The year is 2442. Protein engineering and molecular biology have become incredib
ID: 264927 • Letter: T
Question
The year is 2442. Protein engineering and molecular biology have become incredibly powerful and all diseases are cured. For once in your life, you gained a genuine scientific interest in something other than cytoskeletal racing. You just finished presenting your data to your coworkers at lab meeting, and none of them shared your enthusiasm. In the future, nobody in the field of biochemistry cares to analyze and discuss meaningful scientific data; everyone prefers to spend lab meeting sharing microscopic highlight videos of the latest, most thrilling cytoskeletal races. In fact, your data-driven presentation was so out of the normal that your coworkers feel that you wasted their valuable time, which has made you very sad.
You return to your lab bench and find yourself thinking about the cell cultures that you were experimenting on yesterday. To cheer yourself up, you start analyzing them under the microscope. Bizarrely, you find that there appear to be two cell populations in your culture, and that one of them is growing way faster than the other. Investigating further, you sequence the genomes of both cell populations and find that there is an unexpected mutation in the fast-growing cells: two genes, BCR and ABL have been fused in a translocation. You have never seen anything like this, and eagerly browse the internet to find answers. You find ancient notes from an undergraduate class in the early 21st century labelled "BIOC 442" that appear to have useful information.
This all seems crazy to you, as you previously had very little idea of what diseases are and your naive futuristic mind has never seen anything like this. You decide to hunt down the cause of this. Looking around the lab and reviewing your protocols from the previous day, you make the following observations:
- One of your labmates has been culturing human papillomavirus (HPV) for an unknown purpose, and has spilled some of the culture on her bench. You were using her bench briefly yesterday, and there's a chance that your sample became contaminated with HPV.
- While waiting for your cells to grow in the previous night, you were using a futuristic device to shoot gamma rays (strong radiation) at your prized motor proteins to see if that would make them race faster. There is a chance that your cell culture may have accidentally been exposed to a small dose of gamma rays in the process.
- After the gamma ray experiment didn't work in the previous night, you got bored and used a lab device to take X-ray images of your hand. There is a chance that your cell culture may have accidentally been exposed to a small dose of X-rays in the process.
Question:
Which of the previous observations seems MOST LIKELY to have caused the problems in your cells? Provide a 1-4 sentence explanation.
Explanation / Answer
The year is 2442. Protein engineering and molecular biology have become incredib
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