The Fishbowl Paradox
Jack Nowacek
A question stemming from curiosity, the purest start to a scientific inquiry. We always want to create experiments that perfectly test our hypotheses and elegantly isolate our variable of interest. Sadly, this is not always possible. Too often in research, we are unceremoniously dumped off of our idealistic pedestal and forced to make compromises to drop costs, conserve time, and simplify our experiments. This balance of feasibility vs idealism is an essential theme in experimental design and one that often determines the quality of a study. Finding ways to test complex ideas seems to be one of the most underrated skills in science.
In our case, cell culture is the solution that we have used to test our ideas. This is a brilliant solution to the issue of testing large animal physiology. It would take one impressive fish bowl to house the animals that we are testing. However, all of the methods created to simplify science come with drawbacks. In our case, not all aspects of the situation that we are interested in, diving, are simulated. Intense water pressure, lack of light, low temperature, and oceanic salinity are among the factors that are lost with the cell culture approach. While these are important, and may influence the final results, does that mean that we shouldn't test our ideas with the best methods available? Absolutely not. We should be conducting our research in the best way we can and looking for potential improvements to our methods. Speaking of…
Our next step is to move from cell culture to organoid culture. By de-differentiating the fibroblasts that we usually use for testing, we are able to create model organoids of the heart, liver, lungs, and maybe even the brain. Increasing the complexity of our testable subjects will inherently lead to more applicable results and lead us toward stronger conclusions. Perhaps in the future, we can try to find ways to include environmental conditions in our approach, moving our experiment closer and closer to reality.
Being a part of the process of developing new methods of analysis is a fantastically exciting prospect and I hope that these results will allow us to more specifically test our hypotheses and move faster with our analysis of the diving response.
