One of her sons was homeless and living on the streets of Baltimore. So the family launched a campaign to get some of what they felt they were owed financially. It consumed their lives in that way. What are the lessons from this book? For scientists, one of the lessons is that there are human beings behind every biological sample used in the laboratory. So much of science today revolves around using human biological tissue of some kind.
And for the rest of us? The story of HeLa cells and what happened with Henrietta has often been held up as an example of a racist white scientist doing something malicious to a black woman. The real story is much more subtle and complicated. What is very true about science is that there are human beings behind it and sometimes even with the best of intentions things go wrong. So much of medicine today depends on tissue culture.
And the need for these cells is going to get greater, not less. Sarah Zielinski is an award-winning science writer and editor. She is a contributing writer in science for Smithsonian. Henrietta Lacks' cells were essential in developing the polio vaccine and were used in scientific landmarks such as cloning, gene mapping and in vitro fertilization.
Courtesy of the Lacks family Medical researchers use laboratory-grown human cells to learn the intricacies of how cells work and test theories about the causes and treatment of diseases. Post a Comment. Professor Grymes. NCLC November 11, Learning Log 3: Immortal Genes. In the third chapter of the novel The Making of the Fittest by Sean Carroll we are introduced to immortal genes, which are powerful genealogical records that reflect the degree of relatedness among kingdoms and help us retrieve and reconstruct events in the history of life that are not visible in the fossil record.
Through studying these immortal genes, scientist Tom Brock was able to find a new division of life, which is now referred to as the Archea.
Scrutiny of Archean genes has revealed critical clues about the making of our own eukaryotic ancestors nearly 2 billion years ago. These shared texts forms the remaining traces of an early event that gave rise to the first eukaryote, and is crucial evidence that an archean was one of our original genetic parents. In order to decipher the natural history that resides in the DNA record, we have to have a firm grasp of the language of DNA, and of how DNA information is decoded in making the working parts of living organisms.
Proteins are the molecules that do all the work in every organism, from carrying oxygen, to building tissue, to copying DNA for the next generation. The strands of DNA are held together by strong chemical bonds between pairs of bases that lie on opposite sides, A pairs with C and G pairs with T.
Amino acids are building blocks of proteins, each amino acid is encoded as a combination of three bases or a triplet in the DNA molecule. When assembled into chains of about , the chemical properties of amino acids determine the unique activity of each protein. Genes are the length of DNA that codes for an individual protein. In human, and many other complex species, genes occupy only a small fraction of the entire DNA, and are separated by long intervals of noncoding DNA.
By way of analogy, newborn humans usually remain in a stable healthy state for close to 25 years before outward senescent changes manifest. This means that the mere passage of time does not automatically condemn humans to degenerative aging.
When we can program our genes as easily as we do computers, humans might not need to suffer degenerative aging. They could possibly live in a long-term state of robust biological youth. The encouraging news is that others such as the founders of Google are recognizing the importance of this field of study and are contributing their own money and resources to advance the science.
Craig Venter, a billionaire who is building the largest human DNA sequencing operation in the world, capable of processing 40, human genomes a year. Venter is seeking to use DNA sequencing to identify the molecular causes of aging and age-related illnesses so that humans can live longer and healthier.
William Faloon. Creating Immortality Genes Before the successful study at the University of Wisconsin, it was hard to point to an example of genetic manipulation that resulted in the creation of living matter resistant to something as deadly as high-intensity radiation.
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