I'm a medical illustrator, and I come from a slightly different point of view. I've been watching, since I grew up, the expressions of truth and beauty in the arts and truth and beauty in the sciences. And while these are both wonderful things in their own right -- they both have very wonderful things going for them -- truth and beauty as ideals that can be looked at by the sciences and by math are almost like the ideal conjoined twins that a scientist would want to date. (Laughter) These are expressions of truth as awe-full things, by meaning they are things you can worship. They are ideals that are powerful. They are irreducible. They are unique. They are useful -- sometimes, often a long time after the fact. And you can actually roll some of the pictures now, because I don't want to look at me on the screen.
我是一個醫學繪圖師, 我的觀點和別人稍微不同。 自從我懂事開始,我一直在追求, 藝術中真與美的表現方式, 以及科學中真與美的表現方式。 因為藝術與科學本身就是極美妙的事物 — 它們都有許多美妙的事物藏在其中 — 理論上,可以被科學或是數學所檢視的真與美, 就好像是理想中完美的連體雙胞胎, 每個科學家都會想要跟他們約會。 (笑聲) 這些是對於「真」表示敬畏的形容詞, 意味著,它們是你可以仰慕的事物。 它們是「完美的」、「有力的」、「不可思議的」、 「獨特的」、「有用的」— 有時候,通常要一陣子,才會顯現出來。 事實上,你現在可以開始播放其中一些照片了, 因為我不想要在螢幕上看到我自己。
Truth and beauty are things that are often opaque to people who are not in the sciences. They are things that describe beauty in a way that is often only accessible if you understand the language and the syntax of the person who studies the subject in which truth and beauty is expressed. If you look at the math, E=mc squared, if you look at the cosmological constant, where there's an anthropic ideal, where you see that life had to evolve from the numbers that describe the universe -- these are things that are really difficult to understand.
對於不懂科學的人們, 他們常常不能看見真與美。 它們所描述的美, 常常只有那些懂得該領域科學家 所使用的語言與詞彙的人 才能夠領會其中的真與美。 就像數學中的,E = mc 平方, 或是宇宙學常數, 隱藏著跟人類學有關的理論,從中你可以體會生命起源與 描述宇宙的數值間的關係 — 這些是非常難以了解的事物。
And what I've tried to do since I had my training as a medical illustrator -- since I was taught animation by my father, who was a sculptor and my visual mentor -- I wanted to figure out a way to help people understand truth and beauty in the biological sciences by using animation, by using pictures, by telling stories so that the things that are not necessarily evident to people can be brought forth, and can be taught, and can be understood.
一直以來我想要做的是, 既然我是一個醫學繪圖師 — 我的動畫技術傳自我老爸, 他也是一個雕塑家兼我的視覺藝術導師 — 我希望能找到一種方法,幫助人們 了解生物科學中的真與美, 利用動畫、靜態圖片及好的劇本。 因此那些本來對於人們,可能不是很簡單明顯的事物 可以被帶到檯面上、教導與了解。
Students today are often immersed in an environment where what they learn is subjects that have truth and beauty embedded in them, but the way they're taught is compartmentalized and it's drawn down to the point where the truth and beauty are not always evident. It's almost like that old recipe for chicken soup where you boil the chicken until the flavor is just gone. We don't want to do that to our students. So we have an opportunity to really open up education.
今日的學生們常常處在一種環境中, 在這個環境中,雖然他們的學習主題包含著真與美, 但是教導他們的方式是片面的、不完整的, 因此常常在這個情況下,真與美 並不總是顯而易見的。 就好像關於雞湯的陳年食譜, 烹煮雞肉直到香味通通散去。 我們並不想要這樣對待我們的學生。 這樣我們才有機會真正開啟這方面的教育 。
And I had a telephone call from Robert Lue at Harvard, in the Molecular and Cellular Biology Department, a couple of years ago. He asked me if my team and I would be interested and willing to really change how medical and scientific education is done at Harvard. So we embarked on a project that would explore the cell -- that would explore the truth and beauty inherent in molecular and cellular biology so that students could understand a larger picture that they could hang all of these facts on. They could have a mental image of the cell as a large, bustling, hugely complicated city that's occupied by micro-machines.
