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Tuesday, December 18, 2007

Assignment: Feed Jonathan Golob’s Embryonic Stem Cells

posted by on December 18 at 13:00 PM

This past week, I received an email from a man named Jonathan Golob.

Public Intern-

Feed my embryonic stem cells. I’ll show you how and promise only a slight risk of permanent genomic modification.

- Jonathan Golob

aka Dear Science

I drove downtown to visit Jonathan at the UW Medical Center in South Lake Union. The building looked like something out of a science fiction movie. Big sheets of tinted glass shot up into the sky at odd angles and I saw a sign for Vulcan chained to a fence.

Jonathan let me into the building. In the lobby hung shadowy pictures of animals (post genetic modification?). Jonathan and I took the elevator up to his lab space. Before I could see the live cells, I would have to scrub my hands and arms with soapy water. I turned on the faucet and brown rusty water exploded out of the pipes and onto my shirt. We waited a moment until the water was clean, and then scrubbed our hands and arms the way real doctors do. I pretended I was Goran Visnjic and told John he could be Maura Tierney… the dumpy depressed daughter of Sally Field on ER.

Next, I put on rubber gloves and Jonathan led me into the room with the live cells. He asked me for the second time if I had a suppressed immune system, because the cells we were about to handle had genes that were added using a dormant HIV virus. Jonathan and his colleagues had taken out the proteins that make HIV so deadly and implanted healthy proteins into the virus instead. It was “probably safe,” to handle them, “But, if you had a surpressed immune system you could possibly be affected if you touched the cells with your bare hands,” he said.

Jonathan opened up a large incubator, and took out a tray of yellow petri dishes. He explained to me that the cells were stuck to the bottom of each petri dish, and the water had turned from pink to yellow as the cells had sucked up all the nutrients.

These cells were important. Eventually, Golob and his research associates wanted to implant the cells into human hearts to help them heal after a heart attack.

I watched as Jonathan removed a sterile plastic tube and hooked it up to a vacuum. Jonathan used the tube to suck up all of the waste water out of the petri dishes. He took out another tube and stuck it into a vial filled with purple liquid, which contained nutrient water colored by beets. When the cells sucked up all the nutrients out of the water, the beet juice turned yellow. Using a hand-held vacuum, Jonathan sucked 48ml of purple nutrient water out of the vial and then dropped a few ml of the nutrient water into each petri dish.

During the entire procedure, Jonathan had to carefully balance his hands and arms so that no body part touched the inside of his labarotory station. He explained to me that each station had a fan which circulated air into a vent above to ensure that no bacteria could hang around for very long. All of the tubes had to be opened in the labaratory station so they would remain sterile, and the tips of the tubes could not come within a foot of a human limb, lest the cells die after contact with our own bacteria. Jonathan hovered his forearms through a slit in the glass that enclosed his entire station.

After he was done, Jonathan asked if I wanted a chance to feed the cells. Then, as if he had just realized how much scientific damage I could potentially cause, Jonathan reminded me if I accidentally sucked up the cells instead of the waste water, or touched the tip of the tube to my skin before dropping the liquid in the petrie dishes, I could ruin hundreds of dollars worth of cells.

I lifted a sterile tube out of a plastic container sitting to my right and began to unwrap it. “Oops, you can’t just do that,” Jonathan said. “You have to open the tube in the glass enclosure. You can just throw that one out.”

DSC_0003.jpg

The next tube I opened the right way, and I sucked up all the waste water and fed the cells the purple water. Easy. Jonathan praised my forearm strength.

Jonathan encouraged me to take the SLUT to Westlake Center, just to check it out, but it took forever to arrive. It was raining. I gave up and went home.

Steven Blum
Public Intern

Assignments? PublicIntern@thestranger.com

RSS icon Comments

1

on the plus side, Peter Jackson signed on to produce "The Hobbit" (plus it's sequel), to be released in '10 and '11. Hooray!

Posted by Sporting Fellow | December 18, 2007 1:01 PM
2

baby killer.

Posted by cochise. | December 18, 2007 1:02 PM
3

It's vial, with an 'a'.

Can you really implant cells into a virus? That sounds backwards.

Posted by NaFun | December 18, 2007 1:07 PM
4

For a measly off-site one trick pony columnist, Golob sure is bossy.

Posted by Lake | December 18, 2007 1:07 PM
5

Steven-
Petri dish doesn't have a second "e", and that kind of "vile" is spelled "vial". Sorry to nitpick.

Posted by Cori | December 18, 2007 1:07 PM
6

Thanks #3 and #5. Fixed.

Posted by Steven Blum | December 18, 2007 1:11 PM
7

Remember when Colin Powell's son was the chairman of the FCC

that was hilarious

Posted by Lake | December 18, 2007 1:11 PM
8

funny, I came here to comment on the vile/vial thing too. 'Course, you could spell it "phial", too, and be super old skool.

