Why were there relatively fewer papers about cell fusion before the 1950s?

Question

While working on my cell fusion technology report, I saw PubMed's cell fusion graph of results by year. There have been studies or research since the early 1900s, but until the 1950s, there were no more than ten papers. But, after the 50s, scientists studied a lot of cell fusion. I wanted to know why this happened, but I could not find any reasons on the internet. So, I ended up coming here.

I searched in Nature, PubMed, and google, but there was no detailed explanation of it.

Answer 1

Since you need to be able to grow cells for studying their interactions, I think the main reason for this is the development of cell culture techniques in the late 1940s and early 1950s. As an example of one of the earliest (cancer) cells in culture we can name the HeLa cell line, which was established from a cervical cancer in 1951.

There have been earlier attempts to grow pieces of tissues which at least have been partially successful, but for immortal cell lines attempts failed. See the references for an overview.

With the rise of cell culture in the 1950s, it was possible to reliably grow the cells needed for vaccine development, monoclonal antibodies and also cell-cell interactions.

The figure with the timeline comes from reference 2:

References

1. A History of Cell Culture
2. History of Cell Culture