Years ago, I was called into court to be an expert witness on a case surrounding some pharmaceutical drugs and their possible effects on fetal development. I learned many things about the legal system, but one specific experience stands out in my mind.
I was on the stand, and one of the lawyers was trying to discredit my relevance, using the narrative that I studied “lower animals” and thus my opinions were not germane to human medicine. It went something like this:
Attorney: Dr. Levin, don’t you study frog development?
Me: Yes, I do.
Attorney: Don’t frogs come from an egg?
Me: YOU come from an egg!
Everyone gasps/laughs, and the judge starts banging her gavel. What I didn’t anticipate, before blurting this out, is that they all took it as my trying to insult the guy. I was then instructed to treat the counsel with respect! Seriously, what could signal more respect than pointing out that someone literally self-assembled from a single cell? I would never use this as an insult – it’s a huge, autopoietic honor. But they didn’t know that.
Me: No, your honor, I’m sorry, let me explain. I don’t just mean him – I mean all of us, everyone in this room, even you – we all come from an egg!
And then there was silence, as 20-30 professional adults thoughtfully look up at the ceiling as their brains tried to remember back to 7th grade sex education. Slowly it dawns on everyone that, whoa, yes, we do all come from an egg! The attorney cross-examining me was still not happy, especially when I was then given a chance to paint a picture of shared developmental mechanisms and how frog embryos are used as a model system for numerous human biomedical conditions.
Something else I learned during that process had to do with databases of adverse events reports. People report various side effects of the drugs they are taking. I had never heard of this, but was required to look through a bunch of the data. I won’t go into specifics, but my imagination for the range of possible things that could happen to a human was drastically expanded. Some of the examples are truly amazing (and horrific) – I never knew some of these outcomes were even possible. All the more miraculous that our many bodily systems normally work at all.
Images by Chat GPT4.
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