Alex+Myers


 * Week 1: 22 May 2014**

The Immortal Planarian A topic that has interested me for a while now is planarians. You probably recognize these little fellas from our animal unit. They are flatworms with bilateral symmetry that are often found in fresh water. What is so fascinating about planarians is that several species of them are practically indestructible; they can be cut into over 200 pieces, and each piece will become a new planarian! If one is cut about half way down, between the //ocelli//, or eye spots, each half will become a new head, and you are left with a two-headed planarian! This is thanks to their remarkable stem cells, which allow them to repair their body cells. While humans have stem cells too, planarians are a little bit different. Scientists are not quite sure how, but their telomeres are indefinitely preserved. What are telomeres? They are the noncoding regions of DNA at the end of chromosomes that degrade each time a cell divides. Telomerase, an enzyme that repairs our telomeres, is "limited-use." For some reason, they eventually stop working, our DNA stops getting repaired, and our cells stop dividing to prevent damage to the DNA. This is ultimately believed to be the reason people die of old age. The fascinating thing about planarians is that, while it is unknown why, their telomeres never degrade, whether it's due to the fact that their telomerase never stops working, or some other factor. Since planarian telomeres never degrade, their stem cells never stop functioning, they can constantly repair lost or damaged cells, and they can theoretically live forever. For these reasons, planarians are of great interest for some scientists, as they are perceived as a gateway into figuring out how humans can keep their DNA from degrading. While this can have some exciting implications, like regrowing lost limbs, for example, many people will also be concerned with the ethical implications of potentially immortal humans. If humans become an immortal species, we will put an even greater strain on the ecosystems of our planet, our population will not be kept in check as much, and we will likely cause much more drastic harm to earth, making the proper sustainability of our planet a much more difficult task.

After visiting Robbins Park, I began to realize how accessible planarians are as experimental subjects; we found at least 10 within a few minutes of macroinvertebrate sampling, just turning over rocks! This is great for the field of regenerative studies and the like, because anyone can easily obtain planarians for experiments with little difficulty. Let's just make sure we leave enough numbers to keep their populations sustainable, through methods like cutting them in half to obtain new ones instead of just going out and getting more.

This video shows a two-headed planarian!

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These two links provide rather long, but informative videos that give more background information about planarians and the science behind the current studies with them.

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 * Week 2: 30 May 2014**

Printing... Please Wait This week, I decided to focus on another topic that has interested me in the past: 3D printing. 3D printing has been around for a while now, and is usually used with materials like plastic to print out, layer-by-layer, 3-dimensional structures. A specialized printer follows a computer blueprint, not much unlike your normal printer at home follows a pattern to layer ink over paper and print out that essay you just finished. How does this relate to biology? New technologies make it quite relatable. Now, 3D printing is in use for cells. Yes, we have printers now that follow a pattern and lay down cells to construct new tissue! How is this any different than culturing cells the usual way? The technology allows the process to be vastly sped up, and we can easily print a layer of cells lining a mold of, say, an ear, and the cells will grow and develop on the mold until they take its complete shape. It is also much easier to print a layer of skin for someone than to wait for some cells to divide enough to fill a tray. This technology is still being developed, but there are already a host of incredible uses for it.

As hinted at before for body part replacement, this technology would work wonders for, say, a burn victim. Someone who has had their skin melted off from a burn usually still looks horribly deformed after skin grafts (not that it's the doctors' faults... their face was gone, and they put new skin on as best they could). If a mold of a face could be created, or just skin in one piece that could be fitted on without a bunch of stitch marks, it could help burn victims better get over their trauma and lead a more normal life. This just made me think, though, this could be bad for criminals who want to make REALLY realistic-looking masks or some such thing. Anyway, the technology can also be used with cancer cells to print them out and study how they interact in a more "natural" environment. This is something cancer research could really use to get ahead, and individual treatments could also be tried on a patient's cells, resulting in a more customized and streamlined treatment. Someday, doctors should even be able to print new organs for people with conditions that cause organ failure. Simply put, this technology could create huge advancements in replacement surgeries and scientific studies.

At Robbins Park, we studied macroinvertebrates, including planarians (see above!). Planarians are relatives of other flatworms, including the tapeworm, which is a parasitic worm. Compared to heartworms, that eat an organism's heart and often cause death, tapeworms are tame. Often with heartworms, they are impossible to remove and only really treatable. That is no longer the case, however. If we could print a person a new heart, for example, then who cares about heartworms? The old and eaten heart could be thrown away and a new one attached.

This video shows how 3D printing is being used to make ears in a laboratory! media type="custom" key="26101336"

Here is an informative article that highlights the use of 3D printing in cancer research: []


 * Week 3: 7 June 2014**

I Wish I Was a Little Bit Taller... Considering our focus this week was on biotechnology, and considering the ethical focus I've had in the past couple posts and discussions, I'd like to talk about "designer humans" for this week's post.

We as a species have been artificially modifying our appearances for centuries. Hey, the ancient Egyptians even used makeup. Nowadays, though, there are new ethical concerns on the horizon as we move towards... less conventional methods of modification. I'm talking about genetic modification. The technology is already basically here, and will be much more accessible as time moves on, that allows us to alter an embryo's gene sequence and change how the resulting baby looks or functions. Are you and your wife on the shorter side? No problem. Give your child a gene sequence that codes for a greater height. Are you and your husband predisposed to having a slow metabolism? Want your kid to be able to be the human garbage disposal? Give him the allele that codes for a ramped-up metabolism. This all sounds well and good on the surface, but it brings up some important ethics issues.

Is it right to make all of our children super smart, super athletic, and basically perfect? Is it right for us to "play God" and rule out any flaws in humanity? Besides the moral principles behind perfecting humankind, there are also other issues. For example, if this becomes an industry much like, for example, Botox, then it will be an industry mostly confined to the wealthy. This could result in a "superior race" idea, with the wealthy and genetically superior people taking control over the economically, and therefore genetically, less fortunate people. Also, where does one draw the line? It's a Jason C. Jean gray area... Is it ok to give a kid with an actual growth disorder HDH, but not a kid who just has short parents? There's a lot to think about, and that's why I think we need to place more emphasis in our generation on bioethics. Someone has to think about these issues, and if we don't, uninformed people will then make the decisions, and that's always risky.

This article nicely covers the growing issue of designer humans... It's informative and brings up good points. []