I should be above aesthetics at this stage of the game. After all, am I not a hardened professional scientist, squinting heroically into the winds of the unknown?
Heartbreaker: mammalian cell division
But bravado unravels in the face of truly beautiful data. And I don’t mean ‘beautiful’ in the euphemistic sense that Nature authors use when they are trying to explain why their latest result both kicks butt and will cure cancer. I mean ‘beautiful’ as in the sort of image that catches your breath.
At the moment, I’m playing with a new human cell line kindly provided by a collaborator. It expresses histone fused to monomeric Cherry and alpha-tubulin fused to eGFP, and I’m filming these cells as I inhibit various genes with RNA interference. I’m supposed to be looking for cell shape and cytoskeletal defect phenotypes, but I keep getting distracted by mitosis because it’s so damned beautiful. The cells round up, their cherry DNA hearts beginning to glow like molten lava. Then the chromosomes muster out of nowhere and line up in a scraggly red row, the livid green spindle jostling them into place like fingers. Then whoosh – apart go the fingers, the heart is broken into two and the greenness goes diffuse and pinches apart. The lava cools and the two daughter cells form around them, fading back into the blackness.
My brain, knowing an interesting thing when it sees it, keeps forcing my eyes to zero in on the mitotic events instead of keeping watch on their flat, unassuming interphase colleagues. It’s like being told not to think of ten bald men.
(p.s. I haven’t made stills from my movies yet, so the above image was donated by a friend who wishes to remain anonymous. Cheers, mate!)
oh, that is the pretty, isn’t it?
A lot prettier than mine, I suspect. The problem with live imaging is that things tend to look inherently mushy, whereas a fixed cell can blow it away in terms of aesthetics. But motion has a beauty of its own…
There’s a lot of so-called ‘sci-art’ around Britain that involves displaying pictures like this. I’m still on the fence whether it’s really ‘art’.
Have you seen my Koala?
(Giggle)
OK, that sounds like a challenge. Any one else out there look down their microscopes and see fairy cakes, unicorns, the Virgin Mary or Donald Trump? (Or cells spelling the words ‘Help, I’m trapped in a Petri dish!’?)
I can make cells do whatever I like.
Jennifer,
Please, never become ‘above aesthetics’. If we can’t appreciate from a human perspective, as opposed to logical automata, then what’s the point? Personally, I’m at the crossroads you were at, but facing the opposite way… in part, because I’m not getting data that gives me the pleasure you describe.
Enjoy.
Matt, they are obviously not giving you enough to do. :-)
Leo, thank you for the timely reminder – I will try very hard not to turn into one of my robots! Best of luck if you do decide to try the Other Side; the water is pretty nice over there as well, though there isn’t, alas, a lot of beauty in the editorial office. Politics and irritated authors, yes.
Some of us don’t fake our data, Matt.
Here’s one from Nature Medicine:
(see http://www.nature.com/nm/journal/v13/n11/full/nm1107-1291.html )
Looks like a cross between Henri Matisse and Edvard Munch – now that’s what I call Sci-Art!
I have to say that I’m disappointed by the (lack of) response.
I think your panda blew them out of the water. Have to set the bar a little lower next time!