Author: cancerartscinetwork

6:30 AM, Saturday morning, I opened my eyes and I remembered that I have started a siRNA transfection experiment yesterday on couple of lung cancer cell lines. So, I needed to be in the lab to feed the cells fresh media. But, it was also my weekly detoxification day. After I finished taking care of those cells I had to do something unusual. Something that I have never done before.

I heard about Side Tour coming to Dallas recently. So I went to their website and found a great opportunity to learn about Graffiti from an young artist who was one of two selected mural artists working on Jean Paul Gaultier’s fashion show at the Dallas museum of art in 2011. I have been to that show and took pictures with the evening gown that Gaultier designed for Kylie Minogue for her Aphrodite tour. Today was my opportunity to meet the artist who worked with Gaultier.

I met the kind, young, and talented Jerod “DTOX” Davies in Deep Ellum. He started the tour once all the participants arrived. During the tour Jerod took us through approximately ten murals in Deep Ellum area, among which some were of his own. He explained patiently about the unique motivation, challenges and fun trivia about each one of them. The element of revolution, collaboration among artists, the pop street culture, existentialism, dialogue of two artists (who have never met each other) through their art, he explained it all. Throughout the tour he maintained a balance between “sincerely informative” and “keeping it cool” personalities. Towards the end of the tour, Jerod found a puppy running on the road and rescued him. We followed Jerod to his studio near Fair Park. In a super short crash course about stencils and graffiti he gave us a lot of information and guided us through making our very own graffiti with stencils and spray paint. 

Fortunately, my graffiti turned out to be really good for a first-timer. Jerod’s brother was having an art show at the alley behind the studio. Jerod was so happy with the graffiti that he showed it to everyone there. I smiled and bid goodbye to everyone and got on the green line at the Fair Park station. Right at that moment, I remembered a comment from an artist friend of Jerod who I met at that alley. He looked at the graffiti Jerod taught me and said “You know one artist when you see one”. As the train picked up speed, my eyes burnt and the mural by the station became blurry.

I have been writing this NYC dream blog for past couple of years now. I have written about my experiences in exploring the artistic and social side of New York City. But, I have been very cryptic about the scientific side of my favorite city. Last year, in one post I have mentioned that NYC is the second largest research grant receiving city in USA. This year, last month, I gave a hint that I have been working on some cancer-art collaboration projects. But, what’s really going on with my hardcore biomedical research? I think it is time to poke a hole in the shell of my INTJ persona and push in some of my ESFP persona in it.

In recent years, couple of terminologies flooded the literature describing research findings in cancer. For example, systems biology and heterogeneity. The study of complex systems is not new in mathematics and physics. But until the first decade of this century, biologists focused mostly on reductionist approaches to understand every little detail of the molecular mechanism of cells. However, it was evident while understanding a complex diseased cell (e.g. cancer cell), we may need to study it as a whole. The idea is that the whole is bigger than the sum of its parts. It became more essential as the studies on tumor microenvironment provided evidences on the importance considering tumor cells along with their stromal microenvironment. Unfortunately, the term systems biology has been overused in literature for past few years. Nonetheless, the cancer biologists understand the importance of system-level view of cancer. Hence, in recent years, animal model systems harboring patient derived tumor tissues gained more popularity than two dimensional cell line model systems.

As we have progressed towards more complicated model systems the second term that I mentioned became more and more daunting. Heterogeneity! It means the tumor cells are not only different from one patient to another (inter-tumor heterogeneity), but they can also be different even within one patient’s tumor (intra-tumor heterogeneity). Now, imagine a situation, where a patient has more than one type of tumor cells in his/her body. A single needle biopsy from one region of the tumor may diagnose only one type of cell. If a therapy is designed based on this diagnosis, the undiagnosed cells may escape the therapy causing relapse of tumor. There have been a lot of research efforts to understand the origin and extent of this heterogeneity in cancer.  

There have also been specific scientific conferences addressing systems biology and heterogeneity of cancer. One such meeting is organized by the Center for Cancer Systems Biology at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC) at NYC. MSKCC is the second largest cancer research facility in USA (after MD Anderson Cancer Center at Texas). Hence, when I found out about this meeting, I immediately wanted to go. They had couple of travel fellowships to encourage attendance of PhD students and postdoc in this meeting. They call this fellowship as the young scientist award. I didn’t complain as it sounded better than a travel award. The review committee liked my abstract and I was one of the two awardees last year. As part of this travel award the awardee needs to deliver a short talk on his/her research. I prepared my talk well. The interdisciplinary attendees of the meeting liked my talk. That was a fascinating experience for me.

