Today, two of my students made presentations of the progress of their work to our larger research group. I flew in from Toulouse on Easyjet, caught the Air France bus from Orly to Montparnasse, and walked the last bit, picking up a bag of croissants on the way, and still made it to the meeting on time.
They did very well. They fielded questions, and we all had a relaxed and productive discussion. One question made me think of a really interesting hypothesis for how certain teratomas might arise in the developing organism, and from what.1,2
My first Ph.D. student, whom I’ve mentored now for the last four years, made me proud. In that time, we both have grown and developed a lot in how we work together. Pretty appropriate for embryologists. She has done some first-rate molecular biology lately. We just have to decide to stop experiments at some point and write it up, as the amount of data she now has will be positively unwieldy if we continue to make progress in this vein. (In fact, starting to write it up made for some extremely productive procrastination-inspired experiments.)
What makes me proud, and a little wistful, is that she is planning, justifying, designing and executing her own experiments to build on the previous ones. I see her becoming independent, and it’s great.
Not for nothing do we say that students come out of a school of thought, or from a lineage of scientists. There is that sensation of family, of internal squabbles and differences perhaps but nonetheless solidarity.
I even started my very own immunohistochemistry experiment this afternoon. Nice day!
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1 Now I have to figure out a possible way to test it.
2 I’ve probably already mentioned this somewhere, but I am a developmental biologist because of an ovarian teratoma. I had just turned 18 and was an intern in the pathology department of my local hospital during winter break. The pathologist called me away from putting coverslips on slides (I got to be very good at that in the decades since) to see something “interesting”. He cut open the ovary and showed me the fully formed molar and dark hair growing inside. I want to know how a cell can do that. Still do.
Teratomas are fascinating. Have you read The Troublesome Offspring Of Cardinal Guzman by Louis de Berniéres? It’s the third book in a trilogy, and I highly recommend all of them if you haven’t already read them.
No, I haven’t come across them; thanks for the recommendation! Now I am very intrigued as to the link…
Fascinating, yes, but they still kind of creep me out – and have done since the first time I saw some photos, in a lecture, many moons ago.
If you’re wistful now, just wait until your student graduates and moves on… that will be a day for celebrating, but poignant too I suspect.
One of my all-time Digital Cuttlefish verses was his one about the knitted teratoma
Um. That poem seems in rather poor taste to me, as does this nasty knitted thing. But perhaps I’m just being sensitive.
Here’s a secret. DC isn’t actually all that good.
runs awayWell, we all know that I’m just an unsophistimacated Northerner who thinks poetry should rhyme, but I like it ;)
Well, that was … interesting… and skillful on the part of all participants, but (puts on her pedantic hat) not quite the same.
There is fetus in fetu and there are teratomas, and I think they’ve been conflated here. Although I suppose that formally, a fetus in fetu is kind of a teratoma that got started really, really early. (I obviously subscribe to the “parasitic twin” school of thought.)
I also think the creation looks sort of like a piece of strange fruit with a stem.
I used to knit, then whittled down to just-when-I’m-pregnant, but I’m not quite sure I’d have wanted to knit that when I was pregnant.
What makes me ponder is why every single cell in your body doesn’t develop a teratoma. They’ve all got what it takes.
Ok, off to place some boring orders.
Blast, now I’m going to have to go and look up fetus in fetu. There goes the rest of the morning.
