LINCOLN - Dr. Howard Gendelman has cried twice in his life - first at age 4 after receiving a severe scolding for breaking a lamp, and next after walking into his office in the basement of a building at the University of Nebraska Medical Center.
The cold winds and slick sidewalks of that day - eight years ago come January - didn't help one bit in erasing one word from Gendelman's mind: bleak. Bleak weather, bleak basement, bleak future.
"And I said to myself, I'll never make it. A lot of my colleagues told me, 'You'll fall off the face of the earth. The world is flat, and if you go to Nebraska you're going to fall off the edge of it,' " he said.
But Gendelman did make it. At UNMC he's built a world-renowned research center that draws millions in grants, employs 40 researchers and technicians and even helps plug the worrisome "brain drain" that sees so many talented young people leaving the state.
David Volsky, a Columbia University professor of pathology who directs his own AIDS research center, describes Gendelman's research center this way: "Top of the line. Top-notch."
"He established a very active center that is publishing a lot of first-class publications, doing cutting-edge research in neurovirology and neurobiology," Volsky said of Gendelman. "He's well-funded, well-recognized by his scientific peers. Essentially people are looking forward to work from his center."
How did a brain-disease researcher who'd held prestigious positions at three world-renowned institutions on the East Coast end up in Nebraska? How did he turn a basement office and one technician into a laboratory that boasts the latest technology and explores eight categories of scientific pursuit? What learning opportunities does this offer UNMC students, and fellow professional scientists? This story, the second in a two-part series, will answer these questions. (Click here to read the first story, which concerns the science behind Gendelman's use of human fetal cells in his research.)
Along the way, we'll tell you how research that started looking at one of the great scourges of our times, AIDS, branched out into Parkinson's disease and Alzheimer's disease. Could the three be related? How does that affect the prospects for cures?
Finally, you'll read about three exciting scientific achievements that offer hope for thousands of people. An Omaha woman consigned to die from AIDS-related dementia was saved, using experimental treatments derived from Gendelman's research. Rats with damaged spinal cords moved their legs again, after treatments inspired by Gendelman's ideas. And a UNMC graduate student is pursuing a vaccine for Parkinson's disease, drawing on technological resources and expertise he says are available all in one place at just one laboratory in the country - Gendelman's, in Omaha, Nebraska.
Planting a Seed
It all started in Gendelman's garden, at age 10. He would experiment with different planting methods, fertilizers, watering methods to satisfy his curiosity about why things are the way they are.
"I was interested in why things do what they do," he said. "The whole concept of how and why things developed was something that really fascinated me."
Gendelman turned to medicine relatively late in his life. He received his bachelor's degree in Russian studies and Russian literature; science was only a minor. He had many other interests, classical guitar and theology among them. He chose medicine for his graduate studies because he believed it could integrate his love for science, the humanities and theology.
"Medicine is a unique field where you can give of yourself to other people, while at the same time solving scientific problems," he said.
His third year of medical school was to begin a theme that has echoed throughout his life: He pursued the practice of medicine repeatedly as a physician, but was repeatedly drawn away from clinical practice by his research interests. In that third year, he spent the summer studying infections of the nervous system and the brain with a neurovirologist. "To me it sounded kind of interesting how viruses can attack the brain and cause various motor and mental malfunctions," Gendelman said.
That summer, all of Gendelman's childhood excitement about scientific research came rushing back. He realized that as a practicing doctor, he could apply what other people had discovered. "But as a scientist, you are moving the frontiers of the cutting-edge forward," he said. "You are setting the stage for how medicine is practiced on a global scale."
In a fellowship at Baltimore's Johns Hopkins University, Gendelman was supposed to split his time among treating patients and conducting brain research. But the research so fascinated him that clinical work took a secondary role.
"What I studied there really set the stage for everything that has come in the future, including everything that we're doing right now," he said.
Sheep, Goats and AIDS
Gendelman and other Johns Hopkins researchers were studying brain-damaging viruses in sheep and goats, as a way to ultimately make discoveries about a disease that damages the human brain and nervous system: multiple sclerosis. Gendelman and his colleagues were the first scientists to show that the virus wasn't directly attacking the brain's most important component, the neurons. Rather, the virus was affecting the neurons' support cells, called glia. These glia normally nourish and protect the neurons, the "thinking cells" of the brain. But somehow, the virus turned these glia against the brain, and made them damage the neurons.
The same thing can happen in humans, in a process Gendelman now uses the old story about Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde to describe. The glia in the vast majority of cases act like the good Dr. Jekyll, helping the brain function. But sometimes the glia can be transformed into the evil Mr. Hyde, hurting the brain. In the story, the evil persona isn't permanent - Mr. Hyde turns back into Dr. Jekyll. The analogy to that story is fitting here, because Gendelman's research has found ways to turn the evil glial cells back into good ones.
Early in his career, Gendelman saw his ideas published in premier scientific journals. His future would have seemed bright, were it not for one big hitch: No other research institute would hire him. Johns Hopkins was one of the few institutions in the world studying these sheep and goat viruses, which came from far-flung Iceland.
"Other institutions said, 'What kind of market is there for studying sheep and goats?' " It was expensive to maintain the animals, Gendelman said, and there wasn't a sound, clear linkage between the animal viruses and the human disease multiple sclerosis.
So Gendelman had resolved to leave research and go into private practice as a doctor. But just then, to use Gendelman's description, BANG! Human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV - the virus that causes AIDS - was discovered. The lab in which Gendelman worked was given an early sample of the AIDS virus. Scientists in the lab discovered that the sheep and goat viruses they'd been studying were in the same family of viruses as HIV.
"It became very clear that many of the observations we made in the sheep and goats were clearly applicable to AIDS," Gendelman said. "I went from getting no job requests … to the phone was just continuously ringing off the hook."
Gendelman next went to the lab of a prominent AIDS researcher at the National Institutes of Health in Washington. There, he and other scientists discovered that just like the animal virus he'd studied earlier in sheep and goats, the AIDS virus could affect the glial cells.
Federal grants to study AIDS were limited in the early days of the disease, so there were not many studies ongoing. As a result, every time the NIH lab in Washington published a paper, it would be a major national news story. Gendelman's picture appeared in Newsweek, the New York Times, and other publications. "It was an incredible time where every movement in my scientific life played out in the national press," he said.
Several years later, money started flowing to research and there were a consequent number of new opportunities opening for Gendelman. He had to decide if he wanted to start his own AIDS research lab, or become a student again and learn more. So he joined the U.S. Army in 1987.
Not to fight in the infantry, mind you. He went to Walter Reed Army Medical Center, known as "the bastion of immunology."
"They gave me a commission, and a decent salary, and a place to study with one of the best scientists in the world," Gendelman said. He spent five years at Walter Reed studying the body's immunity systems. The lab in which he worked made pioneering discoveries about immune cells, the way viruses live in the body, and how they can be combated.
"My relationship with the (research on the) brain, for those years I was at Walter Reed, was put on the back burner," Gendelman said. But the interest remained.
After the Gulf War came a round of downsizing in the Army that affected everyone dramatically, including staff at Walter Reed. Fearing he'd be the victim of a budget cut, Gendelman started looking for another place to go.
There Was No Place Like Nebraska
"I had a lot of offers, but when I came to Nebraska, it was because I really felt there were boundless opportunities," Gendelman said.
"One thing that really impressed me of the faculty and the recruiters, they said that our job is to help you be successful, to take all the roadblocks away, to allow you to be successful beyond your wildest expectations.
"That they were more concerned about me and my research than they were about themselves. The sense that really drove me toward Nebraska was they were really interested in building the university as a whole."
