Triangle Fire: The Building Survives

The onetime Asch Building, whose top three floors were occupied by the Triangle Waist Company, is now the Brown Building of Science, where New York University students and scientists occupy laboratories devoted to biology and chemistry. The only hint of its role in one of America’s worst — and most indelible — industrial disasters can be found on two street-level bronze plaques on its facade, one put up by the National Register of Historic Places.

The ninth floor, where two out of three of the 146 died and from where about 50 people plunged to their deaths, is today N.Y.U.’s Center for Developmental Genetics, where researchers are studying such matters as the development of the double-chambered heart in sea squirts.

“We think that it’s fitting that where all these sad things happened, we’re studying the genes involved in illnesses like heart disease,” said Gloria M. Coruzzi, chairwoman of the department of biology, as she showed a visitor around.

The haunted floor, its contents and occupants consumed by the fire, has been gutted and renovated at least twice, and all that is left to offer a sense of what it looked like on March 25, 1911 are the tall windows and the round supporting columns.

Instead of rows of sewing machines, there are rooms and cubicles filled with test tubes, centrifuges and aquatic tanks. Instead of 250 seamstresses and cutters crowded on a floor, there are a handful of professors, postdoctoral fellows and researchers.

“Every now and then you think about it,” Karin Kiontke, a postdoctoral fellow in biology, said of the Triangle fire.

The gray stone 10-story building on the northwest corner of Washington Place and Greene Street was a skyscraper of its time. Built in 1910 in a neo-Renaissance style, it is decorated with such old-fashioned touches as terra cotta trim and fleurs-de-lis moldings.

Most of the nation’s dresses, blouses, hats, feather adornments and other ready-made clothing were then being produced in New York, and the industry employed over 80,000 people. To take advantage of the growing work force of immigrants who were settling in the nearby tenements of the Lower East Side and East Village, factory loft buildings rose east and south of Washington Square.

“All the buildings on Washington Place, on Washington Square East, on Third Street were garment factories,” said Michael Nash, head of N.Y.U.’s Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives. “Most of these buildings date from 1890 to 1916.”

The factories erased much of what was a posh pocket of downtown Manhattan, with the Asch Building itself erected on the site of the town house where the writer Henry James was born in 1843, according to Joyce Gold, an adjunct professor of New York history at N.Y.U. who gives tours of the neighborhood.

Triangle, which moved into the Asch Building one year after it opened, was regarded as a model of clean efficiency compared with the sweatshops inside tenement apartments that had been commonplace, Mr. Nash said. Triangle’s building was fireproof, had freight elevators, tall ceilings and windows that flooded the lofts with daylight.

“Triangle had the reputation of being the most modern of all the factories,” he said.

As the garment industry followed the subway lines and department stores uptown, N.Y.U., which had its law school next door to Asch, began gobbling up the lofts, eventually usurping the footprint of the garment industry. The university acquired the Asch Building in 1929. Still, as recently as 15 years ago garments were produced in the neighborhood.

Today, students with ear buds and book bags, who dominate the neighborhood the way immigrant blouse, dress and hat workers once did, hurry by the building. Most are oblivious to its history.

“I know there were lives lost in that factory, that people had to jump,” said Dominique Williams, 19, an N.Y.U. sophomore smoking a cigarette near the building and listening to her iPod. “I think about it sometimes. I guess it’s like all of New York. It has a lot of history and you can’t really escape, and our place of learning is in that place.”

In vivo systems biology

Biological systems, including cells, tissues and organs, can function properly only when their parts are working in harmony. These systems are often dauntingly complex: Inside a single cell, thousands of proteins interact with each other to determine how the cell will develop and respond to its environment.

To understand this great complexity, a growing number of biologists and bioengineers are turning to computational models. This approach, known as systems biology, has been used successfully to model the behavior of cells grown in laboratory dishes. However, until now, no one has used it to model the behavior of cells inside a living animal.

In the March 22 online edition of the journal Science Signaling, researchers from MIT and Massachusetts General Hospital report that they have created a new computational model that describes how intestinal cells in mice respond to a natural chemical called tumor necrosis factor (TNF).

The work demonstrates that systems biology offers a way to get a handle on the complexity of living systems and raises the possibility that it could be used to model cancer and other complex diseases, says Douglas Lauffenburger, head of MIT's Department of Biological Engineering and a senior author of the paper.

"You're not likely to explain most diseases in terms of one genetic deficit or one molecular impairment," Lauffenburger says. "You need to understand how many molecular components, working in concert, give rise to how cells and tissues are formed — either properly or improperly."

Biological complexity

Systems biology, a field that has grown dramatically in the past 10 years, focuses on analyzing how the components of a biological system interact to produce the behavior of that system — for example, the many proteins that interact with each other inside a cell to respond to hormones or other external stimuli.

"The beauty of systems biology is that it doesn't ignore the biological complexity of what's going on," says Kevin Haigis, an assistant professor of pathology at MGH and Harvard Medical School and a senior author of the Science Signaling paper.

