HDBI Podcast

Podcast transcript: Made the Same Way

Episode 8: A human egg looks nothing like a human

Oneda

You’re listening to the final episode of Made the Same Way, the podcast for those who are curious about how we humans are made. My name is Oneda. I'm a rapper, producer and songwriter from Manchester, and in this series we're discovering how we get from a fertilised egg to a fully functioning human being. To answer this, I've teamed up with HDBI. That's the Human Developmental Biology Initiative to explore science in a brand new way. Each episode will bring together one emerging artist and one knowledgeable researcher to discuss science, life and music, and at the end of each episode, the pair will have a limited amount of time to collaborate on an original piece inspired by their conversation.

Shankar

We speak of science as a thing, one thing, and it's not really it's many, many different things. And it's also a way of almost like a way of looking at the world.

Oneda

In this episode, Shankar, a scientist at Oxford University, meets Aubz, a hip hop artist from Manchester.

Aubz

Hello!

Shankar

Hi Aubz!

Aubz

Nice to meet you, Shankar.

Shankar

Good to meet you!

Oneda

Now they're going to chat about everything that we've learned over the series. What is human developmental biology? And why is it important?

Now this episode may include some discussions of abortion, miscarriage, and infertility, so be cautious and decide if it's something that you'd like to listen to.

We've also included some support resources in the episode description.

Aubz

So tell me a little bit about what you do Shankar… Shankar - sorry.

Shankar

Yes, that was a good pronunciation of it. So what do I do? So, I do several different things. I'm a professor at the University of Oxford. So as a part of that, I teach students, specifically I teach the medical students in the university. And as another part of that job, I run a research group where we conduct research on how embryos develop.

Aubz

Sounds like really good work of course, what you're doing. Because I mean, with music, it’s quite personal. But it sounds like what you're doing is expansive - it's for everyone kind of thing – it’s good stuff.

Shankar

But why don't you start in telling me what it is, how you go about creating hip hop music?

Aubz

OK. So I'll start by saying I've been doing music since I was 14 years old. I’m currently 22. So I’ve been doing that for like roughly eight years. I started out with music from writing poetry. I actually I used to struggle to focus in lessons, so they suggested a poetry class… I started with that I really enjoyed it.

Shankar

So was this completely original? You found yourself writing, imagining things and writing them down? Or were you inspired by other poetry?

Aubz

You know, certain things I wanted to put them on paper and make them sound prettier than what they were. Other things I wanted to show the depth of like, you know, certain things I'd been through. Yeah and I just really kind of enjoyed writing. And there was this one time I was at a friend's house and I read a poem to her and she said to me why don't you put it on the beat? And I was like a beat!? I was like, nah, I can't do that. And then she played me this beat of a Kanye West song called Blood on the Leaves - I'll never forget it. And I and I did the poem over the beat and I had like this rapper's flow. And then from there, it kind of sparked something and I went home and I wrote over a rap beat. And then I said, you know what? This is me. Like, I'm gonna be a rapper - I'm gonna rap.

Shankar

No, it's very, very cool because I don’t like writing. To me it's really amazing - just not, not even to write prose, it's hard enough, but then to write poetry! So you know, it's all that much more amazing..

Aubz

Yeah. So how is it that you found your passion for science?

Shankar

It's a bit might seem strange, but even as a small kid I was always fascinated with the shapes of things. So I always - I guess mostly was in biology class – we used to learn about plants. And you know, plants are amazing. The different types of shapes of leaves, they're all - they have the same basic function and they’re all the same structure of a leaf. But you get so many different shapes! And then similarly, flowers - same basic function, but you have so many different varieties of flowers. And then the other really funky thing is that plants will change one thing into another. So if they're a climbing plant, they have these things called tendrils which will help them climb. They can make these tendrils out of anything else, like a leaf can become a tendril, an entire stem can become a tendril, flowers can become tendrils, et cetera. They just mould them to what they need. So I was really always very curious about how shapes arise, why they have particular shapes, how shapes can change. Yeah, maybe like your age, 13 or 14 when you got into music. Ever since then, I've always been interested in how shapes are formed. I don't know. So in terms of why there was no one single thing - I've always been interested in that, I guess you could say.

Aubz

I mean science is in everything, that's what one of my science teachers actually told me when I was failing to concentrate in science: science is everywhere, science is all over.

