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The Beauty of the Neuron

Sometimes I forget how fortunate I am to be able to be a university professor.... and especially a science professor. For those of you who may not know, I am a biology professor, more specifically my fields of specialization are in endocrinology and neurobiology... basically I am a scientist who studies the "communication" systems of animals (including humans... and humans are animals... but I will leave that go for a future discussion about the theory of evolution). The nervous system is an electrical communication system whereas the endocrine system is a chemical communication system. These simple definitions are adequate in a very simple sense.

For a large multicellular animal to survive, it must be able to successfully coordinate all of its cells towards a unified goal. The nervous system (the brain, spinal cord and the peripheral nerves) acts as an electrical (actually electrochemical is more apt) system to conduct messages throughout the body. We can think of this communication system as being akin to the wires in the telephones we have in our homes. These wires carry a small electrical current that actually will allow a facsimile of our voices to be conducted along them over vast distances. In the same vein, the neuron is basically a "wire" that will conduct an electrical impulse from one cell in one region of the body to another cell or cells in a seperate region of the body.

The neuron is a truly remarkable cell. And there are literally billions of these cells organized excrutiatingly well in order for us to function. It is amazing how we as humans somehow as a species had the innate understanding of circuitry like is seen in the neuron and devised a grandly macroscopic version of this in our electrical system we have globally. I wonder if our structural design influenced the external creativity we expressed in our inventions?

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