Scientist needs to be a flexible animal – 05/29/2023 – Suzana Herculano-Houzel

I arrived in Australia to teach colleagues how to turn the brains of local creatures into soup – insects, bees, spiders and, yes, yes, assorted whole jellyfish. Because I want to know if it’s really true that animals ten times bigger have ten times more cells and nothing like the simplicity of jellyfish, practically devoid of internal organs, to answer that question.

I sent in advance the list of ingredients, I mean, reagents and materials, including a fluorescence microscope, equipped, in addition to white light, with ultraviolet light, necessary for us to be able to see and count the nuclei of cells in the brains transformed into soup –because the trick to count cells is not to count the cells, but the nucleus stored like a seed inside each one. Neurons are peculiar cells, full of arms and protrusions and trinkets, and of varying sizes, that are not evenly spread throughout the tissue, making it difficult to count them by sampling.

But, turning the brain into soup, the neurons, dissolved in detergent, leave their nuclei, now free in the soup. Counting them in the soup is trivial: just take small samples of the soup and look at them under a microscope in a graticulated chamber, where each square has the same volume. It takes ten minutes to count how many nuclei each square of soup contains, and then it’s a simple rule of three to arrive at the total number of cells in the entire brain.

My colleagues received me with everything ready, including a microscope installed by the university specifically for our experiments, imagine that. A modern Olympus, all electronic, with a digital camera operated by software on the computer beside it, a touch-sensitive panel to control the microscope’s lens and light. White light, graticule in sight, right. Ultraviolet light, visible fluorescent blue painted cores, right too.

But it wasn’t possible to use both lights at the same time, the fundamental trick for counting nuclei per square. The microscope was too fancy, and all automated to do what almost every scientist does with a microscope, which is use either white light OR ultraviolet light. No Olympus engineer considered that anyone might want to use both AND one at the same time.

A scientist has to be a flexible animal. I tried my hack from UFRJ days, when the white light died and it would take US$ 500 and two months to get a new one: the light from the phone flashlight, strategically placed. But it wasn’t possible: the chic Olympus was completely closed.

We were saved by the silly microscope forgotten in a corner of the laboratory, all manual, therefore with that beautiful thing of turning each button on and off at will. Using both bulbs at the same time was trivial. Problem solved: I love technology, but nothing like simple equipment with transparent controls that allow the scientist to do whatever he wants.

Smart is the technology that lets us think instead of delivering everything ready-made.

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