Pat Hamer
Period 5
Cell Home Essay
Every day on my way home from school I pass right by the Griffith Biochemical Science Facility, and every day I pass right under one of the protruding windows from the 5th floor. Well one day when I was walking underneath this window I hear a loud ruckus coming from above as if two scientists were fighting. And, as I was staring up at the window I see this vial of chemicals floating through the air and landing straight on my head. The vial broke, and its contents poured all over me. I decided to try to find out what the vial was full of, and when I asked the lady at the lobby of the facility, who was up on the 5th floor she said that the building only had 4 floors. But I knew that the vial fell from the 5th floor, and it seemed like the liquid didn’t do anything to me so I decided that its contents were harmless and carried on with my way home. Well two blocks later I felt a very peculiar feeling, before I was as tall as the street signs but now it seems as if I was only half the height of them, soon I was at eyelevel with fire hydrants. At this point I didn’t know whether I took a wrong turn and was in Giant Town or if I was shrinking. I figured it was the ladder of the two. I didn’t even get home before I entered a world foreign to all I was used to. I was in the world of the cell.
All of the sudden in this new world I tasted Wild Cherry Pepsi? This bewildered me; I saw a large opening at the end of a tunnel and light came in through it. And then more, Wild Cheery Pepsi, soon I saw a fella a little bit a way from me. I found out that he was named CM which was short for Cell Membrane. I asked where I was and found out that I was on the outside of a gustatory cell which would explain the flavor of Pepsi. As I looked around I saw around 14 other gustatory cells around me all on top of a larger bud, a taste bud. CM finally let me into the cell once he let something else out. As I came through the cell membrane I nearly walked into someone in the middle of his work. He was breaking down glucose with a sledge hammer and shipping it out in an easier way that the whole cell could use. When he was done with his hard work he said his name was mito, which was short for mitochondrion but only his mother called him that. He told me his break was over, and nice meeting me but it was time for me to get on my way. I decided to take the cyto road which covered basically everything that there wasn’t something already there. I took the cyto which I later found out meant cytoplasm to the golgi body or apparatus. Upon arriving I found out that the Golgi was a large factory that modifies, collects, packages, and distributes molecules to other sides of the cell. I couldn’t go into the factory because it said hard hat area and I didn’t have a hard hat so I had to stay out. The golgi packed the proteins and molecules onto RER trucks that were waiting to deliver and transport the materials and proteins. In small letters on the back of the RER truck it showed its real name which was the Rough Endoplasmic Reticulum Trucking Company, I decided to hitch a ride on the back of one of these trucks to find out where it was going. We soon pulled into the SER storage units. Here in the Smooth Endoplasmic Reticulum storage units, they unloaded the protein, enzymes, and chemicals into individual units. To the right I saw a few peculiar things in the distance. I walked towards them and found out that they were also a factory but named simply R factories and more. The R stood for Ribosome factoring and more and I figured the two factories were competitors until I realized that they produced different things. The ribosomes were composed of RNA and DNA and produced proteins. I soon got bored of this factory. All around me ribosomes were continually appearing and were being produced by the Nucleolus Storage N’ More. The company stored RNA and DNA and used these to make more ribosomes. Then in the distance I saw a large city with lights and buildings. I was very intrigued and I found out that it was the capital of the gustatory cell named Nucleus. It was the main information center of the cell, and the city was made of DNA. After seeing everything that could be seen in the inside of the gustatory cell I decided that I would go explore more outside of the cell. While I was visiting with CM and walking around the outside of the cell, I felt a large gush of fluid and soon was out of the mouth and back into the real world.
Well I guess, that after the person drank so much Wild Cherry Pepsi that he vomited it up and in the meantime sent me up with it. It was pretty gross considering I was basically swimming in vomit. Then all of a sudden, I was eye to eye with the person I had just been in one of their cells. I believe now that the vomit was the antidote to the vial of potion that landed on me and put me into the cell world. I kind of missed the cell world after I was back in the human world, but was definitely glad to be back. However, the best thing about the whole experience was that the next biology test I took on cells I passed with a 100% A+.
http://www.howe.k12.ok.us/~jimaskew/anatomy15.htm
http://library.thinkquest.org/C004535/eukaryotic_cells.html