The Lives of a Cell : Notes of a Biology Watcher [Reprinted.] 9780140047431, 0140047433

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HE of

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ATIO

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hard science, elegant language and thoughtfulness...

guaranteed

to intrigue both scientist

and poet"

— ROLLING

STONE

The Lives of a NOTES OF

I

EWIS Jthor of

01 OGY

Cell

WATCHER

THOMAS

THE MEDUSA AND THE SNAIL

Boston Public Library

PENGUIN BOOKS

THE LIVES OF A CELL Lewis

Thomas was born

New

in

earning his

After

1913.

York City in

bachelor's

degree

at

Princeton, he received his doctorate in medicine at

Harvard

fessor

in 1937.

He went on

of Pediatric Research

to

become Pro-

at the University

of

Minnesota, Chairman of the Departments of Pathology and Medicine and also

New

Dean

at the

— Bellevue Medical Center,

York University

Chariman of

the

Dean

Medical School, and President of

the

at Yale

Department of Pathology and

Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center

New

York

City.

He

is

also the

in

author of The

Medusa and

the Snail,

Late Night

Thoughts on Listening

The Youngest

Science, to

and

Mahler's

Ninth Symphony. Articles by him have appeared in

The

New

Monthly,

Yorker, Scientific

American, Atlantic

Harpers Magazine, and

periodicals.

Lewis

Thomas

died in 1993.

many

other

The Lives of a Cell Notes of a

Biology Watcher

Lewis Thomas

PENGUIN BOOKS

PENGUIN BOOKS Published by the Penguin

Group

USA Inc., Hudson Street, New York, New York

Penguin Books

10014, U.S.A. 375 Penguin Books Ltd, 27 Wrights Lane, London W8 5TZ, England Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, Victoria, Australia Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue,

Toronto, Ontario, Canada

M4V 3B2

Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, 182-190 Wairau Road, Auckland 10, New Zealand Penguin Books Ltd. Registered Offices:

Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England Published in the United States of America by The Viking Press 1974 Published in Penguin Books 1978 First

27

26

24

25

Copyright

22

23

© Lewis Thomas,

21

1

20

19

18

974

All rights reserved

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA Thomas, Lewis, 1913-1993

The

lives

of a

cell.

Essays which appeared in

New England journal

the

of medicine, 1971-73.

Reprint of the ed. published by

The Viking

Press,

New York.

Bibliography: p. 149. I.

Biology

I.

Title

— Philosophy—Addresses,

{QH331.T45 1978} 14 00.4743 3

essays, lectures.

301.31'01

77-23762

isbn

Printed in the United States of America Set in

Videocomp Garamond

All of these essays originally appeared in

New England Journal ofMedicine.

the

Copyright

© Massachusetts Medical Society,

1971, 1972, 1973

Except in the United States of America, this

that

be

book it

is

sold subject to the condition

shall not,

lent, re-sold,

by way of trade or otherwise, hired out, or otherwise circulated

without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without similar condition including this condition being imposed

on the subsequent purchaser.

gp gp YA QH33 1 .T45 1978

Contents

The

Lives of a Cell

3

Thoughts for a Countdown

6

On

Societies as

A

Organisms

Fear of Pheromones

The Music of

11

16

This Sphere

20

Earnest Proposal

26

The Technology of Medicine

31

An

Vibes

37

Ceti

42

The Long Habit

47

Manhattan

53

The MBL Autonomy

64

Organelles as Organisms

69

Antaeus

in

Germs

75

Your Very Good Health

81

Social Talk

87

Information

91

Open

96

Natural Science

100

Man

103

Death

in the

Natural

The

On

58

Iks

107

Computers

111

The Planning of Science Some Biomythology On Various Words

115

Living Language

133

Probability and Possibility

141

121

127

The World's Biggest Membrane

145

Reference Notes

149

The Lives of a Cell

The Lives of a Cell

e are told that the trouble with that

and

steel,

He

as a

the topmost tiers of polymer,

sits in

dangling

distance the writhing

comes on

is

he has been trying to detach himself from

nature. glass,

Modern Man

life

surveying

at a

this scenario,

Man

his pulsing legs,

of the planet. In

stupendous lethal force, and the earth

is

pictured as something delicate, like rising bubbles at the surface of a country pond, or flights of fragile birds.

But

is

it

about the

illusion to think that there

life

of the earth; surely

this

is

anything fragile

is

the toughest

mem-

brane imaginable in the universe, opaque to probability,

impermeable

to death.

and vulnerable

We

are the delicate part, transient

Nor

as cilia.

is

it

a

new

thing for

man

to

invent an existence that he imagines to be above the rest of life; this

down

has been his most consistent intellectual exertion

the millennia.

As

illusion,

his satisfaction in the past, is

a to

it

has never

any more than

it

worked out

does today.

to

Man

embedded in nature. The biologic science of recent years has been making this more urgent fact of life. The new, hard problem will be cope with the dawning, intensifying realization of

how

interlocked

we

are.

The

old, clung-to notions

just

most of

us have held about our special lordship are being deeply

undermined. Item.

entities.

A good

We

are

made for our nonexistence as not made up, as we had always supposed,

case can be

The Lives of a

4

Cell

own

of successively enriched packets of our shared, rented, occupied.

At the

interior of

parts.

our

We

are

cells, driv-

ing them, providing the oxidative energy that sends us out for the

improvement of each shining day, are the mito-

chondria, and in a

out to be

sense they are not ours.

strict

They

turn

separate creatures, the colonial posterity of

little

migrant prokaryocytes, probably primitive bacteria that

swam

into ancestral precursors of

our eukaryotic

and

cells

stayed there. Ever since, they have maintained themselves

and

their ways, replicating in their

own

fashion, privately,

own DNA and RNA quite different from ours. much symbionts as the rhizobial bacteria in the roots of beans. Without them, we would not move a muscle, drum a finger, think a thought. with their

They

are as

Mitochondria are stable and responsible lodgers, and choose to

them. But what of the other

trust

my

similarly established in

clustering

me

together?

animals,

little

sorting and balancing me,

cells,

My

and

centrioles, basal bodies,

probably a good many other more obscure tiny beings

work

inside

as foreign,

my

and

cells,

each with

as essential, as

no longer the pure

its

own

I

at

genome, are

special

aphids in anthills.

line entities

I

My cells are

was raised with; they are

ecosystems more complex than Jamaica Bay. I

like to think that they

work

in

my

breath they draw for me, but perhaps

through the local park senses, listening to I

am

my

in the early

interest, that

each

who

walk

it is

they

morning, sensing

music, thinking

my

my

thoughts.

consoled, somewhat, by the thought that the green

plants are in the

same

fix.

They could not be

plants, or

green, without their chloroplasts, which run the photosynthetic enterprise it

and generate oxygen for the

rest

of

us.

As

turns out, chloroplasts are also separate creatures with

their

own genomes,

We come cells

speaking their

carry stores of in, at

DNA

in

own

language.

our nuclei that may have

one time or another, from the fusion of ancestral

and the linking of ancestral organisms

in symbiosis.

The Lives of a

Our genomes

are catalogues of instructions from

of sources in nature, for I

me,

I

cannot

before

I

anyone Item.

than

we

its

am

filed for all

all

an entity

as

I

5

kinds

kinds of contingencies.

grateful for differentiation

feel as separate

Cell

As

and speciation, but

did a few years ago,

was told these things, nor,

should think, can

I

else.

The uniformity of the diversity,

earth's

derived, originally, from

some

more

astonishing

single cell, fertilized in

a bolt of lightning as the earth cooled.

of this parent

life,

accountable by the high probability that

is

cell that

It is

from the progeny

we take our looks; we still

share genes

around, and the resemblance of the enzymes of grasses to those of whales

The

a family resemblance.

is

viruses, instead of being single-minded agents of

now

disease and death,

genes. Evolution

still

is

begin to look more like mobile an

infinitely

long and tedious

bi-

ologic game, with only the winners staying at the table, but

more

the rules are beginning to look

flexible.

dancing matrix of viruses; they dart, rather

organism to organism, from plant to insect to

and back again, and into the

genome,

DNA,

strings of

sea,

genes from

We

live in a

like bees,

from

mammal to me

tugging along pieces of this that, transplanting grafts

of

passing around heredity as though at a great party.

They may be

DNA

a

mechanism

for keeping

new, mutant kinds

among us. If this is true, the odd virus disease, on which we must focus so much of our attention in medicine, may be looked on as an accident, of

in the

widest circulation

something dropped. Item.

I

have been trying to think of the earth

organism, but

it is

no go.

I

cannot think of

too big, too complex, with too visible connections. hilly,

wooded

about

this. If

it

most like?

me:

it is

The

as a kind

this

many working

way.

of

It is

parts lacking

other night, driving through a

part of southern

New

England,

not like an organism, what

Then,

it

satisfactorily for that

most like a single cell.

is

it

I

wondered

like,

moment,

it

what

came

is

to

Thoughts for a Countdown

There

is

ambiguity, and some symbolism, in the elabo-

rate ritual

observed by each returning expedition of

astronauts from the

moon. They celebrate

first

of

all

the inviolability of the earth, and they re-enact, each time, in

stereotyped choreography, our long anxiety about the

nature of

life.

knees and

They do

not, as

kiss the carrier

one might expect,

deck;

this

would

fall

to their

violate, intrude

upon, contaminate the deck, the vessel, the sea around, the

whole

earth. Instead, they

briskly,

wear

They walk box. They wave

surgical masks.

arms up, untouching, into a

sterile

enigmatically, gnotobiotically, to the President from behind glass panes, so as not to breathe

levitated to another sealed

box

moondust on him. They are

in

Houston,

to wait out their

days in quarantine, while inoculated animals and tissues cultures are squinted at for omens. It

is

only after the long antiseptic ceremony has been

completed ride

A

that they are

allowed out into the sun, for the

up Broadway. visitor

from another planet, or another century, would

view the exercise

as precisely lunatic behavior,

from outside would understand way, these days.

If

it.

We

there should be

must begin by fearing

it.

We

but no one

must do things

life

this

on the moon, we

must guard against

it,

lest

we

catch something. It

might be a microbe, a strand of

lost nucleic acid, a

molecule of enzyme, or a nameless hairless

6

little

being with

Thoughts for a Countdown

we have imagined

sharp gray eyes. Whatever, once

eign and therefore hostile,

locked up. kill

I

It

for-

must be

how

best to

it.

It is

remarkable that

hooting, as though It

not to be petted.

it is

imagine the debate would turn on

it,

1

says

it

we have

all

accepted

without

this,

simply conformed to a law of nature.

something about our century, our attitude toward

our obsession with disease and death, our human

life,

chauvinism.

There are pieces of evidence

wrong way round. Most of living things

It

the

are essentially cooperative

it is

usually a standoff relation, with

issuing signals, warnings, flagging the other off.

takes long intimacy, long and familiar interliving, before

one kind of creature can cause were

to

be

life

on the moon,

illness in

it

another. If there

would have

waiting for acceptance to membership here. solitary beings.

to

it

one degree or another; when they have

the look of adversaries,

one party

we have had

the associations between the

we know about

ones, symbiotic in

that

Every creature

and dependent on the It

is,

in

some

a lonely time

We do not have

sense, connected

rest.

has been estimated that

we probably have

real

knowl-

edge of only a small proportion of the microbes of the

earth,

because most of them cannot be cultivated alone. They live together in dense, interdependent communities, feeding

and supporting the environment for each other, regulating the balance of populations between different species by a

complex system of chemical nology,

we

can no

we

it

alone, than

a

desquamated

The

more

signals.

isolate

With our present

one from the

rest,

tech-

and rear

can keep a single bee from drying up like

cell

when removed from

his hive.

bacteria are beginning to have the aspect of social

animals; they should provide nice models for the study of interactions

between forms of

life at all levels.

They

live

by

collaboration, accommodation, exchange, and barter. They,

.

The Lives of a

8

Cell

and the fungi, probably with help from a communication system laid on by the viruses, comprise the parenchyma of the soil

(someone has suggested

the microbes contribute,

that

humic

acid, to

which

a sort of counterpart for the

is

ground substance of our own connective tissue). They live on each other. Sometimes they live inside each other; the of other bacteria, tuck them-

Bdellovibrio penetrate the walls

selves

up

inside, replicate,

and burst out again

they thought themselves phages. ties

extend so deeply into the

as to

seem

like

new kinds

rhizobial bacteria that

Some

affairs

of tissue

microbial

though

of higher forms of

life

and animals. The

in plants

swarm over

as

communi-

the root hairs of legumi-

nous plants have the look of voracious, invasive pathogens, but the root nodules that they then construct, in collaboration with the plant cells,

nitrogen fixation.

become

the earth's chief organ for

The production of leghemoglobin

membrane-lined space between plant and

in the

bacterial cells

is

an example of the high technology of symbiosis; the protein is

synthesized by the plant, but only on instructions from the

bacteria, this

and

substance

it is

possible that the plant

came

originally

DNA

for coding

from the microbe, early

in the

evolution of the arrangement.

The

bacteria that live in the tissues of insects, like those

incorporated into the mycetocytes of cockroaches and

ter-

mites, have the appearance of specialized organs in their hosts. It

is

not yet clear what they accomplish for the insect,

known that the species cannot survive long without them. They are transmitted, like mitochondria, from generbut

it is

ation to generation of eggs. It

has been proposed that symbiotic linkages between

prokaryotic cells were the origin of eukaryotes, and that fusion between different sorts of eukaryotes (e.g., motile, ciliated cells joined to

tion of the

phagocytic ones) led to the construc-

communities

metazoan creatures.

that eventually turned out to

If this

is

true, the

marks of

be

identity,

Thoughts for a Countdown

9

distinguishing self from non-self, have long since been blurred. Today, in the symbiotic associations that dominate

much of the life of the sea, there is rarely a question of who is who, even when the combination functions like a single animal. The anemones that fasten themselves to the so

even to the claws, of certain crabs are capable of

shells,

recognizing precisely the molecular configurations that identify those surfaces: the crab, for his part, can recognize

own anemone, and

his

attach that

him

sometimes seek him out and

will

to the shell like an

ornament. The damsel

fish

have become, from their point of view, functioning

parts of certain species of

very young to

life

anemones adapt themselves when

among

the lethal tentacles of their host;

they cannot just swim in forthwith

— they must dart around

the edges until labeled at their surfaces by markers accept-

able to the anemone.

Sometimes,

in the

course of the modulation of relations

between animals, there are inventions

that

seem

been thought up on the spur of the moment, tions to

be submitted for possible evolution.

humored, even eral years ago,

to

to

have

like proposi-

Some are good-

witty. Certain Australian surf bathers, sev-

were stung by

tiny creatures that turned out

be nudibranchs armed with the stingers of Portuguese

men-of-war. Having fed on nity

jellyfish,

the Glaucus

commu-

had edited their meal and allowed the stinging

make

their

way

to the surface of their

new

cells to

host, thus creat-

ing, for the time, a sort of instant hybrid with, allowing for

some asymmetry, the essential attributes of each partner. Even when circumstances require that there be winners and losers, the transaction is not necessarily a combat. The aloofness displayed for each other by members of the marine coelenterate

mechanisms

species of

Gorgonaceae suggests

for preserving individuality

long before the evolution of immunity. tend to

grow

in closely

that

must have existed

The gorgonians

packed, branching masses, but they

The Lives of a

10

Cell

do not fuse to each other; if they did, their morphogenesis would doubtless become a shambles. Theodor, in a series of elegant experiments, has shown that when two individuals of the same species are placed in close contact, the smaller of the two will always begin to disintegrate. It is autodestruction

due

to lytic

mechanisms entirely under the gover-

nance of the smaller partner.

He

not thrown out, not

is

outgamed, not outgunned; he simply chooses to bow out. It is

on

not necessarily a comfort to

in biology, but

The oxygen

at least

it is

in the

know

go

that such things

an agreeable surprise.

atmosphere

is

the exhalation of the

chloroplasts living in plants (also, for our amazement, in the

siphons of giant clams and lesser marine animals).

It is

a

natural tendency for genetically unrelated cells in tissue

culture to fuse to

come

together, ignoring species differences, and

form hybrid

Inflammation and immunology

cells.

must indeed be powerfully designed

to

keep us

out such mechanisms, involving considerable

might have developed

apart; witheffort,

we

kind of flowing syncytium over

as a

the earth, without the morphogenesis of even a flower.

Perhaps forms of

We

is

will find

all,

planets,

a planet

enough of

accommodate other out of sheer good nature.

possible to

it

from other

are, after

B 12 There !

we

life,

where the

it,

rain contains vitamin

by Parker's calculation, when

convective windstorms occur at the time of farmland vation and swirl to

produce a

it

from the

visible

soil into

culti-

the upper atmosphere,

bloom of Euglena

in a fair-sized

pond.

On Societies as Organisms

Viewed ters

from a suitable height, the aggregating

of medical scientists

boardwalk

at

in the bright sunlight

clus-

of the

swarmed there from

Atlantic City,

everywhere for the annual meetings, have the look of semblages of ionic

There

social insects.

as-

the same vibrating,

is

movement, interrupted by the darting back and

forth

of jerky individuals to touch antennae and exchange small bits

of information; periodically, the mass casts out, like a

trout-line, a

long single

file

unerringly toward Childs's. If

the boards were not fastened prise to see It is

down,

them put together

it

would not be

permissible to say this sort of thing about humans.

They do resemble,

in their

ior, ants at a distance.

biological circles to put

most compulsively

It is, it

social

behav-

however, quite bad form

the other

way round,

affairs.

The

writers of books

on

in

to imply that

the operation of insect societies has any relation at

human

a sur-

a nest of sorts.

all

to

insect behavior gen-

erally take pains, in their prefaces, to caution that insects are like creatures

from another planet,

absolutely foreign, totally

They

are

more

machines, and

we

violate science

man meanings

in their

ological.

It is

like

like perfectly tooled

when we

is

but crazy try to

little

read hu-

arrangements.

hard for a bystander not to do

human

that their behavior

unhuman, unearthly, almost unbi-

so.

Ants are so much

beings as to be an embarrassment.

They farm

fungi, raise aphids as livestock, launch armies into wars, use

11

The Lives of a

12

Cell

chemical sprays to alarm and confuse enemies, capture

The

slaves.

families of

weaver

ants

engage

in child labor,

holding their larvae like shuttles to spin out the thread that

sews the leaves together for their fungus gardens. They

exchange information

ceaselessly.

They do everything but

watch television.

What makes

us most uncomfortable

is

that they,

and the

bees and termites and social wasps, seem to live two kinds

of

lives:

without

they are individuals, going about the day's business

much evidence of thought component

are at the same time

tomorrow, and they

for

parts, cellular elements, in

the huge, writhing, ruminating organism of the Hill, the nest, the hive.

because of

It is

most wish for them

to

this aspect,

I

be something foreign.

think, that

we

We do not like

the notion that there can be collective societies with the capacity to behave like organisms. If such things exist, they

can have nothing to do with there

Still,

ered to have

it

A

is.

us.

solitary ant, afield,

much of anything on

only a few neurons strung together by to

have a mind

at all,

like a

ganglion on

legs.

imagined

more

fibers,

less a

he can't be

thought.

He

Four ants together, or

is

ten,

more like They fumble and shove, gradually moving the food

encircling a dead

an idea.

much

cannot be consid-

mind; indeed, with

his

toward the

moth on

Hill, but as

when you watch

a path, begin to look

though by blind chance.

It is

only

the dense mass of thousands of ants,

crowded together around the Hill, blackening the ground, that you begin to see the whole beast, and now you observe it

thinking, planning, calculating.

of

live

computer, with crawling

At a stage needed, and

It is

an intelligence, a kind

bits for its wits.

in the construction, twigs all

the

of a certain

size are

members forage obsessively for twigs of when outer walls are to be finished, must change, and as though given new

just this size. Later,

thatched, the size

orders by telephone,

all

the workers shift the search to the

On

new

twigs. If

is

13

you disturb the arrangement of a part of the

hundreds of ants

Hill,

Organisms

Societies as

will set

vibrating, shifting, until

it

it

somehow

put right again. Distant sources of food are

sensed, and long lines, like tentacles, reach out over the

ground, up over walls, behind boulders, to fetch Termites are even more extraordinary

seem

Two

accumulate intelligence

to

as

it in.

way they

in the

they gather together.

or three termites in a chamber will begin to pick up

and move them from place to place, but nothing

pellets

comes of reach a

They

it;

nothing

critical

built.

is

As more

seem

join in, they

to

mass, a quorum, and the thinking begins.

place pellets atop pellets, then throw

up columns and

and the

beautiful, curving, symmetrical arches,

crystalline

known how the chains of termites building one column know when to turn toward the crew on the adjacent column, or how, when the time comes, they manage the flawless joining of the arches. The architecture of vaulted chambers

how

is

created.

It is

not

they communicate with each other,

stimuli that set

them

off at the outset, building collectively

may be pheromones committee size. They react as if

instead

of shifting things about,

released

when

alarmed. They

they reach

become

gin working, like

Bees at the

live lives

same

time.

agitated, excited,

and then they be-

artists.

of organisms,

The

tissues, cells, organelles, all

single bee, out of the hive retrieving

sugar (instructed by the dancer: "south-southeast for seven

— mind

hundred meters, clover the sundrift")

is still

as

much

you make corrections for

a part of the hive as

if

attached

by a filament. Building the hive, the workers have the look of embryonic

cells

organizing a developing

tissue;

from a

distance they are like the viruses inside a cell, running off

row

after

down

row of symmetrical polygons as though laying When the time for swarming comes, and the

crystals.

old queen prepares to leave with her part of the population, it is

as

though the hive were involved

in mitosis.

There

is

The Lives of a

14

Cell

an agitated moving of bees back and forth, cell

They

sap.

like

granules in

distribute themselves in almost precisely

new one.

equal parts, half to the departing queen, half to the

Thus,

like

an egg, the great, hairy, black and golden crea-

ture splits in two, each with an equal share of the family

genome.

The phenomenon of separate an organism all

animals joining up to form

not unique in insects. Slime-mold

is

the time, of course, in each

life cycle.

