Cutting-Edge Biology Under the Microscope
Summer Public Lectures at the Exploratorium
July 12 and August 3 at 1pm in the McBean Theater

On Thursday, July 12, at 1pm, Dr. Thierry Brassac from the Universitié Montpellier, France, presents sex and embryo development in frogs. Dr. Brassac discusses how we’ve come to know what we know about ourselves from our distant cold-blooded cousins, including putting rubber pants on frogs (!) in order to capture their sperm and thereby explore sperm’s role in fertilization.

On Friday, August 3 at 1pm, Dr. Alejandro Sánchez Alvarado from the University of Utah explores the ultimate stem cell artists, the planarians. These even more distant cousins provide insight into the very beginnings of multi-cellular life and the intersection of death and sex and immortality. How? Planaria are the starting point for understanding stem cells as they keep dividing and going on and on. They are hermaphroditic males with the ability to regenerate. For example, some marine Planaria mate in a mixture of love and war. Their penis is both a weapon — used to cut up their potential mate — and a sex organ. They then inject those pieces with their own sex cells to fertilize and create both new organisms as well as their clones, the remains of the battle. The stem cell is the origin of the very first cells on the planet — a continuous line of life. And Planaria are full of them.