This video shows the cutting edge of education and how Harvard Medical School are educating their future doctors. It’s an animated/simulated film of the inner workings of a cell.

Here is the original from Harvard.

This is the video on YouTube with an explanation of what’s going on. If you think you know something about molecular biology, watch the top one first and see how much you can recognise.

This is a remarkable video for two reasons…

1. It shows you how far video animation has come and what some of the top medical schools are using to teach their students. This could be the future of education – it would be very hard to fall asleep in class!
2. It demonstrates our miraculous complexity. It is mostly animating the machinations of the internal activity of a white blood cell including protein synthesis, enzyme activity and these huge things that look like aliens, but are the prime movers of the cell called kinesins.

Considering we are made up of around one hundred trillion (100,000,000,000,000) or one hundred million million cells, and there are around one hundred thousand kinesins in each cell. Then we must have around 1×10²⁰ or 100 quinitillion (100,000,000,000,000,000,000) of these prime movers crawling around transporting materials in our cells. That’s the equivalent of 20 billion  times the population of earth. How do they know what load to fill up on, where to go and when and what to drop off?

If you are still in awe at this and how DNA duplicates and produces RNA and protein synthesis, watch the video below.

This is the original video I saw about a year ago on TED.

If you have never heard of TED, when you have a spare few hours or turn off the TV and have a look at some of the talks they have. These are some of the best available and incredibly their free!