At Columbia University and Johns Hopkins, Gendelman said, officials were more interested in what he could do for them. This was reflected in those institutions' offers of startup funds, lab space and support. Whereas Nebraska's proposal, he said, "was more generous than any other offer."
So now we're back to that lonely basement office at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, where Gendelman stood alone on an icy January day and felt rather depressed.
"I had to decide what I wanted to do," Gendelman said. "I decided I wanted to take everything I'd learned so far, and get Hyde back into Jekyll."
In four years Gendelman went from just himself and a technician to $800,000 in federal grants and a well-respected, nationally-known laboratory. He spent the money on the best equipment possible, in fulfillment of his vision that he and the other researchers in the center should never be limited by technology.
"The only thing that should limit us in our science is our ability to think," Gendelman said.
Using fetal brain cells from elective abortions was just one of nine approaches Gendelman and his colleagues developed to discover how HIV crossed into the brain from the blood, and turned those good Dr. Jekyll glial cells into evil Mr. Hyde ones. As you'll recall reading in the first part of this two-part series on Gendelman's research, the fetal cells are used to create simulations of the human brain so that concepts first tested in animals can be proven to work in humans.
Many more techniques were created on the animal-testing side of things. The scientists found a way to afflict mice with human-like dementia, and study the behavior of the diseased mice. "We had to become mouse neuropsychologists, so to speak. That didn't exist before," Gendelman said.
Gendelman's team also developed a brain bank to accept donations of autopsied brains, because some concepts had to be proven in a whole brain, not just a reconstruction of it. They found a way to measure the conductive qualities of nerve cells, to see how well the brain's electrical commands were being transmitted in the body.
"So all these different techniques had to be developed, and it's not like we had it across the street," Gendelman said.
Saving a Life
In 1996 came a critical turning point. Gendelman was serving part-time as a clinical professor at Creighton University in Omaha. One Saturday morning while making routine doctor's rounds at Saint Joseph Hospital, Gendelman saw a woman with profound HIV-related dementia.
"It was clear that this case had possibly two or three weeks left to live," Gendelman said. This was before the sophisticated anti-AIDS drugs of today were available. "Someone said to me, 'Dr. Gendelman, there's no way you're going to fix this woman, because dementia is a direct damage to nerve cells. And if it's direct damage to nerve cells, it can't be reversed, it can't be fixed.' "
But Gendelman knew better. After all his research on how viruses affected the brain, research that had started way back with the sheep and goats at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, he knew that the AIDS virus did not directly damage neurons. It acted on those Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde glial cells, which then turned from helpful to harmful and poisoned the neurons. Gendelman's approach was not to cure the AIDS virus; that's a feat that still hasn't been accomplished today. Rather, he went after the glial cells and, with some novel experimental treatments based on his research, convinced them to abandon their evil ways and stop poisoning the woman's brain.
It worked. The woman, consigned to death, survived. She lives today, back at the teaching job she loves. She hasn't been publicly identified because of the stigma of AIDS; she goes by the pseudonym Karen. After recovering, she wrote of her experience and treatment in a foreword to Gendelman's 1998 textbook, "The Neurology of AIDS."
Karen wrote this: "It is nothing short of a miracle that I am alive today. Just two months ago my viral count was over one million and I was given two months to live. Today, my viral count is barely detectable. Dr. Gendelman always tells me that I am medical history in the making. This is the first time where the virus has fully produced so much damage in the brain and then reversed itself. I don't need to be a doctor to know this is a huge breakthrough.
"… Secondly, I still can't believe that of all the places in the world, Dr. Gendelman, with his expertise in HIV that affects the brain, is in Omaha, Nebraska."
For Gendelman, there was the profound joy of saving a life. But there was also the satisfaction of seeing his theories work in a real person. "It taught us scientifically that our hypothesis was right," he said.
By now Gendelman had an $800,000 research program, with 15 or 20 investigators working for him. He began to think that if HIV dementia affected the brain through the glial cells, maybe Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease did the same. "It seemed to me like we had a moral and ethical obligation to pursue these diseases," he said.
So Gendelman went to the dean of the college of medicine with the idea of creating a research center of excellence (that's academic jargon for an extra-special research program). The NU Board of Regents approved, and the Center for Neurovirology and Neurodegenerative Disorders was born. The notoriety of Gendelman's research increased significantly with the opening of the center, and special recognition from the National Institutes of Health brought in even more grants and people.
As if this were not enough success, exciting news came from Israel. There, scientists had applied some of Gendelman's ideas about glial cells to reverse spinal-cord injuries in rats. These rats, which had been rendered quadriplegic, moved their legs again after the treatment.
"So first the hypothesis I'd been studying for 15 years was proven in the woman, in her brain, and then in the rat, in the spine," Gendelman said. "And all of a sudden, this is making some sense. This is not some pie in the sky, Dr. Gendelman in Nebraska idea. This is something that people accept."
'And then the sky fell'
In November 1999, an article appeared in the state's largest printed newspaper revealing that Gendelman received donations of fetal tissue from a Bellevue abortion doctor. The political reaction in heavily conservative Nebraska was instantaneous, and highly critical of Gendelman and the medical center. The governor spoke against the research, anti-abortion groups picketed the Board of Regents, and state senators made plans to introduce legislation banning the use of fetal cells in science.
"This is like a bomb," Gendelman said. "When this fetal-cell thing broke, it was like one day we were top of the universe, and the next day we were questioned in terms of our ethics and morality."
Gendelman had undergone scrutiny before, from fellow researchers. Scientists can be particularly blunt in telling their peers whether an idea has merit, or is pure bunk. But now, criticism of his science was coming from politicians and political activists who knew little or nothing of glial cells and immune factors and nourishing neurons. Especially troubling was the accusation that he was anti-life, that his use of fetal cells was leading to more abortions.
"I consider myself very pro-life. My whole life is pro-life. That's what I'd been doing," he said.
The controversy dominated Nebraska politics during the 2000 legislative session, where attempts to ban fetal-cell research ultimately failed. UNMC promised to pursue alternative sources for the brain cells needed in the research, first saying that miscarriages or ectopic pregnancies might be viable sources. They weren't, so Gendelman and his colleagues set to work creating a new set of technologies and procedures to get the cells from rapid autopsies. Terminally ill people, or the parents of terminally-ill children, allowed Gendelman's team to quickly collect brain tissue after death. Rapid autopsies have produced two of the three types of brain cells needed; the all-important neurons still elude the scientists.
The Quest Continues
Research has continued through the controversy at Gendelman's research center, in eight different areas of pursuit. A professional scientist leads each of the research programs, which makes for a lot of expertise packed into one floor of a building.
The diversity of experiments in the center has opened unique opportunities for the UNMC graduate students who study there. One of them is 29-year-old Eric Benner, a San Clemente, California native learning in a joint M.D./Ph.D program.
"I have had an absolute wonderful experience here," Renner said. "The project I am working on contains a lot of my own ideas. I don't think that there are a lot of labs here on this campus that would be able to support those ideas the way the center has."
In collaboration with Columbia University, Renner is helping create a way to simulate Parkinson's disease in mice. Renner's idea is to use a vaccine to get immune cells, called T-cells, into the area of the brain affected by Parkinson's. Once in the damaged environment, these T-cells actually secrete chemicals that reduce the damage that's occurred. For reasons that are still unknown, these T-cells only do this in damaged areas, not healthy ones.
"I think it's really important for grad students to pursue their own ideas," Renner said. "I think in order to fully pursue my own ideas, I literally could not have done this without the huge amount of integration that is going on here."
