4/10 In class blog

1     What is the argument’s purpose in your article? (Is it an argument: to inform, to convince, to persuade, to explore, to make decisions? It can be more than one of these.) What does it hope to achieve?                                                                                                                                The fetal calf serum (FCS) factor required for both the specific adhesion and spreading of baby hamster kidney (BHK) cells has been purified 140-fold. The purified factor is a mixture which appears to contain two active globular glycoprotein components.

2      What types of evidence are used? Highlight/underline different forms of evidence used. (Types of evidence: Firsthand evidence and research includes observations, interviews, surveys and questionnaires, experiments, and personal experience; secondhand evidence includes library sources, films, photographs – anything beyond yourself.)                                                                                                                             The larger has a sedimentation coefficient of 12.5S and contains polypeptide chains of about 215 000 D and the smaller is 9S and contains popypeptide chains of 94 000, 80 000 and 71 000 D.

3      What is the claim of the argument? What is the article arguing? How do they introduce that claim?                                                                                                                                                            Non-specific cell adhesion (i.e., direct adsorption of cells onto the substratum in the absence of serum) can be completely blocked by pre-coating the substratum with bovine serum albumin (BSA); the purified factor can be shown to compete with BSA for the limited number of potential adsorption sites on the substratum surface. They introduce this idea by providing information about Cell adhesion and proposed how and what they would be using to do so.

4.      What assumptions does the author make? Every argument contains an assumption that is crucial to its validity. The assumption, sometimes stated sometimes left unstated, lies between the claim and support, connecting the two with logic. For example, a claim the authors of They Say/I Say make is that “The authors you summarize at the college level seldom simply ‘say’ or ‘discuss’ things; they ‘urge,’ ‘emphasize,’ and ‘complain about’ them.” They then go on to give the following illustration: [claim] … The Declaration of Independence doesn’t just talk about the treatment of the colonies by the British; it protests against it” [support] (38). What then is the assumption? That the colonists had had it with British rule, they were done talking about the issue, and were readying to revolt. Saying that the colonists wrote the Declaration of Independence to tell England how they felt doesn’t accurately express what the colonists intended.                                                                                             The purified factor is a mixture which appears to contain two active globular glycoprotein components. Activity of the mixed factor requires its adsorption onto the substratum surface and about 0.6-0.85 μg of adsorbed factor protein on a 9.6 cm2 surface is required for complete cell adhesion and spreading to subsequently occur.