What's Eating You?: People and Parasites by Eugene H. Kaplan

Author:Eugene H. Kaplan [Kaplan, Eugene H.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Nonfiction, Biology, Science, Reference, Health & Fitness, Medicine
ISBN: 978-1400832200
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2010-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

NO PRACTICAL PURPOSE

A scientist does not set out to find a “cure for cancer.” He or she chooses to investigate a problem inspired by an interest in a field of study with no practical intent. A scientist is supposed to be like a curious child, investigating whatever strikes his or her intellectual fancy.

In these modern times, even an intent to answer a scientific question is directed by Big Brother. If the researcher does not envisage a “practical” purpose, it will be difficult to obtain the increasingly large amounts of funds necessary to acquire sophisticated instrumentation and graduate students.

People like me, who wander through field and feces, are anachronisms. I am interested in the purest of science, the resolution of problems that have no practical consequence. To my mind, science should have no agenda. Nor should a researcher direct his or her investigation toward a particular complex goal, for example, “finding a cure.” Science is incremental; resolution of a problem by one person contributes to the resolution of the next person’s problem, and so on. Eventually someone sees the big picture and ties together his predecessors’ work into a major discovery. She gets a Nobel Prize—on the backs of her predecessors.

Nowadays it is practical to choose a “fashionable” field that has “useful” consequences in order to have a good chance to get funding. Until a year or two ago it was difficult to study stem cells. Funding depended on political interference in a ghastly distortion of the essence of science. If even one person in a lab was performing “prohibited” research, the whole lab, with its many scientists, could have lost government support.

Something similar happened in Russia in the early days of communism. A powerful, politically connected geneticist named Lysenko pushed back genetic research there for generations. This state-sponsored kind of interference goes along with past political positions tinged with the preposterous notion that “intelligent design” is science.

My unfunded project had no obvious practical consequences. The question I was trying to answer was: Is it possible to culture monogenetic trematodes in a dish? That’s all. Not to develop a cure for an ailment, not even of the fishes upon which they live. (Although, years later, a species of Gyrodactylus decimated salmon farms and a tissue culture technique was needed to find an agent that would prevent the epizootic [epidemic]. My previous pointless-seeming system might have been part of the solution.)

The first step would be to culture killie skin cells; to develop a “line” of skin cells and grow them in a dish. Then to use a layer of these cells as a substratum for the monogenetic trematodes to live on, like a herd of cows eating grass.

We cultured skin epithelial tissue from isolated cells extracted from mature killie skin. In the case of human stem cell culture, cells are taken from an early human embryo, sometimes a microscopic ball of a few cells. These cells are destined to become the tissues of the body, but at this early stage they can become any kind of cell, hence the term “stem cell.

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