Tissue Culture. I.—The Advantages and Limitations as a Research Method

Abstract

There are certain general principles involved in the application of tissue culture to any form of biological inquiry, which perhaps are not sufficiently recognised by those who wish to apply the method in scientific and medical research. Tissue culture often suffers from its admirers. There is a kind of romance in the idea of being able to remove living cells from the body and watch their activities in a glass vessel, as if they were tadpoles in a jam jar, which sometimes causes imaginative people to express many extravagant claims and hopes which experience fails to justify, and which has sometimes impelled the more critically minded to regard the whole subject with suspicion. There are even those who would exalt tissue culture to the status of a distinct science—in the writer's opinion a false ideal, which, if achieved, would greatly restrict the usefulness of the method. Tissue culture is merely a valuable technique with peculiar advantages and corresponding limitations, and it is only valuable when ap...