I
COUNT SIX LITTLEziggurats side by side, stolid
and squat and obviously man-made. They are not
going anywhere, but in between them things are
on the move.
Circles of dots have begun to roil and rotate,
angry blimps rising up among the static trapezoids,
their contents swirling in a frenzy of disorder. Then,
in each one, a ring solidifies and grows in the chaos.
It’s fleeting, and the jiggling hoop is soon churned
back into the mass as the riot spreads unchecked.
These dots are human cells and their acrobatics
are the beginnings of human life, though not as we
know it. There is no womb, no pulsing maternal
heart. Instead, the cells are born in an elaborate
plastic chamber under constant video surveillance,
and I am witness to their first two days of existence,
compressed into a sparse 18 seconds by the wonders
of time-lapse video.
The architect of this dazzling piece of cellular
music hall is bioengineer Jianping Fu, whose field of
expertise – mechanobiology – tries to understand
how living cells change in response to physical forces.
Working from his University of Michigan lab
on the outskirts of industrial Detroit, Fu is bringing
the measured mindset of the machine-builder to theJianping Fu looks on as
postdoctoral fellow Yi Zheng
examines stained stem cells.
At left, the development of
two stem cell groupings at
6 hour increments, from
JIANPING FU0 – 36 hours.
A new device for bioengineering
embryo-like structures is shedding fresh
light on those earliest, most mysterious
- and largely unobservable – moments
of human development. Great leaps
forward in safe, successful pregnancies
and congenital defect prevention await,
but so do a host of ethical questions.
PAUL BIEGLER reports.
Issue 86 COSMOS – 71STEM CELL FRONTIER