Nobel Prize winner: "Cell biology is a hallucination." – Eric Betzig [video]

Transcript:

Almost everything you learn in biology textbooks is a hallucination.

You guys have probably seen on the web: here’s a cargo on kinesin walking along a microtubule like this. And it’s all like in this vast empty space.

I don’t know any cell that’s a bunch of empty space. I’m sorry. It’s crowded as [expletive]. There’s a hundred trillion water molecules in every cell. There’s 10 billion protein molecules. There’s 10 billion carbohydrates. There’s 10 billion [more]. It’s by far the most complex matter in the known universe.

We understand the interiors of neutron stars far better than we understand the interior of cells.

There’s a reason why only 9% of the drugs that enter phase one come out phase three: because we don’t know what the [expletive] we’re doing. We don’t know the real mechanisms that are going on.

And when you start to look at the dynamics, not just the structure, you realize that you had it all wrong. And you realize that so many of the things that they thought they knew, you can’t be sure that they know.