Second Week Back

In the second week back from break we continued our research while learning about cancer and our bodies defenses for it.  To see what I did for my paper see previous blog.  This review paper was fairly easy and interesting because it is a lot like what I do in Museum Research, but it is a completely new and to a point, an uncharted topic.  During these classes though, we learned about the tumor suppressor that humans naturally make called p53 that stops cancer cells.  It stops them by either repairing the mutated DNA or deciding that the DNA is irreparable and makes the cell go through apoptosis (cell seppuku).  Unfortunately as we grow older this p53 gene can mutate and or stop producing nearly as much, so the tumors can become rampant.  This is where Chris and I's idea for "solving" cancer came in.  In presentation form we had to explain our original idea (at least feasible) that could cure a victim of cancer.  So our idea was to inject through the bloodstream more coding for p53 so that our bodies can better suppress tumors even at an older age.

First Week Back

In this amazingly fantastic first week of bio, we got assigned a huge project where we must write  an eight page research paper about a specific type of cancer of our choosing.  Due to the fact that I have many smokers in my family, I wanted to do a type of lung cancer, and eventually decided upon small cell lung cancer (Oat Cell Carcinoma).  This paper was more specifically, a review paper, so I decided to review and compare the two treatments of chemotherapy and surgery.  I worked on this paper when I had free time this week and got a good portion of it done by the end of the week.  During the classes of this week we learned about how cancer starts, how tumors form, and the properties of cancer cells.

Doggy Extra Credit

For this extra credit problem we are asked to determine the genotype of the father of these pups based off of the mother and pup's phenotypes.  So first we look at the mom and see that she is yellow and therefore recessive for color (bb) and dominant for melanin production (Mm) or (MM).  Knowing this we must look at the pups and see that some of them come out dominant for color; aka some are black and some are brown (Bb) and (BB).  This means that the father must have had to be homozygous dominant (BB).  This means for the lighter ones there had to be recessive melanin.  In other words there had to be at least one recessive melanin gene from the mom and dad.  Therefore the dad of these pups must be BBMm and the mom is bbMm.