It was the last week of her summer of research at Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory on the coast of Massachusetts in 2007, and biophysicist Sophie Dumont decided to try one final experiment. With the state-of-the-art microscopes that had been loaned to the research station, Dumont started pressing on mammalian cells and watching what happened. She was hoping to see the effects of such mechanical distortion on the mitotic spindle, the apparatus responsible for divvying up the chromosomes during cell division. It was an important experiment, since mechanical forces may direct the length of the spindle, which varies greatly during development and between cell types, so understanding how the spindle responds to those forces could help illuminate that process. However, like so many of her attempts earlier that year, she succeeded only in killing the cells. Until, that is, the very last night.
It was already dark outside, but Dumont’s ...
