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Oh my god what I saw yesterday in the Jonathan Butcher lab was soooo cool! The 3D printers, and the chicken embryos! Just everything was so incredibly cool!
I'll start from the beginning. Sorry some of this won't have anything to do with my project at all but it was just so cool I can't not share it!
So my dad and I were with a group of high school students from surrounding high schools who were in AP Biology classes. We got a quick tour of the entire lab section of the building which was cool in itself. But then we came across this guy who showed us the first 3D printer I would see in the day. That was neat, but the best party was what they were printing, and what it was made out of. The guy told us that he was printing ears. Yup. Like human ears. And they were made out of cartilage. My mind was blown. Have you ever heard of people just making drawings of ears online and then printing them out? Me either! (I'm super interested in this kind of thing if you haven't noticed) But that was only half of it. Not only can they print ears..they can print YOUR ear. If you were born with a birth defect that left you earless, or your ear got cut off for some reason, they can take a mold of your other ear, or project what the lost ear looked like, or would look like, and they will make YOUR ear. The very same one that's on your head. Like what? What is science these days?! Then a surgeon can take that ear..the very ear you may be missing..and they will sew it onto your head and bam. You have an ear where once you were earless. Mind. Blown. At least I was. I kind of still am too. I just think it's unheard of!
So that was only the first rotation. Then we switched groups and I went to the part of the lab that actually has to do with my WISE project. Chicken embryos.
There is a lady working in Weill working on cardiovascular and biological engineering, what I told you about yesterday, using chick embryos. So she gave us a really really long speech and told us everything that she did in the lab and research and so on. Then I saw another super cool thing. This lady had taken fertilized chick embryos and literally cracked them into a cup. I thought that would just kill them....it doesn't. I saw these chicken embryos only 3 days after fertilization, and boy was it weird and cool and nothing like I had ever seen before. After only 3 days, the chickens hearts are already beating. So in an incubator, in a cup, cracked, I saw the little tiny beating hearts of what could mature into a full grown chicken one day.
That's what it looks like after three days. The little cashew shaped thing in the middle is the little tiny, teeny heart. It was really cool. So one of the guys that I was touring the lab asked, "Hey, you can't grow these things into chickens right? They die after a while." Nope, he was wrong, you can grow a chicken out of it's shell, cracked in a cup. She said it'd be very difficult because at that stage in their lives they don't have a great immune system, so they'd be extremely prone to bacteria and virus's. Anything that could get inside the incubator, they could die. It'd be difficult, but not impossible at all. After a few days you'd need to add egg shell though. She kept explaining and said: Chicken embryos need calcium to develop their bone structures and feathers and really to develop. So there was an easy fix. All you had to do is take an egg shell and crush it up until it is essentially, egg shell dust. Then you just sprinkle that into the yolk and developing fetus when the time is right. Then you can see the entire thing develop outside of a shell. Again: mind blown. Could you imagine how cool that would be? Kind of gross..but cool. The feathers developing, the bones, legs, beak...like I said, gross but cool. She also said another way to look at developing fetus's of chickens would be to create a small hole in the top of the egg, like the picture below
Not as cool, but still pretty cool. I never knew you could do that. I'm definitely not gonna try either of those things with my project, but it's cool to see the alternate ways that you can raise chickens.Then we switched stations again. The last station, like the first, doesn't really have anything to do with my project but it's still too cool not to tell.
I held a pigs aortic valve. Now, I watch a lot of Grey's Anatomy (I'm obsessed) and I don't know how accurate it is
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