Sidebar: Selected Suppliers Of Tools For Cell Culture


BIOREACTOR: Bellco Glass offers the E/Z Access Reactor for culturing mammalian, plant, and insect cells.
Early in this century, 1912 Nobel Prize winner Alexis Carrel of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research was a leader in cell and tissue culture. Among his accomplishments, Carrel showed how to transfer and study colonies of animal cells. At the time, some cell culture researchers were exceedingly formal. In Carrel's lab, assistants even wore full-length rubber gowns and head coverings to keep experiments sterile.

Things have changed.

Today's labs are more casual places. Walk into a lab doing cell culture, and you're likely to find jean-clad graduate students joking around and humming along with a CD player perched atop a lab bench. Still, the basic ideas-and needs-driving cell culture haven't changed since Carrel's time. To grow cells in the lab, a scientist needs at least four...

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