Shankar

Yeah. No, it's just… I mean, you speak of science as a thing, one thing, and it's not really it's many, many different things. And it's also a way of almost like a way of looking at the world - of being curious about the world and trying to understand how it is and how it works. I mean, you know, in a sense, everybody is a scientist at one level or the other. It's about how you look at the world around you.

Aubz

OK, so what exactly is human development biology?

Shankar

So in a broad sense, it's the study how of how babies develop in the womb. And as you’re probably aware, it's a long process - it's nine months from fertilisation to birth. But actually it isn't as though there's a lot of steady changes - lots of things happened right at the very beginning, even in the first month and a half. And then, it's almost as though the baby matures slowly after that. But basically it’s the study of how we develop in the womb. Just to unpack that a little, just like a chicken egg looks nothing like a chicken, the human egg looks nothing like a human. And so that is the central question: how does it come to be that a single cell, which looks just, you know, just like a ball - it has no shape, no features - how does it arise? One other - just sorry - added detail - it's kind of obvious, but it's worth speaking about explicitly is of course - nobody expects a kitten to come out, pop out of a chicken egg, or to hatch out of chicken egg or a puppy to come out of a chicken egg, right? It's always a chick. And that's what makes developmental biology even possible as a scientific discipline, if you see what I mean - it's not random - it happens like –

Aubz

It's very precise

Shankar

Yeah, it isn't - I wouldn't want to describe as clockwork because that's mechanical, almost physics. It's a chemical reaction, literally, that always happens in the same way: if you put the chicken egg into, give it just the temperature, it will form a chick. And that's what makes it possible to be able to then investigate and have any hope of trying to understand because it is something that is possible to predict - there's nothing random about it.

Aubz

That was really interesting! My next question: do you have a favourite fact about human development?

Shankar

Absolutely. I love it and it really still blows me away all the time! But would you believe that - you know where the heart is, right? It's in your chest. And you know where the brain is - it's in your head. But during embryonic development, your heart actually starts out ahead of your brain! And it's during this process by which the body is shaped. It's sculpted from this group of cells that, the tissue that gives rise to the heart, is slowly brought, comes down, to wind up being lower down in your body than your brain.

Aubz

Wow, okay!

Shankar

And it's a, it's all part of another, you know, really very, very funky process. Your body actually starts out flat during development. And the inside - it's a bit gory, but if you were to fillet me open from mouth to anus, you'd open up the inside lining of my gut tract. And that's essentially you have three layers then: the inside of my gut, my skin and everything in between. And that's how the embryo is. It hasn't got that much detail, but there's one simple layer of cells which will give rise to your skin and your brain. Another simple layer which will give rise to the inner lining of your gut and one layer which will give rise to all the stuff in between, like your bones, your muscles, your blood etc. And it's - this whole thing is wrapped together from the sides and from the front and the back - they all meet - what's left behind of it is your belly button. They all meet and form the umbilical cord. And in the process, they convert the flat sheet into a tube. Our gut is a tube right from our mouth to the anus and it's in any case, sorry to come back to - it's this type of folding movement that brings the heart down to its position. So, I'm sorry. You asked one, but I gave you several, but they're they're all very fascinating.

Aubz

Very interesting! My other question, what stage is the sex decided?

Shankar

Ah, that's a it's a cool question! Only because we published a paper just late last year of a very special human embryo - special because it was so very young - it was it was 17 days after fertilisation. We found already at that earliest stage, 17 days after fertilisation, these cells that are called PGC's: primordial germ cells. Germ cells are the things that go on to give rise to either the sperm or the ovum - the primordial germ cells are the early cells that give rise to these germ cells in the embryo. And so we found that as early as 17 days. This relates to the thing I was describing earlier about how all the cells in our body come from one original cell… So that cell divides, gives you two cells. Then those give you 4 cells, then 8, 16, 32 et cetera. And then already by 17 days you have several thousands and thousands of cells in the embryo. For the HDBI, the Human Developmental Biology Initiative, one theme, one wing of it, studies the processes that occurred before the embryo implants in the womb. In contrast with the other themes in the HDBI, there is a theme which studies how blood and associated cells form, there's a theme which studies how the nervous system forms, and there's a theme which studies how the heart and lung forms. I belong to the team which studies how the heart and lung forms. All of these occur after the embryo has implanted in the lining of the womb, so we rely on terminations of pregnancies to get our samples. And so that that's where we get the samples that we study from.

