They Started from the Wrong Cell
The anchor verses are Ecclesiastes 11:5 · Zechariah 12:1 (NIV).
A study published in Nature Neuroscience on September 18 asks researchers to look again at where different parts of the brain begin.
The team, including co-first authors Rayyan Jokhai and Carolyn Dundes and senior author Kyle Loh, traced cells in mouse embryos. They found two populations emerging during gastrulation, an early stage of body formation. One contributed to the forebrain and midbrain; the other to the hindbrain.
In experiments with human stem cells, the corresponding progenitor populations followed different developmental paths. Using the hindbrain pathway, the researchers generated a particular group of motor neurons that had been difficult to produce in the laboratory.
The starting point mattered.
That is more precise than saying nobody had ever grown a hindbrain neuron, or that every earlier attempt was impossible. The paper describes particular cells and experimental conditions. It includes human cells grown in the laboratory, not direct lineage tracing in developing human embryos.
A result in a dish is also not a treatment. Families living with ALS and spinal muscular atrophy deserve careful language about research, as well as care and support in the lives they are living now.
What stays with me is the willingness to reconsider an assumption.
More effort is not always the only answer. Sometimes the question underneath the effort needs another look.
Ecclesiastes has a sentence that belongs beside that thought.
As you do not know the path of the wind, or how the body is formed in a mother’s womb, so you cannot understand the work of God, the Maker of all things.
Ecclesiastes 11:5, NIV.
The passage names a limit to our understanding. It does not ask us to stop learning. The next verse tells the reader to sow in the morning and continue working in the evening, without knowing which effort will succeed.
Uncertainty and action belong in the same passage.
The study does not prove the verse, and the verse does not explain the experiment. Reading them together leaves me with a question about humility: can I learn something real without mistaking it for the whole?
Then Zechariah, introducing a prophecy concerning Israel, names the one who is speaking:
The LORD, who stretches out the heavens, who lays the foundation of the earth, and who forms the human spirit within a person.
Zechariah 12:1, NIV, excerpt.
The heavens. The earth. The inside of one person.
The prophet places the forming of a human spirit alongside the laying of the earth’s foundation. The passage directs attention to the Creator’s authority. It does not assign each person one fixed career, temperament, or role.
I want to be careful there.
A cell’s developmental path is not a verdict on a human life. Struggling at something does not prove we were never meant to try. People learn, change, receive help, and find possibilities they could not see before.
But it does leave me thinking about how many years I have spent protecting a starting assumption and calling it perseverance.
Somebody reading this has been working hard at a version of themselves that keeps failing to form.
The job everyone said should suit you. The temperament you were told to develop. The kind of believer, or parent, or spouse, you were handed as the model and have spent years trying to become.
Perhaps the next step is more practice. Perhaps it is better support. Perhaps the expectation itself needs to be questioned.
I cannot decide that for somebody else from a paragraph of research or a verse of Scripture.
I can ask whether the model has left room for the actual person. I can listen to what their experience is telling me. I can notice when I have treated difficulty as a failure of character before understanding what is happening.
And I can allow the same questions about myself.
Ecclesiastes gives me permission to act without possessing the whole explanation. Zechariah brings me back to the GOD who forms the human spirit.
I do not have to defend every assumption I began with in order to be faithful today.
I can return to the question. I can receive correction. I can take the next step with what I have learned.
I am not here to prove myself. I am here to make HIM visible.
🙏 To the families living with ALS and SMA this morning, whose need for care continues while research moves forward.
🙏 To the researchers willing to revisit an assumption and follow the evidence carefully.
🙏 To the one who has worked diligently for years under an expectation that may need to change.
🙏 To the one who handed somebody else a model, meaning well, and is learning to listen to the person in front of them.
Grace and Peace.
Sources: Jokhai, Dundes and colleagues, Two parallel neural ectoderm progenitors contribute to the developing brain, Nature Neuroscience, September 18, 2026 (accessible abstract) · Ecclesiastes 11 (NIV) · Zechariah 12 (NIV). Scripture quotations: New International Version (NIV). The Zechariah quotation is an excerpt from verse 1.