Posts Tagged ‘leukemia’
“In the beginning there is the stem cell; it is the origin of an organism’s life”*…
C.H. Waddington’s powerful image of embryonic stem cells specializing on a rolling landscape has captivated biologists since the 1950s. As Philip Ball reports, experimental data is finally confirming– and complicating– his visionary ideas…
By the middle of the 20th century, it had begun to seem that biology was almost solved. Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection explained how organisms change and adapt. The modern science of genetics showed how it works at the molecular scale. Genes governing the traits of organisms get passed down from parent to offspring, and random mutations create the variations from which natural selection picks the “fittest.” Natural selection and genetics fitted together in what the biologist Julian Huxley christened “the modern synthesis” in his 1942 book). Once it was shown in 1953 that the genes are encoded by DNA, the rest of biology looked like little more than piecing together details.
But not everyone was satisfied. The British biologist Conrad Hal Waddington), known to his friends and colleagues as Wad, thought this focus on genes was all very well. But it wasn’t clear to him, or anyone else, exactly how genes shape the forms and features of organisms — how they reliably generate all the different tissues of the body, in all the right places, during embryonic development. Around the same time that Huxley unveiled the modern synthesis, Waddington presented a novel picture of how this might unfold.
He visualized the developmental process as a landscape with hills and valleys that split every so often like those in a river network. At the very top of the highest hill he imagined a ball, which represented a population of cells in their earliest embryonic form — what we now call stem or pluripotent cells, which have the potential to become any cell type. The progression of the cells towards their fates — to become, say, skin cells, muscle cells, or nerve cells — is like the ball rolling downhill through the landscape.
When the ball reaches a branching point (bifurcation), the model’s “gravity” pulls it to one track or the other: In scientific terms, it must differentiate. Through a particular sequence of such branching decisions, Waddington argued, cells specialize into their mature types, or fates, each expressing a particular set of genes. The cells are restricted to a small number of well-defined states because they are “canalized,” in Waddington’s lexicon: trapped and channeled by the sides of the valley. In this way, a limited number of cell types reliably arise from the activity of an army of genes.
Waddington’s landscape has been “remarkably useful as a conceptual scaffold,” said James Briscoe, a developmental biologist at the Francis Crick Institute in London. “The core ideas — that development is progressive, that cell states are distinct, that bifurcations represent [cell] fate decisions, that canalization implies robustness — all survive.”
“There’s so much richness to some of the concepts Waddington was trying to share,” said Susanne Rafelski, a biochemist at the Institute for Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine in Seattle.
But the concept was more of a visual metaphor than a representation of an actual biological process. Or so it seemed. In the past several years, researchers have mapped out the real topography of cell-state spaces — in effect, Waddington’s landscapes — from experimental data collected from many thousands of cells over the course of embryonic development. Those analyses are revealing that development is not a mere readout of a genetic program, but rather a dynamic process in which communities of cells build themselves, and the very landscape they navigate, by mutual negotiation and interaction, into an organism.
This cartography of development is now helping researchers understand how identical cells in the early embryo develop into the distinct tissues and cell types of a complex organism. This matters enormously for regenerative medicine and stem-cell engineering, Briscoe said: “If you understand the landscape topology and know where the bifurcations lie, you can in principle design methods that steer cell populations to desired states with precision, rather than by trial and error.”
Waddington’s metaphor, then, could be the key to understanding and reshaping possibilities for what cells, tissues, and embryos can be…
Read on: “How Does Life Unfold? A Landscape Metaphor Comes Into Its Own.” from @philipcball.bsky.social in @quantamagazine.org.
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As we appreciate adaptability, we might send healing birthday greetings to Robert Peter Gale; he was born on this date in 1945. A physician and medical researcher, he conducted important research into leukemia and other bone marrow disorders (e.g., aplastic anemia). Gale was a a pioneer in bone marrow transplantation and co-founded the International Bone Marrow Registry. But he is perhaps most widely known for his assistance to foreign governments in treating radiation victims – to the Soviet Union (1986) after the Chernobyl disaster and to Brazil (1987) following an accident in Goiania. As a specialist in bone marrow transplants, he volunteered to treat Chernobyl victims and was invited by Mikhail Gorbachev to travel with a group to Moscow immediately after the April 1986 accident. He performed bone marrow transplants on 13 Chernobyl victims (though many of the highly exposed Chernobyl survivors have since died from latent radiation effects).
“The midpoint in medicine between excessive emotional involvement with patients and a complete lack of empathy is not a simple one to locate”*…
In sixteenth-century Leuven, a troubled man sent for a physician to help him with his unusually long nose. The man believed that his nose was of ‘such a prodigious length’, it resembled the ‘snoute’ of an elephant. It hindered him in everything he did, to the extent that sometimes it ‘lay in the dish’ where his supper was served. His physician, at this point, artfully and carefully, ‘conveighed a long pudding’ onto the nose of the desperate man, and then with a Barber’s razor ‘finely cut away’ the offending pudding nose while his patient was drowsy from a sleeping draft. The physician prescribed him a wholesome diet and sent the man away, relieved of his extraordinarily long nose, and the burden of ‘fear of harme and inconvenience.’
This case history was described in the English translation of the medical treatise, The Touchstone of Complexions (1576) by the Dutch physician, Levinus Lemnius, as an example of ‘melancholicke’ fantasy. Instead of assuming the man was possessed by a malevolent spirit or demon (a possible diagnosis at this time), that he was a ‘lunatic’ and beyond treatment, or dismissing his delusion to his face, the sixteenth-century physician in the story entered into the world of the ‘phantasie’ to try and help his patient’s obvious distress.
We very rarely read histories of incidents from this period where physicians are concerned for the emotional and mental wellbeing of their patients to this degree. Usually the tendency has been to emphasize the ‘barbarous and debilitating’ treatments of early modern medicine – its bloodletting, purging, and surgery without anaesthetic, or to highlight the moralizing religious doctrine behind treatments of illnesses of the mind or ‘passions’. Yet, here was a doctor trying an imaginative solution to a problem he believed stemmed from an imbalance of the humour ‘melancholy’ in his patient’s body….
More examples of empathetic early healers and the bizarre cases they “cured– the man with frogs in stomach, the man whose buttocks were made of glass– at “The Man with an Elephant’s Nose.”
Body of Work: Meditations on Mortality from the Human Anatomy Lab
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As we make it better, we might send revolutionary birthday greetings to Edward Donnall “Don” Thomas; he was born on this date in 1920. A physician and medical researcher, Thomas shared (with Joseph E. Murray) the 1990 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for his work in transplanting bone marrow from one person to another – an achievement related to the cure of patients with acute leukemia and other blood cancers or blood diseases. Although this prize usually goes to scientists doing basic research with test tubes, Thomas was a doctor doing hands-on clinical research with patients.
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