“If you could visit a cell, you wouldn’t like it.”
At the first glance of this excerpt, I was blown away with befuddlement. I have always imagined a cell as a harmonious utopia, where amiable organelles work together peacefully. This quixotic fantasy stems from my childhood love for the “Ozzy and Drix” cartoon series. The setting of this cartoon takes place inside the body of a teenager, Hector, and the characters are treated like people rather than simply cells. Ozzy is a white blood cell with a dark sense of humor and Agent Drix is a cold pill. Installed as private investigators, the partners vow to protect the well being of Hector from any viral threat. The fact that there would not be a place I could stand without being pummeled and ripped thousands of times every second from every direction within a cell has abolished my childhood dream. However, this epiphany allows me to see the grim reality, in which my cells have to follow their self-fulfilling prophecies to sacrifice and suffer from excruciating deaths during their military duty against the virus and bacteria. Thus, to prevent my cells from dying in vain, I will try to stay healthy.
“One respected observer, Nicolaus Hartsoecker, was convinced he saw “tiny performed men” in sperm cells.”
After reading this quote, I chuckled with bemusement; because as a child, I have always questioned the emergence of a baby. Although Hartsoecker’s hypothesis may seem absurd today, my theory as a child, without any biological knowledge, draws a parallelism with that of Harthsoecker. I used to believe that my mother accidentally consumed a seed and that seed grew into a tiny human (AKA ME!) But, as I grew up and learned more about biology, I realized how demented my idea was. However, I have sympathy toward Hartsoecker’s mistakes and embarrassment. Back at that time, with underdeveloped technology, it was sensible that sperms are homunculus, a supposed microscopic but fully formed human being from which a fetus was formerly believed to develop. But as time goes by, it is proven that these homunculi are actually sperms. This debunk of a once popular concept propels me to believe that what we believe today might be invalid in the future. Therefore, science is concocted from uncertainties and mysteries that continue to unravel everyday.
