Seaside Lab Gives Urchins Deep Purpose
If this were a documentary, the working title would be “Sex and the Single Sea Urchin: Just Another Day at the Beach,” and it would start off with an old-style newsreel.
Opening scene: Flickering black-and-white images of a laboratory at Columbia University in New York City nearly a century ago. Noted biologist Thomas Hunt Morgan peers through a magnifying glass at a jar of fruit flies, which produce new generations every 12 days.
Narrator: Morgan works with fruit flies because they are cheap to raise, are genetically simple and, in these dawning days of genetic research, will allow him to track mutations quickly.
By doing so, Morgan is able to link Darwin’s theory of evolution with Mendel’s revelations on inherited traits and the burgeoning recognition that living things begin with a single cell.
Morgan eventually will win the Nobel Prize in Medicine for uncovering the role chromosomes play in heredity -- a foundation for genetic research that continues today.
Next scene: China Cove in Corona del Mar, 1925. People stand about preparing for the cornerstone-laying ceremony for what will be the Balboa Pacific Palisades Club boathouse.
Narrator: The club, a group of Pasadenans jumping into the Southern California craze of private beach clubs, already owns a three-story hotel built in 1907 on the bluff above, one of the few buildings in the remote beach town. Among the small crowd: Duke Kahanamoku, the Hawaiian surfer and Olympic swimming medalist, and silent-film actress Dorothy MacKail (close-up as they wave self-consciously at the camera).
Scene: The Spanish-style building is open. Club members wade in the water while others drag small boats down a concrete ramp from the building’s ground floor. Upstairs, club members socialize in a large room overlooking Newport Bay and, on the other side, Balboa Peninsula.
Narrator: The club is a beach-lover’s paradise, particularly after the Pacific Coast Highway reaches Corona del Mar from the north. But by 1928, the boom has gone bust, at least for the club.
Caltech -- busily transforming itself into one of the world’s premier universities -- buys the beachside building and converts it into a research facility.
Close-up: Sepia-tone photograph of man in a dark jacket and tie over a white shirt, his hair parted in the middle.
Narrator: The money comes from lumber and electricity baron William G. Kerckhoff, whose donations also finance buildings bearing his name on the Caltech and UCLA campuses. The decision to create a beachfront lab was made under the founding director of Caltech’s new biology department -- Morgan, the man with the fruit flies.
Cut to the present: A wide shot from Newport Bay, the water rough as a winter storm pushes swells up the harbor. Boats rock at their moorings and reticulated docks dance a jittery hula. The camera closes in on the old Palisades boathouse, a landmark largely lost now amid the cheek-to-jowl waterfront homes to the south and climbing up the bluff behind, and a multistory condo complex directly to the north.
Narrator: The name at the top of the south wall marks this as different from the surrounding homes: William G. Kerckhoff Marine Laboratory. Inside, the contrast is even sharper as former social rooms have been converted into laboratories, smaller spaces into computer-filled offices and the ground floor into a seaquarium of tanks holding sea urchins and starfish.
Cut to the building rear: In a ground-level carport a boombox blares oldies as seven young men and women in white smocks sort purple urchins delivered overnight from Bodega Bay in Sonoma County.
Close-up: Patrick Leahy, Kerckhoff building director and associate biology professor, explains that purple urchins -- whose roe are a delicacy in Japan -- live off the Orange County coast but they’re smaller and not as plentiful as up north, where the rocky habitat and kelp beds are more suitable. Because urchins spawn for only two months a year, the researchers need to work quickly, Leahy explains. This is the fourth and last batch they will handle, and over the next hour they will inject more than 1,000 urchins with potassium chloride, which makes the male urchins release sperm and the females release eggs.
Trailing shot: Leahy takes 10 males inside where he siphons the sperm, while the other workers scatter the females in more than 100 saltwater-filled Tupperware containers to catch the roe.
Cut to outside: Workers divide the eggs into a series of one-liter plastic beakers and decant them several times with seawater to rinse out broken spines and other detritus.
Narrator: Each egg is about only 100 microns across; it would take a string of more than 250 lying side by side to measure an inch.
Close-up of Titus Brown, 28, a Caltech graduate student: “You can just sort of see them as individual specks.”
Overview of work tables: With hundreds of millions of eggs in each beaker, they are easy to see and settle to the bottom like orange juice pulp. Later, the eggs are transferred inside to eight plastic garbage cans, where they will be fertilized with the sperm.
Narrator: At selected intervals, the developing larvae will be killed, the teeny carcasses frozen and then thawed, a process that crumbles the individual cell walls.
Close-up of Brown, who is in charge of the protein-farming project: “We freeze them to break down the cell membrane, then extract the nuclei, then crack the nuclei and extract the DNA and proteins.”
Narrator: With those proteins, the real work begins, much of it at Caltech labs in Pasadena. Scientists already know the different stages of development for the sea urchin, an invertebrate, the biological term for relatively simple creatures that do not have a backbone, unlike humans and other more complex creatures. What they don’t know -- about any form of life -- is how DNA tells which cells to develop in which way.
By analyzing the composition of the proteins against different stages of development, scientists hope to unlock the mystery of how an embryo determines which cells will give rise to shell and spine, stomach and mouth.
From there they can begin to unlock the mysteries of human development.
Close-up of Brown: “If you can’t understand the simple stuff, then vertebrates will be too far beyond.”
Narrator: Thus the experiments bring the Kerckhoff lab back full circle. The facility opened under Morgan, whose genetic discoveries using fruit flies set the stage for the current work with sea urchins. A century apart, the researchers are linked by a building, and by a quest: To know.
Final scene: Close-up of a black-and-white picture of Morgan, then cut to the researchers working on the urchin-filled tables. Pull back to a long shot of the building itself.
Roll credits: Kerckhoff Laboratory ... William O. Hendricks, director of the Sherman Library and Gardens ... The Nobel Foundation e-Museum at https://www.nobel.se/index.html.
The End.