The loads of top-notch equipment "right down the hall" don't hurt, either. "I would imagine that there's certainly no place that's more technologically advanced than us," Renner said.
A scientist who's worked at Harvard Medical School and The Cleveland Clinic heads one of the research programs at Gendelman's center. Dr. Tsuneya Ikezu is deputy director of the center, and also chief of the Alzheimer's Disease Pathology unit.
"The unique thing of this research center is that the program of each individual is highly interactive," Ikezu said.
The center often invites other professional scientists to visit and see the laboratories. "They always say that they haven't seen such a research program which is so highly interactive and highly successful," Ikezu said.
"I would say this is one of the most successful programs within the UNMC and in the whole U.S. in this field."
Outside scientists agree. Dr. Subhash Dhawan is chief of the immunopathogenesis section of a research laboratory at the Food and Drug Administration's Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research.
"I think he's doing very important work in neurological diseases," Dhawan said of Gendelman. Of the research center, Dhawan added: "I think it's a fantastic, it's a remarkable center. To my knowledge I don't think any other center exists in the United States that is addressing these issues. And these are very critical issues."
_____
This story originally appeared in Nebraska StatePaper on December 22, 2000.
Friday, December 22, 2000
Thursday, December 21, 2000
Gendelman Explains Science Behind Fetal-Tissue Research
LINCOLN - When Dr. Howard Gendelman searches for cures to brain diseases like Parkinson's and Alzheimer's, he's working with cells that act like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
Gendelman has spent more than 15 years, the last eight of them at the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha, puzzling over a central question. It's this: Why do certain cells, known as glia, act good in most people, nourishing the brain, but in some people turn evil, destroying the brain?
A second question: Can Mr. Hyde be turned back into Dr. Jekyll? Can Hyde's evil work be reversed?
Until now scientific questions and answers about these diseases have been buried under a mountain of political questions about one of five major tools Gendelman uses in his research: brain cells from aborted fetuses. The revelation last November that Gendelman used cells donated by a Bellevue abortion doctor created a controversy that dominated public attention this year, and almost certainly will do so again in the coming year. He no longer receives cells from the Bellevue doctor, but the cells he uses still come mostly from elective abortions.
Seeing only political responses to this most interesting of topics may have generated new questions from people on both sides of the fetal-cell debate. Those who abhor the cells' use because of their connection with abortion, and those who believe using the cells is proper because lives may be saved, may well wonder:
In an interview with StatePaper on Wednesday, Gendelman considered these questions. You'll find the answers about fetal cells in this story; look to Friday's StatePaper to discover how AIDS research branched out, and how Gendelman found his way to Nebraska.
Recreating the Brain
You want to study diseases that damage the brain; diseases like AIDS-related dementia, Parkinson's and Alzheimer's that rob their victims of the ability to think and function. You've got an idea that maybe the glial cells that nourish the brain's key component, the neurons, can turn against the brain and become its enemy. You've even got ideas about how to reverse this process - how to change the evil Mr. Hyde to the good Dr. Jekyll. But how to test your idea? How do you recreate the human brain in a test tube?
Simulating the brain in a test tube requires having three types of brain cells: neurons, glia and astrocytes. Gendelman and his colleagues in Gendelman's Center for Neurovirology and Neurodegenerative Disorders have five methods for getting these cells. One of the methods involves fetal tissue.
As you've read before, but perhaps not all in one place, the sample of brain tissue Gendelman receives from aborted fetuses is the size of a pea. The samples used to come within hours of the abortion from the Bellevue abortion doctor, but now come via overnight delivery from a facility in Seattle, Washington. The samples do not come from the abortion procedure its opponents call partial-birth abortion. Only cells from first-trimester abortions are usable, Gendelman said, because they grow and develop too much after that stage. There's a misconception that the cells come from late-term abortion, or even living infants, Gendelman said, and that's not true.
Now the statement that fetal cells are the only source of neurons that will answer these specific questions raises more questions: Why? What makes Gendelman's research so special? Read on, and you'll find out.
Food for Thought
Gendelman's science revolves around those glial cells mentioned earlier. They produce chemicals and substances that provide the food and nourishment the neurons to function effectively.
For many years, Gendelman said, scientists thought glial cells had no major role in disease. But years of work at several different institutions helped Gendelman and his various colleagues prove otherwise. Somehow, an "insult" to these glial cells - from a virus like the human immunodeficiency virus that causes AIDS, or from an abnormal protein associated with Alzheimer's disease - could turn the glial cells from nurturing to destructive.
So Gendelman and his partners would take different components of the brain, infect them with HIV or afflict them with Parkinson's, and try to get these purposely disease brain parts to mimic a whole brain. "Obviously to do that, you need all the players," Gendelman said. "You can't have the play without the principal stars."
Taking top billing in this play is the neuron. Once again, Gendelman gets neurons from aborted human fetal tissues, and only from that source. Critics of this approach have said neurons can be obtained from stem cells, thus eliminating the need for using morally objectionable fetal cells. Stem cells are the body's precursor or ancestor cells; they develop into all the body's different parts. Scientists have found ways to transform them into many different forms. It's a promising, exciting and highly publicized area of research.
The Whole, Not the Parts
But, Gendelman said, stem cells won't answer the questions he's asking. Here's the problem: Stem cells could be transformed into neurons, sure. But if you did, you'd get just that - a neuron. You wouldn't get a test-tube simulation of a working brain, which is what's necessary to prove that ideas for disease treatments would actually work in the real world.
You can produce the individual parts (with stem cells), but you can't produce the whole," Gendelman said. "It would be like Star Wars without the spaceships."
Recovering neurons from human fetal brains brings not just the neurons, but the supporting glial cells. The neurons can't live by themselves because they depend on the nourishment of the glial cells. The result is a more accurate test-tube representation of the human brain, a place where treatments can be tried with more assurance that they'll work in living people.
One of these proposed treatments is a novel approach: A vaccine for Parkinson's disease. It's being studied right now in Gendelman's research center. Other big successes at the laboratory involve doing just what was mentioned before: Treating brain-destroying diseases by turning "evil" glial cells back into good ones. It's already saved one Omaha woman's life, and helped inspire researchers in Israel to cure heal normally irreversible spinal-cord injuries in rats. Look for more on all those discoveries in the second part of this story, in Friday's StatePaper.
Gendelman thinks his ideas have promise. He thinks treatments or cures for diseases that rob people of their thoughts could come from his ideas. He uses human fetal cells as one of his tools because he believes finding cures for disease requires many different approaches. Other scientists take their paths, and he takes his.
"We're approaching things differently," Gendelman said. "We're all moving toward the same goal.
"That's a fundamental tenet of science, I mean, the search for the truth. You don't know if one approach, both approaches, no approaches, is going to work."
_____
This story originally appeared in Nebraska StatePaper on December 21, 2000.
Gendelman has spent more than 15 years, the last eight of them at the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha, puzzling over a central question. It's this: Why do certain cells, known as glia, act good in most people, nourishing the brain, but in some people turn evil, destroying the brain?
A second question: Can Mr. Hyde be turned back into Dr. Jekyll? Can Hyde's evil work be reversed?
Until now scientific questions and answers about these diseases have been buried under a mountain of political questions about one of five major tools Gendelman uses in his research: brain cells from aborted fetuses. The revelation last November that Gendelman used cells donated by a Bellevue abortion doctor created a controversy that dominated public attention this year, and almost certainly will do so again in the coming year. He no longer receives cells from the Bellevue doctor, but the cells he uses still come mostly from elective abortions.
