Tales of Mad Science: Paddles and Barrels
There truly was a good explanation for the kid's backyard swing set, the garbage cans filled with blood, and the chanting half-naked guy with the canoe paddle...
Through a season of holiday receptions, gatherings, and all else that is the social season at the medical center, one hears many stories. This one comes from one of our senior professors, a story of a friend and colleague of hers many, many years ago at one of the great West Coast biomedical powerhouses. It's one of those stories that starts out very innocently, and then just, through one unexpected thing after another, ends with the Chancellor of the university staring goggled eyed at the scene, thinking that sanity ended at the border of your lab. So while swamped, a story, a story! :-)
Back many decades before, back in the earliest days of modern biochemistry, a biochemist colleague and friend of Dr. B's was working to try to isolate in large quantities the protein for somatomedin, one of the most common and important growth factors in the human body. He reasoned that he could isolate somatomedin chemically from an appropriate source, and the one he chose was blood meal. Blood meal, used as a highly effective fertilizer, was made by taking cattle blood from slaughterhouses and drying it to a powder. Containing all the proteins in cow blood, it would presumably also contain the protein for somatomedin, of which in animals (and people) there were tons of floating around in the body.
The challenge was that, while somatomedin was one of the most copious growth factors in the blood -- which was the only thing making the work even possible with the crude tools and techniques of the day -- it was still vanishingly rare, present at best in 1 to 10,000 concentrations, as best as anyone could guestimate from dilution studies and the like. Further, the techniques and tools available in those days were just that -- crude -- and it would take literally hundreds of pounds of reconstituted blood from blood meal and hundreds of gallons of appropriate sequential buffers to have any hope of isolating a useable amount of somatomedin. The biochemist and his laboratory, the scope of the challenge fully in mind, rolled up their sleeves and got to work. They were doing biochemistry on the gallons and gallons scale, which required them to come up with some slightly unorthodox jury-rigs equipment wise. Which was what, some weeks later, got the biochemist a terse phone message from the Chancellor of the University, demanding that he come to central administration to speak with the Chancellor *immediately*...
The biochemist found himself confronted by the Chancellor, various lawyers, and an agitated Professor from the Philosophy department. Swiftly the Chancellor laid out the problem. The Philosophy professor had discovered, on his accounts, a charge which did not belong to the Philosophy department. It was, in fact, for a swing set, a children's swing set, charged to the Philosopher but delivered to the laboratory of the biochemist. What, exactly, was this about? How it ended up with the Philosophy department was actually explainable: two account number digits had been switched. But the fact that the biochemist -- who had a number of children of his own -- was ordering a child's swing set on university accounts was, to say the least, rather suspicious. What possible legitimate use could a biochemist have in his laboratory for a child's swing set?
Relieved, the biochemist explained -- the swing set *was*, in fact, a research expense: the sturdy steel frame and heavy loops for the chain made an excellent framework for the block and tackle pulleys his laboratory had jury-rigged to help haul the large, heavy buckets filled with blood or buffers for the mass-scale purification they were attempting. The Chancellor and the philosopher, however, didn't buy the story. The biochemist invited both to come to his lab and observe for themselves, which they two of them did. And when they got to the biochemist's lab...
The laboratory -- set up in a loading dock, it being the only place big enough for the work -- looked -- and smelled -- like a cross between a slaugtherhouse and a witch's grimoire. There were huge garbage cans filled with solutions of blood. There were large, fifty pound buckets of buffers and chemicals. There was the swing set set up as a block and tackle frame, just as described. And in the middle of it all was one of the biochemist's post-doctoral fellows, a gentleman who had experimented in the 60's with life as a Sōtō Zen monk, stripped to the waist and sweating profusely from the hard, tedious work of mixing the hundreds of gallons of viscous, blood-red goop, loudly chanting rhythmic Buddhist Koans as he pushed a canoe paddle around and around his make-shift garbage can cauldron.
The Chancellor and the philsopher stopped dead in their tracks, mouths flapping open, staring alternately at the scene and at the biochemist with looks which clearly questioned either the biochemist's sanity or their own. And then beat a hasty retreat. :-)
- Read on, for more Tales of Mad Science: Blood and Alcohol. Muahahaha.....