Graphic turning points, part 1
I saw an article on MSN recently about abortions. Who has them and for what reasons. Turns out it is not just scared little teenagers. I was sad that supposedly mature grown-ups would make the poor choices that got them into that situation.
It brought me back to a turning point in my life. You may wish to stop reading here. What is to follow will be a graphic description of a biology lab experiment in college involving chicken embryos.
I did not know what the lab was that day. I went to bio lab as usual. It was my freshman year at UCLA in the early 1980s. When I got there I saw a bunch of chicken eggs waiting. I was told that these were fertilized eggs, and that we were expected to follow the directions to observe them. We had to crack the eggshell without breaking the yolk. The 1-cm long embryos resided on one side of the egg yolk in a quarter-sized disk of blood vessels. We had to cut the disk off of the yolk using scissors and float it in a petri dish of clear ringers lactate solution and put it under a low powered microscope. I did this and then observed the little embryo floating with it's little heart beating. I got a prickly feeling down the back of my neck as I realized that I was watching the little embryo die. Die because of what I had done. I felt disturbed and nauseous during the remainder of the lab. As I walked out of the building into the fresh evening air of winter I vowed to myself that I would never do that to a child of mine. Never. I have kept my word.
It brought me back to a turning point in my life. You may wish to stop reading here. What is to follow will be a graphic description of a biology lab experiment in college involving chicken embryos.
I did not know what the lab was that day. I went to bio lab as usual. It was my freshman year at UCLA in the early 1980s. When I got there I saw a bunch of chicken eggs waiting. I was told that these were fertilized eggs, and that we were expected to follow the directions to observe them. We had to crack the eggshell without breaking the yolk. The 1-cm long embryos resided on one side of the egg yolk in a quarter-sized disk of blood vessels. We had to cut the disk off of the yolk using scissors and float it in a petri dish of clear ringers lactate solution and put it under a low powered microscope. I did this and then observed the little embryo floating with it's little heart beating. I got a prickly feeling down the back of my neck as I realized that I was watching the little embryo die. Die because of what I had done. I felt disturbed and nauseous during the remainder of the lab. As I walked out of the building into the fresh evening air of winter I vowed to myself that I would never do that to a child of mine. Never. I have kept my word.
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