Life’s Splendor on Film
Day to day, I work a lot with clear, colorless drops of liquid, shuttling them back and forth between small plastic vials. I also work with cells, but they just look like cloudy suspensions in strange-smelling liquids.
But every time I look at cells under a microscope, I can’t help but gaze in wonderment. Cells! Under a microscope!
Even better are images and videos online from the American Society for Cell Biology, which I found via Bitesize Bio. Make sure to check out the videos, some of which are absolutely spectacular and inspiring. Some of my favorites include watching rat heart cells beating in a Petri dish, seeing fish cells zooming across slides (especially check out how fragments of cells without a nucleus can still move around! Movement is thus, at least in the short term, independent of transcription), the movement of mitochondria within a cell, seeing chromosomes divide in real time using just light microscopy, and watching Drosophila embryo syncytial division (where all of the nuclei divide simultaneously, without cytokinesis).
Biology is an absolute wonder, and I hope you find these videos as inspiring as I do.
