A work of art: the mystery of the first heartbeat

Wednesday 10th Jun 2026, 9.45am

“How do we get order emerging from randomness?”

Poetically speaking, our heart is our centre – an organ that has come to represent our feelings, emotions and love for one another. Medically speaking, it is still something wondrous – a biological powerhouse that has the capacity to beat billions of times over the course of a human life. But what prompts that very first heartbeat in a developing embryo? With no evident ‘control system’, the coordination of the first heartbeat has been something of a mystery. Here, Dr Claudio Cortés (Oxford’s Department of Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics) discusses how collaborating with those from other fields – such as computational artist Andy Lomas – is helping improve our understanding of how dynamic patterns and rhythm can spontaneously emerge within previously unsynchronised cells.