DNA
Ooh, things are getting cooler by the second. We've been studying antibiotics and bacteria in biology, which, as I believe I mentioned in a previous entry, can be applied culturally in very interesting ways. Also, my CBL (community based learning) even got tied into it all today. My CBL is basically about cultural differences within this community, which means interviewing people who have moved from foreign countries, working with a student from another country, setting up volunteer work, etc. This project originally stemmed from my interest in race -- a very broad topic. So, my father snipped out an article from the New York Times entitled "Why Race Isn't as 'Black' and 'White' as We Think," written by Brent Staples. It's a very interesting article (I apologize for not linking to it, but you would have to have an account to read it anyways, so I'm trusting that if you're interested you'll seek it out yourself). The article mentions (and this is how it ties into bio) that you can get a
DNA test to identify your ethnicity, which is interesting in a country where it's bound to be very mixed. The author of this article is Black and assumed he had some mix of White and Black, but what he didn't guess was that he had traces of Asian in him as well. My dad explained to me that you can identify races in DNA because of certain patterns found in DNA among people who have lived in a particular area for a long, long time. Sounds fascinating.
Posted by lib at November 1, 2005 06:41 PM