Conception to birth -- visualized | Alexander Tsiaras

I was offered a position as associate professor of medicine

and chief of scientific visualization

at Yale University

in the department of medicine.

And my job was to write many of the algorithms and code

for NASA to do virtual surgery

in preparation for the astronauts going into deep-space flight,

so they could be kept in robotic pods.

One of the fascinating things about what we were working on

is that we were seeing, using new scanning technologies,

things that had never been seen before.

Not only in disease management,

but also things that allowed us to see things about the body

that just made you marvel.

I remember one of the first times we were looking at collagen.

And your entire body, everything --

your hair, skin, bone, nails --

everything is made of collagen.

And it's a kind of rope-like structure that twirls and swirls like this.

And the only place that collagen changes its structure

is in the cornea of your eye.

In your eye, it becomes a grid formation,

and therefore, it becomes transparent, as opposed to opaque.

So perfectly organized a structure,

it was hard not to attribute divinity to it.

Because we kept on seeing this in different parts of the body.

One of the opportunities I had

was one person was working on a really interesting

micromagnetic resonance imaging machine with the NIH.

And what we were going to do

was scan a new project

on the development of the fetus from conception to birth

using these new technologies.

So I wrote the algorithms and code,

and he built the hardware -- Paul Lauterbur --

then went onto win the Nobel Prize for inventing the MRI.

I got the data.

And I'm going to show you a sample of the piece,

"From Conception to Birth."

(Music)

[From Conception to Birth]

[Oocyte]

[Sperm]

[Egg Inseminated]

[24 Hours: Baby's first division]

[The fertilized ovum divides a few hours after fusion...]

[And divides anew every 12 to 15 hours.]

[Early Embryo]

[Yolk sack still feeding baby.]

[25 Days: Heart chamber developing.]

[32 Days: Arms & hands are developing]

[36 Days: Beginning of the primitive vertebrae]

[These weeks are the period of the most rapid development

of the fetus.]

[If the fetus continues to grow at this speed for the entire 9 months,

it would be 1.5 tons at birth.]

[45 Days]

[Embryo's heart is beating twice as fast as the mother's.]

[51 Days]

[Developing retina, nose and fingers]

[The fetus' continual movement in the womb

is necessary for muscular and skeletal growth.]

[12 Weeks: Indifferent penis]

[Girl or boy yet to be determined]

[8 Months]

[Delivery: The expulsion stage]

[The moment of birth]

(Applause)

Alexander Tsiaras: Thank you.

But as you can see,

when you actually start working on this data,

it's pretty spectacular.

And as we kept on scanning more and more,

working on this project,

looking at these two simple cells

that have this unbelievable machinery that will become the magic of you.

And as we kept on working on this data,

looking at small clusters of the body,

these little pieces of tissue

that were the trophoblasts coming off of the blastocyst,

all of a sudden burrowing itself into the side of the uterus,

saying, "I'm here to stay."

Having conversation and communications

with the estrogens, the progesterones,

saying, "I'm here to stay, plant me,"

building this incredible trilinear fetus

that becomes, within 44 days, something that you can recognize,

and then at nine weeks is really kind of a little human being.

The marvel of this information:

How do we actually have this biological mechanism

inside our body

to actually see this information?

I'm going to show you something pretty unique.

Here's a human heart at 25 days.

It's just basically two strands.

And like this magnificent origami,

cells are developing at one million cells per second at four weeks,

as it's just folding on itself.

Within five weeks, you start to see the early atrium and the early ventricles.

Six weeks, these folds are now beginning

with the papilla on the inside of the heart

actually being able to pull down each one of those valves in your heart

until you get a mature heart --

and then basically the development of the entire human body.

The magic of the mechanisms inside each genetic structure

saying exactly where that nerve cell should go --

the complexity of these,

the mathematical models of how these things are indeed done

are beyond human comprehension.

Even though I am a mathematician,

I look at this with marvel

of how do these instruction sets not make these mistakes

as they build what is us?

It's a mystery, it's magic, it's divinity.

Then you start to take a look at adult life.

Take a look at this little tuft of capillaries.

It's just a tiny sub-substructure, microscopic.

But basically by the time you're nine months and you're given birth,

you have almost 60,000 miles of vessels inside your body.

And only one mile is visible.

59,999 miles

that are basically bringing nutrients and taking waste away.

The complexity of building that within a single system

is, again, beyond any comprehension or any existing mathematics today.

And then instructions set,

from the brain to every other part of the body --

look at the complexity of the folding.

Where does this intelligence

of knowing that a fold can actually hold more information,

so as you actually watch the baby's brain grow.

And this is one of the things we're doing.

We're launching two new studies

of scanning babies' brains from the moment they're born.

Every six months until they're six years old,

we're going to be doing about 250 children,

watching exactly how the gyri and the sulci of the brains fold

to see how this magnificent development

actually turns into memories and the marvel that is us.

And it's not just our own existence,

but how does the woman's body understand

to have genetic structure that not only builds her own,

but then has the understanding

that allows her to become

a walking immunological, cardiovascular system

that basically is a mobile system

that can actually nurture,

treat this child with a kind of marvel

that is beyond, again, our comprehension --

the magic that is existence, that is us?

Thank you.

(Applause)