Under the blue-white glow of a lab microscope at Lakeview’s High Desert Field Station, a pinhead of stained tissue looks more like abstract art than anatomy. But to the scientists guiding students through a new public exhibit this week, the tiny shapes on glass are the first rung on a ladder that climbs from cells to tissues, from organs to organ systems, and finally to the organism itself.

The exhibit, called “Parts Into Whole,” was assembled by station biologists and visiting clinicians after a year of community workshops, organizers said. It aims to show how the body’s smallest units stack into larger structures—and how each level’s shape helps determine what it can do.

“People hear ‘cell’ and think it’s a dot,” said Dr. Inez Watanabe, a physiologist who advised the project. “But a cell’s structure is a set of tools. When enough of the right tools are grouped together, you get tissue. When tissues combine in the right architecture, you get an organ. Then organs coordinate as systems, and the organism can survive.”

Cells: Specialized parts with specific jobs

In one display case, visitors can look through a light microscope at a smear of blood.

Under magnification, red blood cells appear as pale, flexible discs. That shape matters, staffers explained, because it increases surface area and lets the cells bend through narrow vessels—features tied to their job of carrying oxygen.

Across the room, a second microscope shows elongated muscle cells arranged like parallel cables. Their internal structure—packed with contractile proteins—allows them to shorten with force.

“To understand function, you start with the structure you can actually see,” said station technician Luis Moreno, who prepared the samples. “Microscopy is where most people get their first proof that biology is built from parts.”

Tissues: Groups of similar cells working together

Cells rarely act alone. The exhibit’s next station uses histology slides—thin, stained slices of tissue mounted on glass—to show how similar cells assemble into working groups.

A panel of skeletal muscle tissue, stained in deep pink, reveals bundles aligned in the same direction. The alignment, staffers said, is what allows the tissue to pull in a coordinated way rather than tugging randomly.

Nearby, visitors can compare that to nervous tissue, where branching cells form networks. The structure—a web of long extensions—supports the rapid transmission of signals across distance.

Histology, Watanabe said, is “the bridge level” between the single cell and the organ. “With tissue slides, you can see the organization—the pattern—rather than just the individual building blocks,” she said.

Organs: Multiple tissues arranged for a complex task

The exhibit then moves from slides to scale models, showing how different tissues combine into organs with distinct roles.

One model focuses on the heart. Muscle tissue forms the thick walls that contract, connective tissue provides strength and shape, and specialized nervous tissue helps coordinate rhythm. The heart’s structure—chambers, valves and tightly organized muscle—supports its function as a pump that pushes blood in one direction.

Another model highlights the lung. Spongy, branching airways end in tiny sacs designed for gas exchange. Thin tissue layers at the air sacs, paired with dense networks of small blood vessels, enable oxygen to move into the bloodstream and carbon dioxide to move out.

“You can’t explain a heart by looking at a single cell,” said Dr. Rafiq Sandhu, a cardiology fellow who volunteered at the exhibit. “But you also can’t explain the heart without understanding that it’s made of tissues, and those tissues are made of cells that specialize for a reason.”

Organ systems: Organs coordinating to keep the body running

In the exhibit’s center, a wall-sized diagram maps how organs collaborate as systems.

The circulatory system, for example, is not just the heart, organizers emphasized. It includes blood vessels that distribute flow and blood that carries oxygen, nutrients and waste. The structure of the system—elastic arteries near the heart, branching capillaries that reach tissues, and veins with valves that help return blood—supports its job of delivering supplies and maintaining pressure.

The respiratory system’s structure is built for movement and exchange: airways conduct airflow, lungs provide exchange surfaces, and the diaphragm’s muscular sheet changes chest volume to draw air in and push it out.

At this level, the tools change. Physicians who helped design the display said they rely on imaging—such as X-rays, CT scans and MRI—to view organs in place and watch systems behave in living patients.

“Imaging lets us see the whole machine running,” Sandhu said. “You can measure blood flow, spot a blockage, see a tumor’s boundaries, or track how lungs fill. It’s still structure and function—just on a larger stage.”

Organism: The whole body as the sum of coordinated systems

The exhibit’s final section returns to the part-to-whole theme with two concrete “ladders,” each tracing a path from a specialized cell to a functioning organism.

In the first ladder, a muscle cell’s contractile structure scales up to muscle tissue, then to the heart as an organ, to the circulatory system as an organ system, and ultimately to a human who can stand, think and heal because oxygen and nutrients are continuously delivered.

In the second ladder, an air-sac cell’s thin structure supports gas exchange, which scales up to lung tissue, then to the lung as an organ, to the respiratory system as an organ system, and finally to the organism’s ability to maintain energy and remove carbon dioxide.

Organizers said the exhibit also touches on how failures at one level can ripple upward. A change in cell structure can alter tissue performance; tissue disruption can compromise an organ; an organ’s failure can strain an entire system.

“People ask where life ‘really’ happens,” Watanabe said, gesturing from the microscopes to the imaging wall. “It happens at every level. The whole depends on the parts, and the parts only make sense in the whole.”

The field station said the exhibit will run through the end of the month, with rotating demonstrations of microscopes, tissue-slide preparation and recorded imaging case studies.