Day 4 – Thursday 19 November
by Girish Sagaram
The first exercise of the day was a practical session in the art of tissue culture. This is where live tissue is grown from cells extracted from either plants or animals. The group was asked to bring in samples of animal tissue to use for this purpose. When animals are killed for human consumption the meat is kept chilled to keep it fresh. The concept of ‘freshness’ actually means that cells in the meat can still be alive. Marrow cells are particularly useful for tissue culture as they are sealed within bone and therefore at lower risk of bacterial and fungal contamination. To begin we first needed to chop up and separate living cells from the bone, skin and other material. This had to be done in the clean air environment of the sterile hoods. The majority of participants used the ‘proper’ hoods installed in the lab. Other’s (including myself) decided to test out the DIY hoods we made on Monday. This was a challenge since our hood, made of a plastic tub, was much smaller than the real thing and the smell of dead fish suggested that our air flow was somewhat ‘sub-laminar’. When we cut open one of our fish we discovered it was pregnant, it’s stomach contained twenty or so small fry, not eggs but actual tiny fish. We put these aside and tried to chop up as much spinal tissue as possible whilst trying to minimise the amount of guts and other detrits that could lead to bacterial or fungal infection of our tissue culture.
The need for sterility (control) made me wonder how this science was developed early last century and reminded me of the Julian Huxley story ‘The Tissue Culture King’ In the story these kinds of experiments were conducted in a remote jungle, in simple wooden huts without electricity or running water.
We placed the chopped up cells (in our case a kind of fish paste) into flasks containing substrate materials such as a felt-like polymer scaffold for the tissue to grow onto and added a liquid growing medium of sugars and amino acids. A common type of medium contains foetal calf serum which caused some concern among members of the group. When we learned that the medium used today didn’t contain foetal calf serum some of us breathed a small sigh of relief, and then wondered why.
Punctuated by video presentations from Markus Schmidt (Synbiosafe Trailer) and Daisy Ginsberg (The synthetic Kingdom), discussion continued around the ethics of biological research and the biological arts, including the definition of ‘consciousness’ or whether our treatment of animals should be predicated on their ability to feel pain. Issues of safety also came up. How do we know what all this technology could lead to? Ideas about the future of nanotechnology and synthetic biology such as those of Raymond Kurzweil and others seem to suggest that the potential dangers of technology are never entirely clear, but living in fear of technology through ignorance is perhaps more dangerous.
In the midst of all this heated debate we did find time to check on the results of Monday’s experiment. The swabs we had taken around campus yielded very little of interest. Try as we might I’m pretty sure no-one found anything growing on their dishes. Despite this strange result I remain hyperaware of the potential of nasty bacteria and make a point of washing my hands regularly.
