When Antonie van Leeuwenhoek looked down at a prokaryote through his simple microscope made of a single mounted lens back in the 1660s, he discovered the first organelle. Captivated by the fluttering “legs” that would later be called the cell’s eyelashes, or cilia in Latin, he might have wondered about the origin of their movement.
That mystery remained unsolved even into the late 1950s when I started working as a graduate student in Keith Porter’s lab at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research (now Rockefeller University). Porter had made important discoveries on cilia. After writing my senior undergraduate thesis on the organelle, I was thrilled with the idea of working in his lab and tackling the question of motility for myself.
Obituary: Pioneering Neuroscientist Berta Vogel Scharrer Dies
A few years before I joined the lab, Porter had pioneered methods that allowed us ...
