Category — Biology

Henrietta Lacks was an African-American tobacco farmer who got cervical cancer at the age of 30. Despite her doctors’ efforts, her case of cancer was too aggressive to control; she passed away in October 1951. But this is not the end of the story.

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When I think of something that is “cold-blooded,” I think of a slimy reptile that is cool to the touch. You know what I mean, the animals that make little girls make a face and say “eew.”

Yes, some of these animals may be gross, but just because they’re cold blooded doesn’t always mean they’re cold.

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In humans, cancer is not something you can catch. Cancer is a disease where your own cells divide and grow out of control. This underlies one of the major divisions between types of diseases: communicable and non-communicable diseases.

Two different types of communicable pathogens under a Gram's Stain.

Communicable disease are usually caused by a pathogen, something nasty that gets in your body and makes you sick. Pathogens can be things like bacteria, viruses, fungi, and other things. The thing that they have in common is that they are caused by an infection. This infection is something that uses you to reproduce and pass to someone else.

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We are all familiar with color mixing. There are things which we agree are to be called the color blue, things which are the color green. When these colors are put together, we would all agree that they would be somewhere in the middle.

Like these photos of a blue-green iris and computer art:

But no matter how much egg nog you have, you cannot see a color which you would describe as red-green (even if you stare cross-eyed at the Christmas tree).

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The Scene of the Crime:

“What was the time of death detective?”

“When we arrived, rigor had begun to set in. I place time of death at 4 hours ago.”

This scene is typical of a CSI murder drama. The Medical Examiner steps on the scene and examines the body for signs of rigor mortis. Like clockwork, the muscles of a dead body begin to stiffen starting 3 hours after death. Full rigor comes on around 12 hours (the medical term for the body at this time is a “stiff”).

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