This chapter was a lot to comprehend, and I had to read through it twice, but I got through it :) It reminded me of a video I watched during Health, about how women got impregnated and how the baby is formed inside the womb. Altering the tiniest piece of tissue can completely change the result. They are so many complications and so many things that can go wrong and it made me realize that we should not take our bodies and features as granted. Everything has to be perfect and if not, it will lead to mutation. How sad :(
Sonic hedgehog connects diverse creatures such as mice, sharks, flies together. "If Sonic hedgehog hadn't turned no properly during the eighth week of your own development, you either would have extra fingers or your pink and thumb would look alike" (53). Ew :( These tiny little things in our cells before we were even born determines everything! and AGAIN the complexity of paleontology(do you even call it that anymore? It concerns SO much more) was emphasized. This made my head....hurt. Experimenting with tiny pieces of tissue must have been frustrating. "The approach involved very careful microsurgery, manipulating patches of tissue no more than a millimeter thick"(49).
When Shubin mentioned the experiment with the "skate embryo with a bead inside that is gradually leaking mouse Sonic hedgehog protein", I was confused (and a little disturbed) even more. WHAT?!
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I think that Shubin uses the example of the mouse and skate embryos to show that even the two most uncommon things are similar in a drastic way.
ReplyDeleteBut if your creeped out about the idea of toying with embroyos you should also think about all the possibilites that result from being able to mess around with genetics. That being said, this chapter would make a great science fiction movie.