Dear Abbe,
I am an asthmatic high school student. For my science project, I injected my expired inhalers into plants and found they grew much larger than the plants I didn't inject! Now I want to use a microscope to see what happened at the tissue level. I don't have experience with plant microscopy, especially not when it comes to hormone detection. How would I do this, and what should I look for?
Science Fair Sally
Dear SciFi Sally,
What great questions! And I'm very impressed that you decided that microscopy is an opportunity to understand the phenomenon. Most of the time people just want to grind up organisms and look at various arrangements of four letters like a poorly designed bingo game or run some test-tube assays to see what chemicals are present. I'm having a moment of lethologica, otherwise I'd tell you what I call these people. Unfortunately, my understanding of plants is limited to alcohol production, so you'll have to bother a plant biologist, like my good friend Frank Salisbury. I'm not surprised that you are interested in hormones, since you are at that age when everyone seems to be hormonally challenged and get into all sorts of situations that you'll have to explain much, much later when they decide to award you some international award or appoint you to a prominent post. Not that I've ever had that problem. Unless you count that time at the Hochbegabtenstudium when I developed my X-ray glasses. I was disciplined severely, then the verrufen Administrator stole my idea and sold them through American comic books.
What good is all that science education if you can't mix it with some good, old-fashioned voodoo? Let Herr Abbe enlarge your repertoire of irrefutable, anecdotal information at [email protected].
