Late last summer and early fall I had two opportunities to see world class medical research on organ transplants. The above image I made for Proto Magazine, it's produced by Time Inc in New York for Mass General Hospital here in Boston. That is a human heart. It's been "decellurized", meaning it's been stripped of all of it's donor's tissue. The idea (as I understand it) is once the living cells have been removed they have a "skeleton" of an organ that they then grow the recipients own cells back onto it. They're putting them in animals now, could perhaps be a technology for humans in the next 10 to maybe 20 years.
From a photo shoot experience stand point, the above image was an interesting afternoon. This heart was inside the machine shown below. In the second picture, you can see it's in a big glass jar inside that machine. Hardly ideal for photography. Our plan was to photograph it as it was being removed from the jar - that way we could get a clear view of the heart without having to look through the scratched up glass on the jar. I was working with an assistant to the lead Doctor on this research, Jeremy. He was eager to help, but was nervous about damaging this very precious organ - as we could be exposing it to risk with our requests for a better picture. Actually it wasn't going very well - the heart looked a piece of chicken, yellowy and blobby....
The main research Doctor, Dr Ott, came in to see how it was going and he wasn't impressed. Conceded it indeed looked like a piece of chicken and photography as we were approaching it wasn't likely to change that. He decided to take charge, with the confidence of someone who is used to being in control of big moments, like when he's got his hands in someone's chest cavity. I'm smart enough to recognize when someone has better skills than I do for the task at hand, and thankful when they have the authority and power to act on their ideas. So I was happy for the help.
We had some fiber optic lights that we could put inside the sterile environment. Flexible tubes that put out a small spot of light, but we only had 2 of them. I also brought some of those lights that you attatch under your kitchen cabinets - needed something small that could provide illumination inside that machine, which wasn't going to come from my strobes. Dr. Ott suggested we put the fiber optic lights inside the heart, they would fit in where the aortas and veins attach to the heart. I think he and I were the only ones in the room that liked that idea, the entourage that followed him around were all very silent, just kind of looking around - but he did it. Put his hands in there and directed those little tubes of light where I thought they should go to make the best picture. I think I had the most educated gaffer, with the steadiest hands, probably in the world on my crew for 20 minutes. Below is a shot from my assistant's phone - that's me in the shadows in the background while another research person assistant photographs the event.
I came back a few months later for Boston Magazine. The same research assistant was there, and they had moved the experiment out of that small stuffy room and could now do this procedure, really anywhere, but we were confined to his lab bench. Below is a good shot of what a pig heart looks like during the process of loosing the tissue cells in their new and improved vessel.
The research assistant I was working with, Jeremy, wanted a picture of a heart and lung combination. I was game to see what that looked like, and the magazine ended up using it. Below are lungs and heart from a rat. These were expendable so we were able to shoot them outside of a sterile environment. After the shoot, he mentioned that I should come back and shoot one of the heart surgeries. While that would be very interesting, I'll wait for the invitation instead of seeking it out. I suspect I'll be busy with prior commitments.
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