The end is in sight! I’ve laid out all my lectures for this final part of my cell biology course.
- This week: cell signaling.
- Next week: multicellularity and cell motility.
- Final week: cell origins.
It may seem weird to end the semester trying to answer where cells come from, but I’ve found that they need to know a lot of basic stuff about chemistry and metabolism before it all makes sense.
Now that I’ve got complete plans for the remainder of the course content, I can focus on just grading, my least favorite part of teaching, which means that now on top of sky-high stress levels I get to add nonstop tedium and misery. At least class itself should be fine! Maybe I should just stop handing out assignments so the work doesn’t pile up.
Next, though, a take-home exam comes due tomorrow, and I have vowed to get it completely graded by Friday. The nightmare continues.
If you actually know the origin of cells please tell the rest of us!
Final week is really easy, though… “God did it!”
I’ll be discussing the RNA world hypothesis and the metabolism first hypothesis. Nick Lane has some good books on the latter.
@PZ
“It may seem weird to end the semester trying to answer where cells come from, but I’ve found that they need to know a lot of basic stuff about chemistry and metabolism before it all makes sense.”
That is where I have been stuck. I’m getting close to a post about the molecular details of transcription and translation that allows me to start discussing all of the other things that I want to blog about with respect to cellular and molecular biology topics of many kinds and especially abiogenesis.
OH cell signaling. One of my favorite subjects. Seriously, not sarcastic at all I loved that part of my microbiology courses. NO JUDGING!
On my first skim I thought you were talking about dropped calls.