Aubz

OK, so my next question that I have, I hope you don't find it personal… Feel free not to answer it in that case. Generalising, do you think that science goes against religion or a form of God?

Shankar

I don't find it offensive at all, or personal.

Aubz

Good!

Shankar

I'm trying to find the - I don't know if I would say it goes against. And also religion is, you know, just like science, is many different things - religion is very many, many different things. And there are… so OK. There's one aspect of religion which it does completely go against, and that's faith. I think one definition of faith, by definition, is believing something without evidence.

Aubz

Ah, makes total sense.

Shankar

That gets to the heart of faith - having faith in something – believing in something without evidence. And that absolutely science goes against that. You would not - by its nature, science is all about evidence. And you mentioned earlier about you being more creative… and this is something I want to talk with you about - you were more inclined towards creative things rather than science. And I would say that the scientists need to be creative and they need to have imagination. They need to, but usually they’ll imagine something. And when I say, imagine something, they'll imagine an explanation for what you see around you in the world, but you need to then prove that your explanation is correct by doing - usually by doing experiments. Otherwise, anybody can come up with any explanation for any observation and then you don't get at what is likely to be the correct explanation. And that's what I mean by that science is in a sense incompatible with faith. It rests on evidence.

Aubz

Solid evidence, yeah. Again, like now that you've said it, it's the faith thing - like now I actually… and I just kind of wondered: is that something that all scientists feel about religion?

Shankar

Some scientists, at least, are much more comfortable with uncertainty and not knowing things. Which again, I don't want to generalise too much... It's not something I've of course studied, but I imagine there's an aspect of religion which is all about certainty, which is about knowing that this is what is going to happen to you after you die, which I would say you could ultimately never know, because no one who has died has come back and told us what it was like, in a literal sense. So you know, I am personally very comfortable not knowing things - at a personal level, that's the nature of the job. But also knowing there's a lot I will never understand. There's just uncertainty about things and it's not something that bothers me… but I feel it bothers other people a lot, uncertainty.

Aubz

If I put that into music terms… so with music, when when a rapper writes a song or any artist I suppose it’s like they could tell a story, but it doesn't necessarily mean it's happened. There's not necessarily any truth within it. Part of the reason why I called myself True Aubz is because with my music, I only want to say things that are actually factual to what I've been through, or like things that mean something to me. So, Shankar, with your research, what are some of the breakthroughs that you've had?

Shankar

So I'll give you an example of one breakthrough – it wasn't from our group and it's been quite a while ago, but I think it's a very powerful example. These days, most pregnant women are recommended to have vitamin B pills, folic acid. And this is, you know, routine within the in the UK. And the reason women are asked to have folic acid is because of this type of research which found your brain and your spinal cord, they come from the same cells and the same tissue that give you the skin. OK, so which sounds really - to me, I always had difficulty getting my head around this - because you know the skin is on the outside of the body and the brain and the spinal cord are inside the body, but that's among some amazing things about how shapes form - they get pinched off really early during embryonic development and go into the into the into the body. And in part as part of doing that, they get pinched off and they need to close to form a tube. The spinal cord is actually a tube because it has a hole down the centre, a canal, and this space actually goes into the brain and even the brain - people, may not be familiar - has spaces within it and fluid and liquids within it… anyway, so this if this doesn't - if you don't have enough folic acid, this type of closure doesn't occur properly - they're called ‘neural tube defects’. And it's this type of research that led us to understand that something as simple as taking a supplement during pregnancy can dramatically reduce the chance of having these type sof defects. And so, you know, it has had an impact on people at a personal level - you know, their babies don't need to suffer. And obviously at a broader level in society, in the sense that the NHS doesn't then have to invest in supporting… it's a reasonably inexpensive intervention and it has great benefits. So I would say that that's one of a big breakthrough from trying to understand how the body forms, how it develops normally, what can go wrong, and how you can try to prevent things from going wrong.

Aubz

OK, from my view, as someone who is obviously not a scientist and someone who's just lucky enough to have life - I just think it's great that someone's out there studying it! You know, it's good that scientists exist and study these things… Because rappers don't do that! So yeah, much respect to you for doing that.

Shankar

Thank you Aubz. But I mean, you know, music also keeps people going.

Aubz

Oh, yeah, 100%.