Posted by el ganador | December 18, 2007 1:11 PM
9

It's spelled "vial" Steve, not "vile." Oh, and while I'm at it, it's a "petri" dish. @1, yeah, I'm happy the turds at New Line finally figured out which side of the bread has the butter on it.

Posted by Fifty-Two-Eighty | December 18, 2007 1:14 PM
10

That's really cute that you think of yourself as Goran Visnjic, and made Jonathan be Maura Tierney. I'm sure he really appreciates being the whiny alcoholic one.

Posted by Aislinn | December 18, 2007 1:16 PM
11

gee, I wasn't aware this post had ANYFUCKING THING to do with the lameass/mother-raping abortion known at LOTR or that fucking old Teutonic cunt Tolkien or fucking, "I used to be an interesting filmmaker of sorts prior to my pedantic adaptation of the aforementioned overwrought fantasy abortion", Peter Jackson.

oh, and nice job, Public Intern. I'm very glad you didn't cause the extinction of mankind by mishandling ye olde phials and exlixers...

Posted by michael strangeways | December 18, 2007 1:27 PM
12

Wuss! Back in my day, we wrangled stem cells with horses and lariats!

Posted by NapoleonXIV | December 18, 2007 1:30 PM
13

Nice forearms, tho.

Posted by NapoleonXIV | December 18, 2007 1:31 PM
14

Well that's definitely an interesting way to play around with HIV.

Posted by Mr. Poe | December 18, 2007 1:35 PM
15

What, no gold farming?

Posted by Will in Seattle | December 18, 2007 1:35 PM
16

It could be worse--while Golob's quite charming, he does look the sort who could absent-mindedly turn a lab assistant into some kind of mutant fly.

Posted by NapoleonXIV | December 18, 2007 1:45 PM
17

I like that idea, but only because I love The Fly.

"You can't be serious! A monkey just came apart in there!"

Posted by Mr. Poe | December 18, 2007 1:49 PM
18

More nitpicking, sorry. Stem cells are several orders of magnitude bigger than viruses. Viruses are just a bit of DNA wrapped in a protein enclosure. Stem cells have nuclei (which, themselves, are full of DNA), mitochondria, ribosomes, amd various other organelles. A stem cell wouldn't fit in a virus, so that whole bit doesn't make any sense. Much more likely, the dead HIV specimens were being inserted into the stem cells, and not the other way 'round.

Posted by Andrew Pendleton | December 18, 2007 1:52 PM
19

Maura Tierney is not dumpy. P.I. (AKA mini-savage), after you turn 30 you will realize that people who don't go out at night shirtless and slathered in baby oil are not all dumpy. I would think of J.G. as more of the anthony edwards type...No Jon, you aren't clooney either, don't even try to argue that point.

Posted by wisepunk | December 18, 2007 1:54 PM
20

"Much more likely, the dead HIV specimens were being inserted into the stem cells, and not the other way 'round."

Yes- Andrew- that's what I wrote:

"the cells we were about to handle had genes that were added using a dormant HIV virus."

Posted by Steven Blum | December 18, 2007 1:57 PM
21

SLOG FIGHT!!!

Posted by Mr. Poe | December 18, 2007 2:00 PM
22

It's no fun until someone mutates another eye out.

Posted by NapoleonXIV | December 18, 2007 2:02 PM
23

People who can't be bothered to feed their own embryonic stem cells shouldn't have them. Get a dog, OK?

Damn Idaho-Montana yuppies.

Posted by elenchos | December 18, 2007 2:05 PM
24

Kinda odd that just anyone can go into the facility and mess around with stuff that probably has public funding and all it's strings attached.
No security?
No procedures that had to be signed off?

Very odd, and somewhat lax, IMO.

Posted by observer | December 18, 2007 2:08 PM
25

Are you kidding? The kindergarten kids line up for the right to take the embryonic stem-cells home for the weekends.

Posted by NapoleonXIV | December 18, 2007 2:18 PM
26

Cha-cha-cha ChiaCells!

Posted by Quimby McF | December 18, 2007 2:28 PM
27

I keep misreading the headline as "Assignment: Feed Jonathan Golob Embryonic Stem Cells."

Posted by NapoleonXIV | December 18, 2007 2:45 PM
28

@18 and here I thought viruses were RNA with a nice crystalline structure that reedits the host cell ...

Sshhhh. Don't tell the siRNA or miRNA, they might get jealous.

Posted by Will in Seattle | December 18, 2007 3:09 PM
29

Sweet assignment, intern! Loved it. =)

Posted by wench | December 18, 2007 6:38 PM
30

@27 - Me too. Also, I read the entire post because I thought the email said "Feed ME embryonic stem cells", furthering my belief that something really wacky was going to happen.

Posted by Chris in Tampa | December 18, 2007 8:48 PM
31

Oh, you're so adorable in the lab.

Posted by Electronicoffee | December 28, 2007 9:21 AM
32

Oh, you're so adorable in the lab.

Posted by Electronicoffee | December 28, 2007 9:21 AM

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