Seeing only political responses to this most interesting of topics may have generated new questions from people on both sides of the fetal-cell debate. Those who abhor the cells' use because of their connection with abortion, and those who believe using the cells is proper because lives may be saved, may well wonder:
- How are the cells used? Do they play a minor or major role in the research? Aren't there alternatives that are less morally objectionable to some?
- How did research that started looking at one of the great scourges of our times, AIDS, branch out into Parkinson's disease and Alzheimer's disease? Could the three be related? How does that affect the prospects for cures?
- How did a researcher who'd held prestigious positions at three world-renowned institutions on the East Coast end up in Nebraska? How did he turn a basement office and one technician into a laboratory that boasts the latest technology, employs 40 researchers and assistants and explores eight categories of scientific pursuit? What learning opportunities does this offer UNMC students?
In an interview with StatePaper on Wednesday, Gendelman considered these questions. You'll find the answers about fetal cells in this story; look to Friday's StatePaper to discover how AIDS research branched out, and how Gendelman found his way to Nebraska.
Recreating the Brain
You want to study diseases that damage the brain; diseases like AIDS-related dementia, Parkinson's and Alzheimer's that rob their victims of the ability to think and function. You've got an idea that maybe the glial cells that nourish the brain's key component, the neurons, can turn against the brain and become its enemy. You've even got ideas about how to reverse this process - how to change the evil Mr. Hyde to the good Dr. Jekyll. But how to test your idea? How do you recreate the human brain in a test tube?
Simulating the brain in a test tube requires having three types of brain cells: neurons, glia and astrocytes. Gendelman and his colleagues in Gendelman's Center for Neurovirology and Neurodegenerative Disorders have five methods for getting these cells. One of the methods involves fetal tissue.
- Donated blood: This first method examines how white blood cells, the disease-fighting component of blood, get into the brain - and what they do when they get there. Gendelman's center receives donations of blood for these studies.
- Surgical resections: From hospitals in other states, the center receives the tissue left over following surgical removal of brain tumors. Some of this tissue is usable for science, as is some of the tissue removed from the brains of people with epilepsy.
- Rapid autopsies: This is the center's newest method, being pursued in an attempt to eliminate the need for using aborted human fetal cells. "That is going pretty well," Gendelman said of the effort. It involves getting permission to extract brain tissue very quickly after a person's death, so the three cell types needed will not deteriorate. So far, the center has succeeded in getting the astrocytes and microglia - but not the all-important neurons.
- Rat and mouse fetal cells: Most of the center's tests are run first on rats and mice, Gendelman said. "We only use the human cells as proof of concept. All the diseases we study - Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, AIDS dementia -- are human diseases. They're not mouse diseases."
- Human fetal cells: This is the only source of healthy neurons which will help answer the questions Gendelman and his center's researchers are asking. Neurons transmit the electrical impulses with which the brain tells the body what to do. They're the thinking cells. They're supremely important.
As you've read before, but perhaps not all in one place, the sample of brain tissue Gendelman receives from aborted fetuses is the size of a pea. The samples used to come within hours of the abortion from the Bellevue abortion doctor, but now come via overnight delivery from a facility in Seattle, Washington. The samples do not come from the abortion procedure its opponents call partial-birth abortion. Only cells from first-trimester abortions are usable, Gendelman said, because they grow and develop too much after that stage. There's a misconception that the cells come from late-term abortion, or even living infants, Gendelman said, and that's not true.
Now the statement that fetal cells are the only source of neurons that will answer these specific questions raises more questions: Why? What makes Gendelman's research so special? Read on, and you'll find out.
Food for Thought
Gendelman's science revolves around those glial cells mentioned earlier. They produce chemicals and substances that provide the food and nourishment the neurons to function effectively.
For many years, Gendelman said, scientists thought glial cells had no major role in disease. But years of work at several different institutions helped Gendelman and his various colleagues prove otherwise. Somehow, an "insult" to these glial cells - from a virus like the human immunodeficiency virus that causes AIDS, or from an abnormal protein associated with Alzheimer's disease - could turn the glial cells from nurturing to destructive.
So Gendelman and his partners would take different components of the brain, infect them with HIV or afflict them with Parkinson's, and try to get these purposely disease brain parts to mimic a whole brain. "Obviously to do that, you need all the players," Gendelman said. "You can't have the play without the principal stars."
Taking top billing in this play is the neuron. Once again, Gendelman gets neurons from aborted human fetal tissues, and only from that source. Critics of this approach have said neurons can be obtained from stem cells, thus eliminating the need for using morally objectionable fetal cells. Stem cells are the body's precursor or ancestor cells; they develop into all the body's different parts. Scientists have found ways to transform them into many different forms. It's a promising, exciting and highly publicized area of research.
The Whole, Not the Parts
But, Gendelman said, stem cells won't answer the questions he's asking. Here's the problem: Stem cells could be transformed into neurons, sure. But if you did, you'd get just that - a neuron. You wouldn't get a test-tube simulation of a working brain, which is what's necessary to prove that ideas for disease treatments would actually work in the real world.
You can produce the individual parts (with stem cells), but you can't produce the whole," Gendelman said. "It would be like Star Wars without the spaceships."
Recovering neurons from human fetal brains brings not just the neurons, but the supporting glial cells. The neurons can't live by themselves because they depend on the nourishment of the glial cells. The result is a more accurate test-tube representation of the human brain, a place where treatments can be tried with more assurance that they'll work in living people.
One of these proposed treatments is a novel approach: A vaccine for Parkinson's disease. It's being studied right now in Gendelman's research center. Other big successes at the laboratory involve doing just what was mentioned before: Treating brain-destroying diseases by turning "evil" glial cells back into good ones. It's already saved one Omaha woman's life, and helped inspire researchers in Israel to cure heal normally irreversible spinal-cord injuries in rats. Look for more on all those discoveries in the second part of this story, in Friday's StatePaper.
Gendelman thinks his ideas have promise. He thinks treatments or cures for diseases that rob people of their thoughts could come from his ideas. He uses human fetal cells as one of his tools because he believes finding cures for disease requires many different approaches. Other scientists take their paths, and he takes his.
"We're approaching things differently," Gendelman said. "We're all moving toward the same goal.
"That's a fundamental tenet of science, I mean, the search for the truth. You don't know if one approach, both approaches, no approaches, is going to work."
_____
This story originally appeared in Nebraska StatePaper on December 21, 2000.
Sunday, April 30, 2000
Abortion or Bust!
WASHINGTON - Being eccentric and outgoing is a job requirement at Kansas City International Airport.
Breath befouled by a Pizza Hut Personal Pan Pizza (Supreme, natch), I proceeded to the airport newsstand to buy some tic tacs. No sooner had I set the mints on the counter than the charmingly grizzled old lady clerk says loudly and enthusiastically, "SO, you need some TIC TACS, do ya?" I smile and nod at this statement of the obvious. She rings up the purchase. "That'll be NINETY-FOUR CENTS."
I hand her a dollar bill. "That'll be six cents comin' back to ya. Not The Sixth Sense, six cents."
I think about asking her if she sees dead people.
But then I figure discretion is the better part of valor and beat a hasty retreat. The aforementioned pizza was a reward for my stomach, which had set to growling after learning my flight was going to depart an hour late. The old gastrointestinal system had been looking so forward to a vacuum-packed travel pillow masquerading as an airline sandwich that it demanded food now, or else.
Getting the pizza is a story in itself. There's a pretty normal-looking woman behind the counter at 10 a.m. when I ask if I can get lunch this far before lunch time. Her colleague with the piercing stare and the vaguely eastern-European accent says somewhat reservedly, "It'll take six minutes to cook one." She must have thought we were in a rush, not knowing we were cooling our heels while the flight crew finished its FAA-mandated rest period. We had till noon, so I told her to take her time.
