Unit Reflection

During this unit I learned many things as expected. But what I will remember for the rest of my life is the fact that people can tamper with the human body. Yes, this can be very useful, like when people are born with the short end of the stick and have to live with difficulties for the rest of their lives. Down syndrome is one of the many genetic and inherited diseases that cause problems. Thanks to people actually tampering with the human genome, we can now create karyotype that show what chromosomes create different problems.  There will always be pros and cons, but the cons shocked me. People can change the way Mother Nature works. For example; designer babies. These children are grown in a Petri dishes and their DNA strands are tampered with. They take the DNA strands and switch on and off the different traits that the parents choose. It is a very pathetic pursuit to perfection. Then again, they are reducing the “imperfections” people have. Many people are not confident with their looks but it is part of life and you have to love yourself just the way you are. The only reason that I think designer babies are some-what fine is the fact that they have reduced chances of getting sick, cancer, diseases and probably live longer. The human genome and genetics will never be fully understood, but one thing is for sure, we are living miracles. From the point where I watched the most disturbing child birth video, to the point where I learned how to make a punnett square and explore what probabilities there are for traits, I have to say that this unit of sexual education and genetics has been the most interesting and most educational. During the test I felt quite confident. When you understand a topic, you will exceed and I felt like I did. Genetics is full of rules and has a lot of common sense. You just have to know what they are and if you do, you can ace the test. I found the last part of the test quite interesting. The miracle of birth is fascinating because it goes by the rules of Mendel, but there is always that chance. The last part of the test was a cross breed between hybrids and purebreds. Two cats were cross bred, one with short hair which is dominant and one with long which is recessive.  You had to determine what the offspring’s genotype would be and if they and their parents were hybrids and purebreds. Hybrids are organisms with traits that are different like dominant and recessive and purebred is a trait that has two of the same alleles that make the trait. That means that they are pure in the trait for example, colours. Some colours are created by mixing different colours and some are just naturally there and don’t need to be mixed. If people were to be labeled hybrids and purebreds, I think it would be very racist. Nature makes us all unique and no one can label us. I think that genetics are a very important thing in our lives and that it has effected the world drastically. We would all probably think we are created by magic. The limitations of genetics are how we can control chance. We can always predict if we will inherit something, but there is chance to stop us. Also we can’t go into the human just yet and heal ourselves with our own cells and traits. The stem cells in our body show some kind of light at the end of the tunnel, but we have not discovered that just yet. The last thing would be cloning. Clones can help us by giving us blood and different organs but it has never been tried on humans. It is also ethically not approved because we are once again tampering with Mother Nature and we can probably cause chaos such as creating hypnotized minions for some evil organizations and just imagine having the world full of the same people. Scary right? We would all be exactly and totally the same. Since I do not know the question for my reflection and since I am in an airplane, I will improvise and write down my feelings for the units we studied. Let’s move on to sex ed. Sexual education was by far the most educational topic. I learned how to keep myself safe and also to always be aware that showing your sexuality is not something bad. You always have to be aware of the things out there in the big world and keeping yourself safe is always the best option. I also learned that you have to be truthful and be smart and pick the right partners. Human ingenuity keeps on improving and with all this technology we can make our life longer, easier and much more advanced. Concluding this everlasting blog post, I learned that the world is incredible and that science is amazing. Genetics will always be about discovering the miracles of life and sexual education will always have to be taught so that the world is uneducated and think that it is taboo. I’m glad I studied these topics and I will use this information for my life in the future.

What I learned from my classmates:

Annie:

Brain cells are specialized cells and unspecialized cells can be any cell in the body and divide faster. Stem cells repair tissues and memories. Adults cells are harder to extract, slower and they glow when they work.

Ana:

Alzheimer’s kills brain cells and ends up making you forget everything. It is genetically passed and is the 6^th leading cause of deaths.

David:

The Chinese dynasty was to use first forensic cases. There are forensic anthropology, geology, psychology. Forensics is always correct  and any type of organism can be identified by their DNA.

Rea:

Genetically modified foods are genetically changed to enhance different traits for lasting longer, taste etc. Also fish DNA was put into tomatoes to make them last longer.

Simeon:

There are two 2 types reproductive and therapeutic cloning. Reproductive is when you have a surrogate mother and therapeutic is grown in dishes.  Not successful 1-4% success and clones age faster.

Sara:

When someone has an extra copy of chromosome 21. The brain and body looses normal development and it causes infertility and there is no cure.

Alon:

Manipulation of an organisms’ genome. Herbert Boyer Stanley Cohen 1973 founded it. You extract DNA  all at once and make a thousand copies to put into other cells.

Svetlana:

O positive is the most common blood type and AB negative is least common.  Blood types depend on your proteins and they are found on the surface of your blood cells. The blood plasma contains antibodies and if not the compatible blood type leads to death.