If you view biology as spanning a scale from the very large (blue whales) to the very small (organic compounds), I have almost always lurked around the miniscule end of the spectrum. My first stint of undergraduate research involved trying to understand the sexual proclivities of a North American tree called the Osage orange (Maclura pomifera [Raf.] Schneid. [Moraceae]), a less edgy relative of cannabis and the beer hop. When I was a child growing up in Ohio, we used to wage guerrilla warfare using its weird fruits: about the size of a grapefruit, thick brainlike skin, highlighter-pen green – in short, alien spores from another planet, so full of latex that even the squirrels left them alone.
Truth is stranger than GMO An aneuploid Osage orange radicle cell with only 55 of its alloted 4 × 16 chromosomes (bar = 10 microns)
So it was only fitting that I would find myself studying this very tree. I used to dissect seeds from fruit vernalized in the cold room and nurse them to seedlings in the steamy greenhouse. I loved working in the shadow of that vast and fecund lemon tree, surrounded by tropical blooms while snow fluttered against the glass panels above. Back in the lab, I would arrest root-tip cells using mitotic poisons, smash them with care and use a camera lucida to sketch their bizarrely dysfunctional autotetraploid karyotypes: my first foray into the microscopic.
Things got smaller from then on. My PhD in Seattle involved viruses, those strange not-quite-alive entities first identified not by what they were, but by what they could do: pass through filters that bacteria could not. Feline leukemia virus, a tidy HIV-related moggie menace with only three genes, was on the small end of the virus scale, though later, in the Netherlands, I worked with an even tinier one, chicken anemia virus. The human tumor cells I use now are huge in comparison, many microns in diameter.
A scientist at the small end of things has to take a lot on faith. I spend most of my days dealing with diminutive amounts of colorless liquid. Sometimes I find myself staring at the pipette tip, where the quarter of a microliter of clear fluid I’ve just drawn up is almost invisible, a mere glistening under the fluorescent lights. How could this infinitesimal amount of stuff ever do anything tangible? Yet a few days later, it’s caused a black band to disappear on a Western blot, or made a protein turn cherry-red on a slide, or forced a cell to warp its shape from ovoid to grossly triangular. Even when I split my cells, I worry that the tiny drop I transfer to a fresh plate couldn’t possibly be enough to perpetuate the strain; yet sure as rain, three day later the plate is full to bursting with life.
There is nothing mysterious about any of this. But it still surprises me, all the same.
I was wondering what that weird tree in my kids’ schoolyard was.
Every time I split my (primary) cells, I worry I flubbed it. Sometimes it’s actually true…
And of course, it’s all quite mysterious to anyone who hasn’t tried it themselves. Witness countless TV spots of molecular biologists with Pipet-Aid or micropipette in hand, often in a laminar flow hood to boot. I think you know something about that…
Heh, yes. The arcane made mundane through familiarity – and vice versa.
Heather, is your schoolyard’s tree a male, a female, or a neuter? You can tell by the flowers (or lack thereof) – should be about the right time of year to sex them.
These days the police use pepper spray and tasers.
I have a weakness for old-fashioned terminology. I think ‘mitotic poisons’ conjures up another era. Much more poetic than talking about cell-cycle arrest.
unicefofficer3@yahoo… seriously?
It’s 2008 spammers… get with the program!
Hey, does this mean I won twice?
Cool.
I got all editory and took the comments down.
Thereby neatly taking the wind out of Ian’s and my snide comments…
At the other end of the (biological) scale, I know a palaeontologist who works on sauropods, the really big dinosaurs that are thin at one end, thick in the middle, and thin at the other. The chap concerned is partially sighted — only sauropods had bones big enough for him to see with ease. He’s now one of the world’s foremost experts on these creatures.
Great story. I know someone who studies blue whales. Always was jealous of scientists who could work on boats instead of in the lab: the privileges of the macroscopic.
Oops – sorry, Matt, for sending my prize winnings on to network@nature… etc.
