Before researchers discovered the gene mutation that caused cystic fibrosis (CF), in the mid-1980s, all scientists knew was that something caused these patients’ sweat to be salty and for their lungs to accumulate mucus. As a graduate student in Alan Cuthbert’s lab at the University of Cambridge, I was studying dysfunctional ion transport in sweat glands from CF patients.
Today, David Brayden studies drug delivery methods at University College Dublin.
Submitted by David Brayden
Isolating these sweat glands was agonizingly slow, and since we sometimes got calls from the hospital in the middle of the night about sample availability, I often spent hours staring under the microscope to separate sweat glands from fat and sebaceous glands instead of sleeping.
One night, I got fed up with this painstaking process and decided to try identifying these glands with the dye neutral red. I knew kidney cell studies used a similar approach, and I suspected that the transporters in the sweat glands would allow them to take up the stain.
To my delight, it worked, and the glands lit up like traffic lights. I could now easily pick them out in a matter of ten minutes. Because I planned to write up the method for a publication, I had taken a photo of my dyed tissue. Then, since this was the days before PowerPoint or even plastic projector film, I made a glass slide to share at conference presentations.
Around this time, Cuthbert was invited to give a talk at a meeting of the Royal Society that would be happening in early January. I had decided to go home for the Christmas holiday, though, so I wasn’t going to be at the conference.
It was on Christmas day, I think, when he called me because I had accidentally brought the slide with my photo of the dyed sweat gland with me, and he wanted to show that in his talk. I rushed to get the slide posted to London, hoping it would show up in time, and only slightly annoyed to be phoned on the holiday.
The slide did in fact show up, but when Cuthbert called me and thanked me for sending it, he told me that it had arrived cracked—in my haste, I hadn’t thought of sending it in a padded envelope. I was mortified and convinced that he was going to kick me out of the lab. He told me that he was still going to use it, but he was going to make a story out of the crack.
I learned later that he talked about how his PhD student learned not to send glass slides through the postal service without being more careful. My lab mates that attended his talk evidently laughed the whole time, and then they teased me about it for months afterward.
Luckily, Cuthbert himself never brought it up again. He was really an incredible mentor. He had high expectations but never expected a student to do something he wouldn’t do himself. And he didn’t mind mistakes as long as you pulled yourself back up or, in this case, would forgive you if he knew your heart was in the right place.
Now, I look back on that experience fondly. It was a human mistake, and everyone could see the humor and humility of that in the slide.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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