Biotechnology at University

                                                                         by S.Calò

We all (from the left Arno Melgiovanni, Silvia Calò,Giuseppe Rizzo, Paola Vivoli, Lavinia Di Prima, Alessia Pillitteri) are attending a biotechnology course at university, that will help us in orientieering if we really want to choose Biology in the next future.


We have to take part to 5 meetings of four hours each on Thursdays at 2.30 am. During these meetings we have been following lessons made up by lecturer Vittorelli and the others teaching fellows; afterwards we perform different trial proofs.



1st meeting.

When we arrived they gave us gowns and books which would have helped us following the lessons and performing the trials proofs. The lessons were about the prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells and others microorganisms. Then we went to the laboratories and made bacteria coltures.



2nd meeting.

This time the lessons were about P.C.R., that is a scientific technique in molecular biology to amplify a single or a few copies of a piece of DNA across several orders of magnitude, generating thousands to millions of copies of a particular DNA sequence. In laboratories we also did it ourselves.



3rd meeting.

The lessons were about the gel electrophoresis, that is a technique used for the separation of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), ribonucleic acid (RNA), or protein molecules using an electric field applied to a gel matrix. In laboratories we did also that one ourselves.



4th meeting.

The lessons were this time about the structure and the duplication of DNA, besides also about the leaching of human DNA. Indeed we managed to draw out our own DNA from our spit.



We haven’t done the 5th meeting jet, so we can’t tell you about that one, but we are sure that it will be as interesting as the previous ones.

Paola Vivoli and Silvia Calò 4A

Wangari Muta Maathai

                                                   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wangari_Maathai



She was born on the first of April in 1940 in Kenya. She was the first African woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, in 2004, because she contributed to the sustainable development. She was a big political competence and she is a member of the Kenyan Parliament.


She was the first woman Central Africa to graduate in the faculty of Biology. In 1976 joined the women’s National Council in Kenya and became the President of the Council. A year later she founded the Green Belt Movement to combat deforestation of the trees in Kenya. Now Wangari Muta Maathai is an environmentalist, activist and veterinary in Kenya

Lupo,Spinoso,D'Eliseo

3A LS Benedetto Croce

Mohamed ElBaradei

Mohamed ElBaradei is an Egyptian man who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2005, on 7 October.He was the director of International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).He won the prize because  he proposed to avoid the nuclear energy to be used by extremist groups and to use it in the best possible way. With the IAEA’s winnings  he proposed to use nuclear techniques against cancer and malnutrition in developing countries. In his Nobel Speech he said that only 1% of money spent in producing nuclear weapons would  be enough to feed all the poor people all over the world.

Ugo Sortino

Jessica Galano

Martina Mangione

Nobel Peace Prize 2010: Liu Xiaobo

The winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010 is the Chinese intellectual Liu Xiaobo.

He was born December 28, 1955 and he is a human rights activist who is little known inside China.

He was in the Tiananmen Square protest in 1989, so since that year until now, he has been in prison and labor education camp four times for his peaceful political activities.

In fact in June 1989 after the Tiananmen Square protest, Liu Xiaobo was detained in the Qincheng prison and he was released in 1999.

In 2004 when he started to write a Human Right Report of China at home, his computer, letters and documents were confiscated by the government. Liu's human rights work has received international recognition in 2007.

In 2010 he won the Nobel peace prize for his long and non-violent struggle for fundamental human rights in China.

 Raimondi- Guarneri

http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liu_Xiaobo

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/2010/

Nobel Peaces Prize in 2008

MARTTI AHTISAARI

Martti Ahtisaari is a Finnish diplomat and politician. He was born on 23 June 1937 in Viipuri, Finland. Athisaari was a UN Special Envoy at the Kosovo status process negotiations, aimed at resolving a long-running dispute in Kosovo, which declared its independence from Serbia in 2008. In October 2088, he won the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to delete and resolve international conflicts. The Nobel statement said that Ahtisaari has played a prominent role in resolving many conflicts in Namibia, Kosovo, Colombia and Iraq, among other areas. In 1994 he was elected President of Finland until 2000.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martti_Ahtisaari