13 It was you who formed my inward parts; you knit me together in my mother’s womb.
14 I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; that I know very well.
15 My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth.
The video is image-maker Alexander Tsiaras sharing for TEDTalks a powerful medical visualization, showing human development from conception to birth and beyond.
TEDTalks (Technology, Entertainment, Design) has videos of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world’s leading thinkers and doers give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes.
…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 over and over and over again in different parts of the body.
…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 kind of 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 a trophoblast coming off of a blastocyst, all of a sudden burrowing itself into the side of the uterus, saying, “I’m here to stay.” All of a sudden 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 [weeks]. 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 can 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 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. I mean, 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 that instruction 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 that we’re doing right now. We’re actually doing the launch of two new studies of actually scanning babies’ brains from the moment they’re born. Every six months until they’re six years old — we’re going to be doing actually to 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?
Psalm 139 gets to the depth of Jewish beliefs about the sanctity of human life: yet with the evolution of Jewish beliefs from ‘surely Thou wilt slay the wicked’ to ‘I hate them with perfect hatred: I count them mine enemies’ to ‘see if there be any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting’ things are made perfect from double-standards, conflict and hypocrisy.
‘Thou art good, for Thy mercies are endless: Thou art merciful, for Thy kindnesses never are complete: from everlasting we have hoped in You. And for all these things may Thy name be blessed and exalted always and forevermore. And all the living will give thanks unto Thee and praise Thy great name in truth, God, our salvation and help. ‘ from the Amidah central Judaism prayer.
I am not sure our generation, with all the scientific and rational explanations of so much of the natural world, grasp the significance of ‘from everlasting we have hoped in you’.
Even the people who claim to believe in ‘Bible literalism’ or some other legalistic interpretation today mostly switch on running clean water, an electric light-bulb, and can use modern communications and systems of law and order to call for help, or receive help from people who do.
Yet for all that- any life is fragile, precious, brief…we seek to reconnect with the spirit of the universe and find higher meaning in this fragile temporary nature of our existence.
There are clues to interfaith coexistence in this psalm ‘If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea,even there your hand will guide me,your right hand will hold me fast.’
‘I was woven together in the depths of the earth’.
When I was working with the dying this was the most common scripture to be asked to read, 1-18.
It is uncommonly beautiful.
Today scientists can re-create the images via computer…but those of us who pre-date this technology remember when these images had to come and be pieced together from miscarriages and stillborns and genuine human experience.
Perfect knowledge of us indeed.
My sons (aged 12 and 10) and I just watched the video of conception to birth images and, in the words of the boys, “Excellent”. For that, you will have to substitute lots of adult verbiage, but in their words, “Excellent.”
Excellent, Gillian.