Week 3: Fertilization

Somewhere between weeks 2 and 3...

Let me sum up the events:

Fertilization, CNP, 2014.

Sometime in this last week or the week to come, an egg and a sperm met in a dark fallopian tube (this sounds like the beginning of an atrocious joke).  The sperm burrowed through those outer minions of cells around the egg, then fused with it, and the two half nuclei became one.  I now have a little group of cells rapidly dividing and multiplying, and carrying on willy nilly, traveling towards the uterus, even though I am unaware.  This little fertilized egg, the zygote, is carrying on all of the characteristics of life, and although it will depend on me for the next nine months, half of the code for this life is mine, the other half my partner's.  It is all rather overwhelming, when I really think about it.

The Zygote!  http://www.stemedical.de/en/dictionary/zygote/

What are these characteristics of life?  I can rattle them off from the top of my head.  I've taught Biology for fifteen years, after all:

• All living things are made of cell or cells.  Why aren't viruses or prions considered to be living?  See rule one. 
• All life has the ability to regulate its internal environment.  Scientists call this homeostasis. 
• Cells can make copies of themselves--a lovely term called autopoesis. 
• Living beings reproduce, either sexually or asexually, or have the capacity to do so.
• Life must be able to transform and break down material for energy and growth--metabolism.
• Life responds to its environment.
• All life is interdependent, with multiple different complex symbioses and interactions with other species.  
• All life carries DNA to pass on to subsequent generations, and
• These generations may change through the survival of those traits best suited to the environment.  

Great list, eh?  I think so.

I am going to be excited to be pregnant, when I find out in a few weeks... just that I am a bit oblivious at this point.

Week 3, CNP, 2014

See what I mean?

Until next week,
Cat