BIO 353 CELL BIOLOGY INTRODUCTION TO THE STUDY OF CELL AND MOLECULAR BIOLOGY NOTES ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY
Introduction to the Study of Cell and Molecular Biology
We are made of cells
Cells - make up our skin, our organs, and our muscles.
Brain - the seat of our thoughts and desires, is made of cells.
Fertilization - is a joining of two separate cells to produce a single new cell, which then multiplies to produce the embryo.
Santiago Ramón y Cajal - hand‐drawn the Diagram of nerve cells from the cat brain that was the first to recognize that the brain is made up of huge
numbers of individual cells, which convinced the world.
Camillo Golgi – (competitor) proposed a that it is a continuousconnected network.
1.1 The Discovery of CellsCells
- too small to be directly seen, heard, or touched
- the subject of hundreds of thousands of
publications each year, with every aspect of their minusculestructure comes under scrutiny.
Cell and Molecular Biology
- stands to human curiosity for seeking to discover, and to human creative intelligence for devising the complex instruments and elaborate
techniques by which these discoveries can be made.
not to imply that cell and molecular biologists have a monopolyon these noble traits.
- is reductionist; that is, it is based on the view that knowledge of the parts of the whole can explain the character of the whole.
Astronomers - utilizing an orbiting telescope to capture images of primordial galaxies so far from Earth they appear to us today as they existed more
than 13 billion years ago, only a few hundred million years after the Big Bang.
Nuclear physicists – forced protons to collide with one another at velocities approaching the speed of light, confirming the existence of a hypothesized
particle—the Higgs boson—that is proposed to endow all other subatomic particles with mass.
Microscopy
Microscope - an instrument that provides a magnified image of a tinyobject.
Spectacles – first made in Europe in the thirteenth century