But while at the NIH, after I'd been there for about four years, Norman left and went to England and, ultimately, to Case Western Reserve. I was on my own, more or less, and I got interested in muscle cells in tissue culture and met a man named Mark Nameroff, who had worked with some of the leaders in the field. I drove over to Walter Reed, where he was working, with a petri dish and he taught me how to dissociate muscle cells from embryonic chicks. I would drive back to the NIH with this petri dish on the floor of the car. The PH changed significantly, but I got back quickly enough to change the media and watch these cells' growth. It was just amazing.
If you want to watch the development of any parameter, to see it in real time, it's a new world. So, I moved from the muscle cultures, where when you dissociate the cells, they come out as mononucleated cells, myoblasts. And if you watch over the next day or two, they migrate around, touch each other and fuse, to form long, multinucleated myotubes. And I found you could do that with cells dissociated from the spinal cord, which was a real revelation. To see these things happen, I needed an inverted microscope.
One of my colleagues at the NIH, who was a senior person who I really respected, Tom Smith, had an inverted microscope which he was not using, so I asked if I could borrow that. Inverted, meaning the optics were underneath, so you could place a tissue culture dish on the stage and look from below, but still introduce microelectrodes from above. He said, 'Yes, but be careful.' I said, 'Sure.' I picked up the scope from his desk by the neck of the scope and started to walk out of his lab, when I realized that the scope optics were not fixed to the upright part of the scope. In fact, they rolled off. Then that was the heavy part of the scope, the base, and the optics and before I knew it, I heard a crash. The optics were on the floor, and I was holding the neck of the scope. I looked up and I saw Tom, aghast, but not totally surprised. So, I picked it up, put it back together and checked, and sure enough, it still worked. There was no real damage, but that was one of my most embarrassing early experiences and was forgiven by Tom.
When I got back to the lab and could see not just the cells, but the fine processes, the axons and dendrites and neurons, and could watch them over time as they reached out and touched muscle fibers, that was one of the most exciting times in my career.
