everything that you can actually see with your eye is just the smallest sliver of Life on this Earth most of Life Is invisible we still have this idea that we're the most Central feature of Earth and it's the humans that are the bystanders the microbes are doing the [Music] work what do you do when you see things that no one has ever seen before l a y Le then they pronounce it with a V hook Le of hook anony Von Leen hoop he was a habacher in the city of Del in the Netherlands and why
his curiosity found an outlet in microscopes that is just lost to history we really don't know the quality of his microscope was superb he made some 500 of these small instruments and only a few of them he showed to visitors he never told anyone how he made his lenses Robert Hook in England he wrote this wonderful book Micro graphia the first observations of the small world with lenses one of the first things that lean hook did was look at things that Rook had looked at there was a stinger of a bee leg I believe of
a Lous singular of lice but he saw some things that hook didn't see because his lenses were better [Music] it was summertime it was it was August the days are so long that you get a lot of algae growth on water he called it green clouds curious again he has what he calls a glass vessel you know a jar probably and he filled it with the water the next day he put it under his lens and and what he saw was green streaks among this was all these little animals and these things were a whole
lot smaller like a thousand times smaller than anything he had ever seen before and and I I think the line is I confess I could not but Wonder at [Music] it Leu call them in Dutch dear and dearin that's an dimentive of the word deer deer d i e r and which is the Dutch word for animal what laen hook called was little animals this was all so new the word microorganism did not exist at the time the word bacteria is from the 19th century and and that strikes me as as Adam in the Garden
of Eden who in Genesis named all the animals it was just a brand new world and he was the first person in it he wrote a letter to the Royal Society one of the first organizations to practice experimental science and they're going oh my Heavens what is this at first they didn't believe it finally the other members of the Royal Society were also able to see it and the rest is [Music] history and so he discovered many things sperm red blood cells protozoa and bacteria which nobody had ever seen before he is the first person
to see everything he looked at for 50 years van Leen hook wanted to see these things well he saw them but now we get most of life is microbial you look at the tree of life you know only this tiny little part is every single thing you've [Music] seen every higher organism is covered you know inside and out with bacteria and and humans would not be alive if these little 24/7 Partners weren't giving us all of these genes and proteins that our own genomes don't encode and they have all kinds of fabulous behaviors vibrio harvi
it's a marine bacterium it looks like a sausage and it's very fast vibrio means vibrate and what is amazing is that if one watches them go from a single cell to a number of cells all of the bacteria in unison start glowing in the [Music] dark by studying this bioluminescent organism we discovered that bacteria can communicate using a molecular language we used to think that social behaviors were the perview of higher organisms What We Now understand is that bacteria were probably the first organisms on this Earth to ever communicate with one another we're always looking
at an unknown World we're driven by our ignorance and we're driven by the idea that the world must be more complex than what we understand right now and that's enough inspiration to do an experiment can you imagine being the first one to see your sperm swimming around I mean that'd be a scary thing right that [Music]
