unbreaking my html
In memory of Harvey Carney, who died on this date in 1657, but not before helping knowledge of the circulatory system stick in its third attempt to do so.
How are restriction endonucleases related to vision?
Oh, how you doubt me, Kossacks. How you disappoint me. Here are some glofish:
(Thanks to www.glofish.com for the picture.)
And here, for reference, is a glofish without the glo (a zebrafish):
Restriction endonucleases - manifesting themselves as recombinant DNA in the case above - have also been used in ... slightly more practical ways, as I'll explain after I go back to where I started.
We owe Otto Loewi (hands up, people who appreciated that sound combination) for a hell of a lot more than the discovery of acetylcholine. It would take several pages to unwrap the language in this page, which details Loewi's work on how organ systems feed themselves and communicate.
And since the heart is an organ, and since it must communicate, it should come as no surprise that Loewi wanted to know how it communicated. So in 1921, Loewi figured out that a chemical later named acetylcholine transmitted an impulse to the heart.
Acetylcholine does a world more than that. It's powering your optic muscles (these guys, your back muscles and that annoying tapping I can hear because I bugged your computer your fingers. And, er, pretty much every other muscle you use of your own volition. (Let's be glad nobody is born with an allergy to this chemical, eh? Death would be painful, and hopefully quickly so.)
This site has a pretty good explanation of acetylcholine's role in making muscles contract, implicit in which is an explanation of why dead contracted muscle stays that way for a good bit:
The contraction will continue as long as calcium and ATP are available. One of the functions of the ATP is to break the bond between the myosin and the actin. (This explains why the muscles of a dead body become rigid as the supply of ATP begins to run short.)
Muscle contraction works a bit like a game of Red Rover. It's very difficult to explain without a picture - or people playing the roles of the various chemicals and physical structures. I could not find a video explaining the process, and alas, I cannot make one. But this page has multiple text-picture arrangements, which is what a proper biology book/video should have.
Without acetylcholine, the work of our next Hero For A Day would have been impossible on ... every front, as you saw above. Torsten Wiesel, see, tested lone cat eyes (while they were still in the cats, natch - lest I forever more incur the mighty wrath of the pootie picture brigade) to see how they would process visual stimuli. To do this, he and David H. Hubel (the co-winner, with him, of the 1981 prize) attached microelectrodes to the primary visual cortices of kittens (because their visual processing ability would be underdeveloped), then made them look at stuff with only the one eye. And they mapped the results.
This is not nearly as frightening as it sounds. First off, the brain of any animal is unable to feel pain. It is not that there is very little pain felt but that the brain lacks the neurons to accomplish the task. You could poke your own brain with your finger, and you'd very possibly not feel anything. Or, if you poked the wrong place, you might feel a lot. What literature I can get at isn't very clear on the subject (presumably because you'd have to be kind of nuts to have a pragmatic reason to ask in the first place).
Second off, the kittens couldn't see what Wiesel and Hubel were doing to them because the primary visual cortex is located ... well, close to the shoulders of the average cat, you might say. In a human, it's around the place in the back of your head where your skull protrudes the most.
Wiesel and Hubel's research established this finding, which most anatomy students now learn as being kind of logical, but proof of which is actually only 46 or so years old:
If you cover one of the eyes of a young seeing organism ("O") and force O to use that eye to see, you will of course prevent O from developing binocular vision, but you will not prevent the development of some of the areas exclusive to the covered eye. The exclusive areas will be co-opted by the used eye, but the shared areas get no love. (A similar brain response is presented in this episode of House, M.D..)
Under most circumstances, a Nobel Prize-winner would get more love, but in this situation, there's something more important to reveal to you: insulin.
The August 2000 Molecule of the Month (arguably the geekiest title anything can have) got a gig helping diabetics.
Oh, and diabetics can have problems with plenty of things, most notably (other than that minor sugar digestion thing) circulatory system issues and eye trouble, so it's pretty cool to me that a discovery make stuff look cool and made insulin easier to come by.
But where are my manners? You probably still don't understand a few elements of Abner's research - or the difference between recombinant DNA and the options restriction endonucleases offer.
Recombinant DNA, according to most of the literature I have read on it, is the result of scientists splicing genetic commands ("Make me some insulin, stat!") into organisms ("I saw your flier for volunteers for making insulin. Hi. Name's coli. E. coli.") Restriction endonucleases operate, amusingly enough, less restrictively. restriction endonucleases are the scissors with which scientists (and nonscientists, like our friend E up there) can interrupt a DNA sequence and insert an additional DNA command, then close the DNA strand like nothing untoward ever happened. (What, your tobacco plants don't glow? The glowing is health, man! It means the tobacco going into your cigarette is safe! At least, that's what this guy and his co-workers tell me.)
Big words, fairly understandable science. I believe quite firmly that if we grew up with scientific terminology as part of the daily lives, we would know worlds more about nature than we currently do. I grew up with a copy of Medical Surgical Nursing feet from my bed, and look at how I turned out. (Ignore the bad stuff.) And thanks to Loewi, Torsten and Abner, you know how you can see it, why you can see it and that glofish could probably be programmed to spell it out for you.