數年前,我接到哈佛大學 分子與細胞生物學系的 Robert Lue 的電話。他問我 我跟我的團隊,是否有興趣徹底改變 哈佛大學的醫學與科學教學方式。 所以我們開始進行,一個探索細胞的計畫, 這將能夠探索,分子與細胞生物學中 固有的真與美, 學生也能夠了解 這些科學事實背後的宏觀概念。 他們腦海中,將會有一個對於細胞的印象, 細胞就好像是,一個錯綜複雜的繁忙大城市, 城市中遍佈著微機械。
And these micro-machines really are at the heart of life. These micro-machines, which are the envy of nanotechnologists the world over, are self-directed, powerful, precise, accurate devices that are made out of strings of amino acids. And these micro-machines power how a cell moves. They power how a cell replicates. They power our hearts. They power our minds.
這些微機械處於生命的中樞。 這些微機械, 能讓全世界的奈米工程師嫉妒, 它們是能自我引導、功能強大且精準的裝置, 它們是由胺基酸鏈所組成。 這些微機械讓細胞移動、 複製、它們讓我們的心臟跳動, 它們組成我們的心智。
And so what we wanted to do was to figure out how we could make this story into an animation that would be the centerpiece of BioVisions at Harvard, which is a website that Harvard has for its molecular and cellular biology students that will -- in addition to all the textual information, in addition to all the didactic stuff -- put everything together visually, so that these students would have an internalized view of what a cell really is in all of its truth and beauty, and be able to study with this view in mind, so that their imaginations would be sparked, so that their passions would be sparked and so that they would be able to go on and use these visions in their head to make new discoveries and to be able to find out, really, how life works.
因此我們希望,能夠找出一個方法, 將這個細胞的故事做成動畫, 這就是哈佛大學 BioVisions 的主軸, 它是一個哈佛大學為分子與細胞生物學學生 所設立的網站, 它將書本、講義、參考書 及老師授課內容以外的所有東西, 視覺化的呈現在一起,這樣這些學生 能夠從細胞內發現細胞的真與美, 並在學習過程中,能一直將此畫面 牢記在腦海中,因而激發他們的想像力 及學習熱誠, 這樣他們能持續 使用他們腦中的這些畫面,來進行探索發現, 我相信,最終將能發現生命的原理。
So we set out by looking at how these molecules are put together. We worked with a theme, which is, you've got macrophages that are streaming down a capillary, and they're touching the surface of the capillary wall, and they're picking up information from cells that are on the capillary wall, and they are given this information that there's an inflammation somewhere outside, where they can't see and sense. But they get the information that causes them to stop, causes them to internalize that they need to make all of the various parts that will cause them to change their shape, and try to get out of this capillary and find out what's going on.
所以我們開始研究,這些分子之間的關聯性。 我們想出了一個劇情大綱,那就是,巨噬細胞 在微血管之間穿梭著, 它們不時接觸著微血管的管壁, 它們能藉此動作,得知微血管壁上 細胞的資訊,而這些細胞放出了,管壁外圍某處 有發炎反應正在進行的訊息,而那個地方的狀態, 巨噬細胞本來是無從得知的。 這個訊息讓它們停了下來, 它們開始進行內化反應,它們必須製造 許多不同的物件,因此它們必須改變外型, 離開微血管,並搞清楚到底發生什麼事。
So these molecular motors -- we had to work with the Harvard scientists and databank models of the atomically accurate molecules and figure out how they moved, and figure out what they did. And figure out how to do this in a way that was truthful in that it imparted what was going on, but not so truthful that the compact crowding in a cell would prevent the vista from happening.
因此這些分子馬達 — 我們必須與 哈佛的科學家一起研究,使用資料庫中真實的 原子層級模型來表示這些分子, 並搞清楚它們是如何移動,做了什麼事。 並想出一個辦法,能夠真實的表現 體內正在發生的現象, 但是又必須將其部份簡化,否則細胞中極端擁擠的環境 將會使得這種視景變得不可能。
And so what I'm going to show you is a three-minute Reader's Digest version of the first aspect of this film that we produced. It's an ongoing project that's going to go another four or five years. And I want you to look at this and see the paths that the cell manufactures -- these little walking machines, they're called kinesins -- that take these huge loads that would challenge an ant in relative size. Run the movie, please.
