Egg & Ego: An Almost True Story of Life in the Biology Lab

198 Pages·1999·3.39 MB·English

by  J. M. W. Slack (auth.)

E~
E
Springer Science+Business Media, LLC
An Almost True Story
of Life in the Biology Lab
J.M.WSLACK
Springer
].MW Slack
Departmem of Biology and Biochemistry
University of Bath
Bath BA2 7AY
UK
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Slack, ].M.W (Jonathan Michael Wyndham), 1949-
Egg and ego: an almost true story of life in the biology lab /
].MW Slack.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-387-98560-2 ISBN 978-1-4612-1420-5 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-4612-1420-5
1. Science-Humor. 2. Biology-Research-Humor. 1. Title.
PN6231.S4S57 1998
818'.5407-dc21 98-7732
Printed on acid-free paper.
© 1999 Springer Science+Business Media New York
Originally published by Springer-Verlag New York, Inc.in 1999
All rights reserved. This work may not be translated or copied in whole or in part without
the written permission of the publisher Springer Science+Business Media, LLC ,
except for brief excerpts in connection with reviews or schol-
arly analysis. Use in connection with any form of information storage and retrieval, elec
tranic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known
or hereafter developed is forbidden.
The use of general descriptive names, trade names, trademarks, etc., in this publication,
even if the former are not especially identified, is not to be taken as a sign that such names,
as understood by the Trade Marks and Merchandise Marks Act, may accordingly be used
freely by anyone.
Praduction coordinated by Impressions Book andJoumal Services, Inc., and managed by
Steven Pisano; manufacturing supervised by Jeffrey Taub.
Typeset by Impressions Book andJoumal Services, Inc., Madison, Wl.
9 8 7 6 5 432 1
ISBN 978-0-387-98560-2
To Janet, Becky and Pippa
Contents
Prologue: Cosmic Egg and Human Ego ix
Chapter 1. The Experiment 1
What we did in the slaughterhouse, and afterwards.
Chapter 2. The Greasy Pole 13
How I got up it myself.
Chapter 3. The Growth Factors 35
The most expensive substances in the world.
Postscript: Molecular Biology, Be and AC.
Chapter 4. On the Catwalk: Publication and Presentation 59
What scientists and actors have in common.
Chapter 5. The Frog and Its Spawn 75
From pregnancy test to the cover of Cell.
Chapter 6. Who's Who in the Lab 103
From the candidate to the chairman, who they are, what they do, and why.
Chapter 7. Laboratory Life and Death 117
Radiation, genetic engineering, animals, computers, technology transfer.
Chapter 8. The Ground Plan of Evolution 135
Why all animals are really the same.
Chapter 9. Paying for It All 151
Where satisfaction means unending exponential growth.
Chapter 10. The Case of the Headless Frog 171
Science and the media.
Epilogue 187
Bibliography 189
Index 191
vii
Prologue: Cosmic Egg
and Human Ego
This is a book about scientists and what it is like to be a scientist today
More specifically, it is about life in the biology lab in the era of genetic en
gineering. The public is often fearful of the closed world of the genetic en
gineers, so I have tried to lift the curtain that shrouds it-to go inside the
laboratory and expose the hopes, fears, and motivations of the people who
live there. When we look at what the scientists are dOing, we find it is not
so strange after all. Their world is a competitive struggle to get money for
research, another struggle to get their experiments to work, and yet another
struggle to publish the results in the most fashionable journals. In these
competitions, many fall by the wayside, but a few succeed and become
stars, adored by their specialist public much as successful actors, musi
cians, or sportspersons are admired by wider society Indeed, the egos of
the research stars are just as large as those of the better-known professions,
and they behave in ways quite recognisable to outsiders, with a familiar
personal motivation toward publicity and career development.
At the same time, I have tried to explain some recent advances in biol
ogy and the excitement they have generated. The "egg" in my title is partly
a real egg, the subject of our research, and partly a cosmic egg, represent
ing the great potency of science. Science is full of very specialised studies
on very small, detailed questions. Just occasionally, the answer to one of
these questions behaves like an egg. It hatches into a wholly new field of
knowledge that grows exponentially and generates enormous changes for
academic science and, a little later, enormous practical benefits-and oc
casionally problems-for the wider society
The book starts in Chapter 1 with a particular experiment I conducted
in 1986. I am a developmental biologist-that is, one who wishes to un
derstand how living organisms develop from eggs or seeds-and the ex
periment concerned the identification of a key substance controlling ani
mal development. The result of the experiment was an important one in
terms of shaping my own career and work. In other chapters (3, 5, and 8)
I explore some of the ramifications of three scientific fields that my own
work has impinged on: the biochemistry of growth factors, the develop
mental biology of early embryos, and the evolution of developmental mech
anisms in the hiStory of life. These chapters explain some of the key ideas
ix
x PROLOGUE
and conclusions reached in recent years and try to communicate some of
the excitement felt by those engaged in the work.
These chapters represent the egg. But science is produced not just
through the procedures of hypothesis and experiment, important though
these are. Science has its own living, working environment with its own
culture; an examination of this brings us to the ego. To understand what it
is like to be a scientist, it is just as important to appreciate people's motiva
tions and behaviour as the formal aspects of their work. There are many
books on the philosophy of science, but perhaps because these are mostly
written by nonscientists, they do not give any idea of the actual day-to-day
