Have we figured out enough about the workings of living systems to even ask that? There remains so many unknowns - the big ones such as what is consciousness and what constitutes it [1], or the trillions of details we still need to figure out about how living things self-assemble, grow, multiply, and evolve, just from atoms. So can we really understand how life works?
The answer, I think, is Yes, we can understand how life works! The answer has perhaps been a "yes" even before the discovery of structure of DNA, the blueprint of life. But, with the invention of tools to peer into the workings of life in snapshots and in real time at the molecular level, the sketchy picture of how life works is progressively getting clearer.
It still remains a challenge, however, for most of us to participate in the excitement of our rapidly growing comprehension of the workings of life at a molecular level, without being inundated, if not lost, in details. Some great teachers, like Feynman [2] could help us understand the macroscopic manifestations of properties of light and atoms with infectious passion and enthusiasm, and most importantly, without any jargon. For instance what causes a mirage, or why does that little water puddle on the road with a thin coating of oil from automobiles, shimmer with rainbow colors? He explains it all without losing the user by trying to explain quantum electrodynamics (the field name itself is an intimidating jargon!). It is a great talent. That talent is perhaps needed now more than ever as our understanding of life deepens and the unraveled complexities grow exponentially. We need more Feynmans perhaps - to infect us with enthusiasm and to educate us.
Alan Alda posted a challenge to scientists to explain "what is a flame?", a contest due to close next week 2 April 2012. Hopefully many scientists take up the challenge - the panel of judges are quite tough - 11 year olds, so the bar for simplicity in explanation is way up there...
Therein lies the catch. That particular video of the cell is a synthesis of several rapidly evolving models of cellular function, based on experimental observations, some of which done live inside cells, and some outside the cell in laboratory conditions ( to those biologists reading this, I am sorry I refuse to use your terms "in vivo" and "in vitro"! I may have considered if it was "in-something" and "ex-something"! ). For example, at time point 2.10 in the 3m 13 secs video, one will find a big ball being hauled (shown above) down a cable by a flat-footed walking thing that has a Donald duck's gait, except with a large head that is weighing the poor creature down. That piqued my curiosity and with some foraging online, I found out what it was - a model of a molecular motor hauling "cargo" around inside each of my cell, transporting them like a tightrope walk on dynamically growing and shrinking highways/cables. All this in one cell! If that very line caused an eruption of questions in you - "Molecular motor? Hauling cargo? What cargo? How are they walking? Where are they going? Highways? In a cell, less than the size of a speck of dust? Highways growing and shrinking? What the heck?" - that is exactly how I felt.
I set out to find more about these flat-footed walking motors and the journey was fun. The first thing I had to unlearn, entering the micro world of cells, was some of the common sense notions that are driven by gravity - the pull of earth on us. For those of us who have read Dr. Seuss's Horton Hears a Who, journey into the world of cells would be very much like visiting Whoville, [3] except the kangaroo had its way and dipped the soft clover with its village, and all its little people living on it, into the barrel of oil - luckily it is not hot! The effects of gravity in the micro world of cells is negligible - it is only the viscosity (the frictional force on things moving in fluids), and the electrical attractions (think combing hair and the "static" after that) that dominate in the world of cells.
There were many more adaptations in thinking, that I had to do to understand this fantastic world - 50 to 100 trillion of them constituting the living thing, called me. The most striking moments of awe and excitement (several orders of magnitude more than the awe of the video above), were the moments when I began to intuitively get the "hang" of how organized aggregation of atoms into complex structures, and organized movement - can all emerge from complete random jiggling of atoms. Also the realization that, as I write this, such hectic activity, is occurring inside each cell, that constitutes me - it is exhilarating! Makes it well worth the effort, stretching both my intellect and imagination, many a time well beyond the breaking limit...
References
1. Christof Koch sets out to find, in his own words, the neural correlates of consciousness in his book, "The Quest for Consciousness: A Neurological Approach", with foreword by Francis Crick. Crick's final paper, written with Koch, proposes that a part of the brain, called the claustrum may be involved in consciousness, What is the function of the claustrum?. Koch recently embarked on an ambitious project to map the mind of a mouse - Nature 483, 397–398 (22 March 2012)
2. Feynman explains what nature is - a playlist of archival footage from BBC - Ted talks
3. Horton hears a who! is a 1954 book by Dr. Suess
