I still can't sleep

It feels like I haven't slept in ages. I lie awake all night exhausted but unable to fall asleep.

I told this to my mom last night and then asked her if she'd give me one of her Ambiens. She said:

"Yeah, sure." and pointed towards her bathroom and continued,

"On the far right in your dad's medicine cabinet you'll find his prescription... it's marked Ambien CR. They're little round blue pills... did you find them?"

I helped myself to one of his pills and went to bed. I woke up at midnight and threw up (I guess that's your punishment when you skip Relief Society to go to out to eat with your sister and friends).

I finally fell back asleep only to wake up a few hours later with the cramps from hell. Sorry if that's too much info... the name of my blog is Upchuck Online after all. That's the great thing about blogs; you can write anything you want even if you don't have anything significant to say-especially if you don't have anything significant to say. I look back over my old posts and it turns out I don't have anything significant to say. Seriously, I blog about my coats! How lame is that? Now I'm blogging about puke and cramps.

I need something inspirational to blog about. Hmmm...

Okay, how about this:

Did you know that you can clone a mouse from a stem cell? You can totally bypass the whole sperm and egg thing, and grow an entire mouse. A stem cell is a type of cell that has the potential to become any type of cell in the body-like a skin cell, or a heart cell, or a kidney cell. Now scientists are showing that stem cells can become an entire organism- a clone of the mouse you took the stem cell from.

Get this, you can take a skin cell or a heart cell or a kidney cell and turn it into a stem cell. You add certain DNA that programs the skin cell to revert back to a stem cell. It's called an Induced Pluripotent Stem Cell or an iPS cell. I worked on helping to make iPS cells over the summer in Mario Capecchi's lab-did I mention I worked for 2007 Nobel Laureate Mario Capecchi? Okay, I did. Like a million times.

Now scientists are taking iPS cells, and cloning entire organisms from them! They took some skin cells off of a mouse tail (or whatever I don't remember what cells they used), turned them into stem cells, and then took the stem cell and grew an entire mouse! Theoretically, I could snatch one of your hairs, turn the living cells at the follicle into stem cells and then clone you.

Watch out.

That may sound kind of like the twilight zone, but I think it's inspiring. Some day they are going to be able to use this kind of technology to grow hearts and livers for people, or to treat diabetes. Scientists will be able to take skin from your body, and grow you a new liver that your immune system won't reject.

This kind of stuff is so fascinating to me- it's why I want to go to graduate school and be a molecular biologist.