At

cells

do

it

they are

first

swimming around,

eating bacteria, aloof

from each other, untouching, voting

straight Republican.

single amebocytes

Then, a

and acrasin

is

released by special cells

toward which the others converge

in stellate ranks, touch,

bell sounds,

fuse together, and construct the slug, solid as a trout.

splendid stalk

of

this

swim

is

raised, with a fruiting

body on

comes the next generation of amebocytes, ready

across the

same moist ground,

Herring and other

fish in

solitary

to

and ambitious.

schools are at times so closely

integrated, their actions so coordinated, that they

seem

be functionally a great multi-fish organism. Flocking especially the seabirds nesting islands in

A

and out

top,

Newfoundland, are

to

birds,

on the slopes of offshore

similarly attached, connected,

synchronized.

Although we are by animals other,

— more

more

all

odds the most

interdependent,

more

social

of

all social

attached

to

inseparable in our behavior than bees

each

—we do

not often feel our conjoined intelligence. Perhaps, however,

and

we

are linked in circuits for the storage, processing,

retrieval of information, since this appears to

be the

may be

most basic and universal of all human enterprises.

It

our biological function to build a certain kind of

Hill.

have access to as

elementary units in the stream of solar photons.

have learned to

all

make,

We

the information of the biosphere, arriving

how

When we

these are rearranged against randomness,

say, springtails,

quantum mechanics, and the

late

On

Societies as

Organisms

15

quartets,

we may have a clearer notion how to proceed. The

circuitry

seems to be there, even

if

the current

not always

is

on.

The system of communications used

in science

should

provide a neat, workable model for studying mechanisms of information-building in

human

Ziman,

society.

in a recent

Nature essay, points out, "the invention of a mechanism for

work of modern

the systematic publication of fragments of scientific

may

well have been the key event in the history

science.".

A

He

regular journal carries from one research worker to another

the various

A

.

.

.

observations which are of

typical scientific

another as

continues:

piece in a larger jigsaw

little

an element

in a

— not

grander scheme. This

modest contributions

common

[italics

power that

.

.

.

to

the store of

human

significant in itself but

technique, of soliciting

is

many

knowledge, has been the secret

of Western science since the seventeenth century, for collective

interest.

paper has never pretended to be more than

it

achieves a corporate,

far greater than any one individual can exert

mine].

With some

alternation of terms,

some toning down,

the

passage could describe the building of a termite nest. It is

fascinating that the

word "explore" does not apply

to the searching aspect of the activity, but has

the sounds

we make

while engaged in

it.

We

its

origins in

like to think

of exploring in science as a lonely, meditative business, and so

it is

in the first stages,

but always, sooner or

the enterprise reaches completion, as

we

each other, communicate, publish, send present papers, cry out on finding.

later,

explore,

we

before call to

letters to the editor,

—

A Fear of

f

hat are we going to do if it turns out that we have pheromones? What on earth would we be doing

with such things? With the richness of speech,

and

all

want

our new devices for communication, why would

to release

odors into the

We

about anything?

cryptic invitations,

bounce words the planets.

we

convey information

can send notes, telephone, whisper

announce the giving of

off the

Why

air to

even

parties,

moon and make them carom around

a gas, or droplets of moisture

made

be

to

deposited on fence posts?

Comfort has recently reviewed the reasons that

we

are, in fact, in

which there

is

pheromones

—

no

rational explanation except as sources of

tufts

of

hair, strategically located

glands, unaccountable areas of moisture. folds of skin here

We

apocrine

even have

and there designed for the controlled

nurture of bacteria, and

eke out a

for believing

possession of anatomic structures for

it

is

known

that certain

microbes

living, like eighteenth-century musicians,

produc-

ing chemical signals by ornamenting the products of their hosts.

Most of the known pheromones are cules, active in

carbon atoms

in a chain are all that are

precise, unequivocal directions about

when and where to

16

behave

small, simple mole-

extremely small concentrations. Eight or ten

to cluster in crowds,

to the opposite sex,

how

needed

all

to generate

kinds of matters

when

to disperse,

to ascertain

what

how

is

the

A

opposite sex,

how

to organize

Fear of Pkeromones

members of

how

proper ranking orders of dominance, boundaries of real estate, and

beyond argument, one's

self.

how

a society in the

to

mark out exact

to establish that

be

Trails can

17

laid

one

and

is,

fol-

lowed, antagonists frightened and confused, friends

The messages know,

at-

and enchanted.

tracted

arrive, for all

we

of ambiguity. "At home, 4 p.m.

to-

are urgent, but they

in a fragrance

may

day," says the female moth, and releases a brief explosion

of bombykol, a single molecule of which will tremble the hairs of

any male within miles and send him driving upwind of ardor. But

in a confusion

awareness of being caught

On

ant.

in

it

doubtful

is

if

he has an

an aerosol of chemical

attract-

the contrary, he probably finds suddenly that

become an

it

has

excellent day, the weather remarkably bracing,

the time appropriate for a bit of exercise of the old wings, a brisk turn upwind.

En

route, traveling the gradient of

bombykol, he notes the presence of other males, heading

same

the

direction,

the sheer sport of it

may seem

it.

in

good mood, inclined to race for Then, when he reaches his destination,

all in

a

him the most extraordinary of coincidences,

to

the greatest piece of luck: "Bless

my

soul,

what have we

here!" It

has been soberly calculated that

bombykol

if

a single female

were

to release

all at

once, she could theoretically attract a

all

the instant. This Fish

the

is,

in

her sac

moth

in a single spray, trillion

males in

of course, not done.

make use of chemical signals for the identification of members of a species, and also for the announce-

individual

ment of changes that has as

soon

tion,

the status of certain individuals.

had a career as

he

is

as a local leader smells

A catfish

one way, but

displaced in an administrative reorganiza-

he smells differently, and everyone recognizes the

of standing. in

in

A

loss

bullhead can immediately identify the water

which a recent adversary has been swimming, and he can

The Lives of a

18

distinguish

Cell

between

this fish

and

all

others in the school.

some preliminary, still fragmentary evidence for important pheromones in primates. Short-chain aliphatic compounds are elaborated by female monkeys in response There

is

and these are of consuming

to estradiol,

interest to the

Whether there are other sorts of social communicaby pheromones among primates is not known.

males. tion

The possibility

that

human beings are involved in this sort much attention until recently. It how it will come out. Perhaps we have

of thing has not attracted too early to say

is still

inherited only vestiges of the organs needed, only antique

and archaic

traces of the fragrance,

forever gone. to

and the memory may be

We may remain safe from this new challenge

our technology, and, while the twentieth century contin-

ues to run out in concentric circles

down

we may how to get

the drain,

be able to keep our attention concentrated on

energy straight from the sun.

But there are

may be

just the slightest suggestions, hints

ahead. Last year

living at close quarters in

that

spontaneous synchronization of their menstrual

paper

in

of what

young women dormitories tended to undergo

was observed

it

cycles.

Nature reported the personal experience of an

anonymous, quantitatively minded

British

scientist

on an offshore

lived for long stretches in isolation

trapped by his electric razor every day, that his

much more

girls.

Schizophrenic patients are reported

have a special odor to their sweat, traced to

methylhexanoic

The mind,

trans-3-

acid.

already jelled by the advances in

munication so that further boggling can imagine whole

create

hairs

beard grew

rapidly each time he returned to the mainland

and encountered

One

who

island,

and discovered, by taking the dry weight of the

to

A

new perfumes ("A

new

is

modern com-

impossible, twitches.

industries springing

Scientific

up

to

Combination of Primer

and Releaser"), and other, larger corporations raising new turrets with flames alight at their tops

on the Jersey

flats,

for

A

the production of phenolic,

Fear of Pheromones

green sprays to cover, mask, or suppress

pheromones

all

("Don't Let On"). Gas chromatography of might reveal

bright

possibly

anesthetic,

19

air

samples

between substances released

blips of difference

over a Glasgow football match, a committee meeting on

academic promotions, and a summer beach on Saturday afternoon,

all

highly important.

One can even imagine aginew agreements in Ge-

tated conferences in the Pentagon,

neva. It is

claimed that a well-trained tracking hound can follow

with accuracy the

marked by the

trail

of a

man

in shoes, across

footsteps of any

provided the dog

is

open ground

number of other people,

given an item of the man's clothing to

smell beforehand. If one had to think up an for a National Institute of

Human

by combining the budgets of the be a good problem to

R&D program

Fragrance (to be created

FDA and FCC), this would

start with. It

might also provide the

kind of secondary, spin-off items of science that see in federally supported research. If it say, that

an intelligent dog can

tell

is

we

like to

true, as the novels

the difference between

one human being and any other by detecting differences their scents, an explanation in

10-carbon molecules, or perhaps differences in the

tive concentrations of several this

is

a

fact,

it

in

might be geometric differences

pheromones

in a

rela-

medley.

If

should be of interest to the immunologic

community, which has long since staked out claims on the

mechanisms involved non-self.

Perhaps the

in the discrimination

between

fantastically sensitive

self and

and precise im-

munologic mechanisms for the detection of small molecules such as haptenes represent another way of sensing the same markers. Man's best friend might be used to sniff out

tocompatible donors. in

And

so forth. If

maintaining the research activity

diverting everyone's attention from releasing large quantities of money,

out of trouble.

we

could

just

at this level, all

his-

succeed

perhaps

other aspects by

we might be able

to stay

The Musk of This Sphere

t

is

one of our problems

together, the sounds increasingly

that as

we make

we become crowded our

to each other, in

complex communication systems, become

more random-sounding,

we

accidental or incidental, and

have trouble selecting meaningful signals out of the noise.

One reason

is,

we do

of course, that

our communication

to information-bearing, relevant sig-

nals.

Given any new technology

tion,

we seem bound

talk.

not seem able to restrict

to use

We are only saved

it

for transmitting informa-

for great quantities of small

by music from being overwhelmed

by nonsense. It is

know

a marginal comfort to

that the relatively

new

science of bioacoustics must deal with similar problems in

the sounds

made by other animals

what sound-making device tures in general

do

is

to each other.

No matter

placed at their disposal, crea-

a great deal of gabbling, and

it

requires

long patience and observation to edit out the parts lacking syntax and sense. Light social conversation, designed to

keep the party going,

prevails.

Somewhere, underlying tinual music.

Nature abhors a long

all

the other signals,

silence.

is

a con-

Termites make percussive sounds to each

other by beating their heads against the floor in the dark,

The sound human ear, sand

resonating corridors of their nests.

described as resembling, to the

has been falling

on

paper, but spectrographic analysis of sound records has recently revealed a high degree of organization in the

20

drum-

The Music of This Sphere

ming; the beats occur

in regular,

in duration, like notes for a

21

rhythmic phrases, differing

tympani section.

From time to time, certain termites make a convulsive movement of their mandibles to produce a loud, highpitched clicking sound, audible ten meters off. So much effort

goes into

one note

this

ing, at least to the sender.

a

wrench

by the

he

is

flung

it

must have urgent mean-

cannot make

it

without such

one or two centimeters

into the air

recoil.

There

meaning exist

that

that

He

obvious hazard in trying to assign a particular

is

to this special kind of sound,

throughout the

field

and problems

of bioacoustics.

One

like this

can imagine

a woolly-minded Visitor from Outer Space, interested in

human

beings, discerning

that golf ball

account for

on

his

spectrograph the click of

on the surface of the moon, and trying

it

as a call

to

of warning (unlikely), a signal of

mating (out of the question), or an announcement of

terri-

tory (could be).

Bats are obliged to sense, by sonar,

all

make sounds almost

ceaselessly, to

the objects in their surroundings.

They

can spot with accuracy, on the wing, small insects, and they will

home onto

things they like with infallibility and speed.

With such a system

for the equivalent of glancing around,

they must live in a world of ultrasonic bat-sound, most of it

with an industrial, machinery sound.

Still,

cate with each other as well, by clicks

greetings.

they communi-

and high-pitched

Moreover, they have been heard to produce,

while hanging

at rest

upside

down

in the

depths of woods,

strange, solitary, and lovely bell-like notes.

Almost anything sound is

is

put to use.

that an animal can

Drumming,

employ

to

make

a

created by beating the feet,

used by prairie hens, rabbits, and mice; the head

is

banged

by woodpeckers and certain other birds; the males of death-

watch beetles make a rapid ticking sound by percussion of a protuberance

on the abdomen against the ground; a

faint

22

The Lives of a

but audible ticking inquilinus,

which

is

Cell

is

less

made by

the tiny beetle Lepinotus

than two millimeters in length. Fish

make sounds by clicking their teeth, blowing air, and drumming with special muscles against tuned inflated air bladders. Solid structures are set to vibrating by toothed bows in crustaceans and insects. The proboscis of the death's-head hawk moth is used as a kind of reed instrument, blown through to make high-pitched, reedy notes. Gorillas beat their chests for certain kinds of discourse.

Animals with loose skeletons snakes, get sounds

less

them, or,

like rattle-

structures. Tur-

crocodiles, and even snakes

tles, alligators,

more or

rattle

from externally placed

make

various

vocal sounds. Leeches have been heard to tap

rhythmically on leaves, engaging the attention of other leeches,

which tap back,

make sounds,

in synchrony.

Even earthworms Toads

faint staccato notes in regular clusters.

sing to each other, and their friends sing back in antiphony.

Birdsong has been so much analyzed for business communication that there seems

music, but

it is

there.

for recruitment,

and demands for is

working day. The thrush

in

my

again, and

I

own

for his

is

redunof the

backyard sings

down

Some

his

of melody, over and over

have the strongest impression that he does pleasure.

calls

as part

dispersal, there

unaccountable

in meditative, liquid runs

for

left

pronouncements of territory,

dant, elegant sound that

nose

content of

time

glossaries of warning calls,

Behind the

alarms, mating messages,

its

little

this

of the time he seems to be

practicing, like a virtuoso in his apartment.

He

starts a run,

reaches a midpoint in the second bar where there should be a set of complex harmonics, stops, and goes back to begin over, dissatisfied. Sometimes he changes his notation so

conspicuously that he seems to be improvising tions. It

is

cannot believe that he

The

sets

of varia-

a meditative, questioning kind of music, is

and

I

simply saying, "thrush here."

robin sings flexible songs, containing a variety of

— The Music of This Sphere

23

motifs that he rearranges to his liking; the notes in each

motif constitute the syntax, and the possibilities for variation

produce a considerable repertoire. The meadow three hundred notes to

of three to

six

work

lark,

with

with, arranges these in phrases

notes and elaborates

fifty

types of song.

The

nightingale has twenty-four basic songs, but gains wild variety by varying the internal

length of pauses.

The

and incorporates into

make expressed by human

The need

to

arrangement of phrases and the

chaffinch listens to other chaffinches, his

memory

snatches of their songs.

music, and to listen to beings.

I

it, is

universally

cannot imagine, even in our

most primitive times, the emergence of talented painters to

make cave

paintings without there having been, near at

hand, equally creative people making song. speech, a dominant aspect of

The

human

It

is,

like

biology.

individual parts played by other instrumentalists

—may

earthworms, for instance

crickets or

not have the

sound of music by themselves, but we hear them out of context. If

we

trated, in their

could listen to them

all at

once, fully orches-

immense ensemble, we might become aware

of the counterpoint, the balance of tones and timbres and harmonics, the sonorities.

back whale,

and

filled

The recorded songs of the hump-

with tensions and resolutions, ambiguities

be listened to

allusions, incomplete, can

as a part

music, like an isolated section of an orchestra. If

of

we had

better hearing, and could discern the descants of sea birds, the rhythmic tympani of schools of mollusks, or even the distant harmonics of midges hanging over

sun, the

There

combined sound might are, of course, other

lift

ways

meadows

in the

us off our feet. to

account for the songs

of whales. They might be simple, down-to-earth statements

about navigation, or sources of

But the proof is not

in,

and

until

krill, it is

or limits of territory.

shown

that these long,

convoluted, insistent melodies, repeated by different singers with ornamentations of their

own, are the means of

The Lives of a

24

Cell

sending through several hundred miles of undersea such ordinary information as "whale here,"

Now

wise.

and again,

in the intervals

shall believe other-

I

between songs, the

whales have been seen to breach, leaping clear out of the sea and landing

on

their backs,

the piece went, or perhaps

own song

awash

in the

turbulence of

Perhaps they are pleased by the way

their beating flippers.

it is

celebration at hearing one's

returning after circumnavigation; whatever,

it

has

the look of jubilation. I

suppose that

my

extraterrestrial Visitor night puzzle

over

my

The

14th Quartet might, for him, be a communication an-

records in

much

same way, on

the

"Beethoven here," answered,

nouncing,

first

listening.

after

passage

through an undersea of time and submerged currents of

human

thought, by another long signal a century

later,

"Bartok here." If,

much

as

I

believe, the urge to

functions, there

none

make

a kind of music

is

as

a characteristic of biology as our other fundamental

at

hand,

I

ought

am

to

be an explanation for

free to

make one

up.

it.

Having

The rhythmic

sounds might be the recapitulation of something else

—an

memory, a score for the transformation of inanimate, random matter in chaos into the improbable, ordered dance of living forms. Morowitz has presented the case, in thermodynamic terms, for the hypothesis that a steady flow earliest

of energy from the inexhaustible source of the sun to the unreliable sink of outer space,

by way of the earth,

is

math-

ematically destined to cause the organization of matter into

an increasingly ordered

state.

The

involves a ceaseless clustering of

resulting balancing act

bonded atoms

cules of higher and higher complexity, and the

into mole-

emergence

of cycles for the storage and release of energy. In a nonequilibrium steady state, which

would not

just

is

postulated, the solar energy

flow to the earth and radiate away;

thermodynamically inevitable that

it

it

is

must rearrange matter

The Music of This Sphere

into symmetry,

ing

it,

away from

probability, against entropy,

25

lift-

so to speak, into a constantly changing condition of

rearrangement and molecular ornamentation. In such a tem, the outcome

is

a chancy kind of order, always

sys-

on the

verge of descending into chaos, held taut against probability

by the unremitting, constant surge of energy from the sun. If

there were to be sounds to represent this process, they

would have the arrangement of the Brandenburg Concertos for

my

ear, but

I

am open

to

wonder whether

the

same

events are recalled by the rhythms of insects, the long, pulsing runs of birdsong, the descants of whales, the

modu-

lated vibrations of a million locusts in migration, the tym-

pani of gorilla breasts, termite heads, drumfish bladders.

"grand canonical ensemble"

is,

A

oddly enough, the proper

term for a quantitative model system

in

thermodynamics,

borrowed from music by way of mathematics. Borrowed back again, provided with notation,

have

in

mind.

it

would do

for

what

I

An Earnest Proposal

was There don

a quarter-page advertisement in the Lon-

Observer for a

your name

in

computer service

that will

an electronic network of

sand other names, sort out your

tastes,

enmesh thou-

fifty

preferences, habits,

and deepest desires and match them up with opposite numbers,

and retrieve for you, within a matter of seconds, and

for a very small fee, friends. "Already,"

computer] has given very

real happiness

tionships to thousands of people, and

it

it

says, "it [the

and

lasting rela-

can do the same for

you!"

Without paying a

fee, or filling

out a questionnaire,

all

of

us are being linked in similar circuits, for other reasons, by credit bureaus, the census, the tax people, the local police station, or the

Army. Sooner or

later, if

it

keeps on, the

various networks will begin to touch, fuse, and then, in their coalescence, they will start sorting and retrieving each other, and

we

enormous

grid.

I

will all

become

bits

of information on an

do not worry much about the computers

that are

wired

to help

me

made,

can always beg off with a headache. But what of the

I

find a friend

among

fifty

thousand.

If errors are

vaster machines that will be giving instructions to cities, to

nations? If they are

programmed

ior according to today's

to regulate

view of nature,

we

human behav-

are surely in for

apocalypse.

The men who run 26

the affairs of nations today are, by and

An

large,

our

world

is

men. They have been taught

practical

fittest

Thus,

that the

an arrangement of adversary systems, that force

what counts, aggression the

27

Earnest Proposal

it

is

what drives us

can survive, and only might can is

at the core,

is

only

make more might.

in observance of nature's law that

we have

planted, like perennial tubers, the numberless nameless mis-

the soil of Russia and China and our Midwestern

siles in

farmlands, with

more

to

come, poised to

fly

out

at a

nanosec-

ond's notice, and meticulously engineered to ignite, in the

our

centers of

all

of them

once,

at

cities, artificial suns. If

we

we

let fly

enough

can even burn out the one-celled green

creatures in the sea, and thus turn off the oxygen.

Before such things are done, one hopes that the computers will contain every least bit of relevant information about

the

way of the world. I should think we might assume this, all. Even the nuclear realists, busy as their

in fairness to

minds must be with calculations of acceptable

levels of

megadeath, would not want to overlook anything. They should be willing to wait, for a while anyway. I

have an earnest proposal to make.

defer further action until

we have

one

plete set of information concerning at least

Then,

we

at least,

are doing.

decade.

we

suggest that

I

acquired a really comliving thing.

we shall be able to claim that we know what The delay might take a decade; let us say a

We and the other nations might set

it

as

an objective

of international, collaborative science to achieve a complete

understanding of a single form of

life.

and the information programmed into

When all

this

is

done,

our computers,

I

one would be willing to take my chances. As to the subject, I propose a simple one, easily solved

for

within ten years.

It is

the protozoan Myxotricba paradoxa,

which inhabits the inner reaches of the digestive

tract

of

Australian termites. It is

not as though

have a

fair

we would be

starting

amount of information about

from this

scratch.

We

creature

al-

28

The Lives of a

ready

— not

enough

Cell

enough

understand him, of course, but

to

inform us that he means something, perhaps a

to

great deal. At

glance, he appears to be an ordinary,

first

motile protozoan, remarkable chiefly for the speed and directness with which he

swims from place

to place, engulfing

fragments of wood finely chewed by his termite host. In the termite ecosystem, plexity,

he stands

however

finely

plies the

enzymes

an arrangement of Byzantine com-

at the epicenter.

Without him, the wood,

chewed, would never get digested; he supthat break

down

cellulose to edible car-

bohydrate, leaving only the nondegradable lignin, which the termite then excretes in geometrically tidy pellets and uses as building blocks for the erection of arches and vaults in the termite nest.

mites,

and

Without him there would be no

no farms of the fungi

will

grow nowhere

that are cultivated

else,

ter-

by termites

and no conversion of dead

trees to loam.

The

flagellae that beat in

synchrony to propel myxotricha

with such directness turn out, on closer scrutiny with the electron microscope, not to be flagellae at

all.

