Abstract
AT the Friday evening discourse at the Royal Institution on November 18, Dr. R. C. Canti exhibited films demonstrating the cultivation of living tissue cells. The films consist of moving photomicrographs of the living cells of animal tissues taken whilst they are growing outside the body. The individual pictures are taken at relatively long intervals but are projected on the screen at the usual speed of 16 pictures per second. This gives the effect of speeding up and approximately three weeks continuous photography is shortened into half an hour. The first film opened with the demonstration of a ‘tissue culture’. This was followed by a picture of a fragment of periosteum of the chick embryo under low magnification which shows the outwandering of the cells from the central mass or explant. Higher magnification is then employed to demonstrate the structure of vegetative cells and the classical stages of cell division. The picture then changed from healthy to malignant tissue and showed the characteristic cells of a cancerous tumour of the rat known as Jensen's rat sarcoma. Dr. Canti's second reel was devoted to a demonstration of the I contents of the cell by the method of dark-ground illumination, which reveals certain structures, for example, granules and mitochondria, invisible by the ordinary methods of trans-illumination. The third reel contained subjects of embryological interest, namely, the development of the rabbit ovum from the single cell up to the morula stage, the development of the young chick embryo from the primitive streak and the development of the bony femur from the cartilagenous rudiment in the six-day chick embryo. The apparatus for taking the photographs is a combination of the cinema camera, microscope and biological incubator, with a specially constructed automatic mechanism for making the exposures at the desired intervals.
Article PDF
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Cultivation of Living Tissue Cells. Nature 130, 805 (1932). https://doi.org/10.1038/130805a0
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/130805a0