Then, it was amazing to me how these myoblasts would settle on the dish, elongate, fuse end-to-end, and form a long, multinuclear myotube, it's called. And if you waited long enough, you could even see them contract. But one problem was that when you dissociated the cells in muscle, not only did you get the myogenic cells, which we got a bunch of fibroblasts, as well, which settled, and which did a good job in nurturing the myoblasts. But eventually they overgrew them, and it was hard to penetrate the muscle cells with an electrode, sometimes even hard to see the muscle cells.

We worked on a technique to use a mitogenic toxin to kill the fibroblasts after the muscle had fused and was withdrawn from the cycle. So, we ended up with a pure culture of myotubes. Then I thought it would be ideal to add nerve cells, so we worked out techniques for dissociating cells from the neural tube of the embryo. That's when Ruth got upset also because she said, 'Do you use all the fertilized eggs?' I said, 'No.' 'What do you do with them?' 'We throw them away.' There were over two dozen and maybe we throw away a dozen because not all had fertilized.

So, she insisted I bring the fertilized eggs home and she began to raise chickens, which we still have. Not the same chickens, but different chickens. We had about 20, 25 chickens in a barn. I'll tell you about the house we lived in later, until one day a fox broke in and killed them all.