They

are

outsiders, in to help with the business: fully formed, perfect

spirochetes

have attached themselves

that

spaced intervals

all

at

regularly

over the surface of the protozoan.

Then, there are oval organelles, embedded

in the surface

close to the point of attachment of the spirochetes, and other similar bodies drifting through the cytoplasm with the particles

of

still

tion, turn

undigested wood. These, under high magnificaout to be bacteria, living in symbiosis with the

spirochetes and the protozoan, probably contributing en-

zymes

that

down

break

The whole

the cellulose.

animal, or ecosystem, stuck for the time being

halfway along in evolution, appears to be a model for the

development of rized the

now

cells like

our own. Margulis has summa-

considerable body of data indicating that the

modern nucleated

cell

was made up, part by

part,

by the

An

Earnest Proposal

29

coming together of just such prokaryotic animals. The

blue-

green algae, the original inventors of photosynthesis, entered partnership with primitive bacterial cells, and

became

the chloroplasts of plants; their descendants remain as

own

crete separate animals inside plant cells, with their

DNA

RNA,

and

replicating

on

their

dis-

own. Other bacteria

with oxidative enzymes in their membranes, makers of

ATP,

joined up with fermenting bacteria and became the

mitochondria of the future; they have since deleted some of

genes but retain personal genomes and can only be

their

regarded to

as symbionts. Spirochetes, like the

M. paradoxa, joined up and became the

The

cells.

centrioles,

chromosomes

are strung for mitosis, are similar separate

basal bodies to

which

cilia

mitosis, they

are attached.

And

become

the

there are oth-

not yet clearly delineated, whose existence in the

ers, is

of eukaryotic

which hoist the microtubules on which

when not busy with

creatures;

ones attached

cilia

cell

indicated by the presence of cytoplasmic genes.

There

is

an underlying force that drives together the

several creatures comprising myxotricha, and, then drives

we

the assemblage into union with the termite. If

understand

this

tendency,

we would

could

catch a glimpse of the

process that brought single separate cells together for the construction of metazoans, culminating in the invention of roses, dolphins, and, of course, ourselves.

It

might turn out

same tendency underlies the joining of organisms into communities, communities into ecosystems, and ecosys-

that the

tems into the biosphere. the

way of

tions, all

the world,

If this

is,

in fact, the drift

we may come

to

genes for the chemical marking of

reflexive responses of aggression

of things,

view immune self,

reac-

and perhaps

and defense

as

second-

ary developments in evolution, necessary for the regulation

and modulation of symbiosis, not designed to break into the process, only to keep If

it is

in the

it

from getting out of hand.

nature of living things to pool resources, to

The Lives of a

30

fuse

Cell

when possible, we would have a new way of accounting enrichment and complexity of form

for the progressive

in

living things. I

take

it

on

faith that

computers, although lacking souls,

are possessed of a kind of intelligence. At the end of the

decade, therefore, in

I

am

willing to predict that the feeding

of all the information then available will result, after a few

seconds of whirring, in something like the following message, neatly

How

and speedily printed out: "Request more

are spirochetes attached?

Do

not

fire."

data.

The Technology of Medicine

Technology

assessment has

become a routine exeron which the coun-

cise for the scientific enterprises

try

is

obliged to spend vast sums for

its

needs.

Brainy committees are continually evaluating the effectiveness and cost of doing various things in space, defense,

energy, transportation, and the

like, to

give advice about

prudent investments for the future.

Somehow

medicine, for

all

the $80-odd billion that

said to cost the nation, has not yet

come

in for

seems taken for granted

analytical treatment. It

technology of medicine simply

exists, take

it

it is

much of this that the

or leave

it,

and

the only major technologic problem which policy-makers are interested in

is

how

to deliver today's kind of health

care, with equity, to all the people.

When,

as

is

bound

to

happen sooner or

later, the analysts

get around to the technology of medicine

itself,

they will

have to face the problem of measuring the relative cost and all the things that are done in the management of disease. They make their living at this kind of thing, and I wish them well, but I imagine they will have a bewildering time. For one thing, our methods of managing dis-

effectiveness of

ease are constantly changing

new

bits

—partly under the influence of

of information brought

in

from

done

all

corners of

bi-

many

things are

that are not so closely related to science,

some not

ologic science. At the same time, a great

related at

all.

31

The Lives of a

32

Cell

In fact, there are three quite different levels of technology

medicine, so unlike each other as to seem altogether

in

and the

different undertakings. Practitioners of medicine analysts will be in trouble First

1.

of

there

all,

if

they are not kept separate.

body of what might be

a large

is

termed "nontechnology," impossible to measure of

its

its

eventual outcome.

It is

in

terms

capacity to alter either the natural course of disease or

A great deal of money is spent on this.

valued highly by the professionals as well as the pa-

of what

tients. It consists

therapy."

It

tides patients

sometimes called "supportive

is

over through diseases that are not,

by and large, understood.

It is

what

"caring for" and "standing by."

however, a technology

in

any

It is

is

meant by the phrases

indispensable.

real sense, since

It is

not,

does not

it

involve measures directed at the underlying mechanism of disease. It is

includes the large part of any

good

doctor's time that

taken up with simply providing reassurance, explaining to

patients

who

fear that they

have contracted one or another

lethal disease that they are, in fact, quite healthy.

what physicians used

It is

to

be engaged

bedside

in at the

of patients with diphtheria, meningitis, poliomyelitis, lobar

pneumonia, and

all

the rest of the infectious diseases that

have since come under control. It is

what physicians must now do for patients with

intract-

able cancer, severe rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis,

and advanced

stroke,

cirrhosis.

One

twenty major diseases that require

can think of

this

at least

kind of supportive

medical care because of the absence of an effective technology.

I

would include a large amount of what

mental disease, and most varieties of cancer, in

is

called

this cate-

gory.

The higher

cost of this all

nontechnology

the time.

It

is

very high, and getting

requires not only a great deal of time

but also very hard effort and

skill

on the

part of physicians;

The Technology of Medicine

only the very best of doctors are good kind of defeat.

It

coping with

this

also involves long periods of hospitaliza-

of nursing,

tion, lots

at

33

lots

of involvement of nonmedical

professionals in and out of the hospital. short, a substantial

represents, in

It

segment of today's expenditures for

health. 2.

At the next

level

up

is

a kind of technology best termed

"halfway technology." This represents the kinds of things that

must be done

after the fact, in efforts to

compensate for

whose course

the incapacitating effects of certain diseases

one

is

unable to do very

much

about.

It is

a technology

designed to make up for disease, or to postpone death.

The outstanding examples

in recent years are the trans-

plantations of hearts, kidneys, livers, and other organs, and

the equally spectacular inventions of

artificial

organs. In the

come

public mind, this kind of technology has

to

seem

like

the equivalent of the high technologies of the physical sciences.

though

umph,

The media tend

it

to present each

new procedure

represented a breakthrough and therapeutic

instead of the makeshift that

In fact, this level of technology

it

is,

really

by

is.

nature, at the

its

same time highly sophisticated and profoundly is

the kind of thing that

is

a

one must continue

to

primitive.

do

genuine understanding of the mechanisms involved

needed

It

until there

disease. In chronic glomerulonephritis, for example, a

clearer insight will be

as

tri-

in

much

into the events leading to the

destruction of glomeruli by the immunologic reactants that

now appear to govern this disease, before one will know how to intervene intelligently to prevent the process, or turn it round. But when this level of understanding has been reached, the technology of kidney replacement will not be

much needed and should no longer pose of

logistics, cost,

and ethics

that

it

the

huge problems

poses today.

An extremely complex and costly technology for the management of coronary heart disease has evolved

— involving

The Lives of a

34

Cell

specialized ambulances

personnel

—

and hospital

end

to deal with the

planted and

at this level

is

artificial

results of

coronary throm-

in heart disease,

of technology, with the trans-

hearts as ultimate examples.

enough has been learned

to

one ought

know what be

to

When

goes wrong

and when

to prevent or reverse the process,

one

really

in a position to figure

pens the current elaborate technology to

of elec-

Almost everything offered today for the treatment of

bosis.

heart disease

ways

units, all kinds

and whole platoons of new professional

tronic gadgetry,

will

this

out

hap-

probably be

set

side.

Much

of what

is

done

in the

treatment of cancer, by

surgery, irradiation, and chemotherapy, represents halfway

technology, in the sense that these measures are directed at the existence of already established cancer cells, but not at

the mechanisms by which cells It is

become

neoplastic.

a characteristic of this kind of technology that

an enormous amount of

money and

it

costs

requires a continuing to the

need

for new, highly trained people to run the enterprise.

And

expansion of hospital

there

is

no way out of

really

knowledge.

facilities.

If the installation

There

is

this, at

no end

the present state of

of specialized coronary-care

units can result in the extension of life for only a

with coronary disease (and there

technology

effective in a

is

few

is

few patients

no question

cases),

it

seems

that this

to

me

an

many of these as can be will be put together, and as much money as can be found will be spent. I do not see that anyone has much choice in this. The only thing that can move medicine away from this level of technology is new information, and the only imaginable inevitable fact of

source of 3.

The

this

that as

information

is

research.

third type of technology

effective that

come

life

it

seems to

is

the kind that

attract the least public notice;

to be taken for granted. This

is

is it

so has

the genuinely decisive

technology of modern medicine, exemplified best by mod-

The Technology of Medicine

35

ern methods for immunization against diphtheria, pertussis,

and the childhood virus diseases, and the contemporary use of antibiotics and chemotherapy for bacterial infections.

The

capacity to deal effectively with syphilis and tuberculo-

represents a milestone in

sis

full

use of

human endeavor, even though And there

has not yet been made.

this potential

the treatment of endo-

are, of course, other examples:

crinologic disorders with appropriate hormones, the pre-

vention of hemolytic disease of the newborn, the treatment

and prevention of various nutritional disorders, and perhaps just

and

around the corner the management of Parkinsonism sickle-cell

everyone the truth

will is

anemia. There are other examples, and

have

his favorite candidates for the

that there are

nothing

like as

many

list,

but

as the public

has been led to believe.

The

point to be

—

that

is

it

comes

becomes

it

relatively simple,

and

available,

relatively inexpensive,

it is

relatively easy to deliver.

human

disease

which medicine possesses the outright capacity

to pre-

Offhand,

I

cannot think of any important

vent or cure where the cost of the technology

major problem. The price

is

never

as

no-technology or halfway technology. fever had to be

1935,

it

managed today by

would run

is

itself a

high as the cost of

managing the same diseases during the

fifty

as the

genuine understanding of disease mechanisms,

result of a

and when

— the

kind of technology

this

technology of medicine

real high

for

made about

earlier stages of

If a case

of typhoid

the best methods of

to a staggering expense. At, say,

around

days of hospitalization, requiring the most demanding

kind of nursing care, with the obsessive concern for details of diet that characterized the therapy of that time, with daily laboratory monitoring, and, on occasion, surgical interven-

abdominal catastrophe,

I

should think $10,000

would be a conservative estimate

for the illness, as con-

tion for

trasted with today's cost of a bottle of

chloramphenicol and

36

The Lives of a

a day or

two of

Cell

fever.

The halfway technology

evolving for poliomyelitis in the early 1950s,

emergence of the ble,

basic research that

made

just

Sister

Kenny, and the

with

rehabilitation,

all

those

was

the vaccine possi-

provides another illustration of the point.

remember

that

before the

Do

you

cost of those institutes for

ceremonially applied

hot

fomentations, and the debates about whether the affected

limbs should be totally immobilized or kept in passive motion as frequently as possible,

and the masses of

statistically

tormented data mobilized to support one view or the other? It is

the cost of that kind of technology, and

effectiveness, that

its

relative

must be compared with the cost and

effec-

tiveness of the vaccine.

Pulmonary tuberculosis had tory.

moval of infected lung rate

similar episodes in

There was a sudden enthusiasm

his-

tissue in the early 1950s,

and elabo-

were being made for new and expensive

plans

installations for

hospitals,

its

for the surgical re-

major pulmonary surgery

and then

INH

in tuberculosis

and streptomycin came along and

the hospitals themselves were closed up. It is

when

bogged down by

physicians are

their

incom-

plete technologies, by the innumerable things they are

obliged to do in medicine

when

they lack a clear under-

standing of disease mechanisms, that the deficiencies of the health-care system are most conspicuous. If

maker, interested long haul,

I

in saving

would regard

money it

as

I

were a

policy-

for health care over the

an act of high prudence to

more basic research in biologic way to get the full mileage that

give high priority to a lot science. This

is

the only

biology owes to the science of medicine, even though seems, as used to be said in the days

had some meaning,

when

like asking for the

the phrase

moon.

it

still

Vibes

We

leave traces of ourselves wherever

whatever

made by

we

One

touch.

small boys

is

that

we

go, on

of the odd discoveries

when two pebbles

are

struck sharply against each other they emit, briefly, a curious

smoky odor. The phenomenon

fades

when

the stones are

when they are heated to temperature, and reappears when they are simply

immaculately cleaned, vanishes furnace

touched by the hand again before being struck.

An across

dog with a good nose can track a man open ground by his smell and distinguish that man's

tracks

from those of others. More than

intelligent

detect the odor of a light

and he

will

remember

human

that slide

for as long as six weeks,

when

this,

fingerprint

and smell

it

the

on

dog can

a glass slide,

out from others

the scent fades away.

More-

over, this animal can smell the identity of identical twins,

and

will follow the tracks

of one or the other as though they

had been made by the same man.

We are marked as self by the chemicals we leave beneath the soles of our shoes, as unmistakably and individually as

by the membrane surface antigens detectable of our

in

homografts

tissues.

Other animals are

similarly

endowed with

signaling

mechanisms. Columns of ants can smell out the differences

between themselves and other

ants

on

their trails.

The

of one species, proceeding jerkily across a path, leave that can ers.

be followed by their

own

relatives but not

ants

trails

by oth-

Certain ants, predators, have taken unfair advantage of

the system; they are born with an ability to sense the

trails

37

The Lives of a

38

Cell

of the species they habitually take for slaves, follow their victims to their nests, and release special odorants that

throw them into disorganized panic.

Minnows and

own

can recognize each

catfish

member

species by his particular, person-specific odor.

minnows

sensing shares

rent puzzles and confusions of

calculated, has

There

is

the receptor

something

cells,

A

rabbit,

it

has been

100 million olfactory recep-

new ones emerging from

with

The

numerous and complex likely that the

matters most.

cur-

a constant and surprisingly rapid turnover of

within a few days.

seems

like

some of the

immunology, apart from the

business of telling self from non-self.

It

behave

it is.

The problem of olfactory

tors.

in a school

of an organism. But

like interchangeable, identical parts

there

hard

minnow,

to imagine a solitary, independent, existentialist

recognizable for himself alone;

of their

It is

By and

basal cells

theories to explain olfaction are as as those for

immunologic sensing.

shape of the smelled molecule

is

what

large, odorants are chemically small,

Spartan compounds. In a rose garden, a rose

is

a rose be-

cause of geraniol, a 10-carbon compound, and

it

is

the

geometric conformation of atoms and their bond angles that

determine the unique fragrance. The special vibrations of

atoms or groups of atoms within the molecules of odorants, or the vibratory song of the entire molecule, have been

made

the basis for several theories, with postulated "osmic

frequencies" as the source of odor.

The geometry

of the

molecule seems to be more important than the names of the

atoms themselves; any

set

of atoms,

if

arranged

in precisely

the same configuration, by whatever chemical name, might

smell as sweet. fired

It is

not

known how

the olfactory cells are

by an odorant. According to one view, a hole

in the receptor

membrane, launching

other workers believe that the substance

bound

is

poked

depolarization, but

may become

to the cells possessing specific receptors for

it

and

Vibes

then

may

just sit there,

somehow

signal

from

on immune

cells.

displaying

a distance, after the fashion of antigens

its

have been proposed, with

Specific receptor proteins

39

differ-

ent olfactory cells carrying specific receptors for different

"primary" odors, but no one has yet succeeded ing the receptors or

Training of

in identify-

naming the "primary" odors.

cells for olfactory

sensing appears to be an

everyday phenomenon. Repeated exposure of an animal to the

same odorant,

in small doses, leads to great

ment of acuity, suggesting the sites

of

are added to the

cells

new receptor new clones

conceivable that

with a particular receptor are stimulated to emerge

in the process

cally

possibility that

cells. It is

enhance-

of training.

The guinea pig,

that

immunologi-

famous animal, can be trained to perceive

fantastically

small amounts of nitrobenzene by his nose, without the help

of Freund's adjuvants or haptene carriers.

been trained

to recognize phenol,

Minnows have

and distinguish

it

from

p-chlorophenol, in concentrations of five parts per billion. Eels have been taught to smell

two or three molecules of

phenylethyl alcohol. And, of course, eels and salmon must

be able to remember by nature,

as the

phrase goes, the odor

of the waters in which they were hatched, so as to sniff their

way back from

the

open sea

for spawning. Electrodes in the

olfactory bulbs of salmon will fire

thelium

is

when

the olfactory epi-

exposed to water from their spawning grounds,

whereas water from other streams causes no response.

We feel somehow inferior and left out of things by all the marvelous sensory technology

We

sometimes

try to

in the creatures

sense) by claiming to ourselves that tive

around

us.

diminish our sense of loss (or loss of

mechanisms behind us

in

we have put such

our evolution.

We

primilike to

regard the olfactory bulb as a sort of archeologic find, and

we speak of the ancient olfactory parts of the

brain as though

they were elderly, dotty relatives in need of hobbies.

But we may be better

at

it

than

we

think.

An

average

man

40

The Lives of a

Cell

can detect just a few molecules of butyl mercaptan, and most

of us can sense the presence of musk in vanishingly small

amounts. Steroids are marvelously odorous, emitting varieties

of musky, sexy smells.

Women

odor of a synthetic steroid named

men for

are acutely aware of the exaltolide,

which most

are unable to detect. All of us are able to smell ants,

which the great word pismire was originally coined.

There may even be odorants

that fire off receptors in

our

olfactory epithelia without our being conscious of smell,

including signals exchanged involuntarily between

Wiener has proposed, on

beings.

intuitive grounds, that

defects and misinterpretations in such a

tem may be an unexplored schizophrenic, he suggests, identity

and

reality

communication

territory for psychiatry.

may have

his

sys-

The

problems with

because of flawed perceptions of his

or others' signals. And, indeed, there

wrong with

human

own

may be something

the apparatus in schizophrenics; they have,

it is

an unfamiliar odor, recently attributed to trans-3-

said,

methylhexanoic acid,

in their sweat.

Olfactory receptors for communication between different creatures are crucial for the establishment of symbiotic rela-

The

tions.

crab and

anemone recognize each other as partdo the anemones and

ners by molecular configurations, as their symbiotic

damsel

fish.

Similar devices are

for defense, as with the limpet,

predators by everting

starfish

its

which defends

employed

itself

against

mantle and thus precluding

a starfish foothold; the limpet senses a special starfish protein,

by

which

all

is,

perhaps

in the

starfish into their

name of

fairness, elaborated

environment. The system

is

evi-

dently an ancient one, long antedating the immunologic

by the antibodies

sensing of familiar or foreign forms of

life

on which we now depend so heavily

for our separateness.

It

of

has recently been learned that the genes for the marking self

by cellular antigens and those for making im-

munologic responses by antibody formation are closely

Vibes

linked.

It is

from the

41

possible that the invention of antibodies evolved

earlier sensing

perhaps designed,

mechanisms needed for symbiosis,

in part, to

keep the

latter

from getting

out of hand.

A

very general system of chemical communication be-

tween

living things of

all

and animal, has been

kinds, plant

termed "allelochemics" by Whittaker. Using one signal or another, each form of others around ing

for

its

proximity to the

on encroachment or spread-

to potential symbionts.

mechanism

coordinated

announces

setting limits

it,

welcome

life

The

net effect

regulation

the

growth and occupations of territory.

It is

is

a

of rates of

evidently designed

for the homeostasis of the earth.

Jorge Borges,

in his recent bestiary

of mythical creatures,

notes that the idea of round beasts was imagined by

many

speculative minds, and Johannes Kepler once argued that

the earth itself

such a being. In

is

this

immense organism,

chemical signals might serve the function of global hor-

mones, keeping balance and symmetry

in the

operation of

various interrelated working parts, informing tissues in the

vegetation of the Alps about the state of eels in the Sargasso Sea, by long, interminable relays of interconnected mes-

sages between

This

is

all

kinds of other creatures.

made

to order for

enough

to store in

an interesting kind of problem,

computers

if

they

nearby galaxies.

came

It is

in sizes big

unsolved puzzles ahead for biology, although

whether we

will

many wonder

nice to think that there are so I

ever find enough graduate students.

(Vp

Tau

Ceti

is

a relatively nearby star that sufficiently

resembles our sun to make

its

solar system a plausi-

ble candidate for the existence of

life.

We

are,

it

appears, ready to begin getting in touch with Ceti, and with

any other interested out to the edge.

body

celestial

CETI

is

also,

in

on Communication with

Extraterrestrial Intelligence, held in

1972

in Soviet

joint sponsorship of the National

of Sciences of the United States and the Soviet

which involved eminent

physicists

various countries, most of

odds for the existence of

whom

life

places,

by intention, the acronym of

the First International Conference

menia under the

more remote

Ar-

Academy Academy

and astronomers from are convinced that the

elsewhere are very high, with

a reasonable probability that there are civilizations,

one

place or another, with technologic mastery matching or

exceeding ours.

On

this

assumption, the conferees thought

it

likely that

radioastronomy would be the generally accepted interstellar

mode

of

communication, on grounds of speed and

economy. They made a formal recommendation that we organize an international cooperative program, with new and immense radio telescopes, to probe the reaches of deep space for electromagnetic signals making sense. Eventually,

we would plan to send out messages on our own and answers, but at the outset

it

seems more

receive

practical to begin

by catching snatches of conversation between others. So, the highest of

all

our complex technologies

hardest of our sciences will soon be engaged,

42

in the

full scale, in

43

Ceti

what

essentially biologic research

is

of social science,

The

We

last

decade, too small

have the feeling of being confined

something

like

The views of the to

at that.

earth has become, just in the

a place. is

—and with some aspects

outgrowing a small town

— shut

dark, pocked surface of Mars,

judge from the

latest

in;

it

in a small county. lifeless

still

photographs, do not seem to have

extended our reach; instead, they bring closer, too close, another unsatisfactory feature of our local environment.

