Stem Lab Quotes

Tomorrow you're all going to wake up in a brave new world, a world where the Constitution gets trampled by an army of terrorist clones, created in a stem-cell research lab run by homosexual doctors who sterilize their instruments over burning American flags. Where tax-and-spend Democrats take all your hard-earned money and use it to buy electric cars for National Public Radio, and teach evolution to illegal immigrants. Oh, and everybody's high!

Confiding Julie, the first to get breasts, was cynical by Thanksgiving. Since no one else looked like the class slut, she was given the position, and she soon capitulated. She bleached her hair with Sun In, and started to mess around with boys who played in garage rock bands. Marianne, because she had long legs and a stem neck, rushed from school to her pliés at the barre, her hair in a bun, her head held high, to arch and sweep and bow toward the mirror until night fell. Cara delivered her audition piece flat, but since she had a wheat-colored rope of braid that brushed her waist, she would be Titania in the school play. Emily, bluntnosed and loud, could outact Cara in her sleep; when she saw the cast list she turned silently to her best friend, who handed her a box of milk chocolate creams. Tall, strong, bony Evvy watched Elise try out her maddening dimple. She cornered her outside class to ask her if she thought she was cute. Elise said yes, and Evvy threw a pipette of acid, stolen from the biology lab, in her face. Dodie hated her tight black hair that wouldn’t grow. She crept up behind blond Karen in home ec class and hacked out a fistful with pinking shears. Even Karen understood that it wasn’t personal.

Sometimes when I look back and analyze my past, I think the catalyst behind this story was my passion for science. I remember looking at seaweed and pond water microorganisms under a microscope during my Physical Science class my freshman year in high school and I felt exhilarated. My curiosity was awoken and I found myself instantly in love with the subject. Then, during my sophomore year in Biology, I single handedly dissected a cow’s eye and heart while my lab partner—and half the class—were busy passing out or vomiting in the bathroom, and that was it. The road ahead was clear. Set. I knew exactly what I wanted to do with my life.

In the fall of 2006, I participated in a three-day conference at the Salk Institute entitled Beyond Belief: Science, Religion, Reason, and Survival. This event was organized by Roger Bingham and conducted as a town-hall meeting before an audience of invited guests. Speakers included Steven Weinberg, Harold Kroto, Richard Dawkins, and many other scientists and philosophers who have been, and remain, energetic opponents of religious dogmatism and superstition. It was a room full of highly intelligent, scientifically literate people—molecular biologists, anthropologists, physicists, and engineers—and yet, to my amazement, three days were insufficient to force agreement on the simple question of whether there is any conflict at all between religion and science. Imagine a meeting of mountaineers unable to agree about whether their sport ever entails walking uphill, and you will get a sense of how bizarre our deliberations began to seem. While at Salk, I witnessed scientists giving voice to some of the most dishonest religious apologies I have ever heard. It is one thing to be told that the pope is a peerless champion of reason and that his opposition to embryonic stem-cell research is both morally principled and completely uncontaminated by religious dogmatism; it is quite another to be told this by a Stanford physician who sits on the President’s Council on Bioethics. Over the course of the conference, I had the pleasure of hearing that Hitler, Stalin, and Mao were examples of secular reason run amok, that the Islamic doctrines of martyrdom and jihad are not the cause of Islamic terrorism, that people can never be argued out of their beliefs because we live in an irrational world, that science has made no important contributions to our ethical lives (and cannot), and that it is not the job of scientists to undermine ancient mythologies and, thereby, “take away people’s hope”—all from atheist scientists who, while insisting on their own skeptical hardheadedness, were equally adamant that there was something feckless and foolhardy, even indecent, about criticizing religious belief. There were several moments during our panel discussions that brought to mind the final scene of Invasion of the Body Snatchers: people who looked like scientists, had published as scientists, and would soon be returning to their labs, nevertheless gave voice to the alien hiss of religious obscurantism at the slightest prodding. I had previously imagined that the front lines in our culture wars were to be found at the entrance to a megachurch. I now realized that we have considerable work to do in a nearer trench.

...because I am a female scientist, nobody knows what the hell I am, and it has given me the delicious freedom to make it up as i go along.

