Vibrio fischeri lives in this squid.

This is the Vibrio fischeri molecule.

The reason that Vibrio fischeri is doing that comes from the biology.

Every single one of them man, woman, child, infant, fetus.

And the basis of the fetus' prediction is what its mother eats.

The clue to this came from another marine bacterium, and it's a bacterium called Vibrio fischeri.

The same happens with the fetus that breathes and feeds through his mother.

Just to give you a few examples ending a pregnancy versus killing a fetus

The fetus' continual movement in the womb is necessary for muscular and skeletal growth.

Let's say you have a little fetus heart, a tiny little heart like this.

The notion of fetal learning may conjure up for you attempts to enrich the fetus

These weeks are the period of the most rapid development of the fetus. If the fetus continues to grow at this speed for the entire 9 months, it would be 1.5 tons at birth.

And to switch on processes that we knew how to do when we were a fetus.

But the pregnant woman's own voice reverberates through her body, reaching the fetus much more readily.

And because the fetus is with her all the time, it hears her voice a lot.

The fetus incorporates these offerings into its own body, makes them part of its flesh and blood.

The fetus adjusts its metabolism and other physiological processes in anticipation of the environment that awaits it.

And so when Tyrone talks about the fetus being trapped in a contaminated environment, this is my contaminated environment.

A mammalian fetus, if it loses a limb during the first trimester of pregnancy, will re grow that limb.

And so, as I was thinking about this, I focused on this organism, which is the El Tor biotype of the organism called Vibrio cholerae.

This is a graph from NOAA's ocean and human health initiative, showing the rise of the infections by vibrio in people over the last few years.

Some cells in the fetus, actually receive signals to self destruct here the developing hand grows has an enormous bumble of cells.

By seven months of gestation, the fetus' taste buds are fully developed, and its olfactory receptors, which allow it to smell, are functioning.

The flavors of the food a pregnant woman eats find their way into the amniotic fluid, which is continuously swallowed by the fetus.

These are two shots of a red tide coming on shore here and a bacteria in the genus vibrio, which includes the genus that has cholera in it.

So what a fetus is learning about in utero is not Mozart's Magic Flute but answers to questions much more critical to its survival.

This story imparts information that the fetus uses to organize its body and its systems an adaptation to prevailing circumstances that facilitates its future survival.

And what we were going to do was scan a new project on the development of the fetus from conception to birth using these new technologies.

You might be wondering 'How do you get a layer that has a gap within it?' Let me try to show you what happens in a fetus.

And so when you realize that chemicals can pass the placenta and go into your unborn child, it made me start to think, what would my fetus say to me?

This keeps the fetus alive in the short term, but the bill comes due later on in life when those other organs, deprived early on, become more susceptible to disease.

So the food that the mom eats, or the pre natal vitamins that she takes, or the cigarettes that she smokes, or the stresses that she encounters at home or at work, can all be transmitted as chemical signals through her bloodstream to her developing fetus, where they can get laid down as Epigenetic marks that affect the fetus' own genes and long term health.

What you're looking at on this slide is just a person from my lab holding a flask of a liquid culture of a bacterium, a harmless beautiful bacterium that comes from the ocean, named Vibrio fischeri.

And what we found so this is now supposed to be, again, my bacterial cell is that Vibrio fischeri has a protein that's the red box it's an enzyme that makes that little hormone molecule, the red triangle.

Because sounds from the outside world have to travel through the mother's abdominal tissue and through the amniotic fluid that surrounds the fetus, the voices fetuses hear, starting around the fourth month of gestation, are muted and muffled.

Much of what a pregnant woman encounters in her daily life the air she breathes, the food and drink she consumes, the chemicals she's exposed to, even the emotions she feels are shared in some fashion with her fetus.

Another important point to make about epigenetics is that these types of marks can be transmitted not only from a pregnant female to her fetus but also from generation to generation if the marks are put down on our sperm or eggs.

There was a character called the Third Stage Guild Navigator, which was a kind of giant, floating fetus creature that lived in a giant tank with this orange mist of psychedelic spice swirling around him, allowing him to bend space and time.

Having conversation and communications with the estrogens, the progesterones, saying, I'm here to stay, plant me, building this incredible trilinear fetus that becomes, within 44 days, something that you can recognize, and then at nine weeks is really kind of a little human being.

The resulting tuning and tweaking of a fetus' brain and other organs are part of what give us humans our enormous flexibility, our ability to thrive in a huge variety of environments, from the country to the city, from the tundra to the desert.

What you are looking at is the Hawaiian Bobtail Squid, and it's been turned on its back, and what I hope you can see are these two glowing lobes and these house the Vibrio fischeri cells, they live in there, at high cell number that molecule is there, and they're making light.

But the placenta is really kind of what the embryo develops inside of, and it's the interface, especially in humans and in mammals, between the developing fetus and its mother, so it kind of is the exchange mechanism that separates their two systems, but allows the necessary functions to go on between them.

And it's shown with all the vessels on it and you can see the vessels coming into and out of it but the heart at its core is a pump and this pump is why we call it one of the hardest working organs in your body, because the heart starts pumping blood from the point where you're a little fetus and you're eight weeks old all the way until the point when you die.