1. I N T R O D U C T I O N
3
Johns Hopkins, placed on a coverslip nerve tissue from the spinal cord
of a tadpole in a medium of clotted lymph from the frog and inverted
it over a hollow-ground microscope slide, sealed it with paraffin wax
and demonstrated for the first time that nerve fibres grow out from
nerve cells by a process not unlike the formation of pseudopodia by an
amoeba. This was not just a random observation, but an experiment
designed to provide data in the controversy which was raging at that
time concerning the nature of nerve fibres, the relationship between
nerve fibres and nerve cells and the problem of continuity or contiguity
between nerve cell and nerve cell. The results of Harrison's experiments
so dramatically answered some of these burning questions of the day
that his method, the hanging-drop method, was soon followed up and
applied to the solution of other problems. That was how Tissue Culture
began.
Burrows (1910), Carrel (Carrel and Burrows, 1910) and Ebeling
(1913), at the Rockefeller Institute, New York, were among the first to
apply the method successfully to the tissues of warm-blooded animals.
They used the hanging-drop method with fowl plasma or serum as a
medium for the growth of tissues from the embryo chick. Fowl plasma
was found to be specially suitable since it could be kept on ice without
clotting until required for use, when it could be made to coagulate and
thus enclose the tissue in a nutrient and protective medium. The
embryo chick was ideal both because its tissues could be obtained free
from bacteria and other infecting organisms and also because embryonic
tissues grow more readily and actively than those of the adult organism,
as these early experiments quickly showed.
Meanwhile W . H. and M . R. Lewis (1911) in Baltimore were also
quick off the mark to make hanging-drop cultures of chick tissues in
simple salt solutions (e.g. Ringer-Locke's solution) to which they added
chick-bouillon. These were early pioneering days, and much had to be
learned about the effects of various salts, pH, osmotic pressure, temperature and the utilization of glucose and other food substances. A n
account of much of this excellent early work, largely devoted to the
study of the detailed cytology of the outgrowing cells and of how cells
behave in culture, was published by the Lewises in "General Cytology",
edited by Cowdry in 1924 and is still a scientific classic.
Tissue Culture became "headline news" just before the 1914-18 war
when Carrel (1913) published his account of the artificial activation of
growth and cell division by means of saline extracts from embryo
tissues. In retrospect, it is interesting to speculate on the effects which
this work had in orientating the history of cell biology. It immediately
focused attention on the method of tissue culture as one which could
be extremely suitable for the study of growth and, of course, this meant
3
Johns Hopkins, placed on a coverslip nerve tissue from the spinal cord
of a tadpole in a medium of clotted lymph from the frog and inverted
it over a hollow-ground microscope slide, sealed it with paraffin wax
and demonstrated for the first time that nerve fibres grow out from
nerve cells by a process not unlike the formation of pseudopodia by an
amoeba. This was not just a random observation, but an experiment
designed to provide data in the controversy which was raging at that
time concerning the nature of nerve fibres, the relationship between
nerve fibres and nerve cells and the problem of continuity or contiguity
between nerve cell and nerve cell. The results of Harrison's experiments
so dramatically answered some of these burning questions of the day
that his method, the hanging-drop method, was soon followed up and
applied to the solution of other problems. That was how Tissue Culture
began.
Burrows (1910), Carrel (Carrel and Burrows, 1910) and Ebeling
(1913), at the Rockefeller Institute, New York, were among the first to
apply the method successfully to the tissues of warm-blooded animals.
They used the hanging-drop method with fowl plasma or serum as a
medium for the growth of tissues from the embryo chick. Fowl plasma
was found to be specially suitable since it could be kept on ice without
clotting until required for use, when it could be made to coagulate and
thus enclose the tissue in a nutrient and protective medium. The
embryo chick was ideal both because its tissues could be obtained free
from bacteria and other infecting organisms and also because embryonic
tissues grow more readily and actively than those of the adult organism,
as these early experiments quickly showed.
Meanwhile W . H. and M . R. Lewis (1911) in Baltimore were also
quick off the mark to make hanging-drop cultures of chick tissues in
simple salt solutions (e.g. Ringer-Locke's solution) to which they added
chick-bouillon. These were early pioneering days, and much had to be
learned about the effects of various salts, pH, osmotic pressure, temperature and the utilization of glucose and other food substances. A n
account of much of this excellent early work, largely devoted to the
study of the detailed cytology of the outgrowing cells and of how cells
behave in culture, was published by the Lewises in "General Cytology",
edited by Cowdry in 1924 and is still a scientific classic.
Tissue Culture became "headline news" just before the 1914-18 war
when Carrel (1913) published his account of the artificial activation of
growth and cell division by means of saline extracts from embryo
tissues. In retrospect, it is interesting to speculate on the effects which
this work had in orientating the history of cell biology. It immediately
focused attention on the method of tissue culture as one which could
be extremely suitable for the study of growth and, of course, this meant