How to pronounce "protein"

The most suprising thing that I 've learnt while running the contest,

is that some scientists are now working directly with dancers on their research.

For example, at the University of Minnesota there is a biomedical engineer

named David Odde, and he works with dancers to study how cells move.

They do it by changing their shape.

When a chemical signal washes up on one side

it triggers the cell to expand its shape on that side,

because the cell is constantly touching and tugging at the environment.

So, that allows cells to ooze along in the right directions.

But what seems so slow and graceful from the outside is really more like chaos inside.

Because cells control their shape with a skeleton of rigid protein fibres.

And those fibres are constantly falling apart.

But just as quickly as they explode, more proteins attach to their ends and grow them longer.

So it's constanlty changing, just to remain exactly the same.

David builds mathematical models of this, and then he tests those in a lab,

but before he does that, he works with dancers to figure out

what kinds of models to build in the first place.

It is basically efficient brainstorming.

And when I visited David to learn about his research,

he used dancers to explain it to me rather than the usual method, PowerPoint.

And this brings me to my modest proposal.