A short animation illustrating how cells defend against foreign DNA has been released by a new partnership of the Annenberg Public Policy Center (APPC) of the University of Pennsylvania and the Vaccine Education Center (VEC) at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.
The two-minute video, “How Do Cells Defend Against Foreign DNA?,” shows how the cells in our bodies are equipped with built-in safety mechanisms that repel DNA fragments that could be introduced by bacteria, food, or vaccines. The video explains why these fragments, no matter where they come from, are not equipped to damage our own DNA.
“This is the first part of an educational move to increase the capacity of high school science teachers to teach foundational knowledge to help students understand how human immunity works,” said APPC Director Kathleen Hall Jamieson.
The new video was created through a partnership of the policy center’s Annenberg Health and Risk Communication Institute and the VEC’s classroom-based initiative, called the Vaccine Makers Project. Next, Jamieson said, the groups will be working with educators to develop lesson plans around this video as well as another that was previously released by the Vaccine Education Center explaining “How COVID-19 mRNA Vaccines Work.”
Charlotte Moser, co-director of the Vaccine Education Center, said the center was founded to bring the voices of scientists to the public conversation about vaccine safety in 2000. That was two years after a former British physician, Andrew Wakefield, published a fraudulent study alleging a link between the MMR (measles, mumps, and rubella) vaccine and autism. The journal, The Lancet, later retracted the study when Wakefield was determined to have engaged in unethical conduct related to the study. He was also stripped of his ability to practice medicine.
“For nearly 25 years, we’ve been helping people answer a lot of the safety questions that they have about vaccines,” Moser said. “We try to address the science of vaccines and vaccine safety concerns in places where people are seeking information, like videos, question-and-answer sheets, a mobile app and e-newsletters, among others.”
VEC Director Paul Offit, a Professor of Pediatrics and an expert in infectious diseases at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, said the animations help to bring state-of-the-art science to a broader audience, including educators, while also countering misinformation about vaccines.
“Fear of foreign DNA is a little far-fetched,” Offit said. “It’s virtually impossible for DNA fragments to do any harm to our cells. They are clinically and utterly harmless.”
The video was produced in partnership with XVIVO Scientific Animation and filmmaker Donald R. Mitchell.
