The Workbench
SEEDmag’s just featured Martin Chalfie’s workbench – an interesting read..
Excerpt:
Martin Chalfie is perhaps best known for his Nobel Prize-winning work on GFP, a jellyfish molecule that glows bright green when exposed to blue light. By injecting it into bacteria more than a decade ago to create the first tool for visualizing biological processes in living cells, Chalfie transformed the life sciences. “I realized this was going to be an extremely important tool,” Chalfie says. “What I didn’t know at the time was how far-reaching the impact of this molecule was going to be.” Now the pioneering scientist is busy illuminating mysteries beyond the glow of a curious jellyfish gene. Seed recently visited him at his office at Columbia University to root around his lab equipment, hear about how his life has changed since receiving the Nobel, and find out why he pokes worms with his eyebrow hairs.
Pia Ednie-Brown
What I loved was Oliver Sack’s workbench: he has a picture of Stromatolites on his pinup board. He makes a point of mentioning this, and WA:
http://seedmagazine.com/interactive/workbench/oliver_sacks/
Everything else on that board are his friends and heros.
Notice he also has a platypus and the word ‘Darwin’ on his shelf.
Reminds of this line from Ballard, that Adrian Lahoud emailed me yesterday:
“Each one of us is as old as the entire biological kingdom, and our bloodstreams are tributaries of the great sea of its total memory.” The Drowned World, J.G. Ballard, Millennium 1999, p.41.
Dec 05, 2009 @ 12:35 pm