Cell Manipulation Quotes

If you can modify a cell, it's only a short step to modifying a mouse, and if you can modify a mouse, it's only a step to modifying a higher animal, even man.

The ideal way to study the property of different types of neurons is to control individual types of cells independently and see what happens when you alter one type of cell. Optogenetics helps to realize this goal.

Cell culture is a little like gardening. You sit and you look at cells, and then you see something and say, 'You know, that doesn't look right'.

In principle. what is done is to take the nucleus out of a cell with a very fine micro-pipette or needle and introduce it into an egg. That had been done with amphibians a long time ago, and then there was a long pause of many years before people were clever enough to make that work in the sheep.

There are no bona fide treatments available for embryonic stem cells. There is nothing in the laboratory, and there is certainly nothing in the clinics available to patients.

One of the first papers I wrote at the University of Wisconsin, in 1977, was on stem cells. I realized that if I changed the environment that these cells were in, I could turn the cells into bone, and if I changed the environment a bit more, they would form fat cells.

My first attempts to transplant nuclei in Xenopus were completely unsuccessful, because the Xenopus egg, unlike those of other amphibians, is surrounded by an extremely elastic membrane and jelly layer that make penetration by a micropipette impossible.

I wondered whether the nuclear transfer techniques could be used to introduce purified macro-molecules into an egg, and hence into embryonic cells.

In science there is something known as a stem cell. A stem cell is an undifferentiated cell which has not yet decided whether it's gonna be a cell of your brain or a cell of your heart or of your finger nail. But science is learning how to coax, how to manipulate, the raw material of life that we call stem cell to become any cell of the body. I think that God is the stem cell of the universe.

For the last century of neuroscience, lots of people have tried to control neurons using all sorts of different technologies - pharmacology (drugs), electrical pulses, and so on. But none of these technologies are precise. With optogenetics, we can aim light at a single cell, or a set of cells, and turn just that set of cells on or off.