Oh, she took her time, burning my pizza while she served my traveling companion his piping hot, delectably greasy masterpiece of frozen-food technology. Before this the first woman, the normal-looking one, asks me where I'm from. I say Nebraska and she proceeds to tell me how she went up there recently and it snowed! In April! "Ma, send me a TICKET! Get me OUT of here," she says, by way of recollecting her chilly Cornhusker State nightmare. I say something about how she'd best get out of the Midwest if she doesn't like that kind of weather. I'm figuring, I think with reasonable cause, that she must recently have moved to Kansas City, because Ol' Man Winter sneezes all over that fair city pretty often, too. But no, she's lived there all her life. She's turned off to Omaha forever, though, because it snowed in April.
I was in Kansas City with a friend who writes for another newspaper because we both wanted to cover the oral arguments on Nebraska's partial-birth abortion ban before the Supreme Court. But we wanted to see the Washington, D.C., sights as well, so we left on the Saturday before last Tuesday's arguments.
Hail thee, mighty electron
We had planned to make the 22-hour drive to D.C., but a handy service called Smarter Living saved us from pancake-flat, aching rear ends and the 10 pounds we'd gain eating iced animal cookies on the way.
(Those pink wonders from the Keebler Elves are God's perfect travel food. They're sweet, but not so much they make your teeth hurt; they're filling; and you can leave the bag open a week and they won't get stale. For those of you who like more natural foods, as do I, you'll be glad to know the ingredient list includes no words with more than three syllables.)
The Smarter Living web site lets you sign up for a service that compiles all the last-minute Internet-only airfare specials from the major airlines. You select the departure airports you're interested in, and every Wednesday you get an e-mail listing where you can go, for how much and on which airline. Most of the fares are for travel that weekend, leaving on Friday or Saturday and returning Monday or Tuesday. But every now and then my personal Holy Grail of Internet airfares appears: the asterisk, which when found next to a fare means it's available for dates other than the coming weekend. Some hugely cheap vacations to far-flung lands can be had this way.
So last week as I was contemplating how to keep blood flowing to my legs for 22 hours on the road, I checked my e-mail and behold! there arose my salvation on electron wings. A $169 fare to Philadelphia, just a $40 Amtrak fare away from my final destination. Regular airfares were running from $600 to $1,200.
(In case readers of my previous report on getting cheap airfare with Priceline are wondering, I did not reveal my low ticket price to a single fellow traveler. I've learned my lesson.)
So we got to Philly, wonderful land of weekend motorcycle races on public streets (not Harleys, but speed-freak Kawasakis), gunshots in the night and razor wire everywhere. Having lived on the Temple University campus for two weeks a few summers ago, I didn't want to stay long. So we hopped the $5 SEPTA train to the Amtrak station, bought tickets there on a handy self-service machine as pigeons flew around indoors and were off. But not before looking around the food court and finding not a single place that sold Philly steak sandwiches. Go figure.
Continuing our streak of cheap-travel luck, we called 1-800-HOLIDAY from Washington's Union Station and got an $89 weekend rate at Holiday Inn Central, mere blocks from the White House. Had there been telephones with data ports in Union Station, I would have searched the Internet for better hotel rates. Might even have used Priceline's name-your-own-hotel-rate service. Using the telephone -- a cellular, granted, but a telephone nonetheless -- felt soooo low-tech.
The rest of the trip up until the Supreme Court arguments is sort of a blur of aching feet and stiff calf muscles, because we walked nearly everywhere, the Washington subway stations are really far apart, and taxis are for weaklings. We did have two outstanding meals and one politically incorrect tavern experience, which I will detail for you in case your travels take you to our nation's capital.
Haven't met a rude French person yet
First was dinner from the $18.95 price-fixed menu at Bistro Francais in Georgetown. For that paltry sum, which is cheap for that quality of food in the Midwest and a miracle back East, we got a glass of house wine, mussels nicoise, our choice from a list of 10 entrees, and dessert.
I could not decide between the rabbit and the duck, so I asked the waiter's preference. Without hesitation, "Ze dook." So I had ze dook, and it was perfection on a plate: thin slices of white meat with a generous layer of fat on the left, a solid slab of dark meat on the right, all wading comfortably in a shallow pool of tart raspberry sauce. The mussels appetizer consisted of 10 (ten!) huge mussels swimming in a garlic-butter sauce. The service was excellent, the maitre d kindly seated us although we were underdressed and 20 minutes early for the 10:30 p.m. start of the price-fixed menu, and I highly recommend the place. The addresses and telephone numbers of all the places I'll talk about are at the end of this story.
Dining by the numbers
The next night we went to the Adams Morgan district, walking right by the National Zoo where six people would be shot the very next day. Freaky. As always, we were in the mood for culinary adventure, so we went to an Ethiopian restaurant, Red Sea. There were two other Ethiopian restaurants within half a block, which seems just as economically unworkable as the three Greek restaurants within half a block of each other in Lincoln. Yet there they were, and Red Sea was closest. So in we went.
We discovered to our delight that Ethiopians don't use utensils. They pick up their food with pieces of a spongy, floppy bread called injera that's just a little thinner than a pancake. Food is served on a big communal platter from which everyone can grab what looks good.
Ordering the food was almost as fun as eating it. The waitresses all dressed in what I ignorantly assume is traditional garb, beautiful white sari-like dresses. I like lamb and tried to order yebeg wat, "succulent lamb simmered in red pepper sauce, with ginger root, cardamom, garlic and exotic spices" (I grabbed a take-out menu so I could get all these details right and not take notes at the table. That's so gauche.) But I must have mangled the pronunciation particularly well, because she said suggestively, "Okay, the Number 3. Now, which two vegetables?"
I took the hint and ordered the A, the non-Ethiopian term for gomen, spicy chopped greens in oil, with onions and pepper. I honestly could not adequately recognize the ingredients in any of the eight other vegetable dishes, so I asked the waitress what she liked. "The H." Okay, the H, which turned out to be yemisir azefan, spicy green lentil puree blended with ginger, garlic, onion and hot chilies and "touched with mustard." Now the funny part came when my friend couldn't decide on his second vegetable, and he asked the waitress what she liked. "Oh, definitely the I." So my friend and I glanced at each other in wonder, because she'd just recommended the previous letter in the alphabet to me. But he still ordered the I, otherwise known as carrot dinich -- carrots and potatoes cooked with onion, ginger and green pepper. (They must have about as much ginger in Ethiopia as India has curry.)
The only dish that tasted most like something I'd had before was the A, which was nearly identical to Southern American collard greens. The 3 reminded me of lamb curry at The Oven in Lincoln, but it was much milder and slightly watery. The other dishes -- especially the H -- are impossible to describe, but I promise they were tasty. So if you're ever in Washington and you've got a hankering for adventure, go to Red Sea. You only have to remember three things: 3, A and H.
Elian Gonzalez
Right next door to Red Sea is Madam's Organ, which according to an advertisement I'd seen offered half-price Rolling Rock beer to redheads. Back in my elementary-school days, when I had even fewer social skills than now and weighed about 300 pounds, I was teased mercilessly about my then-bright orange hair. No amount of repeating "Carrot tops are green!" would dissuade my tormentors. So I figured it was about time to drown my years of suffering in beer I could get on the cheap because of my once-hated coiffure. Poetic justice.
Little did I realize the visual experience that awaited me. Dead animals -- fish and fowl, marine and mammal -- festooned the walls. A street sign pointed the way to "Letcher Avenue." Formal portraits of important-looking white guys competed for space with a Picasso-like composition of gaunt, naked women. One of the daily food specials was Buffalo wings, advertised as -- I'm not kidding -- "hotter than your sister."