Shankar

And yeah, we’re all important in different ways.

Aubz

Thank you very much for having this conversation with me today, Shankar. I've really enjoyed it, I feel like I've definitely learned a lot!

Shankar

Well, thank you. I mean, it's been, good fun talking with you and you make me comfortable to just, you know, waffle off and talk about various thing.

Aubz

OK, right, so… getting on to the creative part. What I've done is, I've picked beats that I like the sound of, my type of genre. Out of the beats, I'm very happy to let you choose one of them, and I will then go away and put some lyrics on a beat.

Shankar

OK!

Aubz

So that short beat there, that's called The Juice. So #1 being The Juice… Also, by the way, I tried to pick instrumentals that kind of reminded me of like a beginning of something, to represent like the beginning of life.

Shankar

OK.

Aubz

That one there's called Hard Offer. Beat #2 Hard Offer.

Shankar

I think the second one, yeah.

Aubz

Right, so Hard Offer is the beat. Good stuff.

Shankar

No, it's exciting. It's fun. I mean, I the only only reason I find it exciting is because I think I'm in safe hands with Aubz.

Aubz

I'd like to think so, yeah. So how we do it in the studio, Shankar, is sometimes one headphone, one earphone on, one earphone off… embryo’s got to grow into a fetus... The beginning of life, it's like nothing could defeat us….The sperm mate - the sperm and the egg and yeah it made us a believer. Shankar and Aubz - now I don't know! Do you think that's a good way to start? Like, what should I? The embryo?

Shankar

Or you could yes, since you're starting, you, could start with the egg. And you said about the sperm and the egg, right? But you said that, I think it was your second or third line, and I don't know if you wanna if you start with that I guess? That’s where our own lives, in a sense, start.

Aubz

The egg and the sperm is about to make a fetus!

Shankar

Hahaha

Aubz

Right. Yeah, I think that's good… So, Shankar, what I want, what my idea before was like for you to be, obviously as the scientist, for you to kind of do the intro of the song. You know what, in my head, right, you know, it totally reminds me of like, a speech from, like, Martin Luther King: this is how it happens - this is how - this is what human development is. This is how we build a fetus.

Shankar

OK, let's maybe you'll see if a different form of words, because there's too much certainty in that to say ‘this is how it happens’. We don't know enough about how things happen… or think you know how the embryo develops? As a challenge?

Aubz

Yeah, there we go! And this is the part I want you to put your creative cap on, Shankar, cause I want you to like do some like really serious voice. Like, just like I really wanna get the point that you're aomeone who studies science.

Shankar

Hi, I'm Shankar. I study how embryos develop. So do you think we know how the embryo develops? No… let's try it again, please!

Aubz

Do it one more time, I'm just going to give you an example, yeah? My name is Shankar. I've been studying science for X amount of years. So you think you know how human is developed?

Shankar

OK. I'm Shankar. I've been studying how embryos develop for 30 years. So you think you know how the embryo develops?

Aubz

That was perfect!

Shankar

Thank you very much guys, that was great fun.

Aubz

Lovely to meet you.

<Musical piece>

Shankar

I'm Shankar. I've been studying how embryos develop for 30 years. So you think you know how the embryo develops?

Aubz

The egg and the sperm, they're about to make a fetus

Just to make it clear, science doesn't disprove Jesus,

It just doesn't run on faith, it's solid evidence that the sperm must win the race.

50/50, that's inside your DNA

As you grow, yeah, it's evident that you're going to change.

Here’s a tissue for your issues that no one is the same

We're made the same way.

XX homogamic better known as she.

XY heterogamic, yeah, that is he

Compare science to the root, but the humans, we’re the tree.

That's how everyone like me gets their feel their heart beat, yeah.

‘Cause the egg and the stem, they're about to make a fetus, yeah.

Compare science to the root, and the humans, we’re the tree. Yeah, yeah.

<end of musical piece>

Oneda

Now you been listening to Made the Same Way. This was our final episode, so thank you very much for listening. Thank you to all the researchers and the artists for taking part and creating some amazing pieces! We'd love more people to get involved with our mission to open up human developmental science.

Now you can help people find us by rating and reviewing Made the Same Way on Apple Podcasts and sharing it with all your friends. Made the Same Way is a Reform Radio production for HDBI, which is funded by Wellcome. It was produced by Olivia Swift with help from Jamie Green.

Download the transcript here