Alex Dunn: When cells communicate by nudging one another

Have you ever pondered how the cells in your hand knew to become a hand and not, say, a foot or a heart or an ear?

Alex Dunn is a chemical engineer who thinks about such things a lot. He has always marveled at the way — from brain to blood to bone — the many cells that make up our bodies derive from just a single cell created when sperm meets egg. He says that process of differentiation comes down to far more than genetics or biochemistry can explain.

Related | Alex Dunn, associate professor of chemical engineering, member of Stanford Bio-X, Stanford Cardiovascular Institute, Stanford Maternal & Child Health Research Institute, Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute and faculty fellow at Stanford ChEM-H.

Dunn counts himself as among an emerging field known as “mechanobiology” that is exploring how physical forces — the tugging and nudging that goes on between cells — play a very important part in how cells differentiate and self-organize into the complex systems that make up the human body.

Dunn says there’s still a lot we don’t know about mechanobiology, but the process of observing and analyzing the behavior of invisible molecules inside a cell is not unlike trying to understand how a bakery works by peering in the window.

For a glimpse inside the inner workings of human cells and the very latest science of cell differentiation, join chemical-engineer-turned-mechanobiologist Alex Dunn for the latest episode of “The Future of Everything” podcast from Sirius XM with bioengineer and host Russ Altman.

Related | Russ Altman, the Kenneth Fong Professor of Bioengineering, of genetics, of medicine (general medical discipline), of biomedical data science and, by courtesy, of computer science.