NIH Director Collins Hails ASCB’s Celldance Video As “Microscopic Blockbuster”

In his “NIH Director’s Blog,” Francis Collins has singled out an ASCB 2014 Celldance video as a “microscopic blockbuster” and urged readers to check out “the spectacular scientific flicks that Celldance has to offer.” Writing under the headline “Cool Videos,” Collins described the 3:28-minute-long video, “Killing Cancer—Cytotoxic T-Cells On Patrol,” made by graduate student Alex Ritter.

ASCB gave three member labs $1,000 each to “Tell Your Own Cell Story” while providing post-production support and an original sound track by Hollywood composer Ted Masur. Collins was enthralled by Ritter’s video showing cytotoxic T-cells, “roving, specialized components of our immune system” closing in and destroying cancer cells. The dramatic climax came, wrote Collins, when “These T-cells literally convince a problem cell to commit suicide.”

This was live action imaging of T cells, not animation. Ritter, a graduate student in the NIH-Oxford-Cambridge Scholars Program, who trained in the Cambridge University lab of Gillian Griffiths, also did much of the imaging in the NIH lab of Jennifer Lippincott-Schwartz. One sequence in the film came from his work at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute lab on the Janelia Farm Research Campus of Eric Betzig, co-winner of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Making a microscopic drama is not easy, Collins wrote. “To give you an idea of the cinematic challenges that confronted Ritter, consider this: Actor Brad Pitt stands 5 feet 11 inches, while a cytotoxic T cell measures only about 10 microns—roughly 1/10th the width of a human hair.”

http://vimeo.com/113629336

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John Fleischman was the ASCB Senior Science Writer from 2000 to 2016. Best unpaid perk of the job? Working with new grad students and Nobel Prize winners.