Journey to the Center of the Cell

A Parody of Journey to the Center of the Earth, by Jules Verne

It's my uncle's entire fault that we took our great journey. Now I am grateful that I saw such great wonders and made scientific breakthroughs. But at the start of our voyage, I wasn't so happy.

My name is Akcell, and my uncle is Professor Lysosome, a cell-famous scientist. One day in his laboratory, he discovered an ancient, coded message written by a legendary scientist by name of Arne Cytoplasm. The message told us of Arne's journey through the cell's very center, and how to take a similar trip. Immediately my uncle made plans for the trip and I, as his unfortunate nephew and apprentice, had to also make the impossible, dangerous, completely outrageous journey.

The cell that we live on is Cell #31495, a eukaryotic cell of the lung of a mammal. 31495, as all cells, is covered in a cell membrane made of phospholipids. It is hard to sneak into, but my uncle figured out a way (with help from Arne Cytoplasm) to climb aboard a nutrient that was entering the cell.

I named the nutrient the S.S. Titanic, because I feared that it would bring us to our doom-and later it nearly did! The Titanic entered the cell and we looked around in awe. There were so many organelles and sights to see! We decided, though, that we would stay aboard the Titanic and take the ride. We began floating through the cytoplasm, the fluid between the organelles, toward a large tubular place, with many bumps on the outer walls. "Ah, the endoplasmic reticulum," voiced my uncle.

"And those are the ribosomes!" I said in realization, pointing at the bumps. Then we entered the ER. Being inside it was like being in a maze- a dark, unlit maze. I started becoming blindly apprehensive when suddenly the ER spit us out.

"Fantastic!" my uncle cried. "See, Akcell, our nutrient vehicle has been converted for better use inside the cell! Scientist figured the process out, but we saw it with our own eyes!"

I was going to tell my uncle that my eyes couldn't see anything inside the dark ER, but the sight of the next organelle wiped the thought from my brain. The Titanic was rapidly approaching mitochondria. "Look, uncle!" I said to the professor. His eyes lit up once more.

"The mitochondria," I said knowledgably. "It breaks down food molecules and makes the energy into adenosine triphosphate, commonly called ATP." Then I realized what I had just said, and cried out.

"What?" said my uncle irritably, still gazing at the mitochondria.

"I don't want to become energy for the cell to use!" I said frantically. "We must jump off, Uncle!"

"Oh well," said my uncle wistfully. "Though the experience would be most interesting, the scientific world will need me more when retaining my shape." We tried to jump off of the Titanic, but it was in vain. We were stuck of the Titanic, but instead of sinking it was being metabolized into an energy molecule. And if we didn't do anything right away, my uncle and I would have too.

The mitochondrion was getting closer as we struggled. I began to wail in my frustration. Just then, I noticed the oxygen flow coming into the mitochondria.

"Uncle!" I cried. "The mitochondrion needs oxygen to metabolize the food molecules. If we could stop the lung that our cell's in from working.."

"We can't," said my uncle. "But we are going close to the oxygen flow. If we could block it, then the mitochondria would stop pulling us and we could jump off." We waited as we came closer to the oxygen flow. We began to join the oxygen valve when.

"NOW!" my uncle cried. It took all my strength to jump and help my uncle block the oxygen valve. The oxygen pushed against us on one side, while the mitochondria tried to pull us in. But after a very long moment, the mitochondria seem to release us and we flew out into the cytoplasm.

Unluckily, there seemed to be a sort of gravity in the cell, and we began to fall through the cytoplasm. Finally we hit what seemed to be one side of the cell membrane, except that we were inside the cell.

We looked around. We seemed to be outside a large structure that was the size of a building to us. Then I noticed some strange, car-size things creeping around. The eerie thing was that they seemed to be watching us.

"Oh no," said Professor Lysosome when he noticed the objects.

"What?"

"They're my namesakes, lysosomes. Their jobs are to digest food particle, wastes, cell parts....and foreign invaders."

"Are we foreign invaders?"

"I'm afraid so."

Suddenly, the lysosomes flew towards us. My uncle and I screamed and began running away from the lysosomes. The lysosomes weren't too fast, luckily, but as we ran we seemed to be circling the building-structure.

Then my uncle grabbed my hand. "In here!" he shouted, and we dove into a tunnel in the structure. We ran through the structure, and it was a moment before we realized that the lysosomes had given up the chase.

My uncle and I sat down in the tunnel to catch our breaths. Soon I began to look around the tunnel. "Let's keep going," I told my uncle. "In case the lysosomes come back."

We walked down the tunnel and in a short time, the tunnel opened up into a huge space. There were small objects floating around without a certain destination, and I noticed that they were too large to get through any of the tunnels. In the center was a dark, small structure.

"I think we're in the nucleus," said my uncle in awe. "See, those are the DNA- those floating objects are kept in here. And the dark structure is the nucleolus, where materials later used to make ribosomes are stored."

I shivered. "I don't want to be made into materials for the ribosome or something like that. Let's go back outside, the lysosomes are probably gone."

I was right. The lysosomes had disappeared, and we began walking toward something that looked somewhat like the endoplasmic reticulum. The shape was slightly different, however, and it was closer to the nucleus. "What's that?" I said.

"I don't know," said my uncle. "Let us go see." We walked towards the maze and carefully went inside. It didn't seem very dangerous. But suddenly some membrane came off of the structure and surrounded us.

"I know!" cried my uncle triumphantly. "It's the Golgi complex."

"What does it do?" I said nervously.

"It transports materials out of the cell...here we go!"

We were shot with a great force out of the cell's interior, and back onto the outer crust of the cell- what we called home. When my uncle reported his discoveries, he and I became famous. Though now many scientists have braved the journey and made it, we were the first.

-Akcell Lysosome