What is the Human Cell Atlas?
The Inquiry
BBC
4.6 • 1.7K Ratings
🗓️ 2 November 2023
⏱️ 23 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The Human Cell Atlas is a project that has 3000 researchers in over 94 countries working to collect samples of every single cell in the human body.
The idea is that an interactive map of the body will be created. It will be a reference for what every kind of normal human cell should look like. But that will also vary depending on who you are and where you live.
It will give doctors a tool to measure illness and disease and make diagnosis and treatment much quicker.
The database will enable any doctor, anywhere in the world, with the right kind of interface, to access the information.
It could be ground-breaking for the treatment of disease and the democratisation of healthcare.
Contributors: Dr Aviv Regev, one of the co-chairs of the Human Cell Atlas Dr Sarah Teichmann from the Wellcome Sanger Institute and the University of Cambridge Dr Piero Carninci, Geneticist, Transcriptome Technology and RIKEN Centre Sean Bendall, Associate Professor of pathology and immunology at Stanford University
Presented by Tanya Beckett Produced by Louise Clarke Researched by Anoushka Mutanda-Dougherty Edited by Tara McDermott Technical Producer is Richard Hannaford Production Co-ordinator is Jordan King
Image: Medical Technology Stock Photo by Kentoh via Getty Images
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the inquiry on the BBC World Service. |
| 0:03.6 | I'm Tanya Beckett, each week one question for expert witnesses and an answer. |
| 0:16.3 | From the beginning of human understanding, civilizations have striven to make sense of our |
| 0:21.6 | universe by creating maps. From rivers and mountains to the cosmos and even the periodic |
| 0:29.7 | table, scientists have worked to build an ever more precise picture of the world we live in. |
| 0:37.1 | But in the last few decades, a quest to create a minute map of something much closer to home |
| 0:43.6 | has been underway. One of the fundamental makeup of the human body. |
| 0:50.4 | In 1990, scientists from six countries collaborated to form what was called the Human Genome Project. |
| 0:58.6 | In the course of just over a decade, they mapped the genetic content of the chromosomes of the human body. |
| 1:07.3 | It was groundbreaking work, but perhaps its most important aspect was that once completed, |
| 1:13.8 | the results were made available to medical communities all over the world. |
| 1:20.8 | But far from being the end of the journey, the human genome project was in some ways just the |
| 1:26.4 | beginning. After all, if we know the instructions our bodies are given, the next puzzle surely to |
| 1:33.3 | solve is how they're used to create the smallest building blocks of our bodies, namely cells. |
| 1:41.6 | This week on The Inquiry, we're asking, what is the human cell Atlas? |
| 1:47.7 | Part One. The smallest form of life. |
| 1:58.4 | If we are to grasp why we might need a map of all the cells in our body, |
| 2:03.4 | then we first need to understand what a cell actually is. |
| 2:09.5 | I'm a Vibregeg and I'm one of the cultures of the human cell Atlas. |
| 2:13.6 | A Vibregeg is a computational biologist and one of two women, the second of which we'll hear from |
| 2:21.2 | a little later, who together were the founders of the Human Cell Atlas project back in 2016. |
| 2:29.3 | Here she explains to us the importance of the human cell. |
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