Stepping out of the Jungle

I heard a story once involving an Amazonian tribe of hunter-gatherers. In this story, a group of explorers was (you guessed it!) exploring the jungle, and happened upon this tribe. The tribesmen were curious about the explorers strange clothes and technology, so the explorers offered to show them where they had come from. When they walked out of the jungle, they saw a vast city laid out before them, complete with skyscrapers, cars, and airplanes. They promptly wet themselves and cowered in fear. The sudden shock that they had been living in the jungle, barely scraping out an existence, while the rest of the world had flourished and prospered, was simply too much for them.

Here's a sample of what I did at work the other day:

This was made on an awesome microscope hooked up to a camera. It's a single cell dividing into two, then those two into four. These cells have had a special protein engineered into them so that certain parts of the cell glow green. They only do this, though, when they're hit with a blue laser. The camera takes pictures every five seconds, at three different depths, two millionths of a meter apart, so that I can see what's happening all throughout the cell. And all of the preparation involved to get to this stage only took about a week.

I feel like I just walked out of the jungle.