Dr. Diego Bohórquez

Grown, like I couldn't find that direct connection.

So then I started to study, perhaps they were associated with the nervous system.

And that's how we made some of the first observations that some of them, with the arm or without the arm, they will have a more intimate relationship with nerve fibers.

And that, of course, opened up a bunch of new questions.

But the first thing that we had to do, it was to come up with a name for this food.

And it kind of became organic.

And I want to highlight this because I think that as we go through the discovery trajectory, we don't realize the need to also engineer language.

how we go about languages, we start to attach words that we already knew.

And we start to put them together to describe something that new that we're observing, right?

And I say this because at the very beginning with my mentor, we will start to call these little feet.

First, we call them axon, which is like the term for like the long extending branches of the neurons, the main branches of the neurons.

So we will call them axon-like because they look like a baby axon.

But then we call them also like pseudopod because it was like a pod, but it was pseudo.

And at some point we, and it was coming from like some cells in the kidneys that they are called podia or something like that.

So it was axon-like, pseudopod-like basal process to describe that it was on the base.

So at some point it became so long that we couldn't fit it in an abstract, right?

So- Yeah, it's a bit of a mouthful.

So we began thinking about it, and then eventually I came up with a term.

I thought, like, ah, Neuropod.

And I remember pitching it to my mentor, and he said, like, let me think about the weekend.