How are restriction endonucleases related to vision?
Oh, how you doubt me, Kossacks. How you disappoint me. Here are some glofish:
(Thanks to www.glofish.com for the picture.)
And here, for reference, is a glofish without the glo (a zebrafish):
Restriction endonucleases - manifesting themselves as recombinant DNA in the case above - have also been used in ... slightly more practical ways, as I'll explain after I go back to where I started.
We owe Otto Loewi (hands up, people who appreciated that sound combination) for a hell of a lot more than the discovery of acetylcholine. It would take several pages to unwrap the language in this page, which details Loewi's work on how organ systems feed themselves and communicate.
And since the heart is an organ, and since it must communicate, it should come as no surprise that Loewi wanted to know how it communicated. So in 1921, Loewi figured out that a chemical later named acetylcholine transmitted an impulse to the heart.
Acetylcholine does a world more than that. It's powering your optic muscles (these guys, your back muscles and that annoying tapping I can hear because I bugged your computer your fingers. And, er, pretty much every other muscle you use of your own volition. (Let's be glad nobody is born with an allergy to this chemical, eh? Death would be painful, and hopefully quickly so.)
This site has a pretty good explanation of acetylcholine's role in making muscles contract, implicit in which is an explanation of why dead contracted muscle stays that way for a good bit:
The contraction will continue as long as calcium and ATP are available. One of the functions of the ATP is to break the bond between the myosin and the actin. (This explains why the muscles of a dead body become rigid as the supply of ATP begins to run short.)
Muscle contraction works a bit like a game of Red Rover. It's very difficult to explain without a picture - or people playing the roles of the various chemicals and physical structures. I could not find a video explaining the process, and alas, I cannot make one. But this page has multiple text-picture arrangements, which is what a proper biology book/video should have.
Without acetylcholine, the work of our next Hero For A Day would have been impossible on ... every front, as you saw above. Torsten Wiesel, see, tested lone cat eyes (while they were still in the cats, natch - lest I forever more incur the mighty wrath of the pootie picture brigade) to see how they would process visual stimuli. To do this, he and David H. Hubel (the co-winner, with him, of the 1981 prize) attached microelectrodes to the primary visual cortices of kittens (because their visual processing ability would be underdeveloped), then made them look at stuff with only the one eye. And they mapped the results.
This is not nearly as frightening as it sounds. First off, the brain of any animal is unable to feel pain. It is not that there is very little pain felt but that the brain lacks the neurons to accomplish the task. You could poke your own brain with your finger, and you'd very possibly not feel anything. Or, if you poked the wrong place, you might feel a lot. What literature I can get at isn't very clear on the subject (presumably because you'd have to be kind of nuts to have a pragmatic reason to ask in the first place).
Second off, the kittens couldn't see what Wiesel and Hubel were doing to them because the primary visual cortex is located ... well, close to the shoulders of the average cat, you might say. In a human, it's around the place in the back of your head where your skull protrudes the most.
Wiesel and Hubel's research established this finding, which most anatomy students now learn as being kind of logical, but proof of which is actually only 46 or so years old:
If you cover one of the eyes of a young seeing organism ("O") and force O to use that eye to see, you will of course prevent O from developing binocular vision, but you will not prevent the development of some of the areas exclusive to the covered eye. The exclusive areas will be co-opted by the used eye, but the shared areas get no love. (A similar brain response is presented in this episode of House, M.D..)
Under most circumstances, a Nobel Prize-winner would get more love, but in this situation, there's something more important to reveal to you: insulin.
The August 2000 Molecule of the Month (arguably the geekiest title anything can have) got a gig helping diabetics.
Oh, and diabetics can have problems with plenty of things, most notably (other than that minor sugar digestion thing) circulatory system issues and eye trouble, so it's pretty cool to me that a discovery make stuff look cool and made insulin easier to come by.
But where are my manners? You probably still don't understand a few elements of Abner's research - or the difference between recombinant DNA and the options restriction endonucleases offer.
Recombinant DNA, according to most of the literature I have read on it, is the result of scientists splicing genetic commands ("Make me some insulin, stat!") into organisms ("I saw your flier for volunteers for making insulin. Hi. Name's coli. E. coli.") Restriction endonucleases operate, amusingly enough, less restrictively. restriction endonucleases are the scissors with which scientists (and nonscientists, like our friend E up there) can interrupt a DNA sequence and insert an additional DNA command, then close the DNA strand like nothing untoward ever happened. (What, your tobacco plants don't glow? The glowing is health, man! It means the tobacco going into your cigarette is safe! At least, that's what this guy and his co-workers tell me.)
Big words, fairly understandable science. I believe quite firmly that if we grew up with scientific terminology as part of the daily lives, we would know worlds more about nature than we currently do. I grew up with a copy of Medical Surgical Nursing feet from my bed, and look at how I turned out. (Ignore the bad stuff.) And thanks to Loewi, Torsten and Abner, you know how you can see it, why you can see it and that glofish could probably be programmed to spell it out for you.