3.2 A Family Tree

A. History of Genetics

To understand how we might create super powers, we have to go back in time to understand genetics and how genetics or the study of genes works. A long time ago, people didn’t know where a disease like hemophilia came from. Was it from food, random or did it come from a bug bite? 

It turns out, one royal family had clues. Have you ever seen a family tree? It tells the history of a family. Check out the family tree in the picture above. Some of the people are parents, some are kids or offspring. Some are both.

 

Think About It: Can you find the six people who are parents on the family tree?

B. History Detectives

To start to understand how genes work, we’re going to start to think about where genes come from. To do that, we’re going to learn a bit more about Jude and hemophilia. Below is a family tree of a famous royal family. Many people in the family had hemophilia.

 

Directions: See if you can figure out where the hemophilia came from by looking at the family tree.  

  1. Do you think the hemophilia came from the environment, it was random or from other members of the family. 
  2. Some of the people are listed as: carrier, not a carrier, has hemophilia. What do you think those terms mean?

C. Check your thinking

Directions: Answer the questions below to check your understanding of the Royal Family Tree.

D. Explaining Inherited Traits:

Inheritance means something passed down to you from your ancestors. Traits are unique things about you- like hair color, eye color, height, bone size etc… Inherited traits are the traits that are passed down to us from our parents. 

 

They come from sexual reproduction because they are traits that are passed down from two parents. Hemophilia, like what Jude has,  is an inherited trait. To get hemophilia, both parents have to have special coding in their bodies that means they can pass on hemophilia to their children. 

 

 

This family tree is just one piece of evidence that human genes are given to us by our parents. That means, if we wanted to have super powers, we’d have to find a way to get powers that we didn’t inherit from our parents. That would require changing our genes. 

 

And to do that, we have to find them….. 

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