I cleaved in two, then four, then eight cells.

Now to do that, first we need to trick brain cells to respond to laser beams.

And because fat cells are actually missing most of the complex cellular machinery found in other cells, it's probably the safest place to store it.

like when it's forming a memory, it will also leave a footprint that will later allow us to know these cells are recently active.

SR and because normally brain cells don't respond to pulses of light, so those that would respond to pulses of light are those that contain a light sensitive switch.

These cells, called glial cells, were once thought to be unimportant structural elements of the spinal cord that did nothing more than hold all the important things together,

These glial cells become activated.

So now, when insulin says to a cell,

The cancer has spread to her stomach.

For example, one group in our lab was able to find the brain cells that make up a fear memory and converted them into a pleasurable memory, just like that.

The sea of blue that you see here are densely packed brain cells, but the green brain cells, the green brain cells are the ones that are holding on to a specific fear memory.

It's a healthy response to the trauma, all of those immune cells rushing to the site of the injury to salvage cellular debris and prevent the spread of infection to elsewhere in the body.

They're sort of biological windows that light up to let us know that that cell was just active.

Within this cell the germ of life is already present, the spark, as the common folk say.

You can think of channelrhodopsin as a sort of light sensitive switch that can be artificially installed in brain cells so that now we can use that switch to activate or inactivate the brain cell simply by clicking it, and in this case we click it on with pulses of light.

This egg represents the most highly developed reproductive cell of the female sex.

This germ illustrates how organs develop, including in the human being.

So whenever a memory is being formed, any active cell for that particular memory will also have this light sensitive switch installed in it so that we can control these cells by the flipping of a laser just like this one you see.

These stories saturated my cells and nerves, and to be honest,

Let's start with leukemia, acute lymphoblastic leukemia, ALL, the most common cancer of children.

Other cellular kitchens, like those in purple bacteria, can make sugar too, but quite as well as green one.

Could we use, let's say, pharmacological drugs to activate or inactivate brain cells?

So it looks like, hmm, indeed we need to find a better way to impact the brain at the speed of light.

But it turns out the glial cells have a vital role in the modulation, amplification and, in the case of pain, the distortion of sensory experiences.

As people get older, their brain cells become less efficient.

And also, there's way more cells in your brain than the number of straws in a typical haystack.

What if obesity is a coping mechanism for a far more sinister problem going on underneath the cell?

laterally, vertically, up and down in the spinal cord and they start interacting with other adjacent cells.

Well if we can embed biological and chemical networks like a search engine, so if you have a cell that's ill that you need to cure or bacteria that you want to kill, if you have this embedded in your device at the same time, and you do the chemistry, you may be able to make drugs in a new way.

I want you to burn more energy than the cell considers safe, the cell, in effect, says,

And insulin resistance, as its name suggests, is when your cells get increasingly resistant to the effect of insulin trying to do its job.

let you know that somebody's probably working there at any given moment, in a very real sense, there are biological sensors within a cell that are turned on only when that cell was just working.

Now I don't know why, but it might be because, in their case, their cells haven't actually figured out the right thing to do with that excess energy.

So whenever a memory is being formed, any active cells for that memory will also have this switch installed.

Now with our system, the cells that are active in the hippocampus in the making of this memory, only those cells will now contain channelrhodopsin.

So electricity is pretty fast, but we probably wouldn't be able to target it to just the specific cells that hold onto a memory, and we'd probably fry the brain.

But perhaps for me the core bit going into the future is this idea of taking your own stem cells, with your genes and your environment, and you print your own personal medicine.

If you ask yourself, what's a cell trying to protect itself from when it becomes insulin resistant, the answer probably isn't too much food.

It turned out that all we need to do is basically to let the brain form a memory, and then the brain will tell us which cells are involved in that particular memory.

You can think of insulin resistance as the reduced capacity of our cells to partition fuel, as I alluded to a moment ago, taking those calories that we take in and burning some appropriately and storing some appropriately.

And in the MRI and MR spectroscopy here, the prostate tumor activity is shown in red you can see it diminishing after a year.

I was a strange child.

Optogenetics gave us this light switch that we can use to turn brain cells on or off, and the name of that switch is channelrhodopsin, seen here as these green dots attached to this brain cell.

You know, as kids, we're taught to play.

So, I added these protocells together to the system, and protocell A and protocell B fused together to form a hybrid protocell AB.