Mac: The Blob’s Little Brother
Do you like horror movies? Did you ever know that horror movies can actually be connected to the study of those cell- like creatures that you can view under microscopes like a kid microscope?
Well this article is all about that connection. In 1988, a movie came out which was a remake of the 1958 science fiction movie called “The Blob”. It’s all about this big jelly- like alien creature that lands on earth and start eating people up by dissolving and absorbing them. In reality, our body also has the same blob- like creature, the only difference is that they are tinier, blob- like cells, and they don’t devour whole humans. They are called macrophages. This article includes photos of how Macs look like but to see it first hand, you look at them under a kid microscope.
Macrophages, or “Macs” for short, gobble parasites, bacteria, fungi and other harmful organisms. They usually surround wherever these germs appear, like a wound or a scrape and eat them up.
Let’s say at first you don’t want to use a kid microscope to know how Macs actually look like. Instead, let’s use our imagination in making a more vivid picture of Macs. Let’s say they are like soldiers, sent to destroy and annihilate, germs that is. Like true soldiers, they also have a communication system, like radio operators which are called T- cells and B- cells. T- cells destroy virus- infected cells before they make more viruses while B- cells make antibodies which are like bombs which target protein present in germs called antigens. Macs first learn from T- cells so that they could further instruct the B- cells which antibodies to produce to fight and destroy the germs. They also act like a garbage disposal unit because they rid the body of wastes such as old blood cells, proteins and other type of wastes. For further study, you can see how these wastes look like by using microscopes like a kid microscope.
So you might ask, if Macs are so smart then why do we still get diseases or infections? Well in these cases, germs have gotten smarter in which viruses might attach themselves to a Mac cell and they trick these Macs into making more copies of this virus. You can see how this might actually look like by using a kid microscope or if you want a picture, there’s one attached to this article.
To counteract the witty innovations of these viruses, further tests could possibly be done first on animals. The only disadvantage to this is that it would require extracting more samples from animals. Extracting more samples from animals would mean causing more harm to them making the task more difficult. Dr. Neil Talbot, an animal health researcher at ARS’ Gene Evaluation and Mapping Lab, Beltsville, Maryland, who is constantly mentioned as the vital researcher in this article suggested that scientists grow hundreds of millions of Mac cells inside plastic flasks by using a few drops of blood or tissue samples that have been previously collected. This is a less harmful method for animals, and through further tests, scientists would be able to find new ways of stopping clever viruses and germs that attack the Mac cells. In this case, this suggestion from Talbot, if followed by scientists, could mean more progress in the field of medicine of both animals and humans. Study more about Macs by using a microscope like a kid microscope.
