CORBIS, LAUGHTING STOCK
It was a late night in 1984, and graduate student Xiaoning Wang was all alone in the lab. At First Military Medical University (now Southern Medical University) in Guangzhou, China, he was working at the lab’s only camera-equipped microscope, under a wooden hood constructed by his advisor, using a hair dryer to keep a cell culture of murine sarcoma cells at 37°C—mouse (and human) body temperature. He’d been doing the same thing nearly every night for the past month, hoping to capture on film what he had witnessed just a few weeks earlier—a tumor cell engulfing a live natural killer (NK) cell, a lymphocyte of the innate immune system and a major player in tumor suppression. After many sleepless nights, he had started to worry ...