The

blue noonday sky, cloudless, has lost

immensity.

The word

is finite. It is,

in truth,

under which we

is

out that the sky

is

old look of

its

not

only a kind of local roof, a

live,

limitless;

luminous but confusingly

we

when

suffused with sunlight;

face a

few miles over our heads.

can sense

We

its

know

it

membrane refractile

concave sur-

that

tough

it is

when hard objects strike it from The color photographs of more amazing than anything outside: we live

and thick enough so

that

the outside they burst into flames. the earth are

inside a blue chamber, a bubble of air

The

blown by ourselves.

other sky beyond, absolutely black and appalling,

wide-open country,

Here we

go, then.

is

irresistible for exploration.

An

extraterrestrial embryologist, hav-

ing a close look at us from time to time, would probably

conclude that the morphogenesis of the earth

coming

is

along well, with the beginnings of a nervous system and fair-sized

ganglions in the form of

cities,

and now with

specialized, dish-shaped sensory organs, miles across, ready to receive stimuli. will

He may

go about responding.

of a Skinner pigeon

in a

well wonder, however,

how we

We are evolving into the situation Skinner box, peering about

make connections, probing. word comes in from outer space,

in all

directions, trying to

When we

will

the

first

probably be used to the idea.

We

finally,

can already pro-

good explanation for the origin of life, here or elsewhere. Given a moist planet with methane, formaldevide a quite

The Lives of a

44

Cell

hyde, ammonia, and some usable minerals,

of which

all

abound, exposed to lightning or ultraviolet irradiation the right temperature,

The

tricky,

might

life

unsolved thing

is

how

polymers to

to get the

arrange in membranes and invent replication. clear going. If they follow life at first,

it

then photosynthesis and the

oxygen, then respiring then speciation, and, is

our protocol,

life

at

almost anywhere.

start off

The

rest

is

be anaerobic

will

exhalation of

first

and the great burst of variation,

finally,

some kind of consciousness.

It

easy, in the telling. I

suspect that

when we have recovered from

acceptance of signs of

nodding

at

being unique

have had

all

the

first

easy

from elsewhere, and finished

we

each other, and finished smiling,

We

for shock.

life

will

be

in

our way, relatively speaking,

it

these years, and

will

it

be hard to deal with

the thought that the whole, infinitely huge, spinning, clocklike apparatus

around us

is

itself

animate, and can sprout

whenever the conditions are right. beyond doubt, by making connections established

but

we

will

life,

We

end up feeling smaller than ever,

single cell, with a quite

new

respond,

will

after the fashion of

our filaments^ extending

floating out

is

a

pili,

as small as a

sense of continuity.

some getting used to. The immediate problem, however,

life

It will

take

much more practi-

cal,

down-to-earth matter, and must be giving insomnia to

the

CETI

participants. Let us

life in

we

be successful

will

we going

earth are

assume

hundred or more

some very long

in getting in

to talk about?

light years

pauses.

The

as

barest amenities,

— Hello,

opening conversations

We

it.

What on

likely,

it is

a

on which we

are you there?,

—

will take

By the time we have our what we had in mind.

at least.

forgotten

and that

away, there are going to be

followed by Yes, hello, from them

may have

space,

seems

from

hundred years

indeed,

touch with

If,

rely for us,

is,

that there

one or another part of remote

sentient

party

two

we

could begin by gambling on the Tightness of our

45

Ceti

technology and

just

send out news of ourselves, like a

mimeographed Christmas

we would have

but

letter,

to

choose our items carefully, with durability of meaning mind. Whatever information

we provide must

sense to us two centuries later, and must

still

seem impor-

still

or the conversation will be an embarrassment to

tant,

concerned. In two hundred years

it

is,

as

in

make

we have

all

found,

easy to lose the thread.

Perhaps the permits,

safest thing to

to send music. This

is

have for explaining what least

do

ambiguity.

I

like to others in space,

for Bach,

out into space, over and over again. of course, but

on

possible face

We

can

justice,

tell

it is

at the

beginning of such an acquaintance.

some of

And,

the other things

of what

U.N. or

Presidential

We could send out our science, of course, but just

think of the wincing at this end

when

the polite

comments

two hundred years from now. Whatever we

today's items of liveliest interest are

and

do ourselves

to

we are we might be send-

fairer picture

ing, like Time, say, or a history of the

arrive

of Bach, streamed

surely excusable for us to put the best

music would give a

speeches.

all

we

with

We would be bragging,

the harder truths later.

really like than

technology

if

language may be the best

we are

would vote

the outset,

at

irrelevant,

maybe even

bound

ridiculous.

I

offer as

to be out of date

think

we

should

stick to music.

Perhaps,

if

the technology can be adapted to

it,

we should

send some paintings. Nothing would better describe what this

place

is

like, to

an outsider, than the Cezanne demon-

strations that an apple

What

be hard, and everyone

What

is

really part fruit, part earth.

kinds of questions should will

want

are your smallest particles?

we

ask?

The

his special

choices will

question

first.

Did you think yourselves

Do you have colds? Have you anything quicker light? Do you always tell the truth? Do you cry? There

unique? than is

no end Perhaps

to the

list.

we should

wait a while, until

we

are sure

we

46

The Lives of a

know what we want

Cell

to

tailed questions. After

know, before we get down all,

opener: Hello, are you there? to be Yes, hello,

about

If

the reply should turn out

we might want

that, for quite a

to de-

the main question will be the

long time.

to stop there

and think

The Long Habit

We

continue to share with our remotest ancestors

the most tangled and evasive attitudes about

we have come

death, despite the great distance in

understanding some of the profound aspects of biology.

We

have

as

much

as for thinking

distaste for talking

about

it;

it

about personal death

an indelicacy, like talking

is

mixed company about venereal disease or abortion

in

in the

old days. Death on a grand scale does not bother us in the

same

special way:

we

discuss war, involving as

can

60

around a dinner table and

sit

million volatilized

human

deaths,

though we were talking about bad weather; we can watch

abrupt bloody death every day, sion, without blinking

back a

in color,

tear. It

on

films

and

televi-

when the numbers we begin to think

is

of dead are very small, and very close, that in

scurrying circles. At the very center of the problem

naked cold deadness of one's own nature of which

we

to face the issue at

first

new hope

We

may be even

in

which we seem

we can

maybe

it

will all

to lead nature

go away.

bit

it

is

less willing

We

like to

the marvelous ways

around by the nose,

avoid the central problem

next year, say, a

"The long

now

the

hand than our predecessors because

that

think, hiding the thought, that with

perhaps

is

the only reality in

can have absolute certainty, and

unmentionable, unthinkable.

of a secret

self,

if

we

just

become,

smarter.

habit of living," said

Thomas Browne,

"indis-

poseth us to dying." These days, the habit has become an

47

The Lives of a

48

we

hooked on and ours on it, grows

addiction:

on

us,

Cell

of giving

we have

it

are

up, even

when

living; the tenacity in intensity.

living loses

put death for

its

grip

cannot think

zest

—even when

lost the zest for zest.

We have come a long way it

its

of

We

off,

and

it is

in

our technologic capacity to

imaginable that

we might learn

even longer periods, perhaps matching the

of the Abkhasian Russians, for a century

and a

half. If

to stall

life-spans

who are said to go on, springily, we can rid ourselves of some of

our chronic, degenerative diseases, and cancer, strokes, and

we might go on and

coronaries,

reasonable, but disease,

it

no

we would make

decade or

so,

We

It

much

a

sounds attractive and

we became

better run of

it

free of

for the last

terminate on about the same

still

may be

like the genetically different

of mice, or like Hayflick's different tissue-culture

programmed

to die after a

clocked by their genomes.

decade, and some

much

lines,

predetermined number of days, is the way it is, some of us come unhinged in the sixth

If this

continue to wear out and

will

on.

certainty. If

but might

schedule as now. lines

is

later,

depending on genetic time-

tables. If

we

ever do achieve freedom from most of today's

diseases, or

even complete freedom from disease, we

will

perhaps terminate by drying out and blowing away on a light breeze, but

we

will

still

die.

Most of my friends do not like They prefer to take it for granted

we

this

way of looking

that

we

get sick, with one lethal ailment or another, and

did not have our diseases biologists

choose to think

we might go on this

at

it.

only die because

indefinitely.

\i

we

Even

about themselves, despite the

evidences of the absolute inevitability of death that sur-

round

their professional lives. Everything dies, all around,

trees, plankton, lichens, mice, whales, flies,

In the simplest creatures

it is

sometimes

death, since the strands of replicating

mitochondria.

difficult to

DNA

see

it

as

they leave be-

The Long Habit

49

hind are more conspicuously the living parts of themselves than with us (not that it

seems

that carry like

fundamentally any different, but

it is

do not develop a ward round of diseases them off, one by one. They simply age, and die,

so). Flies

flies.

We

hanker to go on, even

in the face

of plain evidence

that long, long lives are not necessarily pleasurable in the

kind of society if

we

we have arranged

thus

we have

while, until

do with the found

far.

new

can postpone the search for

We will be lucky

technologies for a

discovered some satisfactory things to

extra time. Something will surely have to be

to take the place of sitting

on the porch re-examining

one's watch.

we would not be so anxious to prolong life if we did not detest so much the sickness of withdrawal. It is astonishing how little information we have about this uniPerhaps

versal process, with

ology. it.

It is

Even

if

all

the other dazzling advances in bi-

not to

know about

could imagine the act of death

in isolation,

almost as though

we

we wanted

without any preliminary stage of being struck ease,

we would be

There are

fearful of

signs that medicine

est in the process, partly

down by

dis-

it.

may be

from

taking a

new

curiosity, partly

inter-

from an

we have not been handling much skill as physicians once

embarrassed realization that

this

aspect of disease with as

dis-

became convinced that and sometimes defeatable enemy.

played, back in the days before they disease was their solitary It

used to be the hardest and most important of

services of a

good doctor

to

be on hand

and to provide comfort, usually in hospitals, in secrecy

in real life).

with

at the

home.

the

time of death

Now

it is

done

(one of the reasons for the increased

fear of death these days totally unfamiliar

in the

all

it;

may be

that so

many people

they never actually see

it

are

happen

Some of our technology permits us to deny its we maintain flickers of life for long stretches

existence, and

50

The Lives of a

in

one community of

keeping a cells

Cell

flag flying.

go down

in

is

not a sudden-all-at-once

You can,

sequence, one by one.

recover great numbers of them

many hours

have gone out, and grow them out

We

to

affair;

you

like,

after the lights

word

finally gets

the provinces.

all

may be about

bad thing

if

in cultures. It takes

hours, even days, before the irreversible

around to

we were

or another, as though

cells

Death

do

to rediscover that

after

all.

he disapproved of people

dying

is

William Osier took

Sir

who spoke

not such a view:

this

of the agony of death,

maintaining that there was no such thing. In a nineteenth-century Africa, there

is

David Livingston about

a story by

experience of near-death.

memoir on an expedition

He

was caught by a

lion,

his

in

own

crushed

across the chest in the animal's great jaws, and saved in the instant by a lucky shot

from a

the episode in clear detail.

friend. Later,

he remembered

He was so amazed by the extraor-

dinary sense of peace, calm, and total painlessness associated

with being killed that he constructed a theory that

all

tures are provided with a protective physiologic

crea-

mech-

anism, switched on at the verge of death, carrying them

through I

in a

haze of tranquillity.

have seen agony

rabies;

in

death only once, in a patient with

he remained acutely aware of every stage

process of his

own

period, right up to his final special

in the

disintegration over a twenty-four-hour

moment.

neuropathology of rabies,

It

was

as

though,

in the

the switch had been pre-

vented from turning.

We will be having new opportunities to learn more about first hand, from the increasing numbers of cardiac patients who have been through the whole process and then back again. Judging from what has been found out thus far, from the first generation of people resuscitated from cardiac standstill (already termed the Lazarus syndrome), Osier seems to have been right. Those

the physiology of death at

The Long Habit

who remember any

fear,

parts or

all

51

of their episodes do not recall

who remained

or anguish. Several people

scious throughout, while appearing to have

con-

been quite

dead, could only describe a remarkable sensation of detach-

ment.

One man underwent

tion of the heart

coronary occlusion with cessa-

and dropped for

all

practical purposes

dead, in front of a hospital; within a few minutes his heart

had been restarted by electrodes and he breathed back into

was

life.

that there

According

way

to his account, the strangest thing

were so many people around him, moving so

urgently, handling his his

his

body with such excitement, while

all

awareness was of quietude.

In a recent study of the reaction to dying in patients with

obstructive disease of the lungs,

process was considerably

more

it

was concluded that the

shattering for the profes-

Most of the

sional observers than the observed.

patients

appeared to be preparing themselves with equanimity for death, as though intuitively familiar with the business. elderly

woman

One

reported that the only painful and distress-

ing part of the process was in being interrupted;

on

several

occasions she was provided with conventional therapeutic

measures to maintain oxygenation or restore trolytes,

fluids

and

elec-

and each time she found the experience of coming

back harrowing; she deeply resented the interference with her dying. find

I

myself surprised by the thought that dying

all-right thing to do, is,

after

all,

but perhaps

it

an

is

should not surprise.

It

the most ancient and fundamental of biologic

functions, with

its

mechanisms worked out with the same

attention to detail, the

the organism, the

same provision

for the advantage of

same abundance of genetic information

for guidance through the stages, that

become accustomed

to finding in

all

we have

long since

the crucial acts of

liv-

ing.

Very

well.

But even

so, if the

transformation

is

a coor-

The Lives of a

52

Cell

dinated, integrated physiologic process in stages, there

that

is still

ness to be accounted for. this

Are we

in

its

local

to be stuck forever with

problem? Where on earth does

stopped dead

its initial,

permanent vanishing of conscious-

tracks, lost in

it

go?

Is

simply

it

humus, wasted? Consider-

ing the tendency of nature to find uses for complex and

mechanisms,

intricate

to think of

it

as

this

me

unnatural.

I

prefer

separated off at the filaments of

attachment, and then drawn like an easy breath back into

its

the

membrane of its

cal

nervous system, but

This as

seems to

somehow

is

some

origin, a fresh I

memory

for a biospheri-

have no data on the matter.

for another science, another day. scientists suggest, that

we

may

It

turn out,

are forever precluded

from investigating consciousness by a

sort of indeterminacy

principle that stipulates that the very act of looking will

make

it

twitch and blur out of sight.

never learn.

I

envy some of

my

about telepathy; oddly enough, acquaintances

who

lightly. All their

there they

sit,

believe

it

It this is

friends it is

who

we

true,

will

are convinced

my European

scientist

most freely and take

it

most

aunts have received Communications, and

with proof of the motility of consciousness at

their fingertips,

and the making of a new science.

It is dis-

couraging to have had the wrong aunts, and never the ghost of a message.

Antaeus in Manhattan

again.

Insects

When

social animals are

gathered together

in

groups,

become qualitatively different creatures from what when alone or in pairs. Single locusts are quiet, meditative, sessile things, but when locusts are added to other locusts, they become excited, change color, undergo they

they were

spectacular endocrine revisions, and intensify their activity until,

when

there are

enough of them packed shoulder

shoulder, they vibrate and

and take

airliner

hum

with the energy of a

to jet

off.

Watson, Nel, and Hewitt have collected large numbers of termites in the

field

vation, in groups

and

and placed them together for obserpairs.

The grouped termites become show no inclination to

increasingly friendly and active, but lay

eggs or mate; instead, they cut

intake, watching their weight,

muscles escalate

flight

in

down on

their water

and the mitochondria of their

metabolic

activity.

Grouped

ter-

mites keep touching each other incessantly with their antennae, and this appears to be the central governing

anism.

It is

act of touching.

become

a

mech-

the being touched that counts, rather than the

Deprived of antennae, any termite can

group termite

if

touched frequently enough by

the others.

something else again. As removed from the group, and the touching comes to an end, they become aggressive,

Isolated, paired termites are

soon

from

as they are all

sides

53

The Lives of a

54

Cell

and abstain

standoffish; they begin drinking compulsively,

from touching each other. Sometimes, they even bite off the distal halves

of each other's antennae, to eliminate the temp-

tation. Irritably, settling

situation, they

down

to

make

the best of a poor

begin preparations for the laying of eggs and

the taking care of the brood. Meanwhile, the mitochondria in their flight

The most

muscles go out of business.

intensely social animals can only adapt to

behavior. Bees and ants have no option cept to die. There individual; he has

life

of his

own

group

isolated, ex-

no such creature

really

is

no more

when

as a single

than a cast-off cell

marooned from the surface of your skin. Ants are more like the parts of an animal than entities on their own. They are mobile cells, circulating through a dense connective

The all

tissue of other ants in a matrix of twigs.

circuits are so intimately

woven

that the anthill

meets

the essential criteria of an organism. It

would be wonderful

to understand

how

the anthill

communication system works. Somehow, by touching each other continually, by exchanging

about

in their

mandibles

like

bits

of white stuff carried

money, they manage

to inform

the whole enterprise about the state of the world outside, the location of food, the nearness of enemies, the mainte-

nance requirements of the

Hill,

even the direction of the

sun; in the Alps, mountaineers are said to use the

ameboid

configurations of elongated ant nests as pointers to the south.

The

Hill, for

its

part,

responds by administering

the affairs of the institution, coordinating and synchroniz-

ing the

movements of its crawling

ing the nest so that

it

parts, aerating

and clean-

can last for as long as forty years,

fetching food in by long tentacles, rearing broods, taking slaves, raising crops, and, at

one time or another, budding

off subcolonies in the near vicinity, as progeny.

The

social insects, especially ants,

have been sources of all

kinds of parables, giving lessons in industry, interdepend-

Antaeus

in

ence, altruism, humility, frugality, patience.

employed

to instruct us in the

tional virtues,

Manhattan

55

They have been

whole range of our

institu-

from the White House to your neighborhood

savings bank.

And now, gallery in

at last,

become an Art Form.

they have

New York exhibited a collection of 2 on loan from Central America,

army

ants,

show

entitled "Patterns

in a

A

million live

one-colony

and Structures." They were

dis-

played on sand in a huge square bin, walled by plastic sides

high enough to prevent them from crawling over and out into Manhattan.

The inventor of

the work, Alan Sonfist,

arranged and rearranged the location of food sources in different places, according to his inspiration

and their

taste,

and they formed themselves into long, black, ropy patterns, extended

like

writhing limbs, hands, fingers, across the sand

and long ellipses, from one station Thus deployed, they were watched with inten-

in crescents, crisscrosses,

to another. sity

by the crowds of winter-carapaced people

in neat

rows to gaze down

with the

New

at

them.

The

who

lined

up

ants were, together

Yorkers, an abstraction, a live mobile, an

action painting, a piece of found art, a happening, a parody,

depending on the I

light.

can imagine the people moving around the edges of the

plastic barrier,

touching shoulder to shoulder, sometimes

touching hands, exchanging

bits

smiling sometimes, prepared as take flight at a

moment's

stoked and steaming.

of information, nodding,

New

Yorkers always are to

notice, their mitochondria fully

They move

in

orderly lines around the

box, crowding one another precisely, without injury, peering in.

down, nodding, and then backing

off to let

new people

Seen from a distance, clustered densely around the white

lines of army ants, murmuring repetitively, they seem an absolute marvel. They might have dropped here plastic

box containing the long serpentine

turning to each other and

from another planet.

— The Lives of a

56

I I

am

sad that

Cell

By

did not see any of this myself.

I

the time

had received the communication on television and

morning paper,

made my had

ants

felt

in

my

the tugging pull toward Manhattan, and

preparations to migrate,

learned that the army

I

died.

all

The Art Form

simply disintegrated,

of those exploding, vanishing faces

all at

once, like one

in paintings

by the Brit-

Bacon.

ish artist Francis

There was no explanation, beyond the rumored, unproved

over the

possibility of cold drafts in the gallery

weekend. Monday morning they were sluggish, moving with

less precision, dully.

one

first

were dead, swept away side for engulfment It is

but

I

Then, the death began,

part and then another, and within a day into large plastic bags

do think

I

am

has something to

it

floor of a gallery, especially

I

think

truck.

do with It is

all

that plastic

way

a long, long to the

ground

when you consider that Manhat-

suspended on a kind of concrete platform,

is

propped up by But

and put out-

unsure of the meaning,

from the earth of a Central American jungle tan itself

affecting

2 million

and digestion by the sanitation

a melancholy parable.

and the distance from the earth.

that,

all

it

a

meshwork of wires,

was

pipes,

and water mains.

which seems

chiefly the plastic,

most unearthly of all man's creations so

far.

I

to

you can suspend army ants away from the earth, on for any length of time.

They

me

the

do not believe

will lose touch,

plastic,

run out of

energy, and die for lack of current.

One

steps

on

without giving

ants, single ants or small clusters, it

a thought, but

it is

every day

impossible to contem-

plate the death of so vast a beast as these 2 million ants

without feeling twinges of sympathy, and something

Nervously, thinking

Manhattan and the

this

else.

way, thinking especially about

plastic platform,

per and reached for the book on

I

my

laid

down my newspa-

shelf that contained,

I

knew, precisely the paragraph of reassurance required by the

moment:

Antaeus

It is

in

Manhattan

57

many analogies have been drawn between human societies. Fundamentally, however,

not surprising that

the social insects and

these are misleading or meaningless, for the behavior of insects rigidly stereotyped

anisms; they

show

is

and determined by innate instructive mech-

little

or no insight or capacity for learning, and

they lack the ability to develop a social tradition based on the

accumulated experience of many generations.

It is,

of course, an incomplete comfort to read

of thing to one's

self.

by several people

at

For

full effect,

it

this sort

needs reading aloud

once, moving the

lips in

synchrony.

