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The Wonder of a Single Cell · Truth in Motion with Dr. Jocelyn

• 0:02
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to Truth in Motion with Dr.
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_00: Jocelyn, where insight, clarity, and wisdom help you thrive.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_01: Good to have you back.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_01: Yesterday we asked what science is.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_01: We saw that real science is observable, testable, and repeatable.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_01: We looked at the difference between data and models, and we saw that some questions belong to science, and some belong to meaning, value, and faith.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_01: Today we slow down.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_01: Take a breath with me.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_01: Today is about wonder.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_01: We're going to look at one small thing, a single cell, and look at it through the five questions we named on Monday.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_01: What is real?
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_01: How we know what we know, what our bodies are for, what we assume when we ask, and what we assume about living bodies.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_01: This season, the Torah readings are in baresheet, Genesis, the beginning.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_01: So it feels right to spend today with our own beginning.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_01: Why does it matter?
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_01: Because how we see our bodies shapes how we care for them.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_01: When many of us look at our bodies, we see a list of problems.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_01: A stubborn knee, an unsettled gut, numbers on a lab report.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_01: And when we see parts, we go looking for parts to fix.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_01: But if every cell in us came from one beginning, then nothing in us stands alone.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_01: The knee is connected to the gut, the gut to the brain, and all of it to the life we're living.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_01: Wonder isn't a luxury.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_01: It changes the questions we ask.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_01: And the questions we ask decide which answers we can find.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_01: Back to Delft.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_01: Yesterday's story began in Delft in Holland with two lead balls dropped from a church tower.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_01: Today's story begins in the same city about 90 years later.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_01: A cloth merchant named Anthony Van Lewenhoek had taken up a strange hobby.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_01: He ground tiny glass lenses, smaller than a pea, and mounted them in little brass plates.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_01: His lenses were as powerful as any in the world.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_01: He looked at everything pond water, rainwater, pepper soaked in water.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_01: And in 1676, he wrote a letter to the Royal Society in London, describing something no one had ever reported.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_01: Tiny living creatures swimming in a drop of water, thousands of them.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_01: A whole world, too small to see.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_01: The next year, Robert Hook in London repeated the observation and saw them too.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_01: Notice the pattern, someone looked closely, someone else repeated it, and a hidden world opened up.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_01: Eleven years earlier, eleven years earlier, Hook had looked at a thin slice of cork and seen rows of tiny boxes.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_01: They reminded him of the small rooms that monks lived in, so he called them cells.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_01: The word stuck and it turned out to describe us.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_01: One cell.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_01: Every one of us began as a cell.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_01: One cell, smaller than the period at the end of a sentence.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_01: Your mother's egg and your father's sperm joined, and in that moment there was one new cell that had never existed before.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_01: That cell divided into two, two into four, four into eight, and it kept going.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_01: Today your body holds about 30 trillion of your own cells.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_01: 30 trillion.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_01: And every one of them came from that very first one.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_01: And living in and on you are about 38 trillion more.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_01: Those came from your microbiome, the bacteria that share our body.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_01: They didn't come from that first cell, so by count, we're a little more guest than host.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_01: Your heart cells, the cells of your eyes, the cells lining your gut, the cells in your brain that are listening to my voice right now, one family tree, one beginning.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_01: So when I say it's all connected, I mean it literally.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_01: Every part of you is related to every other part of you.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_01: They share one ancestor, and that ancestor was a single cell.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_01: And here's something even more wonderful.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_01: Nearly every one of those cells carries the same instructions, the same DNA.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_01: If you could stretch out the DNA from just one of your cells, it would be about two meters long and more than six feet folded into a space you can't see without a microscope.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_01: The same instructions in every cell, and yet one becomes heart and another becomes eye.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_01: Each cell reads the same book and turns to a different page.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_01: So how does a cell know which page to turn to?
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_01: It listens to its neighbors.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_01: In the early 1920s, two German scientists, Hans Speyman and his student Hilda Mongold, did a remarkable experiment with newt embryos.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_01: They took a tiny piece of tissue from one embryo and placed it in a different spot on another.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_01: The cells around it listened to the signals it sent, and they began to build a second body, almost a twin, right there beside the first.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_01: That experiment has been repeated in labs ever since.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_01: Spamen received a Nobel Prize for it in 1935.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_01: What it showed is this cells talk to each other.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_01: They send signals, where a cell sits and what its neighbors tell it helps decide what it becomes.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_01: None of us was built from a blueprint pinned to a wall.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_01: We were built by cells in conversation.
