Lessons from the Lobster Quotes

“It occurred to me to ask why she bought spiny lobsters from California at evident expense, when Homarus americanus was shuffling around the Atlantic coast, on her doorstep. That, Marder told me, was a sort of scientific cautionary tale about the perils of following the herd. The stomatogastric ganglion preparation from Homarus, it seems, was always taken to be difficult to work with because it didn't have lively fictive motor rhythms in the dish. In fact, it was unresponsive because everyone had been putting the ganglion in a saline made with a recipe copied form Edward Kravitz's papers. He is an illustrious researcher, but it so happened that he had devised this saline purposely to keep Homarus muscle preparations from moving, which suited him in the 1960s when he was studying the neuromuscular junction. Somehow the recipe was handed on respectfully and believed to be the 'right' saline for Homarus. ''And that recipe has the wrong calcium to magnesium ratios and so everything is silent. The minute we flipped over to using the Panuliris interruptus saline, the Homarus preparation worked just fine. Homarus got a really bad rap just because of that wrong saline.' Marder put her head in her hands in mock despair. 'Until the late 1990s! Unbelievable.”
― Charlotte Nassim, Lessons from the Lobster: Eve Marder's Work in Neuroscience