chapter 3

As I began reading this chapter I couldn't help but chuckle as how he titled this. I'm a nerd and I enjoy lame puns such as this. While reading about the genes and DNA it definetly gave me flashbacks back to ninth grade bio (yuck). This chapter was very useful in reading because it help build the bridge between the fish fin and the human hand. I found it extremely interesting to read about the methods scientists underwent to discover and learn about embryos, the "slice and dice" era. The idea of manipulating an embryo and creating it to grow duplicate sets of digits was very suprising. To me it felt crazy manipulating the growth of living things. It really opened my mind to countless of ideas of experimentation with living organisms. Suddenly science became very interesting for me. It made me smile that the Tabin group named their gene Sonic hedgehog after the video game. Reading that got me focused on what he was saying about the importance of the gene in the hand. Normally I don't like it when authors begin with an idea and go off talking about something else only to return to the original idea, but in this case it made perfect sense. I understood what they planned on doing to the skate embryos. I liked reading this chapter because I felt he really did a good job on connecting the chapters together and kept it in a logical order so it's easy to read and understand the process.