The Cell

In Our Time: Science

BBC

History

4.5 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 13 September 2012

⏱️ 42 minutes

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Summary

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the cell, the fundamental building block of life. First observed by Robert Hooke in 1665, cells occur in nature in a bewildering variety of forms. Every organism alive today consists of one or more cells: a single human body contains up to a hundred trillion of them. The first life on Earth was a single-celled organism which is thought to have appeared around three and a half billion years ago. That simple cell resembled today's bacteria. But eventually these microscopic entities evolved into something far more complex, and single-celled life gave rise to much larger, complex multicellular organisms. But how did the first cell appear, and how did that prototype evolve into the sophisticated, highly specialised cells of the human body? With: Steve Jones Professor of Genetics at University College London Nick Lane Senior Lecturer in the Department of Genetics, Evolution and Environment, University College London Cathie Martin Group Leader at the John Innes Centre and Professor in the School of Biological Sciences at the University of East Anglia Producer: Thomas Morris.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.uk.
0:09.0	I hope you enjoy the program.
0:12.0	Hello, all life on earth has one thing in common, the cell.
0:16.0	Around 3.5, 4 billion years ago, the first single-celled organism appeared in the oceans,
0:22.0	a microscopic bag of chemicals capable of reproduction.
0:26.2	Every living thing alive today is its descendant, and everyone from bacteria, from bacteria
0:32.3	to the blue whale consists of one or more cells.
0:35.0	The human body contains so many of them
0:37.0	that after 70 billion die and replaced every day.
0:40.0	So where did the cell come from?
0:42.0	What goes inside, what goes on inside it, and how did the earliest single cell creature evolve into a complex organisms containing billions or trillions of cells.
0:51.0	To discuss the cell are Steve Jones, Professor of Genetics at University College London.
0:56.5	Nick Lane, Senior Lecturer in the Department of Genetics, Evolution and Environment, also
1:01.0	at University College London. And Kathy Martin,
1:03.2	Martin, group leader at the John Innes Center and professor in the School of
1:06.8	Biological Sciences at the University of East Anglia.
1:10.0	Steve Jazz, would you begin by telling us a bit more about what cells are? How does a biologist define them?
1:16.0	I suppose it's a bit like what atoms are to a physicist.
1:20.0	In other words, there's a basic units from which everything else is built.
1:25.2	And rather like atoms, if you look more carefully at atoms, you find that actually within the
1:29.2	atom itself, which seemed initially to be a single indivisible particle which is what people thought
1:34.0	about cells in the earliest days. There are all kinds of subtleties and structures unexpected
	...

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