (shaped more like a little pumpkin or a donut) and haichiya (shaped more like an acorn).  

What is Persimmon?

200

In 2007, Timothy Ray Brown—the “Berlin Patient”—became the first person cured of HIV after undergoing this medical procedure. What is the procedure?

What is Stem cell transplant?

200

DAILY DOUBLE: When freezing down cells, addition of this cryptoprotectant chemical prevents the formation of large ice crystals that can damage and kill cells during the freezing process.

What is DMSO?

200

In 2015, Jimmy Carter was successfully treated for metastatic melanoma using this immunotherapy drug. 

What is Keytruda?

200

In machine learning, these vector representations of high dimensional data allow models to learn relationships needed to perform tasks.

What are embeddings?

300

What fluffy, extinct mammal does George Church want to resurrect?

What is a wooly mammoth?

300

This magnificent woman is the only person ever to have won a Nobel in two different  scientific fields. She has museums dedicated to her in both Paris and Warsaw.

Who is Maria (Skłodowska) Curie?

300

This sequencing strategy is used in Illumina’s NGS platform and involves the addition of fluorescently labelled bases to DNA strands in each sequencing cycle. The sequence is read by reading fluorescent signals to identify the base, and then washing away the fluorescent tag before the next cycle.

What is Sequencing by Synthesis?

300

CD22, CD33, and CD169 are members of this surface receptor family that bind sialic acid.

What are Siglecs (“sialic acid binding immunoglobulin-like lectins”.)?

300

This author, whose most famous works include East of Eden, Travels with Charley, and Grapes of Wrath, attended Stanford University but didn’t earn a degree because he left early to focus on his writing career. 

Who is John Steinbeck?

400

The first recorded autopsy was performed on this historical figure.

Who is Julius Caesar?

400

These two scientists won the 2005 Nobel Prize after one of them drank h.pylori to prove it causes stomach ulcers

Who are Barry Marshall and Robin Warren? (Barry was the Bacteria Drinker)

400

Name the locations of 6 lymph nodes in mice.

What are (any 6 of) iliac, mesenteric, mediastinal, inguinal, cervical, brachial, axillary, popliteal, renal, sciatic, lumbar, mandibular (may be more)?

400

What does the B in B cell stand for?

What is Bursa?

400

John Wherry is a major contributor to our knowledge of the role of PD-1/PDL-1 in exhaustion in the context of viruses and cancer. What is his middle name?

Who is John? (this is a trick question. His full name is edward john wherry but he is professionally known as John Wherry. If people are particularly scrupulous, they’ll have noticed that his name appears in publications as E. John Wherry, which should lead them to the correct answer.)

500

What are the Opus numbers of Chopin’s two major collections of piano Etudes?

What are 10 & 25?

500

This astronaut earned four different degrees from Stanford University, including a PhD in physics, and went on to become the first known LGBT astronaut and first American woman in space

Who is Sally Ride?

500

This PCR method is often used to detect rare targets with high accuracy. It involves partitioning a sample into tens of thousands of tiny water-in-oil emulsion droplets, with each droplet acting as an independent PCR reaction chamber. Positive and negative droplets are subsequently counted, and absolute quantities are determined using Poisson statistics to calculate the number of copies per microliter without the need for a standard curve.

What is Digital droplet PCR? (‘digital PCR’ or ‘droplet pcr’ are also acceptable answers)

500

Name the immunologic phenomenon occurring when someone has sensitivity to latex, as well as a number of foods that may include chickpeas, kiwi, avocado, and banana. 

What is “Latex-fruit syndrome” / “latex-food allergy syndrome” / “latex-fruit cross-reactivity syndrome”...etc.?

500

This 2017 research paper introduced the Transformer, a deep learning architecture essential for LLMs.

What is Attention Is All You Need?

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