A leaf grows by enlarging the string of cells located along a central vein; single cells on the perimeter eventually decide independently when to stop dividing. From this tip, smaller veins develop, eventually completing the network at the stem; thus the overall maturation proceeds from tip to base. Once the most daring portion of the leaf is complete, the plant puts horse before cart and begins to slide sugar back down and in, down to where it will be used to make more root, which will be used to bring up more water, which will be used to expand new leaves, which will pull back more sugar, and in this manner four hundred million years have passed.

Scientists from Spain showed in the lab that olive oil secoiridoids could dramatically reduce the growth of breast cancer stem cells.

I look at an awful lot of leaves. I look at them and I ask questions. I start by looking at the color: Exactly what shade of green? Top different from the bottom? Center different from the edges? And what about the edges? Smooth? Toothed? How hydrated is the leaf? Limp? Wrinkled? Flush? What is the angle between the leaf and the stem? How big is the leaf? Bigger than my hand? Smaller than my fingernail? Edible? Toxic? How much sun does it get? How often does the rain hit it? Sick? Healthy? Important? Irrelevant? Alive? Why? Now you ask a question about your leaf. Guess

fund-raising calls; I have to depose a witness that day!” Sure, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, that’s fine. But when we can’t buy new beakers for the science lab and your daughter’s lack of a STEM education leads her to a life as a Hooters waitress, don’t cry to me about chicken wings. Unfortunately,

The obvious solution is stem cells and, while they’re not ready for the clinic yet, “thymus organoids”—small, artificial thymuses grown in the lab—have been shown to work when transplanted into mice without thymuses, and rapid progress is being made in generating thymuses from iPSCs, too.

Aside from the waste, fraud has a terribly demoralising effect on scientists. As we’ve seen, one reason that so many frauds manage to infiltrate the literature is that, in general, scientists are open-minded and trusting. The norm for peer reviewers is to be sceptical of how results are interpreted, but the thought that the data are fake usually couldn’t be further from their minds. The sheer prevalence of fraud, though, means that we all need to add a depressing option to our repertoire of reactions to questionable-looking papers: someone might be lying to us. Nor is it just other people’s papers that require this extra vigilance: fraud can happen on any scientist’s own doorstep. Because papers are rarely authored by lone researchers, a fraudulent co-author can sometimes tarnish the reputation of entire teams of innocent colleagues. In many cases the perpetrator is a junior lab member who drags their senior co-authors’ names through the mud, as in the case of Michael LaCour’s fake gay-marriage canvassing study. Sometimes it goes the other way, with established scientists recklessly jeopardising the careers of their subordinates (the report into Diederik Stapel’s fraud noted, for example, that no fewer than ten of his students’ PhD theses were reliant on his faked data). And we already saw the ultimate cost of reputational damage in the case of Yoshiki Sasai, who took his own life after finding himself involved in the STAP stem-cell scandal.

The Karolinska lab has surmounted all the technical problems and published studies on several tissues. In the brain they isolated nuclei from neurons of the cerebral cortex, the part of the brain responsible for higher functions. The results indicate that there is no renewal of neurons whatsoever. All the cerebral cortex neurons were formed during foetal life and they are not added to after this time, at least not enough to alter the isotope ratio. So, despite the fact that certain other areas of the brain do show some cell renewal, for the all important cerebral cortex we really are living with our lifetime supply of cells from the time of birth. This is one reason why neurodegenerative diseases are so devastating: when central neurons die, nothing can bring them back.

Even a very little girl can wield a slide rule

In the fall copious fruit ripens and seeds are scattered until finally all the leaves are shed in preparation for winter. If you rake fallen leaves into a pile and then examine them, you will see that each one shows a consummately clean break at the same place near the base of the stem. The fall of leaves is highly choreographed. First the green pigments are pulled back behind the narrow row of cells marking the border between stem and branch. Then on the mysteriously appointed day this row of cells is dehydrated and becomes weak and brittle. The weight of the leaf is now sufficient to bend and snap it from the branch. It takes a tree only a week to discard its entire year’s work, cast off like a dress, barely worn but too unfashionable for further use. Can you imagine throwing away all of your possessions once a year because you are secure in your expectation that you will be able to replace them in a matter of weeks? These brave trees lay all of their earthly treasures on the soil, their moth and rust doth immediately corrupt. They know better than all the saints and martyrs put together exactly how to store next year’s treasure in heaven where the heart shall be also.