Scientists are citizens too.
A patriotic biologist might be excused for choosing national colors for banding birds or staining tissue, and Antarctic explorers are expected to plant their countries flags at the South Pole. Still, what happened in Italian cell biologist Lelio Orci s lab went a step further. And Orci insists that it was an accident. For over 30 years Orci, head of the Department of Morphology at the University of Geneva Medical School in Geneva, Switzerland, has been studying, among other things, the hormone-secreting endocrine cells of the pancreas. To do that, he first isolates the endocrine cells from newborn rat pancreases and places them in petri dishes containing culture medium, where they cluster together in aggregates.