Week 12 Assignments - Cell Biology

Connections between cell biology and TCM:

What occurs to me here is how small and subtle shifts and differences create such a diversity of life and organisms and processes; how animal and plant cells have more in common than not, and that for the absence or presence of just a couple of key components a completely different form of life is created, lives, and dies - that but for some mysterious (to me, mostly because I don't quite get the process, no doubt) and slight deviation, cells either simply divide and multiply, or they divide and create male and female, which are in turn capable of continuing to recreate life, and so on and so on. Chinese medicine seeks to understand these subtle and slight shifts and processes - and then uses this understanding to diagnose illness and imbalance and then ultimately to treat those imbalances. Shifting energy through the application of needles and pressure, prescribing herbs which act in a subtle way to alter physiological processes within the body - addressing emotional issues which are stored in the "body memory" of the cells themselves - these components of TCM all address illness that exists in our cellular biology in a very direct way, IMO.

How Cells Divide: Mitosis vs. Meiosis:

This was interesting, and did a pretty good job of showing this division process - but I do feel that for myself, the biology text that I had made all of this a little more clear to me overall. (Can't remember right now the name/version/author of the text...). I guess I am a little fuzzy on why a cell ends up going through either one of these processes - why does a cell perform mitosis vs. meiosis - is a cell specifically coded in advance to go through the reproductive process to begin to create life? And then, I essentially understand all the different steps that this division goes through, but I really hope no one ever asks me to explain it 'cuz I wouldn't be able to do so....

On Cell Biology (links):

The site that does the animated Krebs Cycle was really cool, if I actually understood what was happening it would be even cooler. I get it that this is the process that gives energy to the cells, but the actually exchange of elements and the whole molecular setup is pretty complex and again, I don't understand it very well. However, the link to the site that goes over the cell information was a better one for me than the one up above...the diagrams that are on this site that show the difference between mitosis and meiosis are more like what I had in my biology text at home, and the side by side comparison set up in this way was easier for me to follow than that on the NOVA site. The wikipedia pages are always informative, if not a bit dry.....