But the best part was the chalkboard advertising the drink specials. On this Sunday, just one day after federal troops stormed in to seize a young Cuban boy (does that make them stormtroopers?), those who like mixed drinks could order the Elian Gonzalez Shooter: Cuba Libre with a shot of Cuervo tequila. Price: three Yankee dollars.
* * *
The addresses, as promised:
Bistro Francais, 3128 M St. N.W., (202) 338-3830
Red Sea, 2463 18th St. N.W., (202) 483-5000
Madam's Organ, 2461 18th St N.W., (202) 667-5370
_____
This piece originally appeared April 30, 2000, in Nebraska StatePaper. You can see the original article here.
Breath befouled by a Pizza Hut Personal Pan Pizza (Supreme, natch), I proceeded to the airport newsstand to buy some tic tacs. No sooner had I set the mints on the counter than the charmingly grizzled old lady clerk says loudly and enthusiastically, "SO, you need some TIC TACS, do ya?" I smile and nod at this statement of the obvious. She rings up the purchase. "That'll be NINETY-FOUR CENTS."
I hand her a dollar bill. "That'll be six cents comin' back to ya. Not The Sixth Sense, six cents."
I think about asking her if she sees dead people.
But then I figure discretion is the better part of valor and beat a hasty retreat. The aforementioned pizza was a reward for my stomach, which had set to growling after learning my flight was going to depart an hour late. The old gastrointestinal system had been looking so forward to a vacuum-packed travel pillow masquerading as an airline sandwich that it demanded food now, or else.
Getting the pizza is a story in itself. There's a pretty normal-looking woman behind the counter at 10 a.m. when I ask if I can get lunch this far before lunch time. Her colleague with the piercing stare and the vaguely eastern-European accent says somewhat reservedly, "It'll take six minutes to cook one." She must have thought we were in a rush, not knowing we were cooling our heels while the flight crew finished its FAA-mandated rest period. We had till noon, so I told her to take her time.
Oh, she took her time, burning my pizza while she served my traveling companion his piping hot, delectably greasy masterpiece of frozen-food technology. Before this the first woman, the normal-looking one, asks me where I'm from. I say Nebraska and she proceeds to tell me how she went up there recently and it snowed! In April! "Ma, send me a TICKET! Get me OUT of here," she says, by way of recollecting her chilly Cornhusker State nightmare. I say something about how she'd best get out of the Midwest if she doesn't like that kind of weather. I'm figuring, I think with reasonable cause, that she must recently have moved to Kansas City, because Ol' Man Winter sneezes all over that fair city pretty often, too. But no, she's lived there all her life. She's turned off to Omaha forever, though, because it snowed in April.
I was in Kansas City with a friend who writes for another newspaper because we both wanted to cover the oral arguments on Nebraska's partial-birth abortion ban before the Supreme Court. But we wanted to see the Washington, D.C., sights as well, so we left on the Saturday before last Tuesday's arguments.
Hail thee, mighty electron
We had planned to make the 22-hour drive to D.C., but a handy service called Smarter Living saved us from pancake-flat, aching rear ends and the 10 pounds we'd gain eating iced animal cookies on the way.
(Those pink wonders from the Keebler Elves are God's perfect travel food. They're sweet, but not so much they make your teeth hurt; they're filling; and you can leave the bag open a week and they won't get stale. For those of you who like more natural foods, as do I, you'll be glad to know the ingredient list includes no words with more than three syllables.)
The Smarter Living web site lets you sign up for a service that compiles all the last-minute Internet-only airfare specials from the major airlines. You select the departure airports you're interested in, and every Wednesday you get an e-mail listing where you can go, for how much and on which airline. Most of the fares are for travel that weekend, leaving on Friday or Saturday and returning Monday or Tuesday. But every now and then my personal Holy Grail of Internet airfares appears: the asterisk, which when found next to a fare means it's available for dates other than the coming weekend. Some hugely cheap vacations to far-flung lands can be had this way.
So last week as I was contemplating how to keep blood flowing to my legs for 22 hours on the road, I checked my e-mail and behold! there arose my salvation on electron wings. A $169 fare to Philadelphia, just a $40 Amtrak fare away from my final destination. Regular airfares were running from $600 to $1,200.
(In case readers of my previous report on getting cheap airfare with Priceline are wondering, I did not reveal my low ticket price to a single fellow traveler. I've learned my lesson.)
So we got to Philly, wonderful land of weekend motorcycle races on public streets (not Harleys, but speed-freak Kawasakis), gunshots in the night and razor wire everywhere. Having lived on the Temple University campus for two weeks a few summers ago, I didn't want to stay long. So we hopped the $5 SEPTA train to the Amtrak station, bought tickets there on a handy self-service machine as pigeons flew around indoors and were off. But not before looking around the food court and finding not a single place that sold Philly steak sandwiches. Go figure.
Continuing our streak of cheap-travel luck, we called 1-800-HOLIDAY from Washington's Union Station and got an $89 weekend rate at Holiday Inn Central, mere blocks from the White House. Had there been telephones with data ports in Union Station, I would have searched the Internet for better hotel rates. Might even have used Priceline's name-your-own-hotel-rate service. Using the telephone -- a cellular, granted, but a telephone nonetheless -- felt soooo low-tech.
The rest of the trip up until the Supreme Court arguments is sort of a blur of aching feet and stiff calf muscles, because we walked nearly everywhere, the Washington subway stations are really far apart, and taxis are for weaklings. We did have two outstanding meals and one politically incorrect tavern experience, which I will detail for you in case your travels take you to our nation's capital.
Haven't met a rude French person yet
First was dinner from the $18.95 price-fixed menu at Bistro Francais in Georgetown. For that paltry sum, which is cheap for that quality of food in the Midwest and a miracle back East, we got a glass of house wine, mussels nicoise, our choice from a list of 10 entrees, and dessert.
I could not decide between the rabbit and the duck, so I asked the waiter's preference. Without hesitation, "Ze dook." So I had ze dook, and it was perfection on a plate: thin slices of white meat with a generous layer of fat on the left, a solid slab of dark meat on the right, all wading comfortably in a shallow pool of tart raspberry sauce. The mussels appetizer consisted of 10 (ten!) huge mussels swimming in a garlic-butter sauce. The service was excellent, the maitre d kindly seated us although we were underdressed and 20 minutes early for the 10:30 p.m. start of the price-fixed menu, and I highly recommend the place. The addresses and telephone numbers of all the places I'll talk about are at the end of this story.
Dining by the numbers
The next night we went to the Adams Morgan district, walking right by the National Zoo where six people would be shot the very next day. Freaky. As always, we were in the mood for culinary adventure, so we went to an Ethiopian restaurant, Red Sea. There were two other Ethiopian restaurants within half a block, which seems just as economically unworkable as the three Greek restaurants within half a block of each other in Lincoln. Yet there they were, and Red Sea was closest. So in we went.
We discovered to our delight that Ethiopians don't use utensils. They pick up their food with pieces of a spongy, floppy bread called injera that's just a little thinner than a pancake. Food is served on a big communal platter from which everyone can grab what looks good.
Ordering the food was almost as fun as eating it. The waitresses all dressed in what I ignorantly assume is traditional garb, beautiful white sari-like dresses. I like lamb and tried to order yebeg wat, "succulent lamb simmered in red pepper sauce, with ginger root, cardamom, garlic and exotic spices" (I grabbed a take-out menu so I could get all these details right and not take notes at the table. That's so gauche.) But I must have mangled the pronunciation particularly well, because she said suggestively, "Okay, the Number 3. Now, which two vegetables?"
