The Road to Immortality

Mankind has always been in search of immortality. Whether looking to some scarcely known cult, or to some mystical Chinese herbs, or more recently, to cryopreservation and the secret workings of the telomere, we have been relentlessly trying to uncover the means to beat even Death himself.

Honeybee cells, however, have chosen a different path.

After being painstakingly picked out of a frame of honeycomb, surviving the rigour of sterilization with bleach and ethanol, and enduring the seemingly endless hammering of a pipette tip, the honeybee eggs (or rather, the cells within those eggs) have earned a well-deserved two-day break from the pressures of a laboratory experiment. Yet little do they know, their eternal fate is in the hands of a largely ill-equipped co-op student --- me.

The task at hand appears deceivingly simple. To find an oncogene and introduce it to the cells. Yet one key factor has been overlooked. The person entrusted with this critical issue has absolutely no experience with genetic manipulation. True I have introduced foreign DNA into cells before, but the extent of that endeavour amounted to mixing two solutions together, drip them over the cells, and presto! the cells glow green the next morning! The task at hand, however, is a completely different story......

Not only are there many possible methods to introduce foreign DNA, there are a plethora more oncogenes identified. As if to multiply the difficulty of this problem, I am responsible for actually finding the plasmids required, and if a commercial copy is unavailable, I will have to somehow, someway figure out the exact sequence and all the leader the trailer sequences and all the primers needed......and to deal the final blow to the hope of these unfortunate cells, there is absolutely no previous literature on anyone attempting this feat with honeybee cells. Our best bet rests with the common fruitfly.......

I guess the quest for immortality is no easy task, even for honeybee cells. Thank God for Jesus, eh? XD