ThelHBL

nee you have become permanently startled, as

by the realization that

we

I

are a social species,

am,

you

tend to keep an eye out for pieces of evidence that this

is,

us. You look around we engage in collectively and unconwe build like wasp nests, individually

by and large, a good thing for

for the enterprises that sciously, the things

unaware of what we are doing. Most of the time, these days, it

The

a depressing exercise.

is

joint building activity that

consumes most of our energy and binds us together course, language, but this

and grows so slowly of participating

The mind

less

in the

is,

of

so overwhelming a structure

none of us can

feel a personal sense

work.

immense, more

finite items,

of a size allowing the

to get a handhold, like nations, or space technology,

New

or

that

is

York, are hard to think about without drifting

toward heartsink. It is

in

our very small enterprises

that

we can

find encour-

agement, here and there. The Marine Biological Laboratory in

Woods Hole

of a

life

of

its

is

a paradigm, a

human

institution possessed

own, self-regenerating, touched

all

around by

human meddle but constantly improved, embellished by it. The place was put together, given life, sustained into today's version of

its

and changes

maturity and prepared for further elaboration in its

complexity, by what can only be de-

scribed as a bunch of people. Neither the spectacularly emi-

nent

men who have

served as directors

down through

century nor the numberless committees by which sonally raddled, nor the six

58

the

it is

sea-

hundred-man corporation

that

TheMBL

nominally owns and operates

it,

59

nor even the trustees, have

ever been able to do more than hold the lightest reins over this institution;

makes up

in

it

its

seems to have a mind of

own

its

own, which

it

way.

Successive generations of people in bunches, never seeming very well organized, have been building the it

was chartered

in

1888.

when Woods Hole, Bureau of sorts of

It

Massachusetts,

Fisheries Station

187

life

1,

was selected for a

and the news got round that

marine and estuarine

collisions

MBL since

actually started earlier, in

all

could be found here in the

between the Gulf Stream and northern currents

offshore, plus birds to watch.

Academic types

drifted

down

from Boston, looked around, began explaining things

to

each other, and the place was off and running.

The

MBL has grown slowly but steadily from

sprouting

new

the outset,

buildings from time to time, taking

functions, expanding,

drawing

to itself

on new

by a sort of tropism

greater numbers of biological scientists each summer, tracting students as the it is

from

all

parts of the world.

Today,

uniquely national center for biology in

this

it

country;

the National Biological Laboratory without being

cially

designated (or yet funded) as such.

Its

at-

stands

offi-

on

influence

the growth and development of biologic science has been

equivalent to that of many of the country's universities combined, for for each

you

it

has had

its

pick of the world's scientific talent

summer's research and teaching.

will find that

If

you ask around,

any number of today's leading figures

in

biology and medicine were informally ushered into their

summer course in physiology; a still greater number picked up this or that idea for their key experiments while spending time as summer visitors in the laboratories, and others simply came for a holiday and got enough good

careers by the

notions to keep their laboratories back year.

Someone

have worked

has counted thirty

at the

MBL

at

home

busy for a

full

Nobel Laureates who

one time or another.

The Lives of a

60

It is

amazing

influence

Cell

that such an institution, exerting so

on academic

science, has

absolutely autonomous.

It

has, to

been able

to

much

remain so

be sure, linkages of

vari-

ous kinds, arrangements with outside universities for certain graduate programs, and

up the

street.

it

adheres delicately, somewhat am-

Woods Hole Oceanographic

biguously, to the

But

it

has never

come under

Institute just

the domination

of any outside institution or governmental agency, nor has it

ever been told what to do by any outside group. Inter-

nally, the

important institutional decisions seem to have

been made by a process of accommodation and adaptation, with resistible forces always meeting movable objects.

The ment

invertebrate eye was invented into an optical instru-

MBL, opening the way to modern visual physiThe giant axon of the Woods Hole squid became the

at the

ology.

apparatus for the creation of today's astonishing neurobiology.

Developmental and reproductive biology were

recognized and defined as sciences here, beginning with sea-urchin eggs and working up. Marine models were essential

in the early

days of research on muscle structure and

on muscle has become

function, and research

cupation

MBL.

at the

a major preoc-

Ecology was a sober, industrious

science here long ago, decades before the rest of us discov-

ered the term. In recent years there have been expansion

and strengthening

new

in

munology, genetics, and

fields;

biologic

membranes, im-

regulatory mechanisms are

cell

currently booming.

You

can never

from improbable

when new things may be starting up of work. The amebocytes of starfish

tell

lines

were recently found

to contain a material that immobilizes

the macrophages of

mammals, resembling a product of im-

mune lymphocytes looks as though

it

in

higher forms. Aplysia, a sea slug that

couldn't be

good

found by neurophysiologists to be

one of the world's conservative

for anything, has

filled

been

with truth. Limulus,

beasts, has recently

been

in

TbeMBL

the newspapers;

it

was discovered

61

to contain a reagent for

the detection of vanishingly small quantities of endotoxin

from gram-negative

bacteria, arid the pharmaceutical indus-

commercial

try has already sniffed

possibilities for the

toring of pyrogen-free materials; horseshoe crabs

be

as

marketable

as lobsters.

no way of predicting what the future will be like an institution such as the MBL. One way or another, it

There for

moni-

may soon

is

will evolve. It

may

soon into a new phase, with a

shift

year-round program for teaching and research and a year-

round

staff,

ardizing the

but

will

it

have to accomplish

this

without jeop-

immense power of its summer programs, or

institutional hell will

ways for relating

break loose.

It

to the universities,

are to expand as they should.

It

will

have to

will

if its

find

all

new

graduate programs

have to develop new

symbiotic relations with the Oceanographic Institute, since

both places have so

much

at stake.

And

it

have to find

will

— the kind of money federal governments possess— without losing any of more money, much more

that only its

own

initiative. It

will

be an interesting place to watch,

in the years ahead.

go as well for the MBL as they have in the past, and it should become an even larger and more agile collective intelligence. If you can think of good questions to ask about the life of the earth, it should be as good a place as any to go for answers. It is now, in fact. You might begin at the local beach, In a rational world, things ought to

which functions Beach, because stones.

as a sort it

of ganglion.

It

is

called Stony

used to be covered, painfully, by small

Long ago, somehow, some committee of

scientists,

prodded by footsore wives, found enough money it

with a layer of sand.

big

enough

It is

to cover

the most minor of beaches, hardly

for a committee,

but close enough to the

laboratories so that the investigators can walk

down

for a

sandwich lunch with their children on sunny weekdays.

The Lives of a

62

From time

Cell

pure physicists turn up, with only a few

to time,

minutes to spare from a meeting

summer sifiedly

Academy

National

at the

headquarters, tired from making forecasts on

clas-

obscure matters, wearing the look of doom.

The

physicists are another species, whiter-skinned, towel-draped

against the sun, unearthly, the soles of their feet so sensitive that they limp

A

on sand.

ping

myopia and

small boy, five-ish, with

from the water;

his glasses are

head slowly

mother,

his

DNA

tween

way between

who

in

in his

is

drip-

to master

the conversations,

explaining homology bebacteria,

wonderment, looking

and gelatinous held esting water."

is

and

in chloroplasts

emerges

his hair

bone dry; he has already begun

technique. As he picks his

heading for

glasses,

although

characteristically,

at

he

shaking his

is

something brown

hand, saying, "That

At Stony Beach the water

is

is

very inter-

regarded

as

primarily interesting, even by small boys.

On

weekends,

in

hot midsummer, you can see

governing mechanisms work. pick one's is

way on

always a

lot

It is

tiptoe to find a

so

crowded

that

how

the

one must

hunching place, but there

of standing up anyway; biologists seem to

on beaches, talking at each other, gesturing way things are assembled, bending down to draw diagrams in the sand. By the end of the day, the sand is crisscrossed with a mesh of ordinates, abscissas, curves to prefer standing to indicate the

account for everything in nature.

You

can hear the sound from the beach

before you see the people. noise, half-shout, half-song,

ously raised

You

human

is

that

made by

at a distance,

most extraordinary

confluent, simultane-

voices, explaining things to each other.

hear a similar sound

ning Lecture, the

It

at the close

MBL's weekly grand

of the Friday Eve-

occasion,

when

the

guest lecturers from around the world turn up to present their

most stunning pieces of science. As the audience flows

out of the auditorium, there

is

the

same

jubilant descant, the

TheMBL

63

great sound of crowded people explaining things to each

other as

fast as their

minds

will

work.

You

cannot make out

individual words in the mass, except that the recurrent

—

phrase, "But look

" keeps

bobbing above the surf of

lan-

guage.

Not many institutions can produce this spontaneous musummer after summer, year after year. It takes a

sic at will,

special gift, it.

Perhaps

after it

all.

and the this

The

works, but

can't

seem

is

scale it

MBL

appears to have been born with

an aspect of the way is

very small, and

it is

makes a nice thought

to get anything straight or

we

build language

not

at all clear

for a time

how

when we

do anything

right.

Autonomy

Working

a typewriter by touch, like riding a bicycle

or strolling on a path, a glancing thought.

it

fumble and practiced

skills,

you need

done by not giving do, your fingers

To do

things involving

keys.

to turn loose the systems of

mus-

and nerves responsible for each maneuver, place them

cles

on

wrong

hit the

best

is

Once you

their

own, and

authority in

this,

stay out of

since

you get

it.

There

to decide

is

no

real loss

of

whether to do the

thing or not, and you can intervene and embellish the tech-

nique any time you

like; if

you want

to ride a bicycle back-

ward, or walk with an eccentric loping gait giving a skip every fourth step, whistling at the

do

that.

But

keeping a free

you

It is

last

sticking out the other foot in time to break the

will

end up immobilized, vibrating with

fatigue.

a blessing to have options for choice and change in

the learning of such unconsciously coordinated

were born with

surely miss the variety.

ing world

if

we

all

bicycles. If

acts. If

we

these knacks inbuilt, automated like ants,

all

we would from

details,

with each step and catching yourself at the

moment by fall,

you concentrate your attention on the

touch with each muscle, thrusting yourself into

in

fall

if

little

same time, you can

It

would be

walked and skipped

we were

all

alike,

genetically

play the piano deftly from birth,

a less interest-

and never

programmed

we might never

fell

to

learn to

understand music.

The

rules are different for the complicated, coordinated,

fantastically skilled sides.

64

We

manipulations

do not have

we perform with our inOur smooth-

to learn anything.

Autonomy 65

muscle

cells are

no help from

born with complete instructions,

in

need of

and they work away on their

us,

schedules, modulating the

lumen of blood

vessels,

own

moving

things through intestines, opening and closing tubules ac-

cording to the requirements of the entire system. Secretory elaborate their products in privacy; the heart contracts

cells

and

relaxes;

hormones are

sent off to react silently with cell

membranes, switching adenyl other signals on and

off; cells

cyclase, prostaglandin,

and

communicate with each other

by simply touching; organelles send messages to other organelles;

sonal

all this

word from

goes on continually, without ever a perus.

The arrangement

that of an ecosys-

is

tem, with the operation of each part being governed by the state

and function of

going well,

When

the other parts.

all

as they generally are,

it is

an

things are

infallible

mech-

anism.

But now the autonomy of garded

as inviolate,

is

open

this interior

to question.

domain, long

re-

The experimental

psychologists have recently found that visceral organs can

be taught to do various things,

as easily as a

boy learns

to

ride a bicycle, by the instrumental techniques of operant

conditioning. If a thing at a signal,

is

done

in the

way

the teacher wants,

and a suitable reward given immediately to

reinforce the action,

it

becomes learned.

Rats,

rewarded by

stimulation of their cerebral "pleasure centers," have been instructed to speed

up or slow down

their hearts at a signal,

or to alter their blood pressures, or switch off certain waves

electroencephalograms and switch on others.

in their

The same technology

has been applied to

human

beings,

with other kinds of rewards, and the results have been

claimed that you can teach your kidneys to

startling. It

is

change the

rate of urine formation, raise or

blood pressure, change your heart waves,

lower your

rate, write different brain

at will.

There

is

already talk of a breakthrough in the prevention

The Lives of a

66

Cell

and treatment of human disease. According

when

the technology

lead to

new

is

to proponents,

perfected and extended

it

will surely

can be trained

possibilities for therapy. If a rat

blood vessels of one of his ears more than those

to dilate the

of the other, as has been reported, what rich experiences in self-control

and self-operation may

ahead for man?

lie just

There are already

cryptic advertisements in the Personal

columns of

magazines, urging the purchase of elec-

literary

tronic headsets for the training and regulation of one's

own

brain waves, according to one's taste.

You

can have

Not

to

it.

downgrade

and one ought to

it.

It is

feel elated

extremely important,

know,

I

by the prospect of taking per-

sonal charge, calling the shots, running one's cells around like toy trains.

the thought

them

all

Now that we know that viscera can be taught,

comes

we've been neglecting

naturally that

these years, and by judicious application of

human

intelligence, these primitive structures can be trained to

whatever standards of behavior we wish to

My

trouble, to be quite candid,

myself. If

I

were informed tomorrow

communication with

my

that

would become deeply depressed.

I

now mine

would have the hope of

me and my

ing would save

am, to face the

my

than

liver.

bailing out,

make

hepatic decisions, and I

would not be able

They

are

I

in direct

take over,

I

told, forty

which

I

had

pleased; at least

if I

could find a

open a door. Nothwere in charge. For I

to I

considerably

I

less intelligent

prefer not to be obliged to,

all

whatever they do.

better off without

It

first

thing to do.

rest

of

my working

my

intervention, in

to think of the

have the same feeling about the

parts.

them.

am, moreover, constitutionally unable to

ever. I

how

liver, if

facts squarely, I

jet in

to operate as

parachute and discover quickly

was

sooner be

I'd

thousand feet over Denver, that the 747 a coach seat was

I

now

and could

liver,

set for

a lack of confidence in

is

might be something of a temptation to

Autonomy 67

take over

so in real

my

brain,

life. I

on paper, but

would

cannot imagine doing

I

lose track, get things

mixed up, turn

on wrong cells at wrong times, drop things. I doubt if I would ever be able to think up my own thoughts. My cells were born, or differentiated anyway, knowing how to do this kind of thing together. If I moved in to organize them they would resent it, perhaps become frightened, perhaps swarm out into my ventricles like bees.

Although been

it is,

satisfied

as

I

say, a temptation.

with the operation of

running

my

I

have never

brain,

and

it

There are several

be fun to

try

things

would change, given the opportunity:

I

it

myself, just once.

really

might

certain

memories that tend to slip away unrecorded, others I've had enough of and would prefer to delete, certain notions I'd just as

soon didn't keep popping

in, trains

of thought that

go round and round without getting anywhere, rather like this one. I've always suspected that some of the cells in there are fluffing off

more

much of

could do with a

On

the time, and I'd like to see a

attention and real work. Also, while I'm about bit

more

balance, however,

I

think

there

it

best.

much autonomy

I

best to stay out of this

would be no end

responsibilities. I'd rather leave all

with as

it,

respect.

Once you began,

business.

little

my

to the

automatic functions

as they please,

and hope for the

Imagine having to worry about running leukocytes,

keeping

track,

herding them here and there, listening for

signals. After the first flush

of pride in ownership,

it

would

be exhausting and debilitating, and there would be no time for anything else.

What

to do, then?

have learned anything

It

cannot simply be

technologies will be put to use, sooner or

or worse, as

it is

in

our nature to do.

We

we new

left there. If

at all in this century,

it is

that

all

later, for better

cannot expect an

exception for the instrumental conditioning of autonomic functions.

We

will

be driven to make use of

it,

trying to

The Lives of a

68

Cell

communicate with our and

it

will

internal environment, to meddle,

consume so much of our energy

up even more cut

off

that

we

will

end

from things outside, missing the main

sources of the sensation of living. I

have a suggestion for a way out. Given the capacity to

control autonomic functions, modulate brain waves, run cells,

why

it

be possible to employ exactly the

go

in precisely the opposite direction?

shouldn't

same technology

to

Instead of getting in there and taking things over, couldn't

we

learn to disconnect altogether, uncouple, detach, and

float free? it,

You would

you

that

let

only need to be careful,

go of the

if

you

tried

right end.

Of course, people have been trying to do this sort of thing for a long time, by other techniques and with varying de-

grees of luck. This

come

to think of

under a master, yourself.

Your

it.

is

what Zen archery seems

You

learn, after long

to release the

fingers

to

months of study

arrow without releasing

must do the releasing, on

made.

this,

You

their

it

own,

When you have no matter where the arrow goes, you have it

remotely, like the opening of a flower. learned

be about,

can step outside for a look around.

Organdies as Organisms

We

seem

to be living

tion, so far

through the biologic revolu-

anyway, without being upheaved or

even much disturbed by entirely clear about just it

for granted.

which there

is

It is

what

it is,

it.

Even without being

we are all

learning to take

a curious, peaceful sort of revolution, in

no general apprehension

that old views are

being outraged and overturned. Instead, whole, great

new

blocks of information are being brought in almost daily and

put precisely down in what were previously empty spaces. The news about DNA and the genetic code did not displace an earlier dogma; there was nothing much there to be moved aside. Molecular biology did not drive out older, fixed views about the intimate details of cell function.

seem

to

We

be starting

not only take

at the it

for granted

—we tend

the biologic revolution as though expecting to

from

We

beginning, from scratch. to talk

about

make

profits

rather like a version of last century's industrial

it,

revolution. All sorts of revolutionary changes in technology

are postulated for the future, ranging from final control of

human

disease to solutions of the world food and popula-

tion problems.

futures

we

We are even beginning to argue about which

like

and which we prefer to cancel. Questions

about the merits of genetic engineering, the cloning of desirable

human

beings from single

cells,

and even,

I

sup-

pose, the possibility that two heads might actually be better

than one, are already being debated at seminars.

69

The Lives of a

70

So

far,

anything prise, still

Cell

we don't seem to have been really shocked by among the items of new knowledge. There is sur-

even astonishment, but not yet dismay. Perhaps

too early to expect

It is

this,

some, for myself anyway, organelles. little

my

and

may

it

I

was raised

engines inside

my

in

what

is

I

can sense

being learned about

were obscure

in the belief that these cells,

ahead.

lie just

not too early to begin looking for trouble.

it is

owned and operated by me or

my

cellular delegates, private, submicroscopic bits of

Now,

intelligent flesh.

most important ones

The evidence

is

it

appears,

some of them, and

the

at that, are total strangers.

strong, and direct.

The membranes

lining

the inner compartment of mitochondria are unlike other

animal

cell

membranes, and resemble most

membranes of

bacteria.

qualitatively different

and

from

strikingly similar to bacterial

microbial

The

DNA the DNA

The

RNA

DNA,

it

is

closely the

of mitochondria of animal

DNA;

moreover,

The ribosomes

like

membranes.

closely associated with

of mitochondria matches the organelles'

but not that of the nucleus.

is

cell nuclei

DNA,

inside the mito-

chondria are similar to bacterial ribosomes, and different

from animal ribosomes. The mitochondria do not novo in cells; they are always there, replicating

independently of the replication of the

down from egg

to

newborn; a few come

arise de

on their own, They travel

cell.

in with the

sperm,

but most are maternal passengers.

The and

chloroplasts in

all

plants are, similarly, independent

self-replicating lodgers, with their

own

DNA and RNA

and ribosomes. In structure and pigment content they are the images of prokaryotic blue-green algae.

been reported

It

has recently

that the nucleic acid of chloroplasts

homologous with

that

is,

in fact,

of certain photosynthetic micro-

organisms.

There may be more. It has been suggested that flagellae cilia were once spirochetes that joined up with the other

and

Organelles as Organisms

when nucleated

prokaryotes gether.

The centrioles and

cells

71

were being pieced

some

basal bodies are believed in

own

quarters to be semiautonomous organisms with their separate genomes. Perhaps there are others,

to-

unrecog-

still

nized.

only hope

I

It

can retain

I

surprising that

is

calmly, as though

it

title

we

to

my

nuclei.

take information like this so

fitted in nicely

with notions we've had

along. Actually, the suggestion that chloroplasts and

all

mitochondria might be endosymbionts was made

ago

as

long

as

1885, but one might expect, nevertheless, that con-

would have sent the investigaBut this is a sober, indus-

firmation of the suggestion

tors out into the streets, hallooing.

trious field,

and the work goes on methodically, with special

interest just

There

now

in the

molecular genetics of organelles.

careful, restrained speculation

is

there in the

probably engulfed by larger

cells

more than

ago and have simply stayed there ever

The

usual

way of looking

captured to supply

own, or

on how they got were

place, with a consensus that they

first

ATP

at

them

is

a billion years

since.

as enslaved creatures,

on

their

cells

une-

for cells unable to respire

to provide carbohydrate

and oxygen for

quipped for photosynthesis. This master-slave arrangement is

the

common view of full-grown

But there

is

the other side.

From

biologists, eukaryotes

their

own

standpoint, the

organelles might be viewed as having learned early

have the best of possible worlds, with to themselves

all.

least effort

how

and

and their progeny. Instead of evolving

to

risk

as

we

have done, manufacturing longer and elaborately longer strands of

DN A, and running ever-increasing risks of mutat-

ing into evolutionary cul-de-sacs, they elected to stay small

and

stick to

one

line of

work.

To

accomplish

this,

and

to

assure themselves the longest possible run, they got themselves inside It

is

a

all

good

the rest of us.

thing for the entire enterprise that mito-

The Lives of a

72

Cell

chondria and chloroplasts have remained small, conservative,

and

stable, since these

two organelles

are, in a funda-

mental sense, the most important living things on earth.

Between them they produce the oxygen and arrange

for

its

run the place.

use. In effect, they

My mitochondria comprise a very large proportion of me. I

cannot do the calculation, but

much of them Looked

I

suppose there

sheer dry bulk as there

in

way,

at in this

almost as

is

the rest of me.

is

could be taken for a very large,

I

motile colony of respiring bacteria, operating a complex

system of nuclei, microtubules, and neurons for the pleasure

and sustenance of

their families,

and running,

at the

mo-

ment, a typewriter. I

am

do

intimately involved, and obliged to

of essential work for

my

mitochondria.

membranes of

the outer

enzymes attached Each of them, by

each, and a

to the cristae

all

My

good many of

I

am

Now

the

must be synthesized by me.

accounts, makes only

enough of its own

materials to get along on, and the rest must

And

a great deal

nuclei code out

come from me.

who has to do the worrying. know about the situation, I can find

the one

that

I

of things to worry about. Viruses, for example.

all

If

kinds

my

or-

ganelles are really symbiotic bacteria, colonizing me, what's to prevent

them from catching

a thing as lysogeny,

ganelles?

Then

mitochondria

there

all

a virus, or

is

the question of

die with me, or did

of mine along with their mother's; not worry me,

I

if

they have such

from conveying a phage

know, but

it

my

my

to other or-

estate.

