Molly Webster (host)

Wait, wait, am I glowing right now?

Hey, this is Radiolab.

I'm Molly Webster.

So I was a bio major and we had to take maybe one physics class and then we never thought about it again.

And this is often how it goes in the sciences.

You've got biology.

The environment, animals, our bodies, the kind of organic, messy physical stuff, that's on one side.

And then you have physics, all the abstract stuff, waves, energy, invisible particles, that's all on the other side.

They very much feel like two different worlds.

Can I ask you a couple questions before we get started?

You can ask me so many questions.

But for Narosha Murugan, they go hand in hand.

What I learned from talking to Narosha and what you're going to hear in our conversation today, it is definitely a leap into the unknown.

But it starts with a very simple idea about how living things—bacteria, cactuses, humans, whatever—

how they do what they do.

And it's an idea that made me think about the kind of mark we leave on the world.

So we're going to start with Narosha as a student.

Norosha says she was standing there thinking about all the little molecules in her skin and nerves and spine, all these proteins bumping into each other, interacting and passing along a signal, burn, ow, until it reached her spine.

And then a signal goes back, more proteins bumping into each other, interacting, signaling, move, move your hand, move your hand, back down her arm, all in a split second.

Yeah, there's this shorthand that we use for talking about biology, which is that a lock and a key go together and that like makes things happen in the cell.