• Question: Why do you like cells? What do you find interesting about them ?

    Asked by Elisabethcabanas to Tom, Paul, Natasha, Ester, Eoin on 6 Nov 2017.
    • Photo: Natasha Myhill

      Natasha Myhill answered on 6 Nov 2017:

      Cells are the building blocks of our whole body! Its a bit like baking – some people are happy eating the cake (including me!) but scientists, especially biologists, like to know how to make the cake, what happens when the cake doesnt turn out right and how to make the cake even better! For me, there is so much we can learn by looking at cells that helps us to understand disease and how to fix it! I spend a lot of time looking at cancer cells in the lab and the more I understand about them and how they work, the more I can think of a way to kill them in the body!

    • Photo: Paul McKeegan

      Paul McKeegan answered on 6 Nov 2017:

      I like Natasha’s answer, although I was already hungry!

      I also think cells are amazing because they bring order to the chaos of the universe in a really amazing and unlikely way. The universe tends towards disorder, because this evens out where all the energy is. It’s ‘unfavourable’ to keep all of the energy in one place and it would rather spread out everywhere – shake up a bottle of coke if you don’t believe me. Cells have brought energy under control by bringing together lots of different molecules (made of matter and energy) in a contained environment (like the coke bottle), and on top of that, they run molecular machinery to release that energy and use it to power things like growth and cell replication. This is metabolism, and this is why I find biochemistry bewilderingly fascinating!

    • Photo: Ester Gil Vazquez

      Ester Gil Vazquez answered on 6 Nov 2017:

      Hi 🙂 Similarly to Paul, what I find most interesting about cells is their capacity of organization and how relatable they are. On the one hand, when you look at how cells work it feels like you are looking into a human body: they have organelles with different functions (nucleus, mitochondria), whereas we have organs (heart, lungs, muscles…). On the other, when you look at how they interact with each other it is quite similar to human societies: different cells have specialized in certain jobs (breathing, digesting…) and they cooperate to make the body work as a whole.

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