Dr. Glen D’Souza

For instance, the stuff we do, like killing to get nutrients out, that happens in my gut, that happens in the ocean.

Yeah, I mean, I agree.

I think, you know, historically, if you think, you know, if you type microbiologist and find an image, you'll be people staring at a petri dish, right?

But, I mean, the earliest microbiologists were not like that.

Like, they would, as Ben said, look at the microscope, right?

And I think looking at cells as opposed to petri dishes can get you so many places, right?

For instance, we never talked about stentor, but

bacteria can also learn, right?

Like they don't have a brain or I don't know, I don't think they have a brain, but essentially if I subject some, you know, E. coli cells to say a salt stress, so give them, you know, they like less salt, but if they subject them to salt stress and then look at the progeny and then the progeny of the progeny

there are signatures out there that they remember those stress, right?

So the progeny can take salt stress much better than, say, cells that haven't seen salt stress at all, right?

So they have some sort of memory encoded, not memories like we have, but some sort of memory encoded in there, right?

So I think cells remember...

or at least not on these very long timescales, but on short timescales.

And a short timescale for a cell is at least three generations for a human.

So cells do remember that.

So I think there's a lot of things we do not know.

And I think that's setting the next frontier, trying to understand why do you decide based on where you are, based on who's around you, and based on what genes do you carry.