Do my

children get

this sort

some

of thing should

does.

is the whole question of my identity, and, my human dignity. I did not mind it when of my descent from lower forms of life. I had

Finally, there

more than I first

in

that,

learned

mind an arboreal family of beetle-browed,

speechless,

hairy sub-men, ape-like, and I've never objected to forebears. Indeed, being Welsh,

I

them

feel the better for

as it,

Organelles as Organisms

having clearly risen above them

in

my

time of evolution.

a source of satisfaction to be part of the

is

73

It

improvement of

the species.

But not these from single peace with

things.

that, if

humiliation that I

had never bargained on descent

I

without nuclei.

cells

were

it

have not,

I

have brought them

I

my

could even make

but there

all,

in a real sense,

is

the additional

descended

at all.

along with me, or perhaps they have

all

brought me. It

no good standing on dignity

is

this,

and better not to

are,

moving about

own

me

is

a mystery.

They

are

much

They

feel like strangers, but

that the

same

creatures, precisely the

the thought

comes

same, are out there grass,

in the cells

of sea gulls, and whales,

and seaweed, and hermit crabs, and

ther inland in the leaves of the beech in in the family

even

in

that fly

connected;

I

I

regret

my feel

relatives,

a

new that

mitochondria.

If

I

once removed,

cannot be

concentrate,

in closer

am

over

I

touch with

can imagine that

them; they do not quite squirm, but there I

is,

I

from

cannot help thinking that

knew more about them, and how our synchrony, I would have a new way to only

I

all

kind of information, for me, and I

time to time, a kind of tingle. if

fur-

backyard,

of skunks beneath the back fence, and

somewhat

is

my

on the window. Through them,

have close

the place. This

my

closely

less

hill.

under the

and

There they

than to each other and to the free-living

bacteria out

and dune

It

cytoplasm, breathing for

but strangers.

flesh,

related to

try.

my

in

in a situation like

I

they maintain explain music

to myself.

There

is

something

intrinsically

symbiotic relations, necessarily, but bly the most ancient and

one, which

is

is

all

proba-

most firmly established of

seems especially equable. There dation, and

good-natured about this

all,

nothing resembling pre-

no pretense of an adversary stance on either

The Lives of a

74

side. If

Cell

you were looking

for something like natural law to

take the place of the "social

Darwinism" of a century ago,

you would have a hard time drawing lessons from the sense of

life

there

alluded to by chloroplasts and mitochondria, but

it is.

Germs

mm /

atc hing television,

^mfmf

total

we

you'd think

jeopardy, surrounded on

lived at bay, in

all

sides by hu-

man-seeking germs, shielded against infection

and death only by a chemical technology keep

killing

them

off.

We

ants everywhere, into the air of

and with

special

own germs

that

that enables us to

are instructed to spray disinfect-

our bedrooms and kitchens

energy into bathrooms, since

seem the worst

kind.

We

it is

our very

explode clouds

of aerosol, mixed for good luck with deodorants, into our noses, mouths, underarms, privileged crannies

We

the intimate insides of our telephones. antibiotics to Plastic

is

the

minor scratches and

new

tumblers of hotels

protector; in

more

the already plastic seal the toilet seats

cell,

whole through diligence and

We

still

think of

them with

most

ultraviolet light.

and we only

visible

trying to

stay alive

and

fear.

disease as the

modernized kind of demonology,

teria are the saries.

human

plastic.

and

where the microbes are always

get at us, to tear us cell from

nized,

them with

we wrap

plastic,

like state secrets after irradiating

We live in a world

seal

—even into

apply potent

work of an orgain

which the bac-

and centrally placed of our adver-

We assume that they must somehow relish what they

They come after us for profit, and there are so many of them that disease seems inevitable, a natural part of the human condition; if we succeed in eliminating one kind of disease there will always be a new one at hand, waiting to

do.

take

its

place.

These are paranoid delusions on a

societal scale, explain-

75

The Lives of a

76

Cell

able in part by our need for enemies, and in part by our

memory

of what things used to be

like.

Until a few decades

ago, bacteria were a genuine household threat, and

al-

though most of us survived them, we were always aware of the nearness of death.

We

out of death.

We moved, with our families,

and

in

had lobar pneumonia, meningococcal

meningitis, streptococcal infections, diphtheria, endocarditis,

enteric fevers, various septicemias, syphilis, and, always,

everywhere, tuberculosis. Most of these have of

us,

now

most

left

thanks to antibiotics, plumbing, civilization, and

money, but we remember. In real

however, even

life,

in

our worst circumstances

we

have always been a relatively minor interest of the vast microbial world. Pathogenicity

is

not the rule. Indeed,

it

occurs so infrequently and involves such a relatively small

number of species, considering teria

on the

earth, that

usually results

the

huge population of

bac-

has a freakish aspect. Disease

it

from inconclusive negotiations for symbiosis,

an overstepping of the line by one side or the other, a biologic misinterpretation of borders.

Some

bacteria are only harmful to us

exotoxins, and they only

diseased themselves. streptococci are

do

The

we

toxin.

is

when

they

make

they are, in a sense,

toxins of diphtheria bacilli and

it is

the virus that provides the

Uninfected bacteria are uninformed.

catch diphtheria

involvement

when

produced when the organisms have been

infected by bacteriophage;

code for

this

it is

When

a virus infection, but not of us.

Our

not that of an adversary in a straightforward

game, but more

like

blundering into someone

else's acci-

dent. I

can think of a few microorganisms, possibly the tubercle

bacillus, the syphilis spirochete, the malarial parasite,

few others, to infect in

that

human

have a selective advantage beings, but there

is

and a

in their ability

nothing to be gained,

an evolutionary sense, by the capacity to cause

illness

or

Germs

77

may be something of a disadvantage lethal risks more frightening to The man who catches a meningococcus is

death. Pathogenicity for

most microbes, carrying

them than in

to us.

considerably

danger for

less

his

life,

even without

chemotherapy, than meningococci with the bad luck to catch a man.

on the is

Most meningococci have the sense to stay out During epidemics this

surface, in the rhinopharynx.

where they are

population, and

be found

to

of the host

in the majority

generally goes well.

it

It

is

only in the

unaccountable minority, the "cases," that the line

and then there of

all

is

the devil to pay

Staphylococci live

bacteria.

but most

When

little

all

over

us,

and seem to have adapted

our skin that are uncongenial to most other

you count them up, and

trouble

we have

the destruction of tissues

us,

it is

we

on the

can blame a large part of

zeal of

our

Hemolytic streptococci are among our

own

cells;

it

is

leukocytes.

closest intimates,

to the extent of sharing antigens with the

of our muscle

remarkable

with the relation. Only a few of

us are plagued by boils, and

even

sides,

crossed,

for the meningococci.

to conditions in

how

on both

is

membranes

our reaction to their presence,

can carry brucella for long periods

in

in

We

the form of rheumatic fever, that gets us into trouble.

the cells of our

reticuloendothelial system without any awareness of their existence; then cyclically, for reasons not understood but

probably related to immunologic reactions on our part, sense them, and the reaction of sensing

is

we

the clinical dis-

ease.

Most

bacteria are totally preoccupied with browsing,

al-

tering the configurations of organic molecules so that they

become usable for the energy needs of other forms of life. They are, by and large, indispensable to each other, living in

interdependent communities

become symbionts

in

more

in the soil

or sea.

Some have

specialized, local relations,

ing as working parts in the tissues of higher organisms.

liv-

The

78

The Lives of a

Cell

root nodules of legumes would have neither form nor function without the masses of rhizobial bacteria

swarming

into

root hairs, incorporating themselves with such intimacy that

only an electron microscope can detect which membranes are bacterial and which plant. Insects have colonies of bacthe mycetocytes, living in

teria,

ing heaven

knows what but being

of animal intestinal

And

them

tracts are part

like little glands, do-

The

essential.

microfloras

of the nutritional system.

then, of course, there are the mitochondria and chloro-

plasts,

permanent residents

The microorganisms worst way

— the ones

in everything.

seem

that

that really

to

have

in for us in the

it

appear to wish us

ill

— turn

out on close examination to be rather more like bystanders,

replicate

if

They

will

invade and

given the chance, and some of them

will get into

strays, strangers in

our deepest

tissues

from the and

cold.

set forth in the

blood, but

response to their presence that makes the disease. nals for fighting off bacteria are so powerful,

many

different defense mechanisms, that

midst of explosive devices; It is

we

our

and involve so

we

danger from them than from the invaders.

it is

Our arse-

are in

We

more

live in the

are mined.

the information carried by the bacteria that

we cannot

abide.

The gram-negative bacteria are the best examples of this. They display lipopolysaccharide endotoxin in their walls, and these macromolecules are read by our worst of bad news. are likely to turn

bomb,

When we

on every defense

defoliate, blockade, seal off,

sues in the area. Leukocytes cytic, release

tissues as the

very

sense lipopolysaccharide, at

our disposal; we

and destroy

become more

all

the

we will tis-

actively phago-

lysosomal enzymes, turn sticky, and aggregate

together in dense masses, occluding capillaries and shutting off the

blood supply. Complement

point in

its

is

switched on

sequence to release chemotactic

in leukocytes

at the right

signals, calling

from everywhere. Vessels become hyperreac-

Germs

79

epinephrine so that physiologic concentrations sud-

tive to

denly possess necrotizing properties. Pyrogen

is

released

from leukocytes, adding fever to.hemorrhage, necrosis, and shock.

It is

a shambles.

All of this seems unnecessary, panic-driven.

nothing

intrinsically

look awful, or feel awful, that

it

signifies the

There

poisonous about endotoxin, but

when sensed by cells.

it

is

must

Cells believe

presence of gram-negative bacteria, and

they will stop at nothing to avoid this threat.

used to think that only the most highly developed,

I

civilized animals could

be fooled

The horseshoe

a primitive fossil of a beast, ancient

and

crab

uncitified, but

by endotoxin

is

he

is

just as

as a rabbit

in this

way, but

it is

not

so.

vulnerable to disorganization

or a man.

Bang has shown that an body cavity will cause ponderous, immovable

injection of a very small dose into the

the aggregation of hemocytes in

masses that block the vascular channels, and a gelatinous clot brings the circulation to a standstill.

It is

now known

that a limulus clotting system, perhaps ancestral to ours,

centrally involved in the reaction. Extracts of the

can be

made to The

endotoxin.

jell

is

hemocytes

by adding extremely small amounts of

self-disintegration of the

whole animal

that

follows a systemic injection can be interpreted as a well-

intentioned but lethal error. a

good one, when used with

The mechanism

is

itself

quite

precision and restraint, admira-

bly designed for coping with intrusion by a single bac-

terium: the hemocyte

would be

attracted to the site, extrude

the coagulable protein, the microorganism

would be en-

trapped and immobilized, and the thing would be finished. It is

when confronted by

the

overwhelming

signal of free

molecules of endotoxin, evoking memories of vibrios great numbers, that the limulus his

defenses

It is,

at

flies

into panic, launches

in all

once, and destroys himself.

basically, a

response to propaganda, something like

the panic-producing

pheromones

that slave-taking ants re-

The Lives of a

80

Cell

lease to disorganize the colonies of their prey. I

think

it

likely that

many of our diseases work in

this

way.

Sometimes, the mechanisms used for overkill are immunologic, but often,

more

as in the limulus

primitive kinds of

memory.

pieces because of symbols, and this

we

than to any host of predators.

We are

We

model, they are tear ourselves to

more vulnerable

to

are, in effect, at the

mercy of our own Pentagons, most of the time.

Your Very

Good Health

v

e spend

-.

m^W

$80

Whichever, tion

it is

billion a year

reminding ourselves, or it is

on

is

it

health, as

we keep

now $90

billion?

a shocking sum, and just to

to suggest the presence of a vast,

prise, intricately

men-

powerful enter-

organized and coordinated.

It is,

however,

a bewildering, essentially scatterbrained kind of business,

expanding

steadily without being

planned or run by anyone

Whatever sum we spent last year was only discovered after we'd spent it, and nobody can be sure what in particular.

next year's

bill will

be.

The

social scientists, attracted

problems of this magnitude, are beginning to swarm all

more and more data

shipping to decide

IBM

lips

whether

a proper industry or a house of

this is

amount of money being

all

and shaking their heads,

off to the computers, trying

There doesn't seem

cards.

by

from

quarters to take a closer look, and the economists are

over the place, pursing their

it

in

be any doubt about the

to

spent, but

it is

less certain

where

goes, and for what. It

has

become something of a convenience

whole endeavor illusion that

turns out,

which

is

it is

as the in a

to refer to the

"Health Industry." This provides the

general way

on demand,

a single,

one thing, and that it unambiguous product,

all

health. Thus, health care has

for medicine. Health-care delivery

is

become

the

along with hospitals and the other professionals with doctors,

now known

new name

what doctors now do,

who work

collectively as the health provid-

81

— The Lives of a

82

ers.

The

Cell

become health consumers. Once you no stopping. Just recently, to cor-

patients have

start

on

rect

some of

this line, there's

the various flaws, inequities, logistic defects,

and near-bankruptcies

in today's health-care delivery sys-

tem, the government has

familiarly as

invented

officially

new

institutions

Maintenance Organizations, already known

called Health

HMO's,

spreading out across the country like

post offices, ready to distribute in neat packages, as though

from a huge, newly stocked inventory, Sooner or word.

It is

later,

we are bound

health.

to get into trouble with this

too solid and unequivocal a term to be used as

we

a

euphemism and

this

I

am

we may be overdoing

worried that

agreed not to

Illness still

and death

be what

to

unmentionable

ing, to conceal an

how

seems

about

talk

still

exist

it,

are attempting. taxing

reality that

in public.

It

its

we've somewon't work.

and cannot be hidden.

beset by plain diseases, and

we do

mean-

We

are

not control them;

they are loose on their own, afflicting us unpredictably and haphazardly.

We are only able to deal with them when they we must use the methods we can, for better or worse.

have made their appearance, and of medical care for It

fact

would be is

best

this, as

a better world

that diseases

if this

do not develop

were not

just

ness about the preservation of health. sick only

true, but the

because of careless-

We

do not become

because of a failure of vigilance. Most

illnesses,

major ones, are blind accidents

we have

especially the

no idea how

to prevent.

We

are really not

preventing disease or preserving health

and we are not likely to be

until

all

that that

— not yet

we have learned

good

at

anyway

a great deal

about disease mechanisms.

There

is

disagreement on

the believers

among

this point,

of course.

us are convinced that once

Some of we get a

health-care delivery system that really works, the country

might become a sort of gigantic spa, offering, like the labels on European mineral- water bottles, preventives for every-

Your Very Good Health

thing from

word

weak kidneys

we

a surprise that

It is

is

83

to moroseness.

haven't already learned that the

a fallible incantation. Several decades of mental

health have not

made

been established

that a

schizophrenia go away, nor has it community mental-health center can yet maintain the mental health of a community. These admirable institutions are demonstrably useful for the manage-

ment of certain forms of mental

disease, but that

is

another

matter.

My complaint about the terms is that they sound too much A Health Maintenance Organization, if

like firm promises.

well organized and financed, will have the best features of

communew name.

a clinic and hospital and should be of value to any

but the people will expect

nity, It

to live

it

become, with the sign over

will

its

tion for the distribution of health,

disease develops in

anyone

up

to

door, an

and

if

thereafter, as

its

official institu-

intractable heart it

surely will (or

multiple sclerosis, or rheumatoid arthritis, or the majority

of cancers that can neither be prevented nor cured, or chronic nephritis, or stroke, or moroseness), the people will

begin looking sidelong and asking questions in a low voice.

Meanwhile, we are paying too spect, to the built-in durability

man

organism.

balance. loyal

It is

about

Its

little

and

re-

surest tendency

is

toward

stability

and

a distortion, with something profoundly dis-

it,

to picture the

fallible contraption,

human being

as a teetering,

always needing watching and patching,

always on the verge of flapping to pieces; that

attention,

and sheer power of the hu-

this

is

the doctrine

people hear most often, and most eloquently, on

information media.

We

ought

to

all

our

be developing a much

better system for general education about

human

health,

with more auricular time for acknowledgment, and even some celebration, of the absolute marvel of good health that is

the real lot of most of us, most of the time.

The

familiar questions about the needs of the future in

84

The Lives of a

medicine are

Cell

before

still

us.

What items should be available,

optimally, in an ideal health-care delivery system?

you estimate the

for a

forth, in the best

new way

tests,

hospital beds, x-rays,

My

of rational worlds?

develop answers

to

How do

need, per patient per year, for doc-

drugs, laboratory

tors, nurses,

and so

total

is

suggestion

to examine, in detail,

the ways in which the various parts of today's medical-care

technology are used, from one day to the next, by the most sophisticated, knowledgeable,

sumers

and presumably

who now have full access to the system experienced,

well-trained,

middle-aged,

satisfied

con-

—namely, the married-with-

family internists. I

could design the questionnaire myself,

many

times in the

last five

years have the

I

think.

How

members of your

family, including yourself, had any kind of laboratory test?

How many

complete physical examinations? X-rays? Elec-

How

trocardiograms?

often, in a year's turning, have

you

prescribed antibiotics of any kind for yourself or your family?

How

How

many

formal

many

hospitalizations?

How much surgery? How many

consultations with a psychiatrist?

visits to

a doctor, any doctor, including yourself?

you got this kind of information, and added everything up, you would find a quite different set of I

will bet that if

figures

from the ones now being projected

for the population at large. unscientific way,

data,

still

have tried

by asking around among

in official circles it

already, in an

my

soft but fairly consistent, reveal that

internist friends

dentists; almost all

My

none of

my

few have been x-rayed except by

have resisted surgery; laboratory

in the family are

aspirin, but they

friends.

have had a routine physical examination

since military service; very

anyone

I

seem

tests for

extremely rare. They use a

to write very

almost never treat family fever with antibiotics. This

do not become ill; same incidence of chiefly respiratory and to say that they

lot

of

few prescriptions and is

not

these families have the gastrointestinal

Your Very Good Health

everyone

illness as

same number of anxieties and same number on balance, a small

else, the

bizarre notions, and the

number

—

—of frightening or devastating

It will

85

be protested that

diseases.

and their households

internists

are really full-time captive patients and cannot fairly be

compared

to the rest of the population.

As each member of

the family appears at the breakfast table, the encounter in effect, a house-call.

family doctor. This

The

father

in the liveliest sense, a

is,

true, but all the

is

made of

expecting optimal use to be medicine's technology. There

is

and the cost of all items

is

more reason the

access, the

immediately

is

for

range of

full

no problem of

entire health-care delivery system

is,

surely less than that for

hand,

at

nonmedi-

cal families. All the usual constraints that limit the

use of

medical care by the general population are absent. If

my

friends,

hunch, based on the small sample of professional is

correct, these people appear to use

modern medi-

cine quite differently from the ways in which

we have

tematically been educating the public over the last

decades.

It

cannot be explained away

as

sys-

few

an instance of shoe-

makers' children going without shoes. Doctors' families do tend to complain that they receive

less

medical attention

than their friends and neighbors, but they seem a normal, generally healthy

lot,

with a remarkably low incidence of

iatrogenic illness.

The

great secret,

known

to internists

marriage by

internists' wives,

eral public,

is

Most

that

but

in

most things get better by themselves.

things, in fact, are better by

It is

and learned early

hidden from the gen-

still

conceivable that

morning.

we might be

medical care for everyone needing signed to assure equity, provided

able to provide

it,

we

in a

new

good

system de-

can restrain ourselves,

or our computers, from designing a system in which

all

200

million of us are assumed to be in constant peril of failed

health every day of our lives. In the

same sense

that

our

86

The Lives of a

Cell

system presumes us to be innocent until proved

judicial

guilty, a medical-care system

may work

best

if it starts

with

the presumption that most people are healthy. Left to themselves,

taking

computers may it

as

try to

do

it

in the

opposite way,

given that some sort of direct, continual, profes-

sional intervention

is

required

health of each citizen, and

money on nothing

but

of other things to do

we

all

will

the time to maintain the

end up spending

all

that.

Meanwhile, there

is

we

are to change the

way we

if

together, especially in our

cities, in

a long

our list

live

time. Social health

is

another kind of problem, more complex and urgent, and there will be other

bills to

pay.

Social Talk

same degree

social animals are social with the

Not commitment. all

members are so tied to each other and interdependent as to seem the loosely conjoined cells of a tissue. The social insects are like of

this; is

In

they move, and live

some

all

species, the

their lives, in a mass; a

beehive

a spherical animal. In other species, less compulsively

members make

social, the

their

homes

together, pool re-

sources, travel in packs or schools,

and share the food, but

any single one can survive

detached from the

Others are

social

solitary,

rest.

only in the sense of being more or

less

congenial, meeting from time to time in committees, using

ad hoc occasions for feeding and breed-

social gatherings as

Some

ing.

animals simply nod at each other in passing,

never reaching even a first-name relationship. It is

we

not a simple thing to decide where

time or another in our lives

we manage

imaginable social arrangement.

We

fit,

for at

one

to organize in every

are as interdependent,

especially in our cities, as bees or ants, yet

we

can detach

if

we

wish and go live alone in the woods, in theory anyway.

We

feed and look after each other, constructing elaborate

systems for

this,

cream

pense

ice

books

to tell us

groups, but

and

we

fight as if

even including vending machines in

gas stations, but

how

it

also

We cluster in family

to live off the land.

we were all

to dis-

have numerous

tend, unpredictably, to turn

hanker to accumulate distribute

we

on each other

different species. Collectively,

we

the information in the universe and

around among ourselves

as

though

it

were a

kind of essential foodstuff, ant-fashion (the faintest trace of real

news

in science

has the action of a

pheromone,

lifting

87

The Lives of a

88

Cell

the hairs of workers in laboratories at the ends of the earth),

but each of us also builds a private store of his

knowledge and hides

it

away

have names to label each

like

as self,

reservation that this system of

secret

We

and we believe without

taxonomy

entity, the absolute separateness of each

anism has no discernible function

own

untouchable treasure.

will

guarantee the

of us, but the mech-

in the center

of a crowded

we are essentially nameless, most of our time. Nobody wants to think that the rapidly expanding mass

city;

of mankind, spreading out over the surface of the earth,

blackening the ground, bears any meaningful resemblance to the life of an anthill or a hive.

a

moment

that the

more than

Who

would consider

3 billion of us are a sort of

stupendous animal when we become linked together? are not mindless, nor to the last detail

is

for

We

our day-to-day behavior coded out

by our genomes, nor do

engaged together, compulsively,

in

any

we seem

be

to

single, universal,

stereotyped task analogous to the construction of a nest.

