A Leukocyte Goes About Its Business...

Ah. Here this is with its narration:

In some ways, I think it is better without the narration--without the dry description of what is going on. It is in a sense more marvelous when it is incomprehensible, or rather uncomprehended.

See also:

http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2006/10/yet_more_on_ins.html

http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2006/10/biologists_weep.html

http://sparkleberrysprings.com/v-web/b2/index.php?p=737&c=1

http://cosmicvariance.com/2006/09/29/the-cell-is-like-tron/

http://www.studiodaily.com/main/searchlist/6850.html

Comments

[Colin Danby]

"In even the most complex organism, far more information moves within cells than between cells. Even our brains are bit players compared with the rate at which information from the genetic material directs the synthesis of protein, an entirely intracellular activity."

This is from p. 233 of Steven Vogel's _Cat's Paws and Catapults: Mecanical Worlds of Nature and People (Norton, 1998) (which also includes reflections on economic history). My other airplane reading this weekend was Sean Carroll's fabulous _Endless Forms Most Beautiful_ (Norton 2005) which fleshes out genes as cybernetic systems.

Any more suggestions for good lay reading along these lines?

[Drake]

To be honest, it's a little incomprehensible (to me) even with the narration. Best I can summarize, some biochemically things are going on inside cells.

[sdh]

The narrative sounds like it was written by committee. Its hard to tell who its target audience is--on the one hand, the narration is littered with jargon that would only be comprehensible to more advanced immunology and cell biology students, on the other, the concepts it describes are rather basic.

Much better without narration, imo.

[andres]

Brad has a point. Without the narration and captions, the whole video looks like the work of some avant garde computer artist on hallucinogens. Bravo.

I have more questions regarding the making of the video (and the similar ones previously posted by Brad) rather than the biology itself. First of all, are those the actual colors of the organisms, or are the colors enhanced by computer in order to make the video more watchable? I suspect the latter, but I could be wrong.

Of course, there is the question of light in this whole episode. A miniaturized ship like the Proteus would have needed some unrealistically powerful searchlights for this whole process to be revealed--Asimov's intricate descriptions of inter-cellular processes belie the problem that the crew simply would not have been able to see all that much.

And just to get into the biology, the inner workings of a leukocyte are pretty fun, but even more so would be watching a leukocyte take apart a foreign microorganism (though I could have missed it due to not having heard the narration). When's the video on that coming out?

[sdh]

I have more questions regarding the making of the video (and the similar ones previously posted by Brad) rather than the biology itself. First of all, are those the actual colors of the organisms, or are the colors enhanced by computer in order to make the video more watchable? I suspect the latter, but I could be wrong.

What you are seeing are computer generated models. Unlike Disney models, what you see in the video is pretty much how things look: based on histology (for the cells) and x-ray crystallography (for the proteins).

That said, all of the colors are artificial. Except for melanin and various oxygen-binding iron complexes (like hemoglobin (in red blood cells) and myoglobin (found in red muscle)), most of the human body is fairly colorless. Which shouldn't be surprising, considering that the human body is 80% water. Dried out, most tissues are white.

To reiterate this point, white blood cells are called white blood cells because they look white, and they're the cells in the blood that don't have hemoglobin. (The history of biology and medicine is replete with such matter of fact naming notions. (Usually, however, they are in latin.))

I hope this helps. (Disclaimer, yes I am a biologist.)

[Charles]

Nomination for best DeLong post evah.

Although I have never heard it pronounced "glycoh-zee-lated."

[Monte Davis]

It makes me proud of all the money I've spent on video games and CGI movies, which indirectly helped bring such modeling and rendering within the budgets of mere biologists. The system works!

Two things to keep in mind: for all the visual busy-ness here, the real thing is a lot faster and jiggly-er. Even big biomolecules are very low in mass compared to macroscopic objects, so thermal vibration, Brownian bumping, and charge-controlled reconfiguration whip them around very briskly. This is why, e.g., a single enzyme molecule can catalyze reactions among others hundreds of times a second.

The real thing is also a lot more crowded, with little of the clear space provided here for pedagogic reasons. Yes, it's 80% water, but with solute molecules and colloid droplets and microfibrils and bits of cell machinery jostling everywhere.

Both of which make the pervasive organization even more impressive. I just read a research report suggesting that proliferating cells in a fruit fly embryo may "count" single molecules of a protein whose concentration gradient tells them where they are and thus how to develop.