I must insist that Henry (and anyone else so inclined) see the gorgeous French animation “Azur et Azmar” by Michel Ocelot (of Kirikou semi-fame). In which there is a not-really-blind boy who makes one of many discoveries by using his other senses.
Meanwhile, just to say that I think the Osage orange tree is a male – no flowers in sight – but doesn’t that mean there must be a female in the vicinity? (It’s possible, I haven’t surveyed all the trees on the property). And then do the males make those strange fruit? Anyhow, it was a good description, I recognized it right off.
Henry, that sounds suspiciously like the four blind men and the elephant thing.
The male versions of dioecious plants have flowers too – but they only have anthers (pollen-bearing organs). The female flowers have different bits: sexual dimorphism. (The neuter tree don’t make flowers at all.) If it’s making fruit, it’s a female. I should have realized you were referring to the fruit when you ID’d it – sorry.
Sorry, this is all getting a bit geeky!
Henry, that sounds suspiciously like the four blind men and the elephant thing.
I do know another palaeontologist who is deaf. He works in a geology department so I guess that makes him stone deaf.
Henry,
if it weren’t for that lovely dog of yours (who I hope will be guest of honour in August) I’d be forced to perform violence about your body.
I once dated a geologist. Now that’s a wonderfully macroscopic discipline. We’d go for walks and he could point out all the sediments and explain why they looked like they did. I felt a bit envious at the tangibility of his research.
@ Jenny: I once dated a geologist
… do I sense another novel coming on?
@ Richard: if it weren’t for that lovely dog of yours. She may look cute but she has very fierce teeth.
Hmmm. There’s an idea – not one I should take for granite.
I wasn’t going to add this, Jenny, but as you’ve lowered the tone, I remember while at Cambridge how the geologists used to snigger about obvious mispronunciations of a kind of rock called schistose grit. Perhaps you were right to have ditched the geologist.
Today’s tip is
don’t read anything posted by Henry McGee while you have a mouthful of beer
You always have to stick in your ore, Richard.
Of quartz I do. It’s a gneiss ore.
I once dated a geologist
Radiometrically?
No. I think she just cut one of his legs off and counted the rings.
Surely she would have had to cut him through the trunk?
Not unless he were a dendrochronologist. Which is different, as any fule kno.
I’m not any fule. I’m a highly specialized fule.
I am sitting here trying to resist making a comment involving the words ‘uplift’ and ‘subduction zones’.
As I’ve said before, Jenny, you really should stop reading my novels.
You don’t think I might be twisted enough without your bad influence?
What we need is a control Jenny, that we can keep in a dark enclosed space away from any hint of Gee-ness.
Better idea. Let’s keep Gee in a dark, enclosed space away from everyone else.
@Richard: Let’s keep Gee in a dark, enclosed space away from everyone else.
Listen, buster, I’ve worked for Nature so long that some of the people now old enough to submit papers weren’t even born when I started. If that’s not being kept in a dark, enclosed space away from everyone else, I don’t know what is.
@ Jenny: You don’t think I might be twisted enough without your bad influence?
Ah! Another illusion shattered. And there I was, thinking of you in a long medievalish gown, perhaps holding a lily, an expression of beatific serenity on your face, with nary a stain on a soul that will always be as pure as the driven
slushsnow.I’ve been known to deadhead roses in pajamas and oversized Wellies – does that count?
Roses that wear pajamas and oversized wellies deserve all they get.
That so sounds like something Dr Grant should have said. The normal-person-to-pedant ratio in this salon is getting dangerously low.
Dr Grant has better things to do at 4 in the morning than worry about the Lady of Shallott and her sartorial proclivities.
I’m worried that Dr Grant is even awake at such an ungodly hour. Go get some sleep, Sir.
Did someone mention mirror crackage? I can do mirror crackage. (Or would that be ‘crackery’?) Just waiting for Lancelot, you understand.
How about ‘crackerage’? But, in any case, not ‘brokerage’.
Shatternanigans.
(p.s. I think we’ve scared everyone else away.)
You can’t scare me. I’m unshockable.