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Asked by RageQuit219 to Anais, katy, Lauren, Richard, Stuart on 6 Mar 2016.
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Richard Friend answered on 6 Mar 2016:
Good grief, sounds like the sort of question you should really be asking your parents!! To be fair though, this is a little outside of my area of expertise, my biology isn’t great! Having said that, if you consider that everything we are is built from instructions coded from your DNA, constructed with atoms that were taken from the food you’ve eaten which were all made in the center of a star millions of years ago, it makes the mind boggle. Sorry I can’t be of more use!
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Stuart Atkinson answered on 7 Mar 2016:
Well I’m glad someone else has tackled this issue before me! If you mean ‘particles’ then of course everything in the world we live in is made from these, and the sciences we use to describe their behaviour has different names depending on how close you look. When you’re looking at individual protons, electrons etc we call it physics. When atoms join to form molecules we call it chemistry. And when molecules form extremely complex systems that are required for life we call that biology.
If you meant ‘Pericles’ the ancient Greek, I’m not sure. Maybe that’s the time to ask your parents!?
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Anais Kahve answered on 7 Mar 2016:
Hello, hopefully I can add a bit more about the biology and also add a toxicology stance to this! Cells from the gonads (one from the mother and one from the father) come together and induce cell proliferation via meiosis. This means that the cells start to replicate. Over time (9 months for a human) the features of the baby and the organs develop, however the exact way in which cells ‘know’ how to become a certain organ e.g. the heart is unknown. Aspects like eye colour are determined by the genetics of the parent. Around 50 years ago it was thought that the growing baby was protected from all compounds, including potentially toxic ones, because it is surrounded by the gestational sac. However after the thalidomide case of the 1950s and 1960s (very interesting, I recommend reading up on this), it was found that many types of compounds are toxic to the growing baby. Substances like alcohol and cigarette smoke can cause a baby to have many problems in its life, including social and health problems.
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Lauren Laing answered on 7 Mar 2016:
The responses by the other scientists are really great, so I thought I would leave the human side up to them, and give you an idea of how this works in fish! Fish are different to humans, although some fish are live bearing such as the Blue shark or Hammerheads. This means, like humans, the offspring grow inside the fish, and the fish gives birth to its young. More often, fish are egg laying species. Fish eggs are released into the water by the female, while the male fertilises them, this process is called spawning.
The fertilised egg will then develop into an embryo. Complicated genetic programming controls the stage by stage expression of different genes involved in forming the organs of the body, this changes minute by minute as the embryo develops. For some fish species, like humans, they have a chromosome which is linked to which sex they will be, if they are males of females. Other species are more flexible, for example in some species, such as salmon, goldfish and tilapia, the sex of an embryo is determined by the temperature of the water in which it is grown!
For the zebrafish (one of the fish I study), we still haven’t found a definitive answer regarding how the sex of the embryo is determined! This is really interesting, because lots of people research this species, or keep them in their aquarium at home! We know a lot about their genes and how they work, but we haven’t answered this question yet!!
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