2023-10-19 by Khushi Goel

[Transcript] IndiaAsksWhy | Why Do We Dream?

Listen to the episode here or on Spotify [00:11]

U: Hi, everyone. I'm Utsuka

[00:14]

J: I'm Jigyasa.

[00:15] U: And you are listening to IndiaAsksWhy Season 03, supported by IndiaBioscience Extension Grant.

[00:27] J: At IndiAsksWhy, we love to chase our curious science questions.

[00:32] U: This season listeners from across schools are joining us on our curiosity chasing endeavor.

[00:42]

U: Humans are always curious about humans. Not surprisingly, we sometimes wonder how human babies develop. “Why do babies kick in the womb?” was a question posed by one of our listeners from class 09, Delhi Public School, Secunderabd. Join Utsuka and Jigyasa as they chase this question with two other curious minds, Karthik and Shree. We also have Dr Amitabha Bandyopadhyay, a developmental biologist from IIT Kanpur joining the curious minds to discuss how human babies develop and share his journey as a scientist.

[01:25] Shree: I'm soon going to have a younger sibling.

[01:27]

Karthik: Oh, wow. A baby sibling to play with.

[01:30]

S: I'm sure that we're gonna play football together.

[01:32]

K: Why do you say that?

[01:34]

S: Because the baby is constantly kicking inside my mom.

[01:37]

K: Hmm… Have you ever wondered why babies kick when they're still in the womb?

[01:42]

U: Such an interesting question. Let's find out…

[01:50]

J: Why do babies kick in the womb? This question has opened up so many areas of research.

[01:54]

K & S (together): Then let's dive in!

[01:58] J: Before we dive in, let's understand what are the different organs involved in kicking?

[02:03]

K: Legs, muscles? S: Bones, brains?

[02:06]

J: Yes, exactly. So starting with legs, as the leg of the baby is developing and making future bones, it is also making connections with the developing brain.

[02:20]

S: Hold on! Future bones? What does that mean?

[02:24]

Prof. Amitabha Bandyopadhyay: I will explain in a minute. The first research question that I wanted to ask in this regard is… I knew from literature that the bone formation always starts with a pure cartilage template. So what you have bone today at one point, it used to be only cartilage and that only one piece

[02:46]

K: Cartilage.

[02:47]

J: Yes, the cartilage. It is the stuff that makes the tip of your nose or the top of your ears.

[02:54]

K: Oh! So the cartilage that makes bone is called transient cartilage.

[02:59]

J: Exactly. So coming back, we have the components of kicking - the muscles, transient cartilage joints and the developing brain cells.

[03:12]

S: Joints. We've learned different joints in school. Let me guess. The knee which is involved in kicking is a hinge joint, one of the most flexible.

[03:21]

J: Absolutely the knee joint. So it turns out kicking is a way for the developing baby's body to test out all of these components. Like we say ‘practice makes perfect’. The body tries to test out each of the new components it made to see if it's working fine.

[03:44]

K: That's interesting. How does the body test it out?

[03:46]

J: That's a good question. Let's say the body has newly made brain cells which are connecting with other cells. What do brain cells do?

[03:56]

K: Send out orders to parts of the body to do a function?

[04:00]

J: Exactly. So let's say the brain cells send out orders to muscles in the legs. If the connections to the leg muscles are working fine, the muscles will contract and this will lead to…. S: a kick or a movement of the muscle.

J: Bravo. You're right.

[04:20]

K: And since the moment happened, we know that the muscles work fine too. [04:25]

J: Exactly. That's perfect, Karthik.

[04:28]

S: Also the transient cartilage works. Right?

[04:31]

J: Yes. Yes. Shree, you're on the right track. There is one more reason why it's important for the baby to move in the womb.

[04:40]

K: And what's that?

[04:41]

J: Ummm… to state it shortly, movements help to build muscles and bones just the way we exercise to build our muscles and make our bones strong.

