This program is sponsored by the Covley Prize, which honors scientists for breakthroughs

in astrophysics, nanoscience, and neuroscience.

The Covley Prize is a partnership among the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters,

the Norwegian Ministry of Education and Research, and the U.S.-based Covley Foundation in

Los Angeles, California.

I'm Alan Alder, and this is Clear and Vivid, conversations about connecting and communicating.

The cell is very small.

Think about the smallest hair that you can see, and reduce the size by about a factor of

10, one-tenth is big, and that's about in the range of what a cell is.

Now within that cell, there is a highly organized system, so if you think of it as a complex

city.

You have a factory, you have a distribution center, and then you have each of the many stores

and restaurants and places where things are done in a city.

Jim Rothman won the Covley Prize for neuroscience, and later the Nobel Prize for figuring out

how a particular machine in our body works.

It's a pretty important machine.

It delivers hormones to our blood and thoughts in our brain.

We're trying to make it clear and vivid when he talked about the intricate process in

which our bodies get their working parts from here to there.

Jim used some interesting analogies, like how an apple finds his mouth and not mine,

and how little FedEx trucks are zooming around the body, tracking their own tiny barcodes.

I got so inspired I joined in with a weird analogy of my own, involving lovers who find

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