If

we were ever to put all our brains together in fact, to make a common mind the way the ants do, it would be an unthinkable thought,

way over our

Social animals tend to

keep

something huge for their

heads. at a particular thing,

size;

they

work

at

it

generally

ceaselessly

under genetic instructions and genetic compulsion, using to

house the species and protect

There

are, to

the things cities

on

in

together, like building glass and plastic

bling in armies, or landing samples of ourselves into the next galaxy.

these together without being quite sure why, but stop doing one thing and

We are

some of

the land and farming under the sea, or assem-

moon, or sending memoranda

like.

it

assuring permanence.

be sure, superficial resemblances

we do

all

it,

move

to

on the

We do we

can

another whenever we

not committed or bound by our genes to stick

one activity forever, like the wasps. Today's behavior is no more fixed than when we tumbled out over Europe to build cathedrals in the twelfth century. At that time we were to

Talk

Social

89

would go on forever, that this was the way to live, but it was not; indeed, most of us have already forgotten what it was all about. Anything we do in this

convinced that

it

secondary social way, compulsively and with

transient,

our energies but only for a brief period of our

all

history,

cannot be counted as social behavior in the biological sense. If

we

can turn

on and

it

off,

on whims,

it

isn't likely that

our

genes are providing the detailed instructions. Constructing Chartres was good for our minds, but lives

went on, and

it

no more

is

Rome plows or laser

survival in

we found we

our

that

likely that

will find

bombs, or rapid mass

trans-

port or a Mars lander, or solar power, or even synthetic protein.

We

along, but

do tend

it is

to improvise things like this as

clear that

For practical purposes,

we it

would probably be best

not to be biologically social, in the long run.

have a choice, or course, or even a vote.

good news

we are all roped

to learn that

droning away

ally,

at

some

we go

can pick and choose.

It

Not

for us

we

that

would not be

together intellectu-

featureless, genetically driven

collective work, building

something so immense that we can

never see the outlines.

seems especially hard, even

ous, for this to be the attribute of speech,

It

and argument. Leave

the insects and birds, and lesser

But there

of language

is

this

kind of

mammals, and

life

to

fish.

About human speech. more and more disturbingly, as if the

just that

begins to look,

It

gift

is

peril-

burden of a species with the unique

one

thing.

human

the single

trait that

marks us

all

genetically, setting us apart

from

guage

or hive-making, the universal

like nest-building

is,

in

Lan-

life.

We

en-

We

it

cannot be it

the rest of

communally, compulsively, and automatically.

and biologically

gage

all

specific activity of

human without

our minds would die,

it; if

human

beings.

we were to be separated from

as surely as

bees

lost

from the

hive.

We are born knowing how to use language. The capacity to recognize syntax, to organize intelligible sentences,

is

and deploy words into

innate in the

human mind.

We

are

90

The Lives of a

programmed

Cell

to identify patterns

There are invariant and variable are

common

As

to all of us.

and generate grammar. structures in speech that

chicks are

endowed with an

innate capacity to read information in the shapes of over-

hanging shadows, identify the

we

hawk from other

telling

meaning of grammar

in a string

are born this way. According to

examined

birds,

can

Chomsky, who has language

as a biologist looks at live tissue,

it

we

of words, and

"must simply be a biological property of the human mind." The universal attributes of language are genetically set; we do not learn them, or make them up as we go along. We work at this all our lives, and collectively we give it life, but we do not exert the least control over language, not as individuals

or committees or academies or governments.

Language, once

comes

it

motile organism. Parts of ceaseless activity to

which

words are invented and

alive,

behaves

come

like

an active,

are always being changed, by a

of us are committed;

all

inserted, old ones

ing altered or abandoned.

sentences together

it

new

have their mean-

New ways of stringing words and into fashion

and vanish again, but

the underlying structure simply grows, enriches

itself,

ex-

pands. Individual languages age away and seem to die, but

they leave progeny

over the place. Separate languages

all

can exist side by side for centuries without touching each other, maintaining their integrity with the vigor of incompatible tissues.

At other

times,

two languages may come

together, fuse, replicate, and give rise to nests of

new

tongues. If

language

is

at the

core of our social existence, holding

us together, housing us in meaning,

it

may

say that art and music are functions of the

genetically determined

things to this,

do

together. If

and therefore

for one?)

be safe to universal,

mechanism. These are not bad

we

like ants,

do not mind.

also

same

are social creatures because of I

for

one (or should

I

say

we

Information

According human ment This must

to the linguistic school currently

beings are

for recognizing

mean

that

we

on

top,

born with a genetic endow-

all

and formulating language.

possess genes for

mation, with strands of special, peculiarly the discernment of meaning in syntax.

kinds of infor-

all

human

DNA for

We must imagine the

morphogenesis of deep structures,

built into

coding out,

of speech. Correct gram-

mar

like proteins, the parts

our minds, for

(correct in the logical, not fashionable, sense)

much

is

a biologic characteristic of our species as feathers

as

on

birds. If this

true, it would mean that the human mind is some primary sense, to generate more than just

is

preset, in

the parts of speech. Since everything else that as

human behavior

we

recognize

derives from the central mechanism of

language, the same sets of genes are at least indirectly responsible for governing such astonishing behavior as in the

concert

hall,

where hundreds of people crowd together, meditating, listening to music as though

silent, head-tilted,

receiving instructions, or in a gallery,

moving along

slowly,

peering, never looking at each other, concentrating as

though reading directions. This view of things that a

framework

minds

at birth.

to

them, as

for

is

compatible with the very old notion

meaning

is

somehow

built into

our

We start our lives with templates, and attach

we go

along, various things that

fit.

There are

neural centers for generating, spontaneously, numberless

hypotheses about the

facts

of

life.

We store

up information 91

The Lives of a

92

way

the

cells store

find a direct

a

Cell

energy.

When we

deep explosion

in the

enough

are lucky

match between a receptor and a

fact,

to

there

is

mind; the idea suddenly enlarges,

rounds up, bursts with new energy, and begins to

replicate.

At times there are chains of reverberating explosions, shaking everything: the imagination, as

we say, is staggered. human beings, since

This system seems to be restricted to

we

are the only beings with language, although chimpan-

zees

may have

the capability of manipulating symbols with

The great difference between us and the may be the qualitative difference made by

a certain syntax.

other animals speech.

We

live

words, storing

it

by making transformations of energy into up, and releasing

in controlled explo-

it

sions.

Speechless animals cannot do

do, searching for facts to ses,

but

when

single thud.

fit

of thing, and they

this sort

are limited to single-stage transactions.

They wander,

as

the receptor meets

its

match, there

Without language, the energy

that

is

only a

encoiled,

is

springlike, inside information can only be used once. solitary

we

their sparser stock of hypothe-

The

wasp, Sphex, nearing her time of eggs, travels aloft

with a single theory about caterpillars. She

is,

in fact, a

one

to

match the

winged receptor

for caterpillars. Finding

hypothesis, she swoops, pins

and descends to deposit

it

it,

paralyzes

it,

carries

precisely in front of the

it

off,

door of

the round burrow (which, obsessed by a different version

of the same theory, she had prepared beforehand). She

drops the beast, enters the burrow, inspects the interior for last-minute irregularities, then

egg-laying.

comes out

to pull

thought-out business. But

you move the

in for the

if,

while she

is

inside inspecting,

caterpillar a short distance, she has a less

sensible second thought about the matter.

searches for a

moment,

spot, drops

again,

it

it

has the orderly, stepwise look of a well

It

finds

it,

drags

and runs inside

it

She emerges,

back to the original

to

check the burrow

Information

again. If

you move the

caterpillar again, she will repeat the

program, and you can keep her long

totally

preoccupied for as

you have the patience and the heart for

as

93

it.

It is

a

compulsive, essentially neurotic kind of behavior, as mindless as

an Ionesco character, but the wasp cannot imagine

any other way of doing the thing.

Lymphocytes,

like wasps, are genetically

programmed

for

exploration, but each of them seems to be permitted a different, solitary idea.

They roam through

the tissues, sensing

and monitoring. Since there are so many of them, they can

make

They

at a time.

anywhere out seems

to

there,

be

do

their

carry specific information in their surface

receptors, presented in the

It

on the work one notion

collective guesses at almost anything antigenic

surface of the earth, but they must

form of a question:

there,

my particular molecular configuration?

in the

nature of biologic information that

up

energy but also

not only stores

itself

for more.

an insatiable mechanism.

It is

is

as

it

instigates a search

Lymphocytes are apparently informed about everything foreign around them, and fitting

some of them come equipped

for

with polymers that do not exist until organic chemists

synthesize

them

in their laboratories.

The cells can do more programmed with

than predict reality; they are evidently wild guesses as well.

Not

all

animals have lymphocytes with the same range of

information, as you might expect.

system

is

As with language, the

governed by genes, and there are genetic

differ-

ences between species and between inbred animals of the

same

species.

There are polymers

that will

fit

the receptors

of one line of guinea pigs or mice but not others; there are

responders and nonresponders.

When

the connection

is

made, and a particular lym-

phocyte with a particular receptor

is

brought into the pres-

ence of the particular antigen, one of the greatest small spectacles in nature occurs.

The

cell

enlarges, begins mak-

The Lives of a

94

ing

new

Cell

DNA at a great rate, and turns into what

appropriately, a blast. itself into a

It

is

termed,

then begins dividing, replicating

new colony of identical

cells, all

labeled with the

same receptor, primed with the same question. The new cluster is a memory, nothing less. For

this

kind of mechanism to be useful, the

cells are

required to stick precisely to the point.

Any

tendency to wander from the matter

hand, will introduce

grave hazards for the

which they

live.

cells,

Minor

which neighboring

at

ambiguity, any

and even more for the host

may

inaccuracies

in

cause reactions in

are recognized as foreign, and

cells

done in. There is a theory that the process of aging may be due to the cumulative effect of imprecision, a gradual degrading of information.

It is

not a system that allows for

deviating.

Perhaps

it

is

in this respect that

language

differs

most

sharply from other biologic systems for communication.

Ambiguity seems

to

be an

essential, indispensable

for the transfer of information

element

from one place to another by

words, where matters of real importance are concerned. is

often necessary, for

meaning

to

come through,

It

that there

be an almost vague sense of strangeness and askewness. Speechless animals and

locked-on antigen

send the

when

cell off in

a bee

is

cells

cannot do

at the surface

this.

The

specifically

of a lymphocyte does not

search of something totally different;

tracking sugar by polarized light, observing

the sun as though consulting his watch, he does not veer

away

to discover an unimaginable

marvel of a flower. Only

human mind is designed to work in this way, programmed to drift away in the presence of locked-on inforthe

mation, straying from each point in a hunt for a better, different point. If

it

were not for the capacity

for ambiguity, for the

sensing of strangeness, that words in

all

we would have no way of recognizing

languages provide,

the layers of counter-

Information

95

we might be spending all our time To be sure, we would always have had some everyday use to make of the alphabet, and we might have reached the same capacity for small talk, but it is unlikely that we would have been able to evolve from words to Bach. The great thing about human point in meaning, and sitting

on stone

language hand.

is

that

fences, staring into the sun.

it

prevents us from sticking to the matter at

Death

Most

Open

in the

of the dead animals you see on highways near

Out

the cities are dogs, a few cats.

in the country-

the forms and coloring of the dead are

side,

strange; these are the wild creatures. Seen from a car win-

dow

they appear as fragments, evoking memories of wood-

chucks, badgers, skunks, voles, snakes, sometimes the mys-

wreckage of a deer.

terious It is

always a queer shock, part a sudden upwelling of

grief, part

unaccountable amazement.

ing to see an animal dead

than just the location; death, anywhere. the open.

It is

it is

Everything as a kind

edge of

it

You do

a highway.

It is

simply astound-

The outrage

is

more

the impropriety of such visible

is

not expect to see dead animals in

wrong

to see

to see

them anywhere.

wrong in the

world

of abstraction.

a hillside,

If

dies, but

will

them lying out on the

we

you stand

and look around

thing you can catch sight of

most things

It is

the nature of animals to die alone, off some-

where, hidden. highway;

on

is

only

in a

know about

meadow,

it

at the

carefully, almost every-

in the

process of dying, and

be dead long before you

are. If

it

for the constant renewal and replacement going

were not

on before

your eyes, the whole place would turn to stone and sand

under your

feet.

There are some creatures

that

do not seem

they simply vanish totally into their cells

and

do

this.

The

cell

own

becomes two, then

after a while the last trace

is

gone.

It

to die at

four,

and so on,

cannot be seen as

death; barring mutation, the descendants are simply the

96

all;

progeny. Single

first

Death

in the

Open

97

over again. The cycles of the slime mold have

cell, living all

episodes that seem as conclusive as death, but the withered slug, with

stalk

its

and fruiting body,

is

plainly the transient

of a developing animal; the free-swimming amebo-

tissue

produce more

cytes use this organ collectively in order to

of themselves.

There are at

be a

said to

billion billion insects

any moment, most of them with very short

cies

expectan-

by our standards. Someone has estimated that there are

25 million assorted insects hanging in the temperate square mile, thousands of

phere

in a

feet, drifting

like plankton.

some

eaten,

just

They

Who

are dying steadily,

dropping

is

for

some by being of them

in their tracks, tons as

in

they die, invisibly.

anything like the huge

by the certainty of the death of all birds?

stipulated

dead bird

over every

column extending upward

ever sees dead birds,

numbers

air

through the layers of the atmos-

around the earth, disintegrating

A

on the earth

life

an incongruity, more startling than an unex-

pected live bird, sure evidence to the

human mind

that

something has gone wrong. Birds do their dying off somewhere, behind things, under things, never on the wing.

Animals seem to have an alone, hidden.

ways

Even the

instinct for

largest,

performing death

most conspicuous ones

find

to conceal themselves in time. If an elephant missteps

and dies

in

an open place, the herd will not leave him there;

him up and carry the body from place it down in some inexplicably suit-

the others will pick

to place, finally putting

When

able location.

elephant out

in the

elephants encounter the skeleton of an

open, they methodically take up each of

the bones and distribute them, in a ponderous ceremony,

over neighboring acres. It is

a natural marvel. All of the

of the time,

in the

same volume

us each morning, each spring. All

stump, the

fly

struggling

life

as the

we

on the porch

of the earth dies,

new

life

all

that dazzles

see of this

is

floor of the

the

odd

summer

The Lives of a

98

house

in

my

all

Cell

October, the fragment on the highway.

life

I

have lived

with an embarrassment of squirrels in

yard, they are

all

over the place,

my

year long, and

all

I

back-

have

never seen, anywhere, a dead squirrel. suppose

I

it is

just as well. If the earth

were done

the dying

all

in the

were otherwise, and

open, with the dead there to

we would never have it out of our minds. We it much of the time, or think of it as an accident to be avoided, somehow. But it does make the process of dying seem more exceptional than it really is, and harder to engage in at the times when we must ourselves be looked

at,

can forget about

engage. In our way, nature.

The

we conform

obituary pages

we

as best tell

can to the rest of

us of the

news

dying away, while the birth announcements off at the side of the page, inform us of

but

we get no grasp from

are 3 billion of us

this

on the

we

are

our replacements,

of the enormity of scale. There

earth,

dead, on a schedule, within

that

in finer print,

and

all

this lifetime.

3 billion must be

The

vast mortality,

involving something over 50 million of us each year, takes place in relative secrecy.

We

can only really

deaths in our households, or

among our

detached in our minds from

all

in

low

voices; struck

we

the rest,

down, we

the

take to be

We speak of our own

unnatural events, anomalies, outrages.

dead

know of

friends. These,

say, as

though

visible

death can only occur for cause, by disease or violence, avoidably.

We

send off for flowers, grieve, make ceremo-

nies, scatter bones,

unaware of the

rest

of the 3 billion on

same schedule. All of that immense mass of flesh and bone and consciousness will disappear by absorption into the

the earth, without recognition by the transient survivors. Less than a half century from now, our replacements will

have more than doubled the numbers.

we

It is

hard to see

how

can continue to keep the secret, with such multitudes

doing the dying.

We

will

have to give up the notion that

Death

death

is

strange.

catastrophe,

We

in the rest

will

need

or

comfort that

we

more

99

even

about the cycling of life

of the system, and about our connection to the

comes

alive

that dies, cell for cell.

in the recognition all

Open

detestable, or avoidable, or

to learn

process. Everything that

something

in the

seems to be in trade for There might be some

of synchrony, in the information

go down together,

in the best

of company.

Natural Science

The

essential wildness of science as a manifestation of

human behavior is not generally perceived. As we extract new things of value from it, we also keep

discovering parts of the activity that seem in need of better control,

pay

more

less for

it

We'd

efficiency, less unpredictability.

like to

and get our money's worth on some more

The Washington

orderly, businesslike schedule.

are trying to be helpful in

planners

and there are new programs

this,

for the centralized organization of science

all

over the place,

especially in the biomedical field. It

needs thinking about. There

work

is

an almost ungovernable,

biologic

mechanism

and

should not be overlooked.

this

The

at

difficulties are

in scientific

behavior

more conspicuous when

at

its

best,

the problems

are very hard and complicated and the facts not yet

in.

Solutions cannot be arrived at for problems of this sort until the science has been lifted through a preliminary, turbulent

zone of outright astonishment. Therefore, what must be planned

for, in the laboratories

totally unforeseeable. If

it is

engaged

must be designed primarily for the and the celebration of

elicitation

scientific enterprise

ranged so that the separate imaginations

minds can be pooled, and

is

the

of disbelief

It

this is

is

more

a

must be

ar-

human kind of game than

in different

in the abrupt,

aggregation of random notions, intuitions,

100

work,

surprise.

Moreover, the whole

a systematic business.

in the

centrally organized, the system

unaccountable

known

in science

Natural Science

good

as

it

ideas, that the high points are

101

made.

The most mysterious aspect of difficult science is the way is done. Not the routine, not just the fitting together of

things that

no one had guessed

at fitting,

not the making of

connections; these are merely the workaday details, the

methods of operating. They are

interesting, but not as fas-

is that we do it at all, it under compulsion. we do such and I don't know of any other human occupation, even in-

cinating as the central mystery, which that

cluding what

gaged

in

I

have seen of

art, in

which the people en-

are so caught up, so totally preoccupied, so

it

driven beyond their strength and resources. Scientists at

work have

the look of creatures following

genetic instructions; they seem to be under the influence of a deeply placed

human

instinct.

savage play. stands

are, despite their

To

in

they are near to an answer their hair

on end, they sweat, they are awash

adrenalin. a

When

They

young animals engaged

efforts at dignity, rather like

grab the answer, and grab

in their

own

for

them

it first, is

more powerful drive than feeding or breeding or

protect-

ing themselves against the elements. It

sometimes looks

like a lonely activity, but

the opposite of lonely as

nothing so tive field

it is

be.

as

much

There

communal, so interdependent. An

social, so

of science

human behavior can

is

like

an immense intellectual

is

ac-

anthill;

the individual almost vanishes into the mass of minds tum-

bling over each other, carrying information from place to place, passing

There are chemotactic.

it

around

speed of

at the

light.

special kinds of information that

As soon

as a trace

is

back of the neck are caused to tremble, there

convergence of motile minds

flying

intellects,

is

upwind on

of surprise, crowding around the source.

of

seem

to

be

released, receptors at the

It is

an

a massive a gradient infiltration

an inflammation.

There is nothing to touch the spectacle. In the midst of what seems a collective derangement of minds in total, dis-

The Lives of a

102

Cell

order, with bits of information being scattered about, torn to shreds, disintegrated, reconstituted, engulfed, in a kind

of activity that seems as random and agitated as that of bees of the hive, there suddenly emerges, with

in a disturbed part

new

the purity of a slow phrase of music, a single

piece of

truth about nature.

In short,

works.

it

It is

the most powerful and productive

human beings have learned to do together in many centuries, more effective than farming, or hunting and

of the things

or building cathedrals, or making money.

fishing,

stand

my

instinctive behavior, in

It is

how

it

works.

It

view, and

I

cannot be prearranged

do not underany precise

in

way; the minds cannot be lined up in tidy rows and given directions from printed sheets.

mind

instructing each

committees to minds.

it

a bee to

needs

make

You

this

with the pieces

fit

does not work

It

What

to

is

this

cannot get

it

done by

or that piece, for central

made by other

instructed

way.

for the air to be

make honey, you do not

made

you want

right. If

issue protocols

on

solar

navigation or carbohydrate chemistry, you put him together

with other bees (and you'd better do

do not

tary bees

stay alive)

this quickly, for soli-

and you do what you can

arrange the general environment around the hive. is

right, the science will

come

in

own

its

to

If the air

season, like pure

honey.

There differs

is

something

like aggression in the activity,

from other forms of aggressive behavior

sort of destruction as the objective.

While

looks and feels like aggression: get at it

out, grab

but there

is

it, it's

probably, the end the science

mine!

nothing

is

rupted, there

is

is

It is like

at the

it

a sigh. But then,

new

in

it

having no

going on,

uncover

it,

it

bring

a primitive running hunt,

end of

going well, the sigh a yawping

it,

it is

but

to if is

be injured. More the air

is

right

immediately

and

inter-

question, and the wild, tum-

bling activity begins once more, out of control

all

over again.

Man

Natural

The

social scientists, especially the economists, are

moving deeply

into ecology

and the environment

these days, with disquieting results.

how

It

goes some-

against the grain to learn that cost-benefit analyses can

be done neatly on

whole oceans.

It is

lakes,

meadows, nesting gannets, even

hard enough to confront the environ-

mental options ahead, and the hard choices, but even harder

when

Even the new jargon is somehow, to read the word means that there are so many

the price tags are so visible.

disturbing:

hurts the spirit,

it

environments,

when

the plural

alternatives there to be sorted through, as in a market,

and

voted on. Economists need cool heads and cold hearts for this sort

of work, and they must write in

icy,

often skiddy

prose.