[04:52]

S: The baby is exercising in the womb to make its bones and muscles strong. Who knew this could happen?

[04:59]

J: Ha ha. Yes, somewhat. Now to go deeper into the topic, the baby's body is like we can say ‘clay’. You know, clay, it will only take a particular shape when there is a certain pressure applied to it. And now if we want a bone or a joint in the body of a baby to form a certain shape, there has to be some kind of pressure that needs to be applied to give it that shape, making a movement while growing in the womb has exactly this purpose. It behaves like the pressure on the clay.

[05:40]

K: Oh, wow. That's an interesting way to look at it.

[05:43]

J: Yes, you said it perfectly Karthik.

[05:46]

S: So when the baby makes certain movements repetitively, it basically leads to the correct shape and form of the future bones in the baby's body?

[05:56]

J: Absolutely. Now, you know why the baby is kicking? It is developing its body to play football with you.

[06:04]

K: I wonder how scientists study this in the lab.

[06:07]

J: Let's ask our expert on call.

[06:10]

J: And now it's time to ask a scientist.

[06:15]

U: Dr Amitabha Bandyopadhyay came to the rescue of the curious group. He is an expert of bone development and… Well, wait. Let him tell us about his journey in the lab himself.

[06:30]

A: So I asked my first major question that I asked, how is it possible that the entire cartilage is converted to bone leaving behind only this tiny part on both the ends of each segment. Have any of you ever fractured a bone? No, right. You have seen people with bandage like hard plaster in their hand or leg, right? You know, the fracture will be healed, then the doctor will remove the hard plaster, but it will still not be able to move your hand around the joint. That is because there is a temporary change in cartilage to bone. It's a temporary change. The reason is that the mechanical forces that act on these bones, they were absent because you immobilized it, but nobody knew the molecular basis of it. So if you have elderly grandparents at home, almost 50% of the Indian population above the age of 65 will have joint pain. They will have difficulty walking. That is a disease called osteoarthritis. So normally at the surface of the bone, you should only see a smooth surface. But in osteoarthritic patients, you will see little spikes coming out. So those are bone forming within the cartilage of people. So as a developmental biologist, we thought that this might be again, cartilage to bone formation, which is normal in embryos. But this time it is happening in the adult. So we chased that hypothesis and because I know how cartilage to bone formation happens, I attacked certain molecules and changed the chemistry a little bit.

My biology research that I do and for whatever reason I was roped in by my institute to promote all the technology businesses of IIT Kanpur. So, you know, just to let you know right now, I oversee the business of 175 companies. They do different kinds of businesses. I try to understand what they do and try to help them.

[08:56]

U: while we were all enticed by Dr Bandyopadhyaya’s extensive experience. Shree had a question.

[09:03]

S: Sir, why did you only use rats and other animals like monkeys?

[09:11]

A: Yeah. So let me tell you, there are two issues here. The primary issue is rules and regulations. That is a, you know, moral, ethical, logical call that if you don't do that in animals, you will risk humans. Now, obviously, we are human beings. So we are a little biased towards our own species. But within that there are lots of rules and regulations that all of us are definitely bound to observe. That suggests that, you know, you should try not to, you know, harm large animals. That is well, rat, mice have less emotional involvement there. The other issue is scientific : when you do your experiment often, my kind of work I will do something in the father or the mother and I would like to see the effect in the babies. Now, for monkeys, you know, there will be very few babies only once in a year, which makes it logistically very difficult. But on the other hand, you can get babies every 28 days, actually 21 days. So experimentally, it is much faster to do such manipulations. So, we also do a lot of work on chicken embryos. So it is not the kind of eggs that you get in the supermarket. Supermarket eggs are not fertilized. But the eggs that we use in our laboratory are fertilized eggs. If you keep them in a box that has 38 °C, then the embryo will grow in there, we can watch it. And because it is growing in an egg, it is very easy for us to manipulate in many different ways. This is the reason why we use model organisms because we cannot experiment on humans.

