Essay Assignment
A critical life skill is to be able to communicate complex, specialized information to a non-specialist. In addition, your own understanding of most things improves upon explaining it to someone else. If you tutor, you may have noticed this already. One goal of this class is that each student will be able to explain to a lay audience how a single cell gives rise to an entire organism with all the right parts in all the right places.
Write a letter to a parent, friend, sibling, or anyone you choose who is not an expert biologist, explaining how a single cell grows into an entire organism. Your letter should be between 1000-1500 words. The purpose is to help the reader understand how a cell grows into an organism, and how cool it is that we understand it. I encourage you to have fun with this. Find your literary “voice.” Make it interesting and exciting. Grab your reader’s attention and don’t let it go.
Please include all of the following terms and concepts in your letter. You may present them in any order that makes sense to you. Emphasize what you think your recipient will find most interesting.
Fertilization
Discovery of Juno
Block to polyspermy
Gastrulation
Ectoderm
Mesoderm
Endoderm
Pattern formation
Differential gene expression
Model organisms
Morphogen gradients
Bicoid and Nanos
WNTS and BMPs
HOX genes
Evolutionary conservation
Discovery of Hedgehog in flies
Sonic Hedgehog
Birth defects due to mutations in SHH
Cyclopia
Single midline incisor tooth
Cancer caused by hyperactivation of SHH signaling
Embryonic stem cells (ESCs)
Induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs)
Define ESCs and iPSCs
Compare and contrast advantages and disadvantages of ESCs and iPSCs What are the most optimistic possibilities for their use?
What are the challenges?
As an example, I’ve provided the beginning and ending paragraphs of such a letter. It is critical that you explain any terms the reader is not likely to know (which is most of them).
Sample opening and closing
Dear Dad,
I am taking the coolest class this quarter! We’re learning how a single cell, the fertilized egg builds itself into an entire animal. Would you believe that we actually understand how this works, molecular step by molecular step? And that you and I share all kinds of genes with fruit flies, worms, and chickens? I know, right? Here is just a small fraction of what we have learned in a few weeks.
….
I hope you think it is as amazing as I do that we can actually explain, step by step, how a single cell builds an animal. You know, for the first few thousand years of human thought, no one even knew that a single cell develops into the whole organism, much less how it happens. Looking forward to seeing all of you over Spring Break. I can’t wait to tell you even more details about how developmental biology has brought us to the brink of a medical revolution.
Love,
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