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Casey was having breakfast.
His mother had several surgeries to perform that day, so she was
hurrying around gathering her papers.
Casey couldn’t help it, he knew she was busy, but he had an
important question.
“Mom, do you have just a few minutes.
I’m trying to understand something you said the other day when
we were talking about Parkinson’s disease.”
“Just a few minutes,” said his mother.
Dad will be driving me to the hospital in just a few minutes.”
“OK, I’ll hurry. You
said if we wanted to find a cure for Parkinson’s disease, we would
have to study embryology and mitosis.
Well, now I’ve studied them, but I don’t have any good ideas
about curing Grandpa’s disease.”
“What do you know about mitosis?” Mother asked.
“Mitosis keeps the chromosome number the same each time the cell
divides in two. I know a
song about that….would you like to hear it? “
“Not right now, but sing it for me tonight at dinner.
But you have a clue there in what you know.
If mitosis keeps all the chromosome numbers the same, what can
you say about the genes in every one of our cells?”
Casey thought a minute and then said, “I guess every cell has the same
genes as the original zygote. They
are all alike in their genes but so different otherwise.
Those cells that make the special chemical for coordinating
movement are very different from cells that make insulin or some other
chemical.”
“Right you are,” said Mother. “So if all the cells have the same genes, how could that
help Grandpa?”
“Oh, I see,” said Casey. All
of his cells have the genes for that special chemical.
So if we could get some of his other cells to make the chemical, he might be
cured. But how could we do
that? When each of the
cells have already changed to a specialized cell of some kind, how could
you get any of them to become another kind of cell?”
“Good Question,” said the mother as she put on her coat.
“You should study about embryo cloning and stem cells.
Then we’ll talk again. See
you tonight.”
“Right,” said Casey. “See
you tonight.”
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