[11:03]

U: Listening to these details. Karthik put himself in the shoes of the expert. He also had an interesting question to ask.

[11:12]

K: Sir, actually, I had a doubt that chickens like they are very sensitive, sir. Was it hard to like research on them?

[11:20]

A: One thing Karthik is the stage in which we do most of the experiments. You will not get to see blood, et cetera. Like that's another day's story that blood forms a little later but harming animals, we should think twice. You know, like it's only a degree of closeness. You know, if you think about the other extreme bacteria are also like they also like now we know that bacteria also communicate with each other. It is a little philosophical, Karthik. So we need to really draw the line where we can and cannot operate.

[11:52] U: While we were all immersed in the lab environment. We wanted to clarify something from our scientist on call this time.

[12:02]

U: As Students said that they think of scientists as just people who wear goggles and like white coats. So can you tell us about how your day looks like? So that it gives them a picture as to what it means to be a scientist.

[12:17]

A: Yeah. Well, if I am absolutely honest, you will be a little disillusioned. I talk about science because, you know, I give some couple of hours a day to my students to discuss my science, scientific philosophy with them. They run the show. So I am exactly in this kind of a t-shirt or shirt sitting in my office. All day I only participate in meetings. When I was in the process of becoming a scientist, that's when I had that white coat. But one thing I should tell you is that unlike other jobs where you can work 10 to 5, come home and watch TV, and do something else. If you want to excel in science, you cannot stop thinking about your research. Even for a minute, I'm talking to you in the back of my mind still some of my data, some of the next experiment, etcetera is going on. Like if you are not doing that, like when we were graduate students, my lab was very, very productive. We would gather socially after half an hour of discussing baseball, basketball, then suddenly someone would ask, you know, have you read this paper? And that's it, the next 3.5 hours were gone. So that's how it is.

[13:34]

U: Lastly, as we all are excited about our prestigious institutes in India, we wanted to ask Dr Bandyopadhyay to give us more insights about studying at an IIT...

[13:51]

A: First, you need to think why you want to get into it. If building things is something that excites you, then you must come to it.

[14:00]

J: So Utsuka, do you now know why babies kick in the womb?

[14:07]

U: Babies in the womb kick to make sure that their leg machinery is working fine and to test the connection between the brain and muscles.

[14:18]

J: And Dr Bandyopadhyay told us all about how he studies bone and cartilage development in his lab using various model organisms.

[14:29]

U: Talking about his journey as a scientist, he shared that not all scientists' lives look the same. But they all think about their research every single minute of their life.

[14:41]

J: But listeners, what we know about human babies and their development might change as we get more evidence over time.

[14:52]

U: Who knows, one of our listeners might study them in the future to discover something we never knew before. So that's it for today.

[14:59]

U: If you enjoyed listening to our episodes, make sure to visit our website www.indiaaskswhy.org for more content. You'll find illustrations, transcripts, blogs and scientist profiles for all our episodes.

[15:16]

J: We are sure we must have sparked your curiosity. You can submit all your questions on our website and get a chance to be featured in one of our episodes.

[15:26]

U: Follow us on Instagram and Twitter for more updates. Link in the show notes. J: India asks why? is funded by IndiaBioscience Extension Grant.

[15:37]

U: Shweata N. Hegde and Ruchi Manglunia are the hosts for this podcast. J: Kaviranjana Anthony audio edited the episode and Khushi Goel transcribed it.

[15:47]

U: Also thanks to all our team members for enabling Utsuka and Jigyasa to chase their curiosity.

[15:54]

J: Special thanks to Karthik and Shree for joining us and a big shout out to Delhi public school, Secunderabad teachers for making this possible.

[16:02]

U: Finally, thanks to Doctor Amitabha Bandyopadhyay for answering all the curious questions we post.

[16:11]

J: Don't forget to like and rate our podcast to keep the content coming to you at all times. Until then stay tuned and stay curious!