Introduction

🏎️ How can our knowledge of cell biology contribute to public health?🏎️

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In this blog post I will be talking about our most recently finished science project. Our end product was to make posters to debunk some common myths about vaccination, for mine I chose to research and debunk the articles that claimed there were microchips in vaccines. We also grew our own bacteria to have a better understanding of it! But before we get onto that, we learnt more about the immune system, how vaccines work, and the cells inside of the immune system. We also made posters for each part of the adaptive immune system, my favourite one I made looked like this!

 

Growing our own bacteria

To get a better understanding of the bacteria we are learning about, we had to swab the school with q tips and grow bacteria. With this bacteria, we would place it in a Petri dish and observe! My bacteria was swabbed from the hand railings on stairs of the school and ended up  looking like this. Along with the observations, we filled out a small field journal about the growth of bacteria using the scientific method.

What next?

After we learnt about the immune system and gained some knowledge, we would learn about vaccines, specifically we looked into the polio vaccine, and how it was developed. We watched a documentary about the polio vaccine and everything about the polio virus. We also learnt about 4 types of vaccines: inactivated vaccines, live attenuated vaccines, subunit vaccines, and mRNA vaccines. For a brief description of each, the inactivated vaccine was just where you are injected with a dead virus so your immune system can remember how to fight it and create antibodies for it. The live attenuated vaccines are where you are injected with a weakened virus with the same goal as the inactivated vaccine. Subunit vaccines contain a small piece of the virus, just enough for it to not do harm but just enough for the immune system to create antibodies for it, and for the next time its encountered! Lastly, the more modern mRNA vaccines use a more complicated way of working, but basically they trick the ribosomes in your body to make proteins of the virus, making your body create a dupe of the real virus, and making antibodies to fight it, remembering it for when there is a real encounter! Our last step was to learn about bias and false advertisements, then make a poster!

The posters

My poster was made on debunking the articles which claimed there to be microchips in vaccines, I recorded my research here:

          After this, we applied our research to posters. I chose to make my posters in Canva, and took inspiration from previous classes who had completed the assignment, in the end my focus was on an Ai generated image of a robot with a syringe, symbolizing microchips or robotics in vaccines. The main reason why the articles saying there were microchips in vaccines aren’t true, is because the smallest microchips in the world were not close to being able to fit through the syringe. Anyways! These are my 2 ads:

 

In Conclusion

In conclusion, this project taught me a lot about the immune system, how it works, and how vaccines utilize parts of the immune system to break down viruses, and create antibodies for the next time the virus attacks! I learnt a lot about how bacteria grows, and how many cells in our body actually fight bacteria. I also didn’t know that bacteria grew so fast when in the right conditions. Thank you for reading my blog post!