Natural selection is about the survival of the fittest, but it is not perfect. How can we fix it?
Section 2
Optics, Light-Waves, Photo-Transduction
10:00 – 12:30
Optics Part 1
Walking through the streets of Florence, Italy. We arrive at Piazza dei Giudici; the background is the entrance to the Galileo Museum.
"The first and foremost limitation of our vision is the optics of the eye.
Things that are too small are hard to see. And something can be small because it is really small… or something can be big, but far, far away, and only seems to be small. The people obsessed with solving the problem of seeing things that are far away are astronomers”.
We enter the museum and walk the halls and corridors, around the artifacts.
On-screen Info-Graphics appear as we pan across objects in the museum. We keep walking and we reach the room where Galileo's telescope is exhibited.
"Rudimentary forms of enhancing optical devices existed before Galileo. These were mainly magnifying glasses adapted for sea travel, to spot land and other ships while in the open ocean.
Galileo's genius was evident when he took these magnifying glasses and pointed them at the night sky.
He studied optics and adapted these tools for the observation of the stars, and so he invented the very first telescope, and brought the stars closer to us, like never before.”
We meet the curator of the exhibition (Director Paolo Galuzzi) who shares the story of the first telescope and the discoveries made by Galileo with footage from NASA showing Jupiter's moons that was discovered by Galileo using his first telescope.
Galileo Museum Galileo's telescope
12:30 – 15:00
Optics Part 2
It is sunset and we face the ocean on a hill in the Canary Islands (Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Spain).
“Since Galileo, optics have come a long way… a very long way”.
We walk towards the GTC (Gran Telescopio Canarias) where the Telescopio Nazionale Galileo is a tribute to Galileo's work. Inside GTC, we walk through the observatory while viewing every piece of it. The GTC scientists that we meet are experts on two subjects:
-
The advance of optics for the field of astronomy and the limitations of the human eye
-
The range and resolution of the GTC telescope, as compared to telescopes in space like Hubble.
Fast forward to when it turns into night.
The sky is riddled with stars, and we now witness the capabilities of the telescope.
15:00 – 17:30
Optics Part 3
We are in a busy Tokyo restaurant, eating ramen.
“So… it turns out that stars are really big, they look to us very small because they are very far away.
Mmmm… what about things that are truly small, not just appear small to us?"
We enter the headquarters of the Olympus Corporation in Tokyo, Japan.
We walk the halls and corridors encountering different microscopes from different times, from the earliest models to the latest technologies.
Info-Graphics provide information about each microscope and piece of technology.
The CEO of Olympus talks of the past, present, and future of microscopy as animation and footage tell the story of Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, the inventor of the first microscope in Holland in the XVII century.
We are also acquainted with the works of Santiago Ramon y Cajal, the father of modern neuroscience, who worked and lived in Spain during the last part of the 19th century.
His drawings of retinal neurons are presented.
In Olympus science overcomes the barriers and limitations of the human eye with the latest technology in Multi-Photon Microscopy that are being presented for us.
17:30 – 20:30
Light-Waves Part 1
We are back at GTC, Canary Islands, Spain.
“We began this journey, exploring the limitations of the human retina. It is true that human eyes can see, and discriminate between many colors, tones and sub-tones.
But we still see only a fraction of the full spectrum of wavelengths that light has to offer. In fact, what we call ‘visible light’, is only what our retinas are capable of discerning.
This human-centered view of the world, is very narrow and reduces nature to only what simple primates can see.
Nature is much bigger than us, and those areas of the spectrum of light that we cannot see, are full of information, a true bounty that even may reveal the very origin of the cosmos.
We just need to overcome this sloppy retinal design, and discover what the universe is really like.”
We follow the GTC scientists to find out what is infra-red light, ultraviolet light, the Doppler Effect and Hubble’s discovery of the expansion of the universe. Illustrations, animation and footage from and about Hubble and Doppler are presented, as well as schematic representations of the spectrum of light. Similar to our ‘walk on a retina’, we are now ‘walking on the light spectrum’, from infra-red to ultraviolet.
“Without scientists and engineers overcoming the limitations of the human retina, the whole universe, literally, would have stayed absent from our lives and knowledge.”
20:30 – 24:00
Light-Waves Part 2
We are at the San Diego Zoo in San Diego, California.
"Incidentally, it just happened that only after discovering the secret wavelengths, the Doppler effect and the expansion of the universe, we started looking back at ourselves and the natural world around us."
Helga Kolb (see min. 08:00 – 09:30) talk is intercut with footage from the Zoo, as well as animations where animals see different wavelengths.
Snakes have specialized organs to see infra-red light, while their prey, mice and rats, have ultra-violet cones in their retinas to detect the other extreme of the spectrum.
Microscopy images coupled with Multi-Electrode Arrays (MEA) electro-physiological recordings, show how UV cones in mice retinas react to UV light, while cones from a human retina do not.
Prof. Richard Kramer, while in his lab at the University of California, Berkeley, presents extraordinary visuals of the MEA experiments.
“Evolution did indeed create the possibility of looking deeper into the light spectrum, it just didn't happen for us. We can now say that we overcome that!”
24:00 – 27:00
Photo-Transduction
We are walking through a desert and we see something shines on the horizon.
We get closer to the shining object to discover an array of solar panels.
“Photo-transduction also works outside of the eye.”
We see microscopic isolated single rod cell that is fluorescent.
The fluorescence is a molecular indicator of the cell activity (the intensity of the fluorescence changes according to the cell’s activity).
As light hits the cell, the intensity of the fluorescence changes, demonstrating how rods convert light photons into voltage changes.
“As opposed to every other sensory organ in our bodies, our photoreceptors are constantly active in the dark, when there is no stimulus. When light hits the photoreceptor cell, this ‘dark current’ that is constantly flowing, stops. This stop, in the continuous signal that creates the rest of the response in the retina and in the brain, is counterintuitive, yet it’s true.”
When we see some of the images from the lab of Prof. Edward Pugh (min. 04:00 – 06:30), info-graphics and schematic representations tell the story of how the process of photo-transduction converts light to electrical impulses.
“Even though counterintuitive and upside-down, the process of photo-transduction in the retina is extremely efficient, responding to one single photon. This response is extremely weak."
The process of ‘Amplification and Convergence’ is presented along with animations. In this process, the weak and tiny response of the photoreceptors to individual photons is amplified several times, by transmitting the electrical information from rods to bipolar cells, and from bipolar cells to retinal ganglion cells (= Amplification).
Furthermore, we see how the responses of hundreds and thousands of rods are processed together, and trigger a subsequent response in only a handful of retinal ganglion cells on the other side of the retina.
The circuitry of the retina is showcased with animation and microscopy imagery.
The signal is amplified almost 10-fold, and in that way, it can be sent to the brain for processing.
"Can we improve nature's design?
Can we amplify the signal a lot more?
Can we re-invent photo-transduction?”
