Roll-your-own endothelial tubes

Just one ingredient can make the difference between a delicious meal and an inedible mess even the dog won't touch. Likewise, 20 years ago the recipe for cultivating endothelial cells lacked a vital factor, and many a dish of cells ended up in the trash. The vascular biologists who nabbed the missing ingredient not only simplified the process of growing endothelial cells; their discovery was also a boon for angiogenesis research.

The early to mid-1970s saw a spate of cell-rearing successes, as biologists nurtured primary cultures of endothelial cells (Gimbrone et al., 1974), liver parenchymal cells (Bissell et al., 1973), sympathetic neurons (Mains and Patterson, 1973), and smooth muscle cells (Ross, 1971). Other workers managed to raise secondary cultures of smooth muscle cells (Schubert et al., 1974) and pioneered two- and...