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_01: So let's walk this one cell through our five questions.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_01: The first one, what is real?
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_01: A cell is real.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_01: You don't have to take anyone's word for it.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_01: A simple microscope and a swab from the inside of your cheek will show you your own cells.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_01: Anyone can look.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_01: Anyone can look again tomorrow.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_01: That's observable and it's repeatable.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_01: Here's one of my favorites.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_01: Heart muscle cells separated and placed in a dish will start to beat on their own.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_01: No heart, no brain telling them to.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_01: Scientists watch it happen in labs every day.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_01: And early in life, a heart begins to beat during the fourth week after conception, before it's even finished being built.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_01: But here's where the question gets interesting.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_01: What we see through the microscope is real, and yet how we see it is shaped by us.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_01: Our eyes take in light, our ears take in waves of pressure, our skin takes in touch, and our brains turn all of it into the world we experience.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_01: Color, for example, isn't out there the way we see it.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_01: Our brains build it.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_01: The writer, Anis Nin, put it this way in 1961.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_01: She called it an old saying, quote unquote, we do not see things as they are, we see them as we are.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_01: Some thinkers take that much further.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_01: A cognitive scientist at the University of California Irvine, Donald Hoffman, has written a book called The Case Against Reality.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_01: He argues that our senses evolved to keep us alive, not to show us the truth.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_01: We'll come back to that.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_01: For today, just notice the question.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_01: If our senses build the world we see, how do we know what's really there?
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_01: Which brings us to our second question.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_01: How do we know what we know?
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_01: With cells, we know the way Lewin Hook knew.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_01: We look, we look carefully, someone else looks too, and we compare notes.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_01: That's the beautiful thing about the scientific method.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_01: It doesn't ask us to trust one person's eyes.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_01: It asks many people again and again to look at the same thing.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_01: Each of us sees through our own filter, but when many of us look, test, and repeat, and keep getting the same answer, we get closer to what is really there.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_01: That's how we know cells divide.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_01: That's how we know a heart begins to beat early in life.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_01: We just didn't reason our way to it.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_01: We watched.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_01: But watching isn't the only way we know things about a cell, and it helps us to be clear about which kind of knowing we're using.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_01: Here's what we can observe.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_01: Nearly every one of our cells carries the complete instructions for the whole body.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_01: That's science.
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_01: Observed, tested, and repeated.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_01: Here's a model.
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_01: Some thinkers have proposed that the body is holographic.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_01: Cut a holographic plate into pieces and each piece still holds the whole picture.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_01: The idea is that every part of us holds the whole in the same way.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_01: It's a beautiful model.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_01: And it hasn't been observed.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_01: I believe there's something true in it, and I hold it as a belief, not a finding.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_01: And here's clinical experience.
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_01: In acupuncture, we use what are called microsystems, small areas of the body that map the whole.
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_01: In the 1950s, a French physician, Dr.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_01: Paul Noget, mapped the whole body onto the outer ear.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_01: His map looks like a baby curled upside down in the womb.
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_01: Other systems map the whole body onto the scalp, the hand, or the face.
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_01: Acupuncturists, myself included, use these every day.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_01: So why would they work if no one has proven the body is holographic?
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_01: Here's the honest answer.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_01: Whether something works is one question.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_01: Why it works is another.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_01: The outer ear carries a branch of the vagus nerve, one of the body's great communication lines.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_01: The brain itself holds maps of the whole body.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_01: A neurosurgeon named Wildler Pennyfield traced them in the 1930s, and every one of us came from one cell.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_01: Any of these may be part of the answer.
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_01: The holographic idea may be too.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_01: Observation, model, experience, faith.
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_01: Each one has value.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_01: Wisdom is knowing which ones we're standing on.
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_01: The third question goes deeper.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_01: What are our bodies for?
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_01: Look at how cells live.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_01: Your body makes about 4 million new cells every second.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_01: About 330 billion a day.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_01: Most of them are blood cells and the cells that line your gut, made new so the whole body can keep going.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_01: And here's something that moves me.
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_01: Cells also know when to step aside.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_01: In the womb, our fingers begin as a solid paddle.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_01: The cells between them are designed to let go on purpose so that fingers can form.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_01: Scientists call it programmed cell death.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_01: Some cells give themselves up so the whole body can take its shape.