I took the hint and ordered the A, the non-Ethiopian term for gomen, spicy chopped greens in oil, with onions and pepper. I honestly could not adequately recognize the ingredients in any of the eight other vegetable dishes, so I asked the waitress what she liked. "The H." Okay, the H, which turned out to be yemisir azefan, spicy green lentil puree blended with ginger, garlic, onion and hot chilies and "touched with mustard." Now the funny part came when my friend couldn't decide on his second vegetable, and he asked the waitress what she liked. "Oh, definitely the I." So my friend and I glanced at each other in wonder, because she'd just recommended the previous letter in the alphabet to me. But he still ordered the I, otherwise known as carrot dinich -- carrots and potatoes cooked with onion, ginger and green pepper. (They must have about as much ginger in Ethiopia as India has curry.)
The only dish that tasted most like something I'd had before was the A, which was nearly identical to Southern American collard greens. The 3 reminded me of lamb curry at The Oven in Lincoln, but it was much milder and slightly watery. The other dishes -- especially the H -- are impossible to describe, but I promise they were tasty. So if you're ever in Washington and you've got a hankering for adventure, go to Red Sea. You only have to remember three things: 3, A and H.
Elian Gonzalez
Right next door to Red Sea is Madam's Organ, which according to an advertisement I'd seen offered half-price Rolling Rock beer to redheads. Back in my elementary-school days, when I had even fewer social skills than now and weighed about 300 pounds, I was teased mercilessly about my then-bright orange hair. No amount of repeating "Carrot tops are green!" would dissuade my tormentors. So I figured it was about time to drown my years of suffering in beer I could get on the cheap because of my once-hated coiffure. Poetic justice.
Little did I realize the visual experience that awaited me. Dead animals -- fish and fowl, marine and mammal -- festooned the walls. A street sign pointed the way to "Letcher Avenue." Formal portraits of important-looking white guys competed for space with a Picasso-like composition of gaunt, naked women. One of the daily food specials was Buffalo wings, advertised as -- I'm not kidding -- "hotter than your sister."
But the best part was the chalkboard advertising the drink specials. On this Sunday, just one day after federal troops stormed in to seize a young Cuban boy (does that make them stormtroopers?), those who like mixed drinks could order the Elian Gonzalez Shooter: Cuba Libre with a shot of Cuervo tequila. Price: three Yankee dollars.
* * *
The addresses, as promised:
Bistro Francais, 3128 M St. N.W., (202) 338-3830
Red Sea, 2463 18th St. N.W., (202) 483-5000
Madam's Organ, 2461 18th St N.W., (202) 667-5370
_____
This piece originally appeared April 30, 2000, in Nebraska StatePaper. You can see the original article here.
Sunday, March 19, 2000
Don't Try This in the Air
ON A LOUNGE CHAIR IN FLORIDA - Capt. James T. Kirk got me where I am today.
I needed to take a family-emergency trip to Florida, and all the ordinary Internet cheap-airfare searches came up blank because it's Spring Break time for some of the college set. So I tried priceline.com, that "name your own price" service advertised on television by Capt. Kirk's alter-ego, William Shatner.
Priceline works like this: You say where you want to leave from, where you want to go to, and how much you're willing to pay. You find out an hour later whether an airline has accepted your offer, in which case your credit card is charged. But if at first you don't succeed, try, try again, making minor modifications to your travel plans. Just be careful about setting your departure day as a day on which you're scheduled to work, "just to see what happens." You might get it.
Priceline asks you what level of inconvenience you're willing to accept in order to get tickets at your desired price. You can agree to make up to two connections, endure long layovers, fly on something other than a jet (Read: Treetop Express Airlines. Fasten your seatbelts.), depart and arrive at "non-peak" times (Read: Before God gets up in the morning, and after He is sawing logs.).
So I'm thinking: Isn't it inconvenient enough to be sealed in a pressurized steel tube, stuffed into a chair that's amply sized for Ally McBeal but not the rest of us, given enough leg room to ensure the cessation of blood flow to my feet, and anticipate for the entire flight having to hear the formerly gruff flight attendant say cheerily, "Thank you. Buh-bye. Thank you. Buh-bye. Buh-bye now. Buh-bye"?
* * *
So, $300 poorer (my $250 offer plus taxes and "airport fees"), I board a Boeing 737 jet. I find the gods have smiled upon me doubly: I'm seated in the first row, ensuring my 6-foot-2 frame quick relief from its contortions at flight's end. And I'm seated between two average-sized women, a vast improvement over my usual fate, which involves two amply-proportioned men who use up the armrests with something other than their arms.
* * *
Earlier while waiting to board I'd heard the inevitable, "The flight is oversold and we're looking for volunteers whose travel plans are flexible." My heart always gives a little jump at times like these because I secretly suspect that were there to be no volunteers, they'd first kick off the plane those who'd paid the least for their tickets. Meaning me.
But of course I got on the plane, and it's only after we were all seated uncomfortably that they began dangling carrots before us. They needed two people to debark, and they started the bidding at $350 worth of airline travel.
Warning: Don't try this on an airplane. Being the sociable fellow I am, I turned to the woman on my right and happily announced, "That's more than I paid for my ticket!"
She not-so-happily replied, "I paid $450 for mine." Talk about getting off on the wrong foot.
A few minutes later, after our scheduled departure time had passed, the offer rose to $500. Visions of a European Vacation (minus Chevy Chase, but with that lovely German girl in the lederhosen Rusty has the good fortune to meet) danced in my head. But I sat still.
Seven hundred and fifty dollars. I fidgeted mightily for a moment before two men behind me arose and seized the day.
* * *
Two grateful people with inflexible travel plans take the now-vacant seats. Then I get to observe the flight attendant trying to close the bulkhead hatch. Under normal circumstances, I imagine, this would involve pulling firmly down on a long metal bar until a satisfactory click is achieved. In this instance, though, a full minute of struggle produces no results, so the attendant grasps the bar with both arms, stoops down, and actually hangs from the bar, pulling down with her entire weight. The click, mercifully, finally comes.
I turn to the woman on my right. "This isn't exactly encouraging."
"No, it really is not."
* * *
We've had our tiny plastic glass of ice cubes, with a little soda to get them wet. Also our hermetically sealed package of four wheat 'n' cheddar crackers (marked "Sample Only, Not for Resale"), adorably tiny Three Musketeers "candy bite" (it's too small to be a bar, not even "Fun Size"), a fruit-filled cereal bar and a moist towelette. So a flight attendant stands at the front of the airplane and announces via the intercom, "We've got some boxes of cookies available for one dollar. Proceeds benefit the American Heart Association."
This "offer" is coming just after Girl Scout cookie season. "Didn't we pay enough for this flight already?" I ask the woman on my right.
"Hmmph," she says, shaking her head. Inside, she's thinking: "Yeah, some more than others."
* * *
Later the flight attendant resumes her cookie-sale announcing place, but this time clutches a plastic bag stuffed full of something. I quickly learn via the intercom that it's free samples of Thermasilk ("Heat is good!") shampoo and conditioner. I take one, on the theory that you never know when you'll need hair-care products designed to work better with a blow dryer.
Never one to keep things to myself, I turn to the woman on my right: "Talk about a captive audience for advertising."
"Hmmph," she says.
* * *
The captain (of the plane, not the Starship Enterprise) gets on the horn and says all the turbulence that's been tossing us about has forced a slow down, and that plus the time we spent on the ground trying to bribe two people off the plane means we'll arrive at our destination a half-hour late. This doesn't bode well for the woman on my right, who has a connection to catch.
