Blog 5b: Science Fair Proposal

1. What is your topic?

Molecular Biology.

2. What is the driving problem behind your experiment and the quote by an expert to support that problem? (Expert citation must be MLA format.)

Thanks to new and old technologies alike, scientists have been able to push forward to make amazing breakthroughs in medicine. But, there is still a lot of work to be done, especially when it comes to diseases. With this experiment I will be seeing if there is a correlation between working with HeLa cells and creating patents for researched materials. Once I find out if there is a correlation or not, I will contact some researchers to see what they feel makes the biggest difference in patent publishing, so that I can narrow down a career path for myself.

“The new medicine that people are trying to develop would target the root,” she continues. Tlsty studies the role of telomeres, the DNA at the ends of chromosomes, and centrosomes, organelles within the cell that are involved in the separation of chromosomes as the cell divides. For example, while a normally dividing cell has two centrosomes, each pulling one set of chromosomes to each new cell, a cancer cell can have three or four, making the DNA separate unevenly or even making one cell divide into three or more. Variations in the number of centrosomes “...is one of the earliest genetic changes in the development of a cancer cell,” Tlsty explains. “What we really want is for medicine to be predictive and preventative. If we can understand what those first few little changes are and eliminate those cells, the hope is that we can eliminate cancer before it forms.” (Thea Tlsty, researcher from the University of California, San Francisco, is speaking in the quotes.)

"Cancer: Cells Behaving Badly." Exploratorium.edu. The Museum of Science, Art and Human Perception at the Palace of Fine Arts, n.d. Web. 8 Feb. 2013. <http://www.exploratorium.edu/imaging-station/research/cancer/story_cancer4.php>.

3. What is your hypothesis? (Must be in If-Then form.)

If a university conducts research involving HeLa cells, then they will publish more patents than universities that do not conduct research with HeLa cells.

4. Write a paragraph summary of how you will perform the experiment.  Include the tools you plan on using.

I will contact (at least) 22 different universities to find out if they are doing/have done any research involving HeLa. I will record the number of years that they have been working with HeLa cells. Then, I will look to archives or data resources to find out how many patents those universities published within a certain time period (the time period I end up using will depend on the information I can find). Finally, I see if there is a correlation between the sets of numbers I gather.

5. Select one of the following Project Categories for your experiment:

Biochemistry & Molecular Biology