It is good to be appreciated and recognized for the hard work that we researchers put in everyday in the lab. In addition, it also opened new doors and windows in knowing intelligent scientists from various aspects of cancer research.

The question that interests me now is – is there a way to reeducate these cancer cells about the fact that the host body would be unable to contain them beyond certain limits?

When I heard about the art show located at Cedar Hill, I had no idea that not only I would be able to travel to Cedar Hill from Dallas, but also, at 9 PM of a chilly night, I would be in a Tundra truck with a friend I made on the previous night at the train station, and would be visiting my artist friend and her filmmaker husband’s house at Duncanville that connects with the main road with a narrow track completely surrounded by dark, large trees, in front of a creek full of raccoons, to make up for the time before going to watch the late night show of a sci-fi film that I have never heard of!

In the above sentence, I wanted to bring in two things that are absent from an average scientist’s life – spontaneity and long sentences! In general, scientists enjoy extensive planning and following their plans. I even have some scientist friends who get pretty uncomfortable and sometime, even upset, if things don’t go according to their thoroughly thought-about plans. As a result, they miss the fun of unplanned adventures. Secondly, scientists are forbidden from the creative freedom of writing any sentence that has more than 17 words. The reasoning behind this is that most fellow scientist readers, even if they are native English speakers, don’t have the patience to read long sentences. As unfortunate as this situation could be, I don’t have to stick with any of these two eccentricities while writing my blog (or living my life)!

Now coming back to how this luminous experience came into being for me. I first met Dr. Anne Gordon Perry and her husband Tim Perry at the “Literary night” at AT&T performing arts center. From the very first day, Anne and I became friends. After hearing about my art-science interests, she invited me to audit her humanities class at the Art Institute at Dallas. This was an evening class and was perfect for me as it didn’t clash with my day work schedule in the lab. As part of the class, we learnt various movements of art throughout the history, important terminologies for all forms of art ranging from drawing, painting, photography, sculpture, architecture, music, literature, cinema, theatre and dance! We took field trips to Dallas museum of art, Nasher sculpture center and the Pocket sandwich theatre. We read interesting poetry and fictions, and watched and discussed very unique documentary and fiction films. I have never been to a class of 40 students each one with good handwriting! One day, in the humanities class, Anne told us about an art show where she was taking part by displaying some of her fused glass works. Unfortunately, this show was in Cedar Hill where I could not commute via public transport from Dallas. But something interesting happened that night, which not only allowed me to travel to Cedar Hill but also have a great experience. 

That night, after the class I was waiting for the light rail at the station. I saw another student from the humanities class. I didn’t remember his name. He was a tall, white man, with long brown hair and a smiling face. I went ahead and started a conversation. His name was Brad. I found out that we were waiting for the same train. We spoke about my work at the lab and his work at the studio. During the small chat, my portrait painter identity kicked in and I noticed he had a sharp, long, Caucasian nose, dreamy eyes and thin lips. He said that he was going to the art show next day and would be able to give me a ride as my apartment was on his way. So, there was my new friend and my ride to the art show.

We reached the art show in Brad’s Tundra truck at around 8 PM. Anne was surprised and delighted to see us. We met with Tim, Anne’s glass work teacher, her friends, fellow artists and enjoyed a variety of artworks at the show. Then suddenly, Anne came up with the plan of inviting us to join her and Tim to watch “Interstellar”. I had no idea what it was – another art show, a sculpture, a musical or dance performance, or a film! But, I figured if two world traveler filmmakers and artists like Tim and Anne are interested in watching something, it must be something good. Fortunately, Brad was excited to watch it too. We were also joined by another student from the art institute – Mike. As this “Interstellar” started late at night we had some time to spare at Anne and Tim’s house at Duncanville. On our way to their house, Brad filled me in that Interstellar was a sci-fi film. Following Tim and Anne’s car we reached their house.

We were greeted by two very stranger-friendly cats. The house showed that Tim and Anne have traveled to so many places around the world. The whole house was full with souvenirs and relics and artworks from many countries, religions and cultures! Tim showed us his drone that he used to take the overhead shots in his films. We watched a short silent documentary film that was shot outside the Bahai temple at Chicago with four segments depicting four seasons – winter, spring, summer and fall.

