Re: How has research in cells brought improvement to human health?

Tyler,

I suppose it is hard to find the information because there is so much of it everywhere. Where does one begin?

I will take a historical approach to reveal how knowing about cells has resulted in improving human health.

First of all one has to be able to see a cell. Some cells are really big. Take for instance an egg. An egg is a single cell. Because it must carry most of the nutrition and building blocks for development of an early embryo most eggs are among the biggest single cells of a body. Think ostrich or chicken egg. But the human egg is so small you would need a microscope to see it even though it is very much larger than a sperm cell, one of which will carry the father's set of chromosomes into it so that these can combine with the chromosomes of the egg to create the first cell of the new offspring that will develop.

I mentioned microscope. Microscopes are optical instruments that magnify what is being examined. Before microscopes there was no way to conceive of a cell. The first microscope was invented by Zacharias Jansen in 1595 but its ability to magnify only nine times original size barely qualifies as a microscope capable of seeing a cell.

In 1670 Robert Hooke discovered the cell while looking at a slice of cork.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_(biology)
He called it a cell because the empty cell walls of the cells of the dry cork bark looked like prison cells to him. Thus the concept of cell was born but so far there is no connection with human health.

Between 1683 - 1702 Anton von Leeuwenhoek discovered bacteria, sperm cells and blood cells using one of the 500 powerful but simple microscopes he made.
http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/history/leeuwenhoek.html
Here is what he wrote in 1678 to the Royal Society about what he saw:

"these little animals were, to my eye, more than ten thousand times smaller than the animalcule which Swammerdam has portrayed, and called by the name of Waterflea, or Water-louse, which you can see alive and moving in water with the bare eyes.”

And, this is what he wrote when he saw sperm and bacteria:

"...an unbelievably great company of living animalcules, a-swimming more nimbly than any I had ever seen up to this time. The biggest sort. . . bent their body into curves in going forwards. . . Moreover, the other animalcules were in such enormous numbers, that all the water. . . seemed to be alive."

Bacteria are autonomous living cells that have the capacity to cause diseases when certain of these cells colonize the human body. The discovery of bacteria enabled scientists to see how "cells" could cause diseases and this enabled scientists like Pasteur, Koch and others to formulate ways of studying the causes of infectious diseases and to arrive at antiseptics, sterilization techniques, vaccines and ways to prevent or treat infectious diseases. Certainly knowledge of these kinds of cells had a major impact on human health directly through learning how to selectively kill bacteria causing infections and indirectly through better sanitation and water purification.

In the 19th century Rudolf Virchow, a pathologist, was amazed at changes in cell organization and appearance in the organs and tissues affected by diseases.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolf_Virchow

Virchow is credited with multiple significant human health discoveries. He is cited as the first to recognize leukemia. However, he is perhaps best known for his theory Omnis cellula e cellula ("every cell originates from another existing cell like it.") which he published in 1858. In the same year he published a textbook of pathology which is entitled "Cellular Pathology" because it incorporates his cell theory into conceptualizing disease entities like inflammation (infection), degeneration (wear and tear) and neoplasia (cancer).

Virchow's ideas focused attention on the need to understand what is happening in cells in order to understand disease. He also performed some of the first in vitro studies with bits of tissue removed from organs and also attempts to culture cells.

Culturing cells in dishes called Petri dishes named after Dr. Petri who invented them was a key step in the new science of cell biology which emerged at the beginning of the 20th century and prospered in the laboratory of George Gey at Johns Hopkins Hospital.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Otto_Gey His laboratory is where cell culture became an important tool in understanding disease and in conquering it.

I understand that Dr. Gey was the first to show that the Polio virus could grow in cultured cells.
http://www.jcb.org/cgi/content/full/168/7/988
This enabled large scale production of Polio vaccine by Jonas Salk and later by Albert Sabin.

Cancer was a disease of cells. They looked different in microscopic images and they behaved differently in George Gey's cell cultures but for enough cells or enough time to be able to discover how to conquer cancer cells would have to be grown as continous cell lines. This happened in George Gey's laboratory when tissue from a cervical cancer growing in Henrietta Lacks was grown in cell culture and it continued to grow through numerous passages.
http://www.jhu.edu/~jhumag/0400web/01.html

In fact, Henrietta Lacks' cells are still growing now, more than 50 years after she passed away. These tumor cells became the first tool medical scientists could use to understand the fine details of what made a tumor cell different from a normal cell and pointed the way to development and testing of drugs that could be used to treat cancers.

I think I will stop here as I am sure by now you can appreciate that the study of cells is extremely important to human health and to further improvements in human health.

By the way, the lab I worked in when I started my own medical research at Johns Hopkins used to belong to George Gey. He had died just two years before I began my research. After all of his equipment and things were removed from his lab some items remained in a heap outside the door. I have a few of these which I treasure. One of them is a prototype brass flywheel fabricated by Arthur Thomas company especially for the first shaker cultures used by Dr. Gey for growing cells. The other treasured item is a mahogany wood film cassette with an Ivory plaque for recording the data codes.
http: //www.geocities.com/artnscience/george_gey_film_reel.jpg
This film cassette was used by his collaborator Dr. Lewis to make the first motion pictures of lymphocytes crawling in vitro in 1931.
http://statenislandtalk.com/v-web/gallery/albums/Arts- Artwork/LEWIS_1931.jpg

Movement of lymphocytes is a topic I adapted to the study of lymphocyte recirculation in immune responses.
http://www.geocities.com/artnscience/index.html