Andres Contreras Thammanouvong

Cells to Self: Are Your Cells You?

Name of Virtual Presenter: Kevin Boyd

Date: May 11, 2023

I’ve learned a lot about cells from this virtual tour and here are some of the things I have

learned. Cells can continue to live on outside of your body, cells can divide many times,

and cells can basically live on forever by dividing. I was also amazed at how ridiculously

small cells are and can be, I can’t imagine how many cells are living in our body right

now. One thing that also caught my eye was how cells look like, most cells are colorless

and see-through and there are many different shapes and sizes of cells. I’m also

interested in how ridiculously small cells are that they are completely invisible to the

naked eye.

I thought it was interesting that Henrietta’s cells continued to live on outside of her body

even after her death. Another thing I found interesting is how cells are able to divide

over and over again which means you can keep them alive indefinitely. I also thought

that it was important to include that cells can live outside of your body and live on for a

long time by dividing over and over again. Some questions that I have are, if they

removed the cells from Henrietta before she died and the cells lived after her death, is it

still her cells or not? Can cells live in water? How small can cells get and how big is the

largest cell?
Although many living things are very different on the outside, on the inside they are all

made of the same thing. Every living being on Earth is made of cells including, Animals,

Plants, etc. All cells are generated by existing cells. Stem cells are simple cells that

have yet to develop into more specialized cells. Stem cells are now used to treat

conditions, such as Alzheimer’s and heart disease. Scientists are working on

personalized medicine, which would allow us to grow stem cells from our own cells and

then use them to understand disease processes. All of this started from a single

obsevation of the cell in a cork. I found these main Ideas from the article I read to be

very interesting as I learned a lot about cells that I didn’t know about before.