Small But Mighty!

This is the story of the radically awesome science project called Small But Mighty! This project was all about the immune system! Being a person who is really interested in the human body (mostly after it’s deceased) I found this project especially interesting! We learnt about two main topics related to the immune system, different cells that help our immune system and vaccines! The driving question is “How does our knowledge of cell biology contribute to public health?” I think that the more you know about a topic the more you can help other people understand therefore, spreading knowledge of cell biology the more people will understand public health.

Field Journal:

To kick off the project we made a field journal all about the growth of bacteria! Our first step was to design an experiment that would demonstrate the growth of bacteria. I decided to test which cleaning chemicals best subdued or completely stoped the bacterial growth. I then swabbed my shoe three different times and then rubbed the dirty swab on three different Petri dishes. On one Petri dish I rubbed hand sanitizer, the second I rubbed dish soap on, and the third I didn’t put any cleaning supplies on. Then you just sit and wait! As it turns out, dish soap is the best cleaning supply to slow the growth of bacteria.

Immune Cell Characters:

For our second stepping stone in the project we made cute little characters for the different immune cells! The white blood cell, the b-cell, the T-cell, the anti body, and the macrophage. I chose to draw all my characters as random people from shows and movies. The white blood cell is portrayed a Shrek, the B-cell as Chicken Joe, the T-cell as Shellington, the macrophage as Toothless, and the anti body as Tunip!

Vaccine Media Campaign:

For our final product we learnt about Vaccines! There are 4 different types of vaccines, the inactivated vaccine, the live attenuated vaccine, the subunit vaccine, and finally the mRNA vaccine. Inactivated vaccines are vaccines made out of dead pathogens so that the immune system can test run it so that if the live pathogen were to come along, then the immune system can fight it off really easily. Live attenuated vaccines are made out of pathogens that have been attenuated (weakened) so that the body gets the weak version of the virus or disease instead of the full force one. Subunit vaccines come from pathogens that have been cut up into microscopic pieces big enough to trigger a response from the immune system but not strong enough to harm you. And finally we have the mRNA vaccine. Vaccines like these, are completely man made. Scientists study a pathogen until they have the ‘recipe’ to recreate it, then they re-make it to be smaller and weaker so that its enough to trigger a response. Now that you know all about the different types of vaccines, I can tell you what our final product was! We made campaigns to make a point against many of the mis information that has been spread about vaccines. For the campaigns, I was paired with my good friend Evelyn! (I will link her blog post below). We made three different campaigns about misconceptions about the COVID-19 vaccine. Two of our campaigns were about how the COVID vaccine would make people magnetic. And our last one is about how the COVID vaccine would make people part of the ‘chess game’ that Bill Gates has engineered into our shots.