Join us for a livestream program featuring Jon Lieff ’66 to discuss his latest book The Secret Language of Cells: What Biological Conversations Tell Us About the Brain-Body Connection, the Future of Medicine, and Life Itself and the "chatter" among living cells of every possible kind — from those in our body and brain to those in the environment around us.
From electrical alerts to chemical codes, the greatest secret of modern biology, hiding in plain sight, is that all of life’s activity boils down to one thing: conversation. While cells are commonly considered the building block of living things, it is actually the communication between cells that brings us to life, controlling our bodies and brains, determining whether we are healthy or sick, and directly influencing how we think, feel, and behave. Lieff will discuss the significance of these conversations, for everything from mental health to cancer, and the surprising science of how very different cells — bacteria and brain cells, blood cells and viruses — all speak the same language. He is a physician, neuropsychiatrist, and a nationally recognized expert in geriatric psychiatry, including as a Distinguished Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association.
Moderating the session is Hao Xu ’09, a quality engineer at Thermo Fisher Scientific in the Pharma Services Group.