nature of the work. I feel it is important to remedy this defiCiency, for the
benefit both of students contemplating a career in the life sciences and of
those in the general public interested in what science is really like. So the
remaining chapters of the book deal with various incidents I have seen,
heard of, or been a part of myself. In these sections I have perhaps empha
sised the dramatic and played down the long periods of relatively hum
drum activity that exist for any profession, but it is nonetheless a story of
real life in the biological laboratory It describes the system of academic sci
ence-where the money comes from, the career paths that people follow,
and the endUring vanities of scientists that make them resemble actors as
much as any other profession. My experience is mostly in the United King
dom, but science is international in character, and the differences between
the United Kingdom and the United States are much less Significant than
are the similarities.
All the events recounted really happened, or are at least thought by
someone to have happened. I have, however, transposed a few events in
time and space in order to make the story flow more smoothly I have also
in these chapters altered the names of certain individuals and institutions
to protect them from embarrassment. In this category are James Samson,
Tobias Fortune,jack Large,john Field, George, Ben, Sylvia,jaspar, and the
professors at the University of Portree. Indeed the "Serious Disease Soci
ety," and the "University of Portree," do not really exist, although they have
a certain resemblance to real institutions. In a few cases where individuals
might be seriously embarrassed, they have been "composited"; that is, they
are not Single people but are instead mixed characters possessing attrib
utes drawn from several different real people. This is true of Messrs. Simon
Law, Bob Franklin, and Mehmet Hussein. It is in these respects that my
narrative is an almost true rather than a literally true story of life in the bio
logical laboratory
My message is that science is indeed a fusion of the egg and the ego, the
boundless promise of the small new idea combined with the vanities and
competition of ordinary human beings. It can only be fully understood if
PROLOGUE xi
this dual character is appreciated. Lest some be shocked by what they read,
I want to emphasise that I have no intention of putting off able people who
want to enter science. All professions have their trials and tribulations, and
this is no exception. Academic science does share with acting a high drop
out rate, as there are many more entrants than the system can possibly ac
commodate in the long run. However, most of those who leave go to do
something else that is perfectly valuable and worthwhile; and there is
everything to be said for ensuring that at least some people in other areas of
life, such as politics, business, or teaching, know what science is like on the
inside. At the same time, academic science will never be short of recruits.
There is a magic to the well-executed experiment, and the occasional expe
rience of it is enough to drive people on and sustain them through all the
failures and disappointments that consume most of their time.
I also do not wish to undermine the validity of science. It is true that
the dry, formal, deductive character of science is a fiction. It is maintained
largely because scientists and nonscientists alike seem to wish to maintain
that science has some special status that guarantees the truth of its findings.
Any hint that values might enter science from outside sources, such as eco
nomic imperatives or the fashions of wider society, are strongly resisted be
cause it is felt that the recognition of such influences would weaken the au
thority of the results. It is also true that the modern practitioners of "science
studies" will use such examples to argue that the profession of science is
merely a priesthood and that there is no more value in molecular biology
than in astrology or homeopathy. This is not the place to pursue this argu
ment in detail, but lest my book be misunderstood, I want to put on record
that I do believe that the results of science are on the whole correct and
valid. I think it is difficult to identify anything that uniquely distinguishes
scientific knowledge from other forms of knowledge; the ultimate justifica
tion of value should be sought in successful practical application rather
than in philosophical debate. The practical applications of the fields I shall
discuss in this book are just beginning to be realised. But when they are
fully realised, they will change the world profoundly.
].M.W Slack
CHAPTER
The Experiment
They looked like tiny sausages, and never had I been so pleased to see a
sausage. They were actually little pieces cut out from frog embryos, so
small that they could only be seen clearly down a microscope. Normally,
such small dumps of cells will round up into balls and stay that way for
several days, remaining alive but in a very inscrutable way, as they do not
do anything much to attract the observer's attention. But the ones I was
looking at had elongated into sausages. I knew that their unusual shape
was due to their having been treated with a protein we had purified from
cows' brains. I also knew that the elongation I saw meant that the cells
were developing in a different way from usual and that they would deci
sively change the course of my future work.
This was an experiment. The treated tissue explants were the experi
mental cases, and the untreated ones, taken from the same embryos on the
same day and kept in the same salt solution, were the controls. Described
like this, the experiment may not sound either interesting or impressive.
But it actually marked the convergence of two lines of scientific work both
extending back about 50 years. One was the science of experimental em
bryology, which asks: "How do embryos develop?" The other was the
study of tissue culture, or the growth of cells in tubes or bottles outside the