The coolest thing I did this week was probably beginning the process to immortalize a cell line. Yep, you read that right- immortal cells. For those of you not fluent in the ridiculous language of biology, immortalized cells are cells that don’t stop replicating; they keep dividing and dividing and grow unchecked. There’s generally a set of checkpoints and stops that keep your normal, everyday cells from spontaneously becoming immortal, but when you immortalize cells, you keep them under ideal growing conditions until one of them “suffers a psychotic break”, to quote my postdoc, and decides to ignore the checkpoints in favor of replicating indefinitely. It’s a very long, repetitive process. The initial step of setting up the cells to grow probably takes more than two hours, and then you have to incubate them for three days at a time, for an average of twenty cycles before they start to replicate indefinitely. Every three days, they have to be washed with a chemical that will remove them from the plate they’re growing on, and then suspend them in new media, which is basically food for cells.
Although this might seem like a great anti-aging plan (in the sense that you could just set up your cells to be immortal so you’ll never need to worry about dying), it’s actually very much not a good thing when it happens in your body. Immortalized cells that no longer respond to the system that keeps them from replicating out of control result in tumors. A determining factor of whether something is cancerous is whether the cells are dividing at an abnormal pace. In fact, some of the first immortalized cell lines were developed from cancerous tumors that were being preserved for examination.
Immortal cells present a whole series of ethical conundrums. The first and most widely known of these can be found in the case of Henrietta Lacks. Henrietta Lacks was an African American woman who was treated for cervical cancer in the 1950’s. Without her knowledge, samples of her tumor were taken and preserved for observation. At the time, it wasn’t common practice to ask a patient for permission to keep samples of their cells, probably because technology was not advanced enough that such a practice was seen as necessary. This has caused various legal issues today, as ethics practices have advanced significantly.
Since you’re probably not reading this for treatises on scientific issues, I’m going to move on and talk about my life. I thought I would mention HeLa cells (cells from derived from Henrietta Lacks’ tumor), because they're are one of the things I find most fascinating about modern science, and they’re bound to come up when discussing immortal cells, so it seemed relevant.
Anyway, now onto life events. With regard to exciting things, I didn’t do too many this week. On Friday, a friend and I had a movie night- we ate way too much food and watched the 2009 Star Trek, which was an excellent movie, and I highly recommend it to anyone who hasn’t seen it. We ended up staying up really late talking about things, which was good, but lead to me falling asleep rather early the next day. :P On Saturday, my roommate came back to Boston! Which was super exciting... the room was a little lonely for a month. We’re actually going to be roommates for the next year, which should be fun. I also found out this week that we’re going to have six forced triples on our floor, and, as luck would have it, I’m in one of them. So next year I’ll be living with my current roommate and a freshman, unless things change significantly between now and the beginning of the term. It should be an... interesting year, to say the least. But, we’ve decided that we’re going to make the best of it, since that’s really all there is to do. And my cost of living will hopefully be slightly lower, which is always good. :P Anyway, that’s pretty much all of the new things that happened this week... time to go to sleep so I’m ready for the next one!
Oh, I almost forgot... I went on a run down the Charles River along the Head of the Charles course, and I took some pictures. I also took a few pictures during my walk into Boston to go to the library with some friends on Saturday.
This is Eliot Bridge, the last bridge on the course.
Here's the Cambridge Boat Club boathouse, which I think is ridiculously pretty.
This is the Harvard Men's (Weld) boathouse.
Here's another bridge (Weeks Bridge, for anyone who's been to Boston)... I mostly just liked the composition of this picture :P
I really like how geometric this building is... I've wanted to take a picture of it pretty much since I first came to Boston.
The Hancock Tower, near the library.
This is the church across from the library... the architecture is gorgeous!
This is the facade of the Boston Public Library's Central Branch... It's very different from Seattle's Central Library (here, for anyone who hasn't seen it)
This is the courtyard, with a fountain IN THE MIDDLE OF THE LIBRARY. So cool. And yes, that's a wedding off on the left. It was adorable. :)
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