Richard Grant? Here’s a secret – if DC ’isn’t all that good’, why are they published in BOTH of the two most recent Open Laboratory books? ;)
Oh that’s right – you are too, aren’t you? Ah, you must be making a joke, because as a judge of the 2008, you perhaps liked their work to give them the final nod, after all? A poet like yourself! I praise you on your good taste, if not your ‘running skills’. ;) I hope people buy the most recent copy, for everyone’s fine writing that’s included – such as Digital Cuttlefish’s poetry. No teratomas in it, I promise! ;)
As for the ‘nasty knitted thing’ – could it perhaps be as educational as the experience that Heather had with the teratoma in the lab? There are knitted brains (again, another work I was introduced to by DC’s poem about them!); there are even toys that apparently mimic the structure of diseases:
http://www.giantmicrobes.com/
Giant plush microbes! Best sellers include the Black Death and Ebola! You know, for kids! Or big kids. Are they bad taste too, or just because no one has grumbled about a poet who can write wonderfully about them? ;)
Personally, I’ve yet to buy a good friend their very own ‘white blood cell’ to celebrate her recent paper that was published in a reputable journal – but I do know that her partner got the chemical structure of a particularly nasty virus artistically tattooed on his ankle in celebration of his PhD. There’s over a hundred ‘science tattoos’ featured on Bora’s website, I believe? :)
Maybe we don’t all have the same tastes, and maybe we’re sometimes sensitive, Richard – but I don’t think we can deny the value of the intersection between science and art when it absolutely inspires checking things out or promote a love of wondering. Looking forward to you looking up the rest of DC’s work – it’s worth the journey to their site. :)
Heather – I’ve just started reading Freaks by Jan Bondeson. The first chapter discusses conjoined twins as the ‘result of imperfect splitting of a fertilised ovum’, which confuses me slightly, as being too early(?). I used to read that either the incomplete splitting occurred later, or that splitting completes, followed by fusion of the twin – polarised – embryos; either way allows for two primitive streaks and some organisation of form of the malnourished, mal-developed (‘parasitic’) twin (not a teratoma). Presumably, fetus in fetu refers to some kind of parthenogenetic (or teratogenic) event occurring in an embryo’s own aberrant germ cell during early development? How might that transpire?
Shorter K Sturgess: “Isn’t it great that we all like different things? But how dare you like different things than I do?”
(although I do agree with his/her overall point).
BTW, Digital Cuttlefish is on record as saying “I don’t write poetry, I write verse.” Just in case that helps. (Yes, I’m a big fan of DC – ask him, he’ll tell you!)
I have two giant microbes in my house – an HIV virus and a Strep. I reserve my right to be offended by that ugly and tasteless teratoma however.
I suspect that the OpenLab initiative is broad-minded enough to publish authors even if some of the judges don’t like their work, but I guess I’ll defer to RPG on that point, if he’s listening.
@K: I do resonate a wee bit with the “funny but tasteless” verdict, in that one might not have bought/made a knitted white blood cell for a friend with, say, leukemia…
@L: I’ll keep my eye out for that book, but that phrase doesn’t sound right to me, in the sense that conjoined twins arise from rather a ways past the time at which monozygotic twins do. I was checking on that and while I don’t want to cite it precisely as a reference_, Wikipedia does have a good clear explanationtwins in the section I link to (as opposed to the lamentable bit on “parasitic twins”.
My guess is that fetus in fetu may arise as an even later event, perhaps due to exposition to an inductive agent toward the end of the second week of pregnancy. Check out this report by an Indian group – I love these colorful abstracts: “In case report 2, 4 month female was found to have lump in the abdomen by housemaid while bathing.”
There are other interesting phenomena that one doesn’t think about much unless working in developmental genetics, like chimeric mosaicism… And the number of fertilized chicken or quail eggs I have seen with conjoined twins would be quite striking, if I had kept track.
So I forgot to finish up my thought for Lee: what if fetus in fetu is a kind of conjoined twin, but as they seem to be either in retroperitoneal or (more rarely) cranial positions, the fact that one becomes dominant would mean that you’d expect to find hindlimbs and lower vertebrae in the latter, and head structures in the former. That might be borne out by these abstracts, particularly the second.
@Richard: “I reserve my right to be offended "
You’ll get no argument from me on that front.
Heather, I’m afraid I can’t access your links without a ‘Mot de passe’.
Fetus in fetu makes me think of Russian Dolls. A somewhat distasteful notion, but I ‘reserve my right’ to posit it(?).
Ack, I don’t know why recently I have to go through that portal to get to PubMed; once I’ve logged in early in the day, I don’t notice the links have changed. Here they are again.
My next post may well be on the topic of offense; I’ve received and read a couple of intriguing academic articles on that theme.
Sounds like a great idea Heather!
My next post may well be on the topic of offense
With photos? Can’t wait! ;)
Sigh. I’m mentally constipated: it seems like a big one, and I don’t have that much time to
spend on the toiletwrite lately. I’ve been bringing the reprints to and from my house for days now.