Molly Webster (host)

Correct.

So something is a shape and it fits into a hole.

Really?

Yeah.

I'm like, wow, this is why you were a better bio student than I was.

Because I was like...

I don't know.

There's a lock.

There's a key.

Like one of them is the lock shape.

One of them is the key shape.

The key goes into the lock.

It's just floating along.

Yeah, and with also, if you think about like the interior of a cell, it's like there's thousands of other proteins and there's, you know, trash and there's the nucleus and there's, I don't know, endoplasmic reticulum.

There's like all sorts of things inside the cell that are between the lock and the key, between the two shapes like finding each other.

Damn, it's pretty fast.

It's like the janitor took the ring of keys and just threw it at a lock and somehow the right key on that ring disappeared.

Gets into the lock and like it makes it across the space, even though there's so, so much in the middle.

As Narosha kept puzzling this, she thought maybe there's something in physics, the world where particles are always zipping around really fast, maybe there's something there that could help me out.

What Narosha stumbled into was a weird little corner of biology pioneered by this Russian biologist, Alexander Gurvich.