The Hot Zone Part 2 & Photos (7)

The Hot Zone Part 2

I found this reading as being very hard to put the book down. Part 2 was filled with uneasiness and unanswered questions. From when Bill Volt first noticed the monkey's illness, and Dan Dalgard suspected SHF, which seemed to explain the monkey deaths, but something just wasn't quite right, I couldn't stop reading until all the pieces fell into place. I really became fascinated when a young intern by the name of Tom Geisbert, who enjoyed studying virus structures, was the one who began to put pieces into place by discovering that something wasn't quite right with the simple diagnosis of SHF, or Simian Hemorrhagic Fever; which is very contangious and deadly to monkeys, but not humans. When Peter Jahrling and Geisbert "whiffed" what Jahrling thought to be a plastic contaminated cell culture known as pseudomonas, I was the one experiencing the "puke factor" because I, as the reader, just knew that they had just made a huge mistake. Knowing this book is about dangerous Level 4 viruses, I suspected Marburg was going to be what was causing these monkey death's, and soon the infection of Jahrling and Geisbert, however further tests by Jahrling uncovered that this was not just SHF, but also a filovirus, and this filovirus reacted positive to Mayinga blood containing Ebola Zaire, and not Marburg which means that they could be dealing with an Ebola-related filovirus, possibly a new strain of Ebola. And so began the power fight between the Center for Disease Control and the Army. While this was happening, a monkey house worker was hospitalized with a heart-attack, which is a blood clot in the heart. Blood clotting up can be caused by Ebola, which made this situation much more serious since humans have now become involved. My main unanswered questions are "Is the man with the heart attack ill with the same thing the monkeys have?" , "Has anybody else, such as other workers, been exposed to a possible Ebola-like virus inside the monkey house?" and, "Is this virus a combination of SHF AND Ebola or is it a new (undiscovered) mutated virus all-together?"

Photos

 Meristem- Meristem is the undifferentiated tissue which cells keep growing from. To my understanding the grooves in the green pepper is the result of cells continuously growing from the meristem.

 Asexual Reproduction- Asparagus reproduces asexually, which means it can reproduce individually. There are many ways that plants reproduces asexually, however asparagus reproduces through shoots. If one were to plant the 'crown' of the asparagus, shoots would eventually appear above ground .

 Long-Day Plant- A long day plant is a plant that only flowers after being exposed to light in elongated periods of time, such as summer. Lettuce is an example of a long-day plant.

 Modified Root of a Plant- The orange carrot itself is actually the root of the plant. It is underground and stores food and energy for the plant for when the flowering takes place above ground.

 Modified Stem of a Plant- This rose flower has a modified stem which has thorns on it to protect it against anything trying to eat it. 

 Lipid Used for Energy Storage- Canola Oil is a lipid, and as most lipids do, Canola Oil along with other oils are used to store energy.

 Unicellular Organism- A unicellular organism is any organism which is made up of only one cell. Each yeast grain is an example of a unicellular organism.