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Tissue Culture-Alexis Carrel was not the first man to experiment on disembodied tissues and the effects of diverse fluids on those tissues. Yale's Biologist Ross Granville Harrison, a scientist as introverted as Scientist Carrel is extroverted, as tall and spare as Carrel is short and stocky, as pallid as Carrel is pink, originated the method. Just 30 years ago Dr. Harrison placed a piece of embryo frog's nerve tissue in a drop of frog lymph. The nerve grew. While others elaborated the method, grew bits of eyes, ears, limbs, and bones in glass flasks. Dr. Harrison, retiring this month as chairman of Yale's zoology department, stayed with embryos, strove to find out what made certain cells in a subdividing ovum become eyes and nothing but eyes, certain others legs and nothing but legs. His good friend. Professor Hans Spemann of the University of Freiburg worked on the same problems. They exchanged information and students. Dr. Spemann got a Nobel Prize in 1935, which many a scientist thought should have been given jointly to Dr. Harrison.
On Jan. 17, 1912, four years after Dr. Harrison's experiment. Dr. Carrel placed a fleck of tissue from the heart of an unhatched chick in a glass flask with some nutritious pink fluid.*In 48 hours the fleck had doubled in size and sprouted fluffy grey filaments which made it look like a tiny, quarter-inch dandelion gone to seed. Two days later the growth was four times its original size; two days later eight times. Dr. Carrel began to trim it. Today, 26 years later, cuttings from successive outgrowths of that first piece of embryonic heart grow in Dr. Carrel's black laboratories.
The lack of an aseptic pump which would perfuse whole organs, keep them alive outside the parent body, served to restrict Dr. Carrel to the study of tissue alone. Tissue did not require circulating blood, could be cultivated merely in a fluid bath. In an immense series of experiments covering the next 18 years, he observed the physiology and morphology of all types of body cells. In his foreword to Dr. Parker's book, he sums up the work of these years: "The study of the influence of different media on tissues living in vitro has led to the discovery of substances that stimulate cell proliferation, of other substances that maintain the life of the tissues without increasing their volume, and of still others that retard growth. . . . The observation of the effects of these various media on the different cell types is leading to new hypotheses concerning the mechanisms of fundamental processes, such as growth, regeneration and senility."
And, even more practically, Dr. Carrel attributes to his long work in tissue culture a demonstration "that viruses of malignant tumors are either present almost everywhere in normal tissue or generated spontaneously by normal tissues under the influence of certain chemicals." To Dr. Carrel, the findings presage the solution of mankind's cancer problem.