In the end, fed with crackers and hummus, warmed with almond tea, having taken a tour in Anne’s chaotic and creative studio, holding three stories written by Anne and a dvd of the Bahai film made by Tim and Anne called “Luminous journey”, I left with Brad to follow Anne, Tim and Mike to the theater playing Interstellar.

The film was good. But for me the interesting experience was something else. After the last scene of the film ended, the screen started showing the credits. Generally, everyone starts to get up and leaves during this time. But, Tim, Anne, Brad and Mike, all of them sat through the whole credit very respectfully and religiously. I realized people who are connected with the filmmaking process, have interests in understanding and knowing the process of making of the film as well as the end product. Anne and Tim kept pointing at the names of the people in the crew that were known to them. Brad and Mike were silent, but I could see that they were paying attention to the names of those people. After the film, we came outside, said bye to everyone. I hopped into Brad’s car. He dropped me at my apartment at 2:30 AM.

It was truly an illuminating experience!

NYC apartments can be eccentric; full of strange angles, teeny tiny surface area, sometime unusually high ceiling, with big windows or little skylights. When I first heard the phrase “think vertical”, I have thought about bookcases, dividers, folded tables, cabinets, floating racks, wall lamps, magnetic spice containers, wine bottle hangers and even two storied closets. Only recently it occurred to me that I have missed the elephant in the room – the bed! The full bed (queen if you are lucky) takes the maximum amount of horizontal area in a teeny tiny studio apartment!

I was never a murphy-bed lover. After working at minimum two jobs (one pays your bills, the other is simply for fun), when I enter my apartment, there is nothing more welcoming than the sight of a cozy, comfortable bed with personalized pillows and a sexy painting hanging over the headboard. A murphy bed never does that unless you leave it unfolded, in which case the purpose of murphy-bed is lost. In addition, my apartment is my “sanctum sanctorum” and apart from my occasional dates, I don’t generally entertain a large group of people. In addition, if you are renting, not many owners would allow you to fix a murphy-bed on the wall. So, what are my other options?

Loft bed! Yes, if you have high ceilings, you can choose to raise the largest furniture you own and then utilize the space underneath for a table, couch, or both, a small walk-in closet, a reading nook, or even a dorm refrigerator or microwave.  However, there are couple of challenges that you need to overcome before being comfy in your lofty bed.

1. At 7 AM, Leave for Rockville center station, take Babylon towards Penn station at 7:27 AM. Reach Penn station at 8:15 AM.

2. Walk to 34^th St. – Herald sq. Station. Look for Horace Greeley’s statue. Take R towards Bay ridge or N towards Coney Island to 23^rdst. station.  Flat iron building. Walk to Madison Square Park.

3. Walk to Museum of sex at 233 5^th ave at E 27^th st. The museum opens at 10 AM.

4. At 12 PM, walk to 28^thst station. Take R towards Bay Ridge to 8^th st – NYU station or 6 towards Brooklyn bridge-city hall to Astor – PI station. Walk to the Trash clothing store at 4^thst Marks PI.

5. At 1 PM, look for food trucks nearby in YELP.

6. Walk to Sclupture Alamo (The cube) at 57 Astor PI.

7. Walk to Union square-14^thst.  George Washington and Abraham Lincoln statue in Union square park. Look for Metronome and Passage time.

8. At 2:30 PM, from 14 st – union sq station, take 4 towards Crown hits – Utica av or 5 towards bowling green to Bowling green station. Walk to Charging bull statue at 1 Bowling Green.

9. At 3:15 PM, walk to South Ferry station; take 1 towards Van Cortlandt Park to 116 st – Columbia University station. Walk to Riverside Church at 490 Riverside Dr.

10. At 5 PM, walk to 116st – Columbia University station, take 1 towards South Ferry to 59 st – Columbus circle; Eat from food trucks.

11. At 5:45 PM, walk to 59 st – Columbus circle station, take A towards Ozone park – Lefferts Blvd or C towards Euclid av, High st station. Walk to Brooklyn Bridge Park: Pier 1 at Old Fulton st.

12. At 7 PM, from High st station, take A towards Inwood – 207 St, or C towards 168 st, to 34^th st – Penn Station. Walk to Eagle bar or Six Lounge for a drink or two.

13. Walk back to Penn station. Take Babylon towards Balylon to Rockville center.

You can imagine, by the end of the day, how tired yet fulfilled I was!