Professor Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz is interested in our fate: not in an existential sense, but rather in the fate of cells at the earliest stages of life. “We look at how cells decide their fate,” she explains. “All of the cells initially look the same, and yet we know that they will go on to make different parts of the body – our hands, our head, the left and right side of our bodies. How do the cells know where to go?”
To read more, including how synchronised swimmers can help us understand embryo development, see the article on Medium.
The journey from a single fertilised egg cell through to a baby delivered crying into the arms of its mother is one of the most beautiful and complex processes to occur in nature. We are only just beginning to understand the very earliest stages of life – when we are nothing more than a cluster of cells.
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