我將要播放一個三分鐘, 我們所製作的這個影片第一部份的「讀者文摘」版, 這個計畫尚未完成, 預計還會進行四到五年。 我希望你們能看著這部影片, 看到細胞製造這些東西的步驟 — 這些會走路的小機械,它們是驅動蛋白 — 能夠背負這巨大的貨物, 這大小比例關係,可能更甚螞蟻的背負能力。 請開始播放。
But these machines that power the inside of the cells are really quite amazing, and they really are the basis of all life because all of these machines interact with each other. They pass information to each other. They cause different things to happen inside the cell. And the cell will actually manufacture the parts that it needs on the fly, from information that's brought from the nucleus by molecules that read the genes. No life, from the smallest life to everybody here, would be possible without these little micro-machines. In fact, it would really, in the absence of these machines, have made the attendance here, Chris, really quite sparse. (Laughter) (Music)
但這些驅動著細胞內部的機械, 真的很神奇,它們真的是所有生命的基礎。 因為所有這些機械,彼此之間都存在著互動。 它們彼此傳遞訊息; 它們導致細胞內各種不同現象的發生。 細胞會利用能讀取基因的分子, 讀取由細胞核中傳來的資訊, 以飛速的製造這些細胞所需的零件。 沒有生命,從最小的生命到今天在座的各位, 如果沒有這些小微機械,生命將不可能發生。 事實上,如果沒有這些機械, Chris,今天的出席狀況將會非常慘烈。 (笑聲) (音樂)
This is the FedEx delivery guy of the cell. This little guy is called the kinesin, and he pulls a sack that's full of brand new manufactured proteins to wherever it's needed in the cell -- whether it's to a membrane, whether it's to an organelle, whether it's to build something or repair something. And each of us has about 100,000 of these things running around, right now, inside each one of your 100 trillion cells. So no matter how lazy you feel, you're not really intrinsically doing nothing. (Laughter)
這就是細胞中的 FedEx 快遞小弟: 這小傢伙叫做驅動蛋白, 它拉著一大袋新合成的蛋白質 到細胞所需的任何地方, 不論是到細胞膜、胞器, 不論將是用來製造或是修補。 我們體內每個細胞,大約有十萬個這些小傢伙 正在跑來跑去, 而我們有大約一百兆個細胞。 因此不論你感覺有多懶惰, 本質上,你還是非常地忙碌的。 (笑聲)
So what I want you to do when you go home is think about this, and think about how powerful our cells are. And think about some of the things that we're learning about cellular mechanics. Once we figure out all that's going on -- and believe me, we know almost a percent of what's going on -- once we figure out what's going on, we're really going to be able to have a lot of control over what we do with our health, with what we do with future generations, and how long we're going to live. And hopefully we'll be able to use this to discover more truth, and more beauty. (Music)
你們回到家後,我希望你們 能想想這個問題,想想我們的細胞多麼地強大, 想想我們已經學到的 關於細胞機械的種種事情。 一旦我們全盤了解細胞內發生的所有事情 — 相信我,我們大概才知道 1% 而已 — 一旦我們了解細胞內的狀況, 我們將能更好的控制 我們的健康, 我們的後代, 我們的壽命。 並且,希望我們能藉此 發現更多的真與美。 (音樂)
But it's really quite amazing that these cells, these micro-machines, are aware enough of what the cell needs that they do their bidding. They work together. They make the cell do what it needs to do. And their working together helps our bodies -- huge entities that they will never see -- function properly. Enjoy the rest of the show. Thank you. (Applause)
這些細胞,這些微機械,真的很不可思議, 它們能察覺細胞需要它們為它做些什麼事。 它們同心協力; 它們使細胞能完成它所需要的事情。 它們合力使我們的身體 — 一個巨大,它們永遠無法察知的個體存在 — 正常的工作。 請繼續欣賞接下來的表演。謝謝各位 (掌聲)