Can dead tissue show you
where a disease begins?
In ALS, motor neurons die one by one. The name is over 150 years old and there is still no drug that stops it — because nobody knows where to aim.
To find that place you have to look at dying motor neurons, but a human spinal cord can only be had after death — by which time the cells that were going to die are gone.
Over these 20 lessons we download five real public datasets and walk straight into that wall: misaligned metadata, post-mortem delays that will not parse, the same patient counted twice, and the finding that measuring one spinal cord two ways gives a correlation of just 0.43. Python runs right inside this page.
How you'll learn
What a motor neuron is and why it dies — and why knowing SOD1 still does not give you a target.
Rows that swap places between samples, a delay recorded as 10 to 34, the same patient counted twice — all from the real files.
One patient, one spinal cord, measured two ways. Thirty percent of genes flip sign.
Of eight targets verified in flies, our method found one. Why we missed seven is the conclusion.