The gecko has pads on his toes. They're little lines that look like the bottom of a sneaker. But if you look at them under a microscope, they don't look like lines. There are hundreds of thousands of hairlike structures, down to a micron. She pauses, looking at the small creature standing calmly upside-down on the sheer plastic surface.
Nobody really knows how they do it.
Lila Gierasch sets out an artist's painting of an amorphous pink blob, and traces with her finger the path of a thin white ribbon curling through it. It turns a corner here, then does a sort of spiral staircase, then turns and does another spiral here. The pink blob is a cell, and the ribbon represents a protein within it. Gierasch's research centers around how proteins fold within cells. If the ribbon fails to curve into a specific shape, the cell won't be able to fulfill its function.