The Proteus Effect

Ann Parson . Science Writer | home

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The Proteus Effect; Stem Cells and their Promise for Medicine

Reviews

Named to Library Journal's Best Sci-Tech Books for General Readers list for 2004

Joseph Henry Press

"One of the most timely and topical popular science books of the year, this title gives the essential background, puts forth the possibilities, and also grapples with the sensitive moral issues involved with this kind of research."

-- Library Journal

"Parson does a thorough and thoughtful job of discussing the potentials of stem celln medicine and the challenges, both scientific and political, that it is facing. By providing readers with enough solid information to make up their own minds on stem cell research, The Proteus Effect should have a pretty good legacy of its own. It may well be the most important science book of the year."

-- San Jose Mercury News

”All in all, Parson admirably brings to life the stem-cell story from a tiny Maine fishing village to the battle for the American presidency in 2004."

-- Lee M. Silver, Nature

"[Parson] has the rare ability to make the complex world of science understandable for the general reader. ... Ms. Parson clarifies for the non-scientist what stem cells are, how they differentiate, what cell transplantation is, and explains the difference between embryonic and adult stem-cell research. ... The great virtue of The Proteus Effect is that it makes this complex and awe-inspiring scientific endeavor commonsensical to her readers, too."

-- The Standard-Times

"Ann B. Parson has written a timely and cogent account of the history of stem-cell research and the prospects for its future clinical applications. ... Most importantly, Parson highlights the complexities involved in the work and tempers the hype that stem-cell-generated cures are just around the corner."

-- The New Republic

Excerpt

Chapter One: Plant or Animal?

Many Junes ago, in the early summer of 1740, a thirty-year-old tutor from Geneva -- his name was Abraham Trembley -- walked out into Holland's countryside to collect bits and pieces of Nature that might tease the minds of his young wards, the two sons of Count William Bentinck. Stopping by a ditch on the count's estate that connected to a stream that passed not far from the town of The Hague, the tutor selected a horsetail, a handful of duckweed, and a plump water lily. Not until he returned to the count's manor did he notice, with the help of his handheld magnifier, the countless little green nubs clinging to the stems of these plants.

If the samplings fascinated his young pupils for more than a minute, Trembley was to be congratulated. More to the point of this story, those little green nubs would very much fascinate Trembley. In fact, the very same oddities, together with other creatures that possessed similar properties, in time would motivate an army of naturalists to probe and paw at Nature so thoroughly that entire populations of plants and animals would be at risk of being trampled. So riveting did those little green nubs prove to be that some historians would go so far as to say that they inspired the beginnings of modern biology.

Whether the innsie specimen was plant or animal, the young naturalist couldn't at once say. Under his magnifying glass the mystery object looked fairly inconsequential -- not unlike a thin scrap of tubing -- and offered no clues. Trained as a mathematician and an ace at problem solving, Trembley was determined to solve the identity of the little nub, whose firm clutch on freshwater plants made him fairly certain that it was, at the very least, alive.

It was green and stationary, so it probably was a plant, he initially guessed. But the more he stared through his magnifier, the more he changed his mind. The object appeared to have something like a head, as well as skinny arms emerging from its head. Trembley would later describe these appendages in his Mémoires as "arms shaped like horns." And sometimes the arms -- or were they tentacles? -- did, in fact, move about. Or did that happen only when he inadvertently sloughed the water the object sat in? Maybe his first guess -- plant -- was correct after all, and the waving appendages were branches. A third possibility was that he had stumbled on to a specimen of a "plant-animal," a life form that some people imagined must exist but no one had found. It was theorized (this representing but one theory among a chaotic panoply of theories that characterized Trembley's era) that a "Chain of Being" linked plants to animals, and it seemed a reasonable supposition that plant-animals, or zoophytes, occurred as intermediaries somewhere in between.

Plant? animal? or zoophyte? As much as Trembley kept changing his mind, he slowly became more and more convinced that his found species was an animal, largely because it moved forward by contracting and expanding "much in the same way as do inchworms," he later jotted down. Before long he would also observe that it used its spindly arms to catch water fleas, which it stuck into its extremely small mouth and appeared to eat! He would hold to this animal view, even though the more of these tiny individuals he studied, the more he saw that their arms varied in number. One individual might have five arms while another had eight, a variability seen in plants but never in animals.

One simple experiment, Trembley decided, could solve the plant-or-animal conundrum. He would cut his "insecte" (a word used for all manner of beast in those days) in two, and if it were animal, as he believed it must be, one or both halves would surely expire. But if he was wrong and it was plant, both halves would presumably stay alive and grow bigger again, just like plant cuttings.