This attempt to isolate cell constituents might have been a failure if they had been destroyed by the relative brutality of the technique employed. But this did not happen.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
In the earlier years when I started this project at Stanford University, everyone told me it was nuts to go and try to reproduce the mysterious complexities that occur in a whole cell.
That's the new way - with computers, computers, computers. That's the way we can have the cell survive and get some new information in high resolution. We started about five years ago and, today, I think we have reached the target.
I was driven completely by a desire to understand how cells worked.
Cell culture is a little like gardening. You sit and you look at cells, and then you see something and say, 'You know, that doesn't look right'.
In principle. what is done is to take the nucleus out of a cell with a very fine micro-pipette or needle and introduce it into an egg. That had been done with amphibians a long time ago, and then there was a long pause of many years before people were clever enough to make that work in the sheep.
The question was, 'Is there a way of minimizing the amount of damage you're doing so that you can then study cells in a physiological manner while also studying them at high spatial and temporal resolution for a long time?'
I don't start a piece knowing exactly what effect it's going to have. There is a seed of an idea that I could never articulate, right at the beginning of the piece, literally like one cell.
The knowledge we have of communication among cells does not permit my giving you a sophisticated understanding.
If you wanted to dissect the structure of living cells, genetic analysis was an extremely powerful method, so my interest turned to that.
Given the opportunity, under the right conditions, two cells from wildly different sources, a yeast cell, say, and a chicken erythrocyte, will touch, fuse, and the two nuclei will then fuse as well, and the new hybrid cell will now divide into monstrous progeny. Naked cells, lacking self-respect, do not seem to have any sense of self.