Molecular Biology

There is something deeply soothing about the tissue culture room. The hint of ethanol and bleach tinging the air, the buzz of incubators. A hum like a tuning fork rings out as a CO2 pumps kicks on, drifting across air warmed by the electronics. The world is narrow here, working in a sterile hood. You watch your gloved hands work through a pane of glass, arm cloaked in a lab coat, no skin showing. The air filters in the hood purr, a low noise, but pervasive. It silences the sounds from the hall, the sound of industry and progress. It muffles the hectic chatter from the hospital next door, and eases you into a state of relaxed focus. Your gloved hands deftly maneuver vials and dishes, the warmth of heated glass soothing against your palm. The cells you are working with are mammalian, and thrive on warmth the way you do. Everything you touch is warmed to the temperature of blood, a comfortable and familiar temperature.

Tilting a dish, the rough texture of cells growing across the bottom can be seen against the light. These aren't bacteria, able to grow from a single cell into a colony of millions. No, these cells are a tissue, a collective unit, a repeating pattern of similar cells, working together to maintain the whole. They cannot live in isolation from one another. Each cell grows and divides by listening to signals from its neighbors. Each cell sending a chemical signal to the others saying "I am here! Keep growing."

If you put too few cells in a dish, the signal is lost. The cells can't make it on their own. They reach out, becoming long and thin as they seek out other cells. Eventually, if they can't get the signals they die, unable to grow or divide without support from others.

This tiny microcosm of life is my workplace, nurturing and caring for the cells, coaxing them into doing what we want, observing changes in their machinery smaller even than microscopic. Manipulation of the cellular world shows us how the molecular world works, atoms shifting and interacting, bonds breaking and reforming. Something as small as a different amino acid can cause diseases that wrack the entire body. Effects at the molecule expanded a trillion times to change whole lives.

This is what I do.