A Monster Story

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A Monster Story

By Karla Moeller
Illustrated by Sabine Deviche

There is an old story that is told to this day about a land filled with colorful monsters. In this mysterious world lived a family of monsters with a brother and sister, Matt and Matilda. Matt and Matilda shared everything—their monster toys, their monster candy, and even their monster dolls and trucks. One day, Matt and Matilda told their mother that they wanted to share their spots too—they were both blue, but Matt had green spots and Matilda had purple spots.

“Oh, my lovely monsters,” started Momma, “you are both so sweet, but you cannot share your spots, for your bodies are made to look different from any other monster’s. Inside each of you are special instructions that make you unique. Matt, your instructions tell your body to grow only green spots, and Matilda, your instructions make you grow only purple spots. This is what makes each of you so different and special.”

“You mean no one else has the same instructions as we do?” Matilda asked.

“Well, since you two aren’t identical twins, each of you is the only monster with your particular instructions! Let me explain…” and Momma Monster then told her young monsters all about their tiny cells and the special instructions inside them called DNA.

All of the tissues in our body like our skin and our bones and muscles are made of tiny compartments called “cells.” Most cells are so small we cannot see them without a using a special magnifying glass or microscope. Each of these cells has instructions on how to build bodies, whether it’s a monster cell building monster bodies, or a chicken cell building chicken bodies. Chickens are a good example of how one special cell, the egg, can be large enough to see with your eyes.

“Every living thing has DNA, including all monsters, plants and animals, and even those strange creatures called humans that live across the seas. These different life forms are all made up of the same basic instructions, just in different orders,” Momma continued. “DNA determines how we look, what we should be made of, and how our bodies will work.”

Matt was still confused.  “But how can so many different things be decided from one tiny set of instructions?”

“Well,” started Momma, “think of the monster alphabet, which has 10 different letters, that can be used to form thousands and thousands of monster words. When put together, these words can make beautiful monster stories…”

“Now imagine you had only 4 letters, but you could combine them as many ways as you wanted, and you could make long, long lines of different combinations.  DNA is just like long, unique combinations of 4 letters.

“For talking about monster DNA, let’s think of it as 4 colors,” said Momma.  “I like to use colors, so we can think of all the beautiful combinations we can make.”

“We do like colors!” Matt and Matilda agreed.

“Okay then,” continued Momma, “colors it is. These different colors join together in special combinations that make up the instruction manuals for our cells. Different combinations of colors tell the cells to do different things…”

As an example, let’s take 2 colors: yellow and red. If you are allowed to make a string of 3 colors, let’s see how many different combinations you can make.

Let’s start with just one color: yellow. What combinations can we make? Only one, right?

The whole thing would have to be yellow, since that’s the only color we have.

What if we add a second color? Let’s add red. Now how many combinations can we make?

So all together, using yellow and red, we already have 8 different combinations we could make. Now, if we had 3 colors, we could make 27 combinations.

If we had 4 colors, we could make 64 combinations. Each of these combinations gives a unique instruction to the cell.

Your aunt Martha, who is a mathematician, built this table to show how many different combinations you can make using different colors and number of dots.

What’s really amazing is how complex these instructions can be, using only 4 different colors. If we put some of these 3-color combinations together, as if we were putting different letters together to make words, we could make even more combinations!

“Let’s think again about 4 colors that stand for DNA molecules… red, yellow, blue, and green. If we join some of these colors together like colored beads in a long necklace, hundreds or thousands of colors long, we can make what we call a “gene.”  A gene is a section of DNA that decides what traits we will have, such as if our two horns will be purple or blue, or what colored spots we might have.”

“So Matt,” Momma Monster continued, “now do you understand that your genes code for purple spots, and Martha, yours code for green spots? With your different DNA, just think of all the other ways you are unique monsters!”

“Now that I’ve told you two all about DNA,” said Momma Monster, “we can play a monster DNA game. The game has sets of 3 colored dots, which we will match to sets in the decoding section. For example, the set of 3 colors, red-green-blue stands for the capital letter “C”.  Once we’ve decoded all the color sets, we can see the words, or genes, that decide what our monster picture will look like!”

“The good news is human scientists can’t decode monster DNA to make live monsters. If they could they’d have to clean up after you messy monsters all day long,” joked Momma. “However, they do use DNA instructions to try to improve human health…

“Using computers that can search through the long, long instructions that make up human DNA, scientists try to find patterns in the instructions. For many instructions, scientists expect humans to have the same code as each other. However, even for important traits like the structure of your cells, sometimes a single color will be different than it should be, or there can be missing or extra colors. These are called DNA mutations, which means the DNA is changed. By finding these mistakes in the pattern, scientists may learn what part of the code may be causing problems, such as different diseases, or which instructions may help a person to avoid disease.”

“Momma,” Matilda asked, “can I can work as a scientist once I get older?  Is that in my DNA?”

“Of course you can, my little monster, no matter what your DNA says. Your DNA may decide what you are made of and what you look like, but you get to decide what you do with your wonderful monster life.”

Matt thought and thought and then thought some more about these body building instructions called DNA. Could they really be in every single cell in a monster’s body? After a long time he approached Momma monster.

“Momma, how does the same set of instructions get into every one of my cells and where do those instructions come from?” he asked.

“Well, my marvelously curious monster, let’s start with where the instructions come from. The two parents of a monster child each make special types of cells. Momma monsters, like me, make what are called eggs, and Daddy monsters make what we call sperm. These two special types of cells, eggs and sperm, each have some monster building instructions in them. Eggs have some of Momma’s instructions, and sperm have some of Daddy’s instructions.

“When these cells join, the egg is activated, or fertilized. You can think of it as waking up so it can start to grow. The instructions in both the egg and the sperm join together to make mini monster DNA, like yours. This is why sometimes mini monsters have parts of them that look a little like their mom’s and sometimes they have parts that look a bit like their dad’s. You can see that with each of you. Matilta, you have purple spots like your dad and Matt you have green spots like mine.

“Now, on to how the instructions end up in every one  of your cells… As your first cells grew and split into more and more cells to form your body, the instructions were passed along to each new cell. The instructions would be copied within a cell, and then as that one cell breaks into two different cells, each cell only takes one copy of the instructions. These instructions are so long, that each cell only ends up using part of them, and this allows us to grow different types of tissue, such as skin, bone, and blood.

“I think the most amazing thing to think about is that all of the instructions to make an entire monster body are all curled up and packed in to a tiny fertilized egg,” finished Momma.  “Isn’t monster DNA magnificent?”

“It sure is!” agreed Matt.