[MD] Cell city

[Magnus Berg]

Hi all

I just saw this cool article in a Swedish news paper:

http://www.svd.se/nyheter/vetenskap/artikel_1640739.svd

For those not native to the Swedish tongue, I'll try to make a quick 
translation, Christopher feel free to correct me if you spot some grave 
mistakes. The main theme being a coming film about a cell described as a city 
(society), with library, city hall, police, transportation, etc. etc. I.e. all 
those things I've always claimed a cell contains and why I think a cell is a 
social pattern in itself (apart from also being a biological building block in 
larger structures (societies)). It also describes viruses in much the same way I 
do in my new essay (The levels undressed).

BTW, Lennart Nilsson is a world famous photographer and specializes in 
photographing small parts of the inside of the human body. I think he's most 
famous for some very spectacular images of a growing fetus.

Anyway: (My comments inside [] )

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Ancient bacteria stars in new movie

Lennart Nilsson's images of the growth of the human fetus has become modern 
icons. But this time, he films even smaller processes of life - the mechanisms 
inside the human cell. The movie is cool without being faked. For me as a 
journalist, it's incredible to have seen and be a part of this, Lennart Nilsson 
says.

Ingemar Ernberg, a professor in tumor biology at the "Karolinska" institute, 
hatched the idea. The producer Mikael Agaton, who has worked with Lennart 
Nilsson for twenty years, also liked the idea. The thought was to show the cell 
as a city, populated by tenths of millions of citizens on a surface smaller than 
the tip of a needle.

- The cell has a library and a city hall, where all decisions are made. There 
are police forces who defend against invasion, there are transportation systems 
and telephony - both wireless and wired. There are small buses, factories, power 
plants and restaurants. You can find analogies to everything in the cell world, 
Mikael Agaton says.

Inside the cell nucleus is the library - the DNA. The two spiraled molecule 
chains contain instructions for how the cell's proteins should be constructed. 
These are assembled in the ribosomes - the cell's protein factories. The cell's 
power plants are called mitochondria and manufactures the energy rich molecule ATP.

- We want to amaze the audience about how improbably complex the life inside our 
own cells are. When you get involved in the subject, you end up just sitting in 
awe, says Mikael Agaton.

The project will result in a TV-series for "Utbildningsradion" [a part of the 
Swedish public TV network producing educational contents], and is to be 
broadcast during 2009.

- Last fall, we spent shooting the interior of the cell, the so called 
organelles, i.e. the police station, factories and all the others, he says.

But life isn't always calm in cell city. Sometimes, terrorists threatens the order.

- What happens when they attack? A virus enters through the city gate, makes its 
way to the cell nucleus and strolls past the guards. When inside, it exchanges 
the cell's DNA with its own.

It's quite similar to a state coup. The cell stops working as intended and is 
transformed into a factory ruled by the enemy. This is what happens when you get 
a cold.

Lennart Nilsson has been working with viruses for almost 25 years - for a long 
time with HIV-virus but during later years with bird flu virus.

- Viruses are real terrorists. They force the cells to manufacture lots of virus 
copies, he says.

He hasn't just shot microscopic images of the viruses' exterior, but also their DNA.

- We make a so called cracking by freezing the virus with liquid nitrogen and 
then try to crack it open with a knife. We have to check hundreds, perhaps 
thousands of viruses to find one that's opened up, he says.

The film team also wanted to trace the tracks back to the oldest forms of one 
cell life. They contacted the researcher Russel Vreeland at the West Chester 
university in Pennsylvania, USA. He and his colleagues claims to have brought 
back 250 million year old bacteria to life. In a salt crystal from a mine in New 
Mexico were small bubbles filled with liquid. When the researchers sterilized 
the surface of the crystal, they could extract spores that developed into living 
bacteria.

- They are the oldest living things on Earth right now. I brought the bacteria 
culture to Sweden, and we filmed the organisms when they swam and moved around, 
says Russel Vreeland.

The bacteria finding was reported in 2000 in the Nature magazine. The 
researchers could establish that the crystal has been intact for 250 million 
years, and that the contained bacteria thereby had been cut off from the outside 
world for so long. But the high age was the cause of some debate, and was 
questioned by researchers claiming that the bacteria's DNA was suspiciously 
similar to currently living bacteria and that more differences should have 
developed.

- But we had sterilized the crystal according to scientifically valid methods, 
and today, the main part of the scientific community believes that the organisms 
are more or less the age we claimed, says Russel Vreeland who has just started 
working with even older salt crystals.

Russel Vreeland and Lennart Nilsson spent three days in Stockholm to photograph 
the bacteria.

- Lennart took care of the photography and I sat next to him and was amazed. He 
is one of the most fantastic persons I've met during my years as a scientist. 
His energy and capacity is astonishing, says Russel Vreeland.

The pictures were taken using a so called scanning electron microscope [I think 
that's the right term in English], that uses a beam of electrons to image the 
objects.

- It gives a different, more three dimensional picture than the type of 
equipment most scientists use, and that makes Lennart Nilsson's pictures unique.
That's why he regularly reaches results that make other scientists astonished 
when they see it, in spite of the fact that they really look at the same thing 
every day - in other ways and with other methods, says Mikael Agaton.