I went to Jayne Raper’s talk for BioBus. Jayne is a microbiologist who travels all over the world and she is an expert in transgenic animals. Her talk was about these little parasites that go into your blood and affect you in many dangerous ways. Not only do we humans get it, but also many other animals can get this parasite and also spread it to other living things. Sneaky little demons, right?
At first, these nasty parasites where only in Africa, but later they were transported to South America and spread across Asia. Tetse flies can carry these beasts and give them to other animals or put it in their blood. Trust me, you don't want them in your blood, because when you see them, they change coat. Then you see them in your blood again, but then they change coat again! They have 2,000 coats!!! So many, right? But if that's not enough, they even mix it up. It is a very big microbe, but in your blood, it is swimming around showing itself when other microbes are hiding so you don't find it, but this one knows you can’t get ahead of it, so like I said it does not bother to hide. It's like it can do whatever it wants and it knows you can’t do anything about it.
In Africa, there are over 60,000,000 cattle that are dosed with drugs to kill this outrages monstrous parasite. The drugs are like getting chemotherapy. It is nasty and toxic and you have to give it to your cattle every night. Imagine that. Now imagine a bony, skeletal, skinny cattle lying on the ground. That is what you get when you don't give it to the cattle.
As I said before, humans can get this disease too. Like the drug for cattle, the drug we use for humans is like getting chemotherapy also, but it has been getting better. Without cattle to do the work of plowing the fields in Africa, no fields will be plowed well enough. And Jayne says, “well without the cattle to plow the field, someone else does it…the woman! Yup, the woman!" But even with this parasites’ nasty tricks, we can still do something to prepare ourselves. If an animal infected parasite infects us, surprisingly, we would survive because of this amazing thing in our blood called T.L.F. Jayne told us more about it later. They are great superheroes, according to Jayne. So this “superhero” protects us so that humans will never get this parasite. Yay! So what Jayne and her team are going to do is put T.L.F in the animal’s blood.
You may have heard of the good cholesterol but even if you haven’t, I’ll tell you this, you get good cholesterol eating good and healthy foods and bad cholesterol by eating foods from places like McDonald's. Now, the parasite needs cholesterol, any cholesterol, it does not care or matter which one it is. What it does is, it eats your good or bad cholesterol. It drags the cholesterol into the stomach, but something called... well, something with a really long name that I can’t remember, inserts into the stomach, and pokes holes and kills it from the inside. I wish I had that power! Now if it kills it, we can’t get this parasite.
Now, there are some parasites in the East Coast and some on the West Coast of Africa that figured out how to infect us. If you get infected you will die if you’re not treated. First, you get the swells, then the fevers, after that is E.coli, and eventually death. If everything I’ve said before did not make you hate them, I am convinced that this will. We don't know how it does all of this though, Jayne’s team still needs to find that out.
The team is working on solutions to stop or kill this nasty parasite. I think it is important for them to find a cure. The talk helped many people know about this dangerous critter, this way the people that are not on their team can also try to help. What I liked about Jayne’s talk is how she put in things that her team is good at, but also told us where they were struggling so that we can help them out.
To find out more about BioBus Talks, you can go to their website. Here is a short interview that I did with Jayne.
Federico: Did you like science when you were a kid?
Jayne: Yes!
Where did you go to school and what was your major?
Newcastle upon Tyne, I majored in biochemistry and genetics.
Did something inspire you to go into science?
l learned chemistry & physics. Taught about biology and loved it.
When you travel to a location for lecture how long do you stay normally?
Four Days.
Do you go to other states on the bus?
No, I do not work on the bus!
Which scientist do you admire the most?
Prions – Stanley Prusiner
(Specialist in Prion Diseases, Prusiner discovered prions, a class of infectious self-reproducing pathogens primarily or solely composed of protein.)
Which field of science do you like the most?
Infectious disease
What are you working on now?
Transgenic cattle!
Federico Lynch Ferraris is a fourth grader at The Peck Slip School who loves math, science, swimming, drawing, reading, writing, and TED Talks. He also loves to play his violin. He lives in NYC with his mom, dad, and older brother. He is a John Hopkins CTY scholar and a member of USA Swimming.
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