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_01: No cell lives for itself.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_01: Everyone lives for the whole.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_01: Scripture describes us this way too.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_01: Paul wrote that the body is one and has many members, and that if one member suffers, all the members suffer with it.
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_01: He meant the church, but it's true for ourselves as well.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_01: So what are our bodies for?
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_01: At the smallest level, we see cooperation, we see giving, we see each part serving the life of the whole.
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_01: And remember those 38 trillion guests?
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_01: They help us digest our food and train our immune systems, partners in being alive.
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_01: Our fourth question: What do we assume when we ask?
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_01: Every time we ask a question about the body, we bring assumptions with us.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_01: Here's one many of us carry without noticing.
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_01: We've been thought to think of cells as little machines.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_01: Biology books talk about molecular machines, cellular factories, and the body as a mechanism.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_01: That language is useful.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_01: It helps us describe what we see, but it's a picture, not the thing itself.
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_01: And if we only ever picture ourselves as machines, we tend to ask only machine questions.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_01: What part is broken?
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_01: What part do we need to replace?
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_01: Those are good questions, but they aren't the only ones.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_01: A living cell does something no machine we've ever built does.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_01: It makes more of itself, it repairs itself, it takes in what it needs and lets go of what it doesn't.
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_01: A heart cell in a dish beats.
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_01: So it's worth noticing the picture we bring to the question.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_01: It quietly shapes the answers we find.
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_01: And that brings us to our fifth question.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_01: What do we assume about living bodies?
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_01: Here's the one I want to leave with you today.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_01: You began as one cell.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_01: That cell had no brain, no eyes, no thoughts.
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_01: And yet here you are, aware, listening, wondering, able to ask, is this real?
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_01: Where did that come from?
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_01: Science can tell us a great deal about how cells divide, how the brain develops, and which parts of the brain are active when we see, feel, and think.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_01: Those are real, measurable findings.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_01: But how and why any of that becomes experience, the feeling of being you is still an open question.
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_01: Even many neuroscientists and philosophers say so.
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_01: Some call it the hard problem of consciousness.
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_01: Some assume consciousness is only a byproduct of cells.
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_01: Others believe it reflects something deeper, a spirit, a breath of life.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_01: In Genesis, God forms the man from the dust of the ground and breathes into him the breath of life, and he becomes a living being.
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_01: I just want to invite you to hold the question with wonder.
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_01: If we came from one cell, what is the me that is aware of it?
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_01: Long before anyone had a microscope, a psalmist wrote these words.
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_01: For you formed my inward parts, you covered me in my mother's womb.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_01: I will praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_01: Marvelous are your works, and that my soul knows very well.
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_01: And then, your eyes saw my substance, being yet unformed.
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_01: That phrase, my unformed substance, is one Hebrew word, golmi.
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_01: It appears nowhere else in the Bible.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_01: The early translators understood it as the body before it has taken form.
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_01: The psalmist is saying, You saw me when I was still that first unformed being.
• 15:37
  SPEAKER_01: 3,000 years before anyone saw a cell, someone stood in awe of exactly this.
• 15:45
  SPEAKER_01: Our practice this week is to question.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_01: Today I'd like to invite you to question with wonder.
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_01: Once today, stop and place a hand over your heart, feel it beat, and remember that it started beating before it was finished, and that every cell in it came from one beginning.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_01: Then ask one gentle question.
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_01: We went back to Delft, where a cloth merchant found a hidden world in a drop of water.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_01: We remembered that each of us began as one cell and that every one of our own cells came from it.
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_01: So, yes, it's all connected, literally.
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_01: We walked that one cell through our five questions.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_01: We saw that cells are real and that what we perceive is shaped by who we are.
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_01: We saw that we know by looking and by looking together.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_01: We saw cells that live for the whole.
• 16:50
  SPEAKER_01: We sorted what we observe from what we model.
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_01: We noticed the machine picture many of us carry, and we sat with the mystery of how one cell becomes someone who wonders.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_01: Tomorrow we'll pick up with the question we touched on today.
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_01: Is reality real?
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_01: And if it isn't, how could we ever do science at all?
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_00: Keep the conversation going.
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_00: Find your next steps in notes from a fellow traveler, my blog.