Conception to Birth Visualized

Alexan­der Tsiaras has made a career of using advances in visu­al­iza­tion tech­nol­o­gy to offer vivid tours of the human body. His books have tak­en read­ers inside the human heart, the kid­neys and vas­cu­lar sys­tem, and also human repro­duc­tion. Back in 2002, Tsiaras pub­lished From Con­cep­tion to Birth: A Life Unfolds, a book that offers a “visu­al diary of fetal devel­op­ment.” Now, near­ly a decade lat­er, he brings that visu­al diary to video at a con­fer­ence affil­i­at­ed with TED. The visu­als are impres­sive. There’s no deny­ing that. But what might leave you cold (or not) is his will­ing­ness to talk about human devel­op­ment in terms of “mys­tery, mag­ic, and divin­i­ty” rather than try­ing to grap­ple with any sci­en­tif­ic analy­sis. Is this a nod to “Intel­li­gent Design”? Or an unfor­tu­nate byprod­uct of the short talk for­mat? Who knows.…