SCIE6662 Ask a Scientist Post

What makes your goat dance?

Ask a Scientist  - Week 3 SCIE 6662 Post

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (Skloots, 2010) talks about the survival of the HeLa cells. We have no secrets from your cells but the survival of the HeLa cells still hold many secrets for us. Naturally, a cell is prescribed to expire so that it makes room for other cells. This process is called apoptosis. However, when cells fail to expire in the prescribed manner of apoptosis and proliferate wildly, that resulting situation is called cancer.

The question that I want to pose to Ask a Scientist is the following: If cancer cells proliferate at such a fast rate, why does it take so long to diagnosis cancer when this occurs? I really liked this website.  I will tell my students to visit this website to answer unit questions as a challenge/early finisher task.  However, I will have to do my own research; if the answer is not already on the site, I cannot assign students to ask a question.  If it takes too long, then we have already progressed to another unit.

I learned a lot from this website.  For instance, the “Science Fair” section is very informative and well, it’s filled with a lot of fun activities.  It also takes my students through the science fair process and that is what I will be focusing on. 

Unfortunately, they did not answer me yet.  I became more and more interested as to how cells operate, especially after completing the web lab on http://www2.edc.org/weblabs/WebLabDirectory1.html.  This is another really cool site that tells you how cells behave.  I really enjoyed observing how alleles, and gametes separated and joined with others in each phase.