WHETHER it鈥檚 Christmas or some other celebration, choosing the right present
for a person is important. For loved ones, a suitably sentimental message can
also make all the difference. So it was that Paul Brindle, then a graduate
student at the University of California at Davis, put down his test tubes of
proteins one February day and crafted a very special message for his
girlfriend鈥攁 Petri dish streaked with salmon-coloured yeast and
yellow-hued bacteria.
He popped it in the incubator to give the cells time to grow, and the next
day it was ready: a pretty pink heart with 鈥淗appy Valentine鈥檚 Day鈥� inscribed in
yellow above it.
鈥淚 don鈥檛 recall it going over real well,鈥� admits Brindle. 鈥淚 think it was
allowed to lay quietly in the fridge, out of sight.鈥� But if Brindle鈥檚 girlfriend
was unimpressed, the head of his department was downright annoyed when Brindle
and fellow students put up ads in the hallways offering to design similar
鈥減athograms鈥� for all comers. The posters were ripped down. 鈥淪ince then,鈥� sighs
Brindle, 鈥淚 haven鈥檛 met anyone special enough to warrant whipping up another
驳谤补尘.鈥�
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快猫短视频s, most of them, like what they do鈥攎ost of the time. But
anybody who has sat too long in a windowless lab poking electrodes into
grasshopper nerves or pipetting reagents from one tube to another will tell you
that the day-to-day business of research is a grind, and not a very lucrative
one at that. No wonder, then, that some experimenters turn their skills and
inspirations to artistic, frivolous鈥攁nd potentially
money-making鈥攑urposes. At no time do the creative juices flow more freely
than at Christmas, when money is on everyone鈥檚 mind, alcohol in every lab fridge
and thoughts stray naturally to gifts for colleagues, friends and family.
快猫短视频 asked around to find out what gifts researchers have dreamt
up while they should have been uncovering the mysteries of the universe.
Lucky numbers
If the lovelorn Brindle needs help to find a new sweetheart worthy of a
pathogram, perhaps he should consider calling Terry Michaelson-Yeates or David
Wofford, since they have scientific solutions to everyone鈥檚 problems. Both are
clover geneticists, and for their serious day jobs breed better strains of white
clover for animal feed. That didn鈥檛 stop either of them from independently
pursuing a sideline: getting four-leafed clovers to breed true. In the US, you
can even call 1-800-BIG LUCK and order the strain that came out of Wofford鈥檚 lab
at the University of Florida. (Though when we tried the number last month, it
was 鈥渢emporarily out of service鈥�. Perhaps the sales outlet needs a rabbit鈥檚
foot.)
Geneticists reckon that environmental stresses or viruses are responsible for
the errors that cause four leaflets to pop up sporadically on standard,
three-leafed plants. Usually, these 鈥渓ucky鈥� plants do not breed true if
cultivated. Not so for those that Michaelson-Yeates stumbled on during a fishing
trip to Ireland. He took them back to the University of Aberystwyth to find that
they kept their trait, at times producing 鈥渆xtra lucky鈥� plants with seven
leaflets. His wife gives them as gifts to friends.
Not to be outdone, Wofford has seen eleven leaflets on his clovers. But are
the scientists enjoying good fortune? One could definitely argue so, insists
Michaelson-Yeates, research funding being what it is today. 鈥淚鈥檓 still in a
job,鈥� he says.
At the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, meanwhile, plant
molecular geneticist Steve Kay hopes soon to be rolling in clover without the
help of Michaelson-Yeates or Wofford. By Christmas鈥攚hen he has enough
seeds 鈥攈e plans to create the first biotech Chia pet with which to attract
potential investors. The Chia pet, recall, is a whimsical clay creature
which鈥攚hen seeds are embedded in the ridges of its back鈥攕prouts
green fur.
Kay鈥檚 pet will be a thing of even greater beauty. It will sprout green fur
that glows in the dark, courtesy of a firefly gene that he鈥檚 spliced into the
DNA of the plant that he uses in his serious studies, thale cress or
Arabidopsis thaliana. One simply waters the engineered cress seeds with a
solution of the nontoxic chemical, luciferin, and the enzyme encoded by the
firefly gene, luciferase, converts it into a glowing chemical.
Kay doesn鈥檛 remember any Eureka moment that spawned his Chia pet concept. 鈥淚t
was probably in a bar,鈥� he says. 鈥淏ut it was just so obvious.鈥� Less obvious but
definitely important from the business perspective is a way to stop customers
from buying one bag of Arabidopsis seed and then forever growing their
own. Kay is considering crossing mutant thale cress with his own plants to stop
them setting seed.
Cressmas tree
If Kay鈥檚 investors bite, then another group of researchers, led by plant
molecular biologist Chris Somerville of the Carnegie Institution of Washington
in Stanford, California, has the perfect Christmas card to accompany the glowing
Chia pet. It鈥檚 a charming depiction of a green Christmas tree on a red
background, made by planting out 25 000 thale cress seeds of two types and then
photographing them under an ultraviolet lamp. The seedlings that form the
Christmas tree look a normal green. But the background seedlings are mutants:
they fluoresce red when the plant鈥檚 chlorophyll is excited by the ultraviolet
light. Clint Chapple did the planting out and Kurt Stepnitz took the snap.
The list of curious gifts that scientists have given each other is endless:
sculptures of Petri dishes melted together in an autoclave, cunning nativity
scenes featuring flies lying in mangers fashioned from plastic test tubes, and
2D gels of the proteins from a scientist鈥檚 blood. Some Drosophila
geneticists even have needlepoint cushions lovingly stitched in the shape of a
fruit fly, or simply of its eye or attractive ceramic plates bearing a depiction
of a favourite mutant fly. Ed Lewis of Caltech, Pasadena, has been known to give
such memorabilia replete with an image of the Ultrabithorax mutant, the
four-winged fly that helped him to shape the theories that won him the Nobel
prize for medicine last year.
For that special intimate biological gift, you can send $55 to
Immortal Genes, a company based in Seattle, for a piece of gauze that you rub
around your mouth. Mail it back and within weeks you will receive a handsome
aluminium paperweight inscribed with your name and birth date, and encapsulating
a tube of your DNA (which your descendants might one day use to make a clone of
you, says microbiologist James Bicknell, the brains behind the business).
Retirements are also a perfect time for wildly inventive gifts. Physicist
John Wheeler, emeritus professor of Princeton University, New Jersey, recalls a
researcher who, upon leaving his job, was given a handsome clock. Clocks, of
course, are standard retirement gifts. But this one was powered by cosmic rays,
which rain down on the Earth in fits and starts. The resulting clock ticked
sometimes fast, sometimes slow, telling the correct time only on average.
But nothing, perhaps, can compare to the gift given to the 鈥渄addy of leech
neurobiology鈥�, neuroscientist John Nicholls of the University of Basel in
Switzerland. In 1994, to celebrate his 65th birthday, Nicholls was treated to a
special banquet at a meeting in Miami of the Society of Neuroscience. The
pi猫ce de r茅sistance was a piano trio composed in his
honour by Elaine Bearer, a former student who now works at Brown University,
Rhode Island.
The final movement of the composition is based on the electrical firing
rhythms of cells in the leech鈥檚 nervous system. Nicholls, by all accounts, was
deeply moved. Bearer鈥檚 leech melodies are now available on CD through Albany
Records, in Albany, New York: a gift perhaps for that special bloodsucker in
your life.