"Biologists are trained to be reductionists," adds Haigis, who was a postdoctoral associate at MIT before moving to MGH. "I don't think people have failed to realize the complexity of how biology works, but people are accustomed to trying to reduce complexity to make things more understandable."

In contrast, the systems biology approach tries to capture that complexity through computer modeling of many variables. Inputs to the model might be the amounts of certain proteins found inside cells, and outputs would be the cells' resulting behaviors — for example, growing, committing suicide or secreting hormones.

While at MIT, Haigis worked in the lab of Tyler Jacks, director of the David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT, studying the role of the cancer-causing gene Ras in the mouse colon. He teamed up with Lauffenburger and others to computationally model Ras' behavior in cell culture.

After Haigis moved to MGH, he and Lauffenburger decided to bring this computational approach to studying living animals because they believed that studies done in cultured cells could miss some of the critical factors that come into play in living systems, such as the location of a cell within a living tissue and the influence of cells that surround it.

Inflammation

In the new paper, the researchers tackled the complex interactions that produce inflammation in the mouse intestine. The intestine contains many types of cells, but they focused on epithelial cells (which line the intestinal tube) and their response to TNF.

Previous work has shown that TNF plays a central role in intestinal inflammation, and provokes one of two possible responses in the intestinal epithelial cells: cell death or cell proliferation. Chronic inflammation can lead to inflammatory bowel disease and potentially cancer.

In this study, the researchers got the data they needed to develop their computational model by treating normal mice with TNF, then determining whether the cells proliferated or died. They found that cell fate depended on the cells' location in the intestine — cells in the ileum proliferated, while those in the duodenum died.

The multi-faceted result would likely not have been seen in a lab dish. "In cell culture, you would have gotten one or the other," Lauffenburger says.

They also correlated the diverse outcomes with the activities of more than a dozen proteins found in the cells, allowing them to determine how the outcomes depended on quantitative combination of key signaling pathways, and furthermore, to predict how the outcomes would be affected by drug treatment. The researchers then tested the model's predictions in an additional cohort of mice, and found that they were accurate.

Modeling disease

Jason Papin, assistant professor of biomedical engineering at the University of Virginia, says that the team's biggest accomplishment is demonstrating that systems biology modeling can be done in living animals (in vivo). "You always want to move to an in vivo setting, if possible, but it's technically more difficult," says Papin, who was not involved with this research.

The researchers are now trying to figure out in more detail what factors in the intestinal cells' environment influence the cells to behave the way they do. They are also studying how genetic mutations might alter the cells' responses.

They also plan to begin a study of neurological diseases such as Alzheimer's disease. Cancer is another disease that lends itself to this kind of modeling, says Jacks, who was not part of this study. Cancer is an extremely complicated disease that usually involves derangement of many cell signaling pathways involved in cell division, DNA repair and stress response.

"We expect that our ability to predict which targets, which drugs and which patients to bring together in the context of cancer treatment will require a deeper understanding of the complex signaling pathways that exist in cancer," says Jacks. "This approach will help us get there."

Art or Science: the True Nature of Digital Photography

What is the true nature of digital photography? Many people have been asking this question for a long time. In fact, when people ask the question about the true nature of digital photography, they often mean to ask whether it is art or it is science.

Here are some arguments for both sides:

A) Art – many people consider digital photography as an art because it allows for an expression of emotion. They believe that digital photography is a continuation of the art of drawing or painting. You see, digital photography is just like painting in the sense that although it does take accurate pictures of reality, it also allows for some modification through the various digital tools available today.

Even without the editing many people still believe that digital photography is art because of the fact that it does take an artist's eye to find a great subject of digital photography. The nature of digital photography as an art has something to do with the fact that an artist is able to express emotions and statements through visual subjects.

The supporters of the "artistic nature of digital photography" also argue their case by stating its ability to convey emotional messages through aesthetics. The beauty of each photograph, of course, needs also to be credited to the person taking the pictures. One of the strongest arguments for the artistic nature of digital photography is the fact that the picture is rarely really what is seen with the naked eye. Through the camera and computer, a person can alter the image in order to present what he or she wants to show.

B) Science – some people argue that science is the true nature of digital photography. One argument is that photography, unlike painting, actually comes from something existing and not from a painters mind or emotion. This can be very persuasive since, indeed, a photographer does not actually make photographs. He or she merely takes them.

Another argument regarding the scientific nature of digital photography is the fact that the editing that people do and adjustments that photographers make are based on a series of steps that can be narrowed down scientifically. People who argue for the scientific nature of digital photography may reason that the same series of steps can be taken in order to achieve the same results. There is a certain quality of constancy about digital photography that renders it a science.

But what is the true nature of digital photography? We have read the various arguments supporting science and art. There appears to be no solution to this question, right?

The true nature of digital photography will always remain to be a paradox. This means that though it can be considered as an art, it can also be considered as a science. When is the paradox of the nature of digital photography solved? Well, it is solved when a person takes a digital photograph.

The true nature of digital photography lies in the hands of the person who takes the pictures. The way a person treats the process defines the nature of digital photography for him or her. It is not absolutely art nor is it absolutely science. The true nature of digital photography is a paradox. It might seem to be contradictory, but it is somehow true.