Alice Klein

speaker

164 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Aug 2026 last heard 16 Sep

Alice Klein’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

The World, the Universe and Us · The Mystery of Childbirth Is Finally Being Unravelled · 16 Sep 2026 podcast

Well, they just took some of these macrophages and they incubated them with uterus muscle cells, which they got by taking biopsies of women when they had cesarean sections at full term.

So they had these macrophages and uterine muscle cells in a dish and they just sort of put them there and thought, okay, what are they going to do?

And amazingly, they found that the macrophages started forming these tiny tubes and sending them out so they could grab onto the uterine muscle cells.

What were these tubes doing?

What were they for?

I know it does sound a bit alien-like, but so in other systems, sometimes you get these tiny tubes forming between cells and they are sometimes used to transfer mitochondria.

So the researchers wondered if the same thing was happening here.

And to find out, they added a dye to the mitochondria.

And sure enough, they were able to see mitochondria being delivered from the macrophages, the immune cells, to the uterine muscle cells through these little tubes.

And they've got videos of this.

And it's amazing because you can see the mitochondria streaming between the cells.

But

Yeah, I mean, if you think about labor, it's this hugely energy-intensive process.

You need that muscle part of the uterus to contract really strongly over and over again to try to push out the baby.

Having done this three times myself, I mean, I was shocked by how powerful it was.

It felt like an earthquake ripping through me.

Oh, God.

And as you say, mitochondria, they're like the battery power of cells.

They provide the energy.

So the most likely explanation is that the immune cells donate lots of mitochondria through these little tubes into the uterus muscle to give it that extra energy it needs for labor.

Showing 21–40 of 164 · page 2 of 9