Fragments From Floyd

"Gee whiz, Mr. Wizard. That's amazing!"

Yes, I know it dates me to confess that I used to Watch Mr. Wizard in the mid-fifties. And it might have been here on this ad-lib, low-budget, black and white TV show that I first had the sensation of amazement that matter (often involving baking soda, batteries or balloons) could be so complex and yet so marvelously interesting if you just knew how to look at it. Sometimes, that different view of the ordinary came through microscope or telescope or other lenses that revealed what was there all along, right under our noses or swirling along through our very veins. This was my first encounter with science. I sometimes imagined myself as one of the Wizard's young toadies who watched in wonder, and I've been a gee-whiz kind of a guy ever since.

One of my earliest science memories is from late-elementary school biology where we drew "the cell" as a round blob consisting of three labeled parts: cell membrane (a mere edge, nothing more); the nucleus (another featureless round blob inside the larger one) and the insipid goo of the empty space called cytoplasm. That was it--not a terribly interesting unit of architecture--and yet we were told that we and all living things were made up of such circles, and owed our very lives to the collective of these things. Because cells were in some way alive, so were we. Believing that took much faith and instilled very little awe--to be made up of countless trillions of simple circles drawn with the graphite of a yellow pencil on ruled paper.

Imagine, then, my school-boy wonder last week when viewing the latest and most thorough-going graphic depiction of the complex, moving, three-dimensional world inside a single white blood cell. Here is a two minute clip from the original eight minute animation that shows a wealth of "basic biology" from the workings of cell membrane (a vastly complex and important bi-layer outside of which nothing is alive), of structural and informational proteins in their complex shapes that relate so precisely with their functions. Here you'll see cellular machines synthesizing proteins, moving secretions along internal railroad tracks of the microtubular skeleton of the cell. And in the end, the white blood cell, whose inner workings we've been watching as it becomes equipped to seek out and destroy invaders and debris, morphs from its globular passive state into an amoeboid, actively moving state, and slips out between the endothelial cells of a capillary to patrol the tissue spaces.

That you read and comprehend these words this very instant is because of the same kinds of high-speed, precisely-engineered communication within and between your living cells as you see in this recent graphic video. And if you can't be amazed at that, boys and girls, you haven't listened carefully enough to Mr. Wizard.

We are all far more marvelous than we give ourselves credit for. We still draw each other as stick men and women, outlines with simple skins inside which we're merely goo going about our business. Understanding the true complexity of a single cell is a good object lesson toward a new beginning--to a look just ahead to a period when we must take better care of our bodies, our soil and water and air, and this Water Planet teeming with life. Let's start over with Gee Whiz, and go from there.