Ode to a ‘Scope

Honoring the man who informed much of my scientific life. Dear Dr. de Duve I show roses to remember you and to celebrate the divine designs of cells.  As a post-doc I worked on the microscopic part of the cells for which Dr. de Duve won a Nobel prize (the lysosomes)and later explored principles of design in  cells and the sacred, as did he in some of his later writings.  I saw again we were hooked into the same inner universe.

I quote him a lot in Secrets of Your Cells.

See the big cell on the left, the tiny granules that make the inside of the cell look grainy or bumpy – those are the lysosomes in a  human white blood cell (WBC). This a living cell but if you ‘fix’ the cell and stain it, these granules pick up different colors –

I studied lysosomes from WBC from little boys whose cells couldn’t kill bacteria so that they would get very bad infections; most died pretty young.   So lysosomes and cells were my entry into broken human cells and to explore why these children’s cells didn’t work right.   I then continued my journeys into human blood cells to uncover what goes wrong in leukemia (cancer of the white blood cells) and can we fix that.

Christian de Duve died the same week my cell book was released and my microscope died.

Thank you Dr. de Duve for your incredible wisdom.  Only upon reading your obituary did I remember that my work as a scientist began with understanding your work.  It was your discovery that I studied under the microscope as a post-doc in immunology that introduced me to CELLS As  the  wonders of our inner world.

So my ode to a scope is also especially to you too – loving our vital dust!

If you equate the probability of the birth of a bacteria cell to chance assembly of its atoms, eternity will not suffice to produce one… Faced with the enormous sum of lucky draws behind the success of the evolutionary game, one may legitimately wonder to what extent this success is actually written into the fabric of the universe.

– Christian de Duve. “A Guided Tour of the Living Cell” (Nobel laureate and organic chemist)

As I evolved as a cellular scientist, I moved into a much more esoteric and mystical perspectives of life – a belief in divinity being part of our origins.  We aren’t accidents of nature.  I was gladly relieved to know of another scientist, a cell explorer, believed in life not being due solely for thousands of evolutionary accidents – read his quote below.

So dear Dr. de Duve thank you for guiding me to loving our cells and invisible worlds.

Many decades ago as a medical scientist I bought several microscopes for my laboratory research at UCSF Medical School.  When I left, my department chair asked did I want to take any of my equipment (paid for by the grants I had generated).  Surprised by his question, I said yes, I wanted the microscope that  I had begun to take ‘pretty pictures’ with.

My first professional photography was of human blood cells, normal and not so normal.  I had spent years following their antics with my expanded vision.  I also had developed clinically useful diagnostic tools with old ‘trusty.’

This microscope was also witness to the images of stuff that expanded people’s vision and mind from LSD to caffeine to wine.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The  photograph of me with my scope probably says it all – I fell in love with what it could show me, an inner world of such magnificence, I could never imagine.  Lost sometimes in these light shows from inner space, I wanted everyone to see this magical mystical world.  The SCOPE was my partner in this escapade – join us….

Starting first with the old original multi-media shows (if you are old enough you might remember those shows with stacks of slide projectors, dissolve units, etc).  I was creating movies of inner space.  Then I leaped into making a business of wine explorations from the vine to wines lost in time.

Funny now that I have two books out, both of which reveal some of the awesome mystery of the micro world, my microscope died a gentle death this week.  At least that’s the diagnosis, so far.  No spare parts for a scope with such old bones. It has been so good to me.  It opened my mind to something more than provable science though itself was from science.  It gave me something phenomenal to share with kids, adults, people challenging life-threatening illnesses.  I had something that not many people had.  I still have the thousands of images from invisible worlds.

And now what will I do without a microscope by my side, ever ready waiting for me to open it to gazing at brand new worlds?

For sure I express and feel gratitude to this trusty tool that opened me to beyond my imagination. Maybe it is time for my mythic persona to take center stage.

The very top image is a rose petal magnified about 30x.  What I’m pointing to in this picture is a wine expression.