I toured the University of Washington South Lake Union building near Mercer and 9th this morning with Councilmembers Drago and Rasmussen and saw things both cool and creepy. The main reason for the visit was to better understand their use of their existing South Lake union buildings and to understand their proposal to expand into potentially three new buildings to the west. We looked at development charts and boards, we talked about research funding and search for the cure for cancer, we talked about height and open space, and we talked about land use planning and neighborhood goals.
And then we put on white lab coats and blue paper booties in order to enter the research lab and look through microscopes at real stem cells — the controversial little things the Bush Administration was ambivalent about and the Obama Administration has more openly embraced for research. We looked at basic, run-of-the-mill stem cells. It was, frankly, a little difficult to figure out what we were seeing under the microscope.
Then we looked at stem cells that had been made into cardiac cells. And they were beating. Under the scope it looked like a light green sea of cells with waves moving through at a regular pulse.
Weird. Why? How are they beating? What’s telling them to beat?
If the lab coats, booties and cells are meant to impress and distract from the more difficult land use questions, they succeeded. We have the first discussion of the UW proposal at the Planning Land Use and Neighborhoods Committee meeting Wednesday, September 23, at 9 a.m. in Council Chambers.