Cheerily, I turn to her and say, "You want to hear my best horror story about being late for a connection?"
"No, probably not," says she, "but go ahead."
So I do. St. Louis airport. Thirty minutes late getting in because of weather. Connecting flight, last one of the night, literally one mile away in another terminal. Have to work the next day. Not exactly in shape. Heavily laden with Florida oranges. Sprinting, running, jogging, walking, near-crawling. Still not there. Wonderful companion outpaces me, arrives at gate to find door shut, jetway retracted from plane and bulkhead hatch closed. Can see pilots preparing to taxi away. Jumps up and down and pounds on window until they see her. Several minutes later, jetway operator pokes head out of door and says, "Can I help you with something?" I arrive several minutes later, and the jetway is extended, hatch opened, just for us. Hot glares of other passengers not felt on our sweaty, flushed skin.
"But that's St. Louis. I'm sure things will be much better for you."
Of course, things are a lot better for me -- sort of. I've got a three-hour layover in Orlando, courtesy of Capt. Kirk and all the other good folks at priceline.com. That plus a roller-coaster ride on a propeller-driven aircraft to my final destination, ending with a nine-point landing (three points, BOUNCE!, three points, bounce, three points), leads me to believe that the bad karma earned from gloating -- however unintentionally -- about snagging a cheap ticket catches up with you faster than you might expect.
_____
This piece is adapted from an article that originally ran March 19, 2000, on Nebraska StatePaper. You can see the original article here.
I needed to take a family-emergency trip to Florida, and all the ordinary Internet cheap-airfare searches came up blank because it's Spring Break time for some of the college set. So I tried priceline.com, that "name your own price" service advertised on television by Capt. Kirk's alter-ego, William Shatner.
Priceline works like this: You say where you want to leave from, where you want to go to, and how much you're willing to pay. You find out an hour later whether an airline has accepted your offer, in which case your credit card is charged. But if at first you don't succeed, try, try again, making minor modifications to your travel plans. Just be careful about setting your departure day as a day on which you're scheduled to work, "just to see what happens." You might get it.
Priceline asks you what level of inconvenience you're willing to accept in order to get tickets at your desired price. You can agree to make up to two connections, endure long layovers, fly on something other than a jet (Read: Treetop Express Airlines. Fasten your seatbelts.), depart and arrive at "non-peak" times (Read: Before God gets up in the morning, and after He is sawing logs.).
So I'm thinking: Isn't it inconvenient enough to be sealed in a pressurized steel tube, stuffed into a chair that's amply sized for Ally McBeal but not the rest of us, given enough leg room to ensure the cessation of blood flow to my feet, and anticipate for the entire flight having to hear the formerly gruff flight attendant say cheerily, "Thank you. Buh-bye. Thank you. Buh-bye. Buh-bye now. Buh-bye"?
So, $300 poorer (my $250 offer plus taxes and "airport fees"), I board a Boeing 737 jet. I find the gods have smiled upon me doubly: I'm seated in the first row, ensuring my 6-foot-2 frame quick relief from its contortions at flight's end. And I'm seated between two average-sized women, a vast improvement over my usual fate, which involves two amply-proportioned men who use up the armrests with something other than their arms.
Earlier while waiting to board I'd heard the inevitable, "The flight is oversold and we're looking for volunteers whose travel plans are flexible." My heart always gives a little jump at times like these because I secretly suspect that were there to be no volunteers, they'd first kick off the plane those who'd paid the least for their tickets. Meaning me.
But of course I got on the plane, and it's only after we were all seated uncomfortably that they began dangling carrots before us. They needed two people to debark, and they started the bidding at $350 worth of airline travel.
Warning: Don't try this on an airplane. Being the sociable fellow I am, I turned to the woman on my right and happily announced, "That's more than I paid for my ticket!"
She not-so-happily replied, "I paid $450 for mine." Talk about getting off on the wrong foot.
A few minutes later, after our scheduled departure time had passed, the offer rose to $500. Visions of a European Vacation (minus Chevy Chase, but with that lovely German girl in the lederhosen Rusty has the good fortune to meet) danced in my head. But I sat still.
Seven hundred and fifty dollars. I fidgeted mightily for a moment before two men behind me arose and seized the day.
Two grateful people with inflexible travel plans take the now-vacant seats. Then I get to observe the flight attendant trying to close the bulkhead hatch. Under normal circumstances, I imagine, this would involve pulling firmly down on a long metal bar until a satisfactory click is achieved. In this instance, though, a full minute of struggle produces no results, so the attendant grasps the bar with both arms, stoops down, and actually hangs from the bar, pulling down with her entire weight. The click, mercifully, finally comes.
I turn to the woman on my right. "This isn't exactly encouraging."
"No, it really is not."
We've had our tiny plastic glass of ice cubes, with a little soda to get them wet. Also our hermetically sealed package of four wheat 'n' cheddar crackers (marked "Sample Only, Not for Resale"), adorably tiny Three Musketeers "candy bite" (it's too small to be a bar, not even "Fun Size"), a fruit-filled cereal bar and a moist towelette. So a flight attendant stands at the front of the airplane and announces via the intercom, "We've got some boxes of cookies available for one dollar. Proceeds benefit the American Heart Association."
This "offer" is coming just after Girl Scout cookie season. "Didn't we pay enough for this flight already?" I ask the woman on my right.
"Hmmph," she says, shaking her head. Inside, she's thinking: "Yeah, some more than others."
Later the flight attendant resumes her cookie-sale announcing place, but this time clutches a plastic bag stuffed full of something. I quickly learn via the intercom that it's free samples of Thermasilk ("Heat is good!") shampoo and conditioner. I take one, on the theory that you never know when you'll need hair-care products designed to work better with a blow dryer.
Never one to keep things to myself, I turn to the woman on my right: "Talk about a captive audience for advertising."
"Hmmph," she says.
The captain (of the plane, not the Starship Enterprise) gets on the horn and says all the turbulence that's been tossing us about has forced a slow down, and that plus the time we spent on the ground trying to bribe two people off the plane means we'll arrive at our destination a half-hour late. This doesn't bode well for the woman on my right, who has a connection to catch.
Cheerily, I turn to her and say, "You want to hear my best horror story about being late for a connection?"
"No, probably not," says she, "but go ahead."
So I do. St. Louis airport. Thirty minutes late getting in because of weather. Connecting flight, last one of the night, literally one mile away in another terminal. Have to work the next day. Not exactly in shape. Heavily laden with Florida oranges. Sprinting, running, jogging, walking, near-crawling. Still not there. Wonderful companion outpaces me, arrives at gate to find door shut, jetway retracted from plane and bulkhead hatch closed. Can see pilots preparing to taxi away. Jumps up and down and pounds on window until they see her. Several minutes later, jetway operator pokes head out of door and says, "Can I help you with something?" I arrive several minutes later, and the jetway is extended, hatch opened, just for us. Hot glares of other passengers not felt on our sweaty, flushed skin.
"But that's St. Louis. I'm sure things will be much better for you."
Of course, things are a lot better for me -- sort of. I've got a three-hour layover in Orlando, courtesy of Capt. Kirk and all the other good folks at priceline.com. That plus a roller-coaster ride on a propeller-driven aircraft to my final destination, ending with a nine-point landing (three points, BOUNCE!, three points, bounce, three points), leads me to believe that the bad karma earned from gloating -- however unintentionally -- about snagging a cheap ticket catches up with you faster than you might expect.
This piece is adapted from an article that originally ran March 19, 2000, on Nebraska StatePaper. You can see the original article here.
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