The degree of the earth's

and

it

to

which we are

life is just

all

come

easily.

us,

human thought. We've just made our way

means another revolution

This will not

involved in the control

beginning to dawn on most of for

through inconclusive revolutions on the same topic, trying

make up our minds how we feel about nature. As soon we arrived at one kind of consensus, like an enormous committee, we found it was time to think it through all over, and now here we are, at it again. The oldest, easiest-to-swallow idea was that the earth was to

as

man's personal property, a combination of garden, zoo,

bank

vault,

and energy source, placed

at

consumed, ornamented, or pulled apart betterment of mankind was, as

our disposal to be as

we

we understood

wished. it,

the

The

whole 103

The Lives of a

104

Cell

point of the thing. Mastery over nature, mystery and

all,

was

few years we were wrenched away from

this

a moral duty and In the

last

social obligation.

way of looking

at

agreement

we had

but

that

it,

and arrived wrong.

it

at

something

We still argue

masters of nature that

pendent on the

rest

of life

that

as are the leaves

We are part of the system. One way to put is

or midges or it is

a loosely formed, spherical organism, with

parts linked in symbiosis. ers

nor operators;

for the

the defish.

that the earth

working

all its

We are, in this view, neither ownwe might

at best,

see ourselves as motile

tissue specialized for receiving information

best of

the details,

we are not we thought ourselves; we are as

conceded almost everywhere

it is

general

like

—perhaps,

in the

possible worlds, functioning as a nervous system

all

whole being.

There

is,

for some, too

and they prefer

much dependency

in this

ent, special species, unlike

any other form of life, despite the

No mat-

sharing around of genes, enzymes, and organelles. ter,

there

life

of our

we

live,

the underlying idea that

is still

own

view,

to see us as a separate, qualitatively differ-

we cannot have

without concern for the ecosystem

whether

in

in

a

which

majesty or not. This idea has been

strong enough to launch the

new movements

nance of wilderness, the protection of

for the suste-

wildlife, the turning

off of insatiable technologies, the preservation of

"whole

earth."

But now,

we may be

just

when

in for

the

new view seems

another wrench,

this

to be taking hold,

time more dismaying

and unsettling than anything we've come through. In a sense,

we

ing in the

shall

be obliged to swing back again,

still

believ-

new way but constrained by the facts of life to live may be too late, as things have turned out.

in the old. It

We

are, in fact, the masters, like

It is

a despairing prospect.

it

or not.

Here we are,

ing twenty-first-century mankind,

filled to

practically speak-

exuberance with

Natural

our new understanding of kinship to

and here we

are,

all

Man

the family of

And we

under the

cannot

stop this controlling, unless

were such

ourselves. If there

hill

world mind,

it

life,

nineteenth-century man, walking boot-

still

shod over the open face of nature, subjugating and it.

105

should crack over

civilizing

we

vanish

a thing as a

this.

The truth is, we have become more deeply involved than we ever dreamed. The fact that we sit around as we do, worrying seriously about how best to preserve the life of the earth, is

not

itself

is

the sharpest measure of our involvement.

human arrogance

but the most natural of natural events.

way,

we grew

this

way,

It

that has taken us in this direction,

we

We

developed

this

are this kind of species.

We have become, in a painful, unwished-for way, nature We have grown into everywhere, spreading like a

itself.

new growth over

the entire surface, touching and affecting

every other kind of risks

life,

incorporating ourselves.

being eutrophied by

feature of our

metazoans,

lodged

own

us.

We

now

earth

the dominant

environment. Humans, large

terrestrial

by energy from microbial symbionts

fired

in their cells, instructed

stretching back to the earliest live

neurons essentially the same earth, sharing structures with off the sun, are

are

The

now

in

by tapes of nucleic acid

membranes, informed by

as all the

other neurons on

mastodons and

lichens, living

charge, running the place, for better

or worse.

Or

is it

really this

way?

It

other way around. Perhaps

could be, you know,

we

just the

are the invaded ones, the

subjugated, used. Certain animals in the sea live by becoming part-animal, part-plant.

selves as

They engulf

complex plant

whole company.

I

algae,

which then establish them-

tissues, essential for the life

suppose the giant clam,

if

of the

he had more

of a mind, would have moments of dismay on seeing what

he has done to the plant world, incorporating so much of

The Lives of a

106

it,

enslaving green

Cell

cells, living off

the photosynthesis. But

the plant cells would take a different view of

it,

having

captured the clam on the most satisfactory of terms, including the small lenses in his tissues that focus sunlight for their benefit; perhaps algae

may

be doing to the world of clams.

collectively

With

luck,

have bad moments about what they

our

own

situation

might be

similar,

on a larger

This might turn out to be a special phase in the mor-

scale.

phogenesis of the earth

when

it is

necessary to have some-

thing like us, for a time anyway, to fetch and carry energy,

new symbiotic arrangements, store up informasome future season, do a certain amount of ornamenting, maybe even carry seeds around the solar system. look after

tion for

That kind of thing. Handyman for the earth. I

would much prefer

this useful role, if

the essentially unearthly creature

way

to

becoming.

mental changes

were

It

in

I

had any

We

would mean making some quite funda-

our attitudes toward each other,

wonderment and

even acknowledge the

accompany high start

up

endangered

we to

We would discover, in ourselves, the delight that

other manifestations of nature.

might

if

elements

would surely become the environment

worry about the most. sources of

say, to

otherwise on the

really to think of ourselves as indispensable

of nature.

in all

we seem

fragility

we have

discerned

Who knows, we might

and vulnerability

specialization in biology,

that always

and movements

for the protection of ourselves as a valuable,

species.

We

couldn't lose.

The Iks

The

small tribe of Iks, formerly

gatherers

in

nomadic hunters and

mountain valleys of northern

the

Uganda, have become

celebrities, literary

for the ultimate fate of disheartened, heartless

Two

large.

disastrously

symbols

mankind

conclusive things happened

at

to

them: the government decided to have a national park, so they were compelled by law to give up hunting in the valleys

and become farmers on poor

were

hillside soil,

and then they

two years by an anthropologist who dethem and wrote a book about them.

visited for

tested

The message of the book

is

that the Iks

have transformed

themselves into an irreversibly disagreeable collection of unattached, brutish creatures, totally selfish and loveless, in

response to the dismantling of their traditional culture.

Moreover,

this

selves,

and we

society

comes

is

what the

rest

of us are like in our inner

will all turn into Iks

when

The argument

rests,

of course, on certain assumptions

about the core of human beings, and tive.

You have

tally a

bad

lot,

as affection

the structure of our

unhinged.

all

to agree in

is

necessarily specula-

advance that

man

is

fundamen-

out for himself alone, displaying such graces

and compassion only

as learned habits. If

you

take this view, the story of the Iks can be used to confirm it.

These people seem

small,

dense

individuals with

but only to

to

be living together, clustered

in

villages, but they are really solitary, unrelated

for each other. They talk, demands and cold refusals. They never sing. They turn the chil-

no evident use

make

ill-tempered

They share nothing.

107

The Lives of a

108

dren out to forage

as

Cell

soon

can walk, and desert the

as they

whenever they can, and the foraging children snatch food from the mouths of the helpless elders. It elders to starve

a mean society. They breed without love or even casual regard. They defecate on each other's doorsteps. They watch their neighbors for signs of misfortune, and only then do they laugh. In the book they do a lot of laughing, having so much bad is

luck. Several times they

who found

even laughed

this especially repellent

the lines, that the scholar

is

at the anthropologist,

(one senses, between

not himself the world's luckiest

man). Worse, they took him into the family, snatched

his

food, defecated on his doorstep, and hooted dislike at him.

They gave him two bad It is

years.

a depressing book.

as

If,

Ikness at the center of each of us,

on

to the

he suggests, there

name of humanity will be

structure of our society, and

completely that

Meanwhile,

it is

we may never

only

in endlessly

mending the

changing so quickly and

find the threads in time.

ourselves alone, solitary,

left to

is

our sole hope for hanging

we will become

the same joyless, zestless, untouching lone animals.

But

this

may be too narrow a view. For one thing, the Iks They are absolutely astonishing, in fact.

are extraordinary.

The

anthropologist has never seen people like them any-

where, nor have ples of the

I.

You'd

common

think,

if

they were simply exam-

known my

share of peculiar,

ple, but I've

detestable

more

essence of mankind, they'd seem

recognizable. Instead, they are bizarre, anomalous. difficult,

I

have

nervous, grabby peo-

never encountered any genuinely, consistently

human

beings in

all

my

life.

The

Iks

sound more

like abnormalities, maladies. I

cannot accept

it.

I

do not believe

sentative of isolated, revealed habits.

I

that the Iks are repre-

man, unobscured by

believe their behavior

is

something

extra,

social

some-

thing laid on. This unremitting, compulsive repellence

is

a

The

kind of complicated

I

it,

have a theory, then.

The

109

They must have learned somehow. The Iks have gone crazy.

to act

ritual.

way; they copied

this

Iks

of an exploded cul-

solitary Ik, isolated in the ruins

new defense

ture, has built a

you

for himself. If

live in

an

unworkable society you can make up one of your own, and this

a

what the

is

one-man

Now

have done. Each Ik has become a group,

Iks

on

tribe

its

everything

seem, after

own, a constituency. into place. This

falls

vaguely familiar to

all,

them before. This

is

precisely the

all

is

of

why they do We've seen

us.

way groups of one

size or

another, ranging from committees to nations, behave.

of course, rest

It is,

of humanity that has lagged behind the

this aspect

of evolution, and

this

is

why

the Ik seems so primitive.

In his absolute selfishness, his incapacity to give anything

away, no matter what, he

he stands

at the

neighbors

in a

door of

is

a successful committee.

When

shouting insults

at his

his hut,

loud harangue, he

city

addressing another

the Ik characteristics.

They defecate on

is

city.

Cities

have

all

doorsteps, in rivers and lakes, their

They

leave rubbish.

They

detest

own

or anyone

neighboring

all

else's.

cities,

give

nothing away. They even build institutions for deserting elders out of sight.

Nations are the most Iklike of

seem

For

familiar.

total

irresponsibility there

by law, are selves.

is

all.

no such thing

is

wonder

the Iks

nothing to match a nation. Nations,

solitary, self-centered,

There

No

greed, rapacity, heartlessness, and

withdrawn into them-

as affection

between

nations,

and certainly no nation ever loved another. They bawl sults

from

snatch

all

their doorsteps, defecate into

in-

whole oceans,

the food, survive by detestation, take joy in the

bad luck of others, celebrate the death of others,

live for the

death of others. That's

it,

and

I

shall stop

worrying about the book.

It

does

110

The Lives of a

not signify that

man

He's

It

all right.

is

Cell

a sparse,

inhuman thing

never had enough time to worry about, that learned

how

to stay

Ik, in his despair,

at his center.

only says what we've always

is

known and haven't yet

The and perhaps we

human when assembled acting out this failure,

we

in masses.

should pay closer attention. Nations have themselves be-

come some

too frightening to think about, but things by watching these people.

we might

learn

Computers

You

can

some

make computers

respects they are

that are almost

human. In

superhuman; they can beat

at chess, memorize whole telephone compose music of a certain kind and write

most of us books

at a glance,

obscure poetry, diagnose heart ailments, send personal tations to vast parties,

even go transiently crazy.

programmed

to be of

yet

computer

a

invi-

No one has

two minds about a

may come. human hardware, great

hard problem, or to burst out laughing, but that

Sooner or

be

there will

later,

real

whirring, clicking cabinets intelligent zines

enough

to read

and vote, able to think rings around the

rest

maga-

of

us.

Well, maybe, but not for a while anyway. Before

begin organizing sanctuaries and reservations for our

ware

we

selves, lest

vanish like the whales, here

is

we

soft-

a thought

to relax with.

Even when technology succeeds

in

manufacturing a ma-

chine as big as Texas to do everything

human,

it

amounts

to nothing, practically speaking.

will

still

we

recognize as

be, at best, a single individual. This

To match what we

can do, there would have to be 3 billion of them with more

coming down the assembly line, and I doubt that anyone will put up the money, much less make room. And even so, they would all have to be wired together, intricately and delicately, as

we

are,

communicating with each other,

ing incessantly, listening.

If

all

their

waking hours, they wouldn't be anything

human,

after

all. I

way,

It is in

talk-

they weren't at each other this like

think we're safe, for a long time ahead.

our collective behavior that

we

are most mysteri-

111

The Lives of a

112

ous.

Cell

We won't be able to construct machines like ourselves

until

we've understood

we know

is

the

this,

and we're not even

messages to each other, talking and trying to

listen at the

same time, exchanging information. This seems most urgent biological function; lives.

By

the time

we

a staggering store,

even more than we take

we

be our

to

what we do with our

it is

reach the end, each of us has taken in

enough

of it incomprehensible, and

energy;

close. All

phenomenon: we spend our time sending

to exhaust

we generally manage

in.

are driven by

it.

Information It

has

enterprise, a kind of energy system

of us are being connected by sets, airplanes, satellites,

any computer, much

is

become

on

its

to put out

our source of a

tremendous

own. All

3 billion

telephones, radios, television

harangues on public-address

sys-

tems, newspapers, magazines, leaflets dropped from great heights,

words got

circuitry

around the

a computer to end

in

edgewise.

earth. If

all

We

are

we keep

becoming

a grid, a

we

become

at

it,

will

computers, capable of fusing

all

the

thoughts of the world into a syncytium. Already, there are no closed, two-way conversations. Any word you speak this afternoon will radiate out in all directions, around town before tomorrow, out and around the

world before Tuesday, accelerating to the speed of

light,

new and unexpected messages, emerging at the end as an enormously funny Hungarian joke, a fluctuation in the money market, a poem, or modulating

as

it

goes, shaping

simply a long pause in someone's conversation in Brazil.

We

do

any other

a lot of collective thinking, probably social species,

like secrecy.

we

We

although

it

goes on

don't acknowledge the

in

more than something

gift publicly,

and

we do it. Effortthought, we are capable without giving it a moment's

are not as celebrated as the insects, but

lessly,

of changing our language, music, manners, morals, enter-

way we dress, all around the earth in a seem to do this by general agreement, without voting or even polling. We simply think our way tainment, even the

year's turning.

We

Computers

113

along, pass information around, exchange codes disguised

change our minds, transform ourselves.

as art,

Computers cannot deal with such and

Otherwise,

just as well.

it is

levels of improbability,

we might be tempted make

take over the control of ourselves in order to

range plans, and that would surely be the end of us.

mean

some group or

that

It

to

long-

would

other, marvelously intelligent and

superbly informed, undoubtedly guided by a computer,

would begin deciding what human say,

over the next

society

hundred years or

five

ought

to

be

and the

so,

like,

rest

of

would be persuaded, one way or another, to go along. The process of social evolution would then grind to a standus

still,

and we'd be stuck

Much

millennium.

in today's rut for a

we work our way out of it on our own, governance. The future is too interesting and danbetter

without

gerous to be entrusted to any predictable, reliable agency.

We

need

the

all

fallibility

we

can get. Most of

to preserve the absolute unpredictability bility

of our connected minds. That way

the options, as

all

It

we have

would be nice

to

we

all,

total

we need improba-

can keep open

in the past.

have better ways of monitoring what

we

we're up to so that

and

could recognize change while

it is

up as we do now to the astonthe whole century just past wasn't what

occurring, instead of waking ished realization that

we thought

it

help in

although

lation

to

this,

was, at

all. I

Maybe computers

rather doubt

it.

models of cities, but what you learn

be beyond the reach of intelligent

use

You

common

sense to

make

botched up than ever. This

is

can be used to can

is

make simu-

that they

analysis; if

you

predictions, things get interesting, since a city

most concentrated aggregation of humans,

all

seem try to

more is

the

exerting

to bear. The city seems we cannot understand how this get very far with human society

whatever influence they can bring to

have a

works,

life

we

of

its

own.

If

are not likely to

at large. Still,

you'd think there would be some way

in.

Joined

114

The Lives of a

Cell

together, the great mass of

seems is

to

behave

human minds around the earth The trouble

like a coherent, living system.

that the flow of information

is

mostly one-way.

obsessed by the need to feed information can, but

much

I

in, as fast as

we

mechanisms for getting anything

will confess that

in the

ant.

to start.

lack sensing

I have no more sense of what mind of mankind than I have for the mind Come to think of it, this might be a good place

back.

goes on of an

we

We are all

The Planning of Science

is

generally accepted that the biologic sciences are abso-

Itlutely splendid. In just the past decade, they have uncovered a huge mass of brand-new information, and there is

plenty

more ahead;

the biologic revolution

in

early stages.

Everyone approves. By

still

its

is

evidently

contrast, the

same

public view of the progress of medicine during the

period

For

is

new knowledge, we

the

all

eases,

restrained, qualified, a mixture of hope

still

new

tinues to

move from

processes of

Why,

it is

asked, does the supply

strength to strength, elaborating new, in fine detail, the

we

There

life?

are

is still

all

one

field

we would

like to

show

of inquiry, share and share

alike.

the conspicuous

as

asymmetry between molecular

biology and, say, the therapy of lung cancer. face

up

to

it:

there

is

human problems. This

is

We may as well

a highly visible difference

pace of basic science and the application of to

very

doesn't seem to help to apply the inclusive term "bi-

omedical" to our science, much that

dis-

miracle drugs lag so far behind, while biology con-

powerful technologies for explaining,

It

have formidable

unsolved, lacking satisfactory explanation, lack-

ing satisfactory treatment.

of

still

and worry.

It

between the

new knowledge

needs explaining.

an especially lively problem

at the

moment,

be-

cause of the immediate implications for national science policy.

It is

administratively fashionable in

attribute the delay of applied science in

Washington

to

medicine to a lack

115

The Lives of a

116

Cell

of systematic planning. it is

with

said,

more

Under

of practical applications,

more

quickly and,

new kind of management,

a

businesslike attention to the invention

we

should arrive

at

our targets

claimed as a bonus, more economi-

it is

is the new word. We need more targeted more mission-oriented science. And maybe less basic research maybe considerably less. This is said to be the new drift.

Targeting

cally.

research,

—

One

trouble with this view

is

that

it

attributes to biology

and medicine a much greater store of usable information, with coherence and connectedness, than actually real life, the

exists. In

biomedical sciences have not yet reached the

stage of any kind of general applicability to disease mech-

anisms. In

some

respects

we

the early twentieth century,

booming along

possible that

It is

we

have one

as a

is

yet.

The important

whether

this

There are

risks.

a trap here that has its

terri-

we

don't

question before the policy-

should be allowed to occur naturally, it

can be ordered up more

under the influence of management and money.

We

of trouble with which

of

has to be said that

it

matter of course, or whether

quickly,

new

on the verge of developing

are

a proper applied science, but

makers

into

without an equivalent for the engineering of that

tory, but

time.

are like the physical sciences of

may be asking for more of the kind we are already too familiar. There is

enmeshed medicine

professional existence.

It

for

all

the millennia

has been our perpetual habit

on the slimmest of chances, the thinnest of hopes, empirically and wishfully, and we have proved to to try anything,

ourselves over and over again that the approach doesn't

work

well. Bleeding, cupping,

illustrations,

but

and purging are the

we have plenty

be embarrassed about.

classical

of more recent examples to

We have been hoaxed along by com-

parable substitutes for technology right up to the present.

There ter:

is

we

no question about our good intentions in this mathanker, collectively, to become applied scientists

all

117

The Planning of Science

as

soon

as

takes

It

we

can, overnight

if

possible.

some doing, however. Everyone

and hard the work must be before the

become

applications

The

applicable.

achievement of modern medicine

our

into

last

great contemporary

the technology for con-

It

had

beginnings in the

its

this

did not

appearance of penicillin and the

laps with the

sulfonamides.

how long

really important

and preventing bacterial infection, but

trolling fall

is

forgets

final

quarter of the

century, and decades of the most painstaking and de-

manding research were required before the etiology of pneumonia,

worked

scarlet fever, meningitis,

out.

and the

rest

could be

Generations of energetic and imaginative

vestigators exhausted their

whole

lives

in-

on the problems.

It

overlooks a staggering amount of basic research to say that

modern medicine began with

the era of antibiotics.

We have to face, in whatever discomfort, the real possibility that

the level of insight into the mechanisms of today's

unsolved diseases or stroke

—

is

— schizophrenia, for instance, or cancer,

comparable

to the situation for infectious dis-

ease in 1875, with similarly crucial bits of information

unencountered. be done

if

We

not in the years to be lived through.

prospect, or anything like to speed things

still

could be that far away, in the work to

this, all

If this

is

the

ideas about better ways

up should be given open-minded, close

scrutiny.

Long-range planning and organization on a national scale are obviously essential. this;

There

is

nothing unfamiliar about

indeed, we've been engaged in a coordinated national

effort for

over two decades, through the established pro-

cesses of the National Institutes of Health. Today's question is

whether the plans are sharply focused enough, the organi-

zation sufficiently tight.

Do we

search management, with

arranged to be aimed

all

need a new system of

re-

the targets in clear display,

at?

This would seem reassuring and

tidy,

and there are some

The Lives of a

118

Cell

important disease problems for which

done

proach does work. Poliomyelitis

Once

ample.

it

has already been

demonstrating that the direct, frontal ap-

effectively,

the most spectacular ex-

is

had been learned (from basic research) that

it

there were three antigenic types of virus and that they could

be abundantly grown that a vaccine could

be easy, or

in tissue culture,

need of any

in

it

became a

certainty

be made. Not to say that the job would less rigor

the previous research; simply that

and sophistication than could be done. Given

it

the assumption that experiments would be carried out with technical perfection, the vaccine

elegant demonstration of

and for

this

reason

it

how

was a sure thing.

It

was an

to organize applied science,

would have been a

surprise

if it

had

not succeeded.

This

from

is

the element that distinguishes applied science

basic. Surprise

is

what makes the difference.

are organized to apply knowledge, set a usable product,

from the

need

it

will

is

on which you base protocols

facts

to plan the

centralized

schedules, and

authority,

some

sort of

is

all

you need the

intelligible

no other source.

In basic research, everything

you need

at the outset

otherwise

it

start

time

detailed

and these must come from basic

basic facts to begin with,

There

elaborately

reward system based on speed

and perfection. But most of research.

produce

with unambiguous meaning. work and organize the workers come out precisely as predicted. For this, you

challenge

so that

When you

targets,

you require a high degree of certainty

outset. All the facts

must be reasonably hard

The

up

is

isn't likely to

is

just the opposite.

be an important problem.

with an incomplete roster of

their ambiguity; often the

What

a high degree of uncertainty;

problem

facts,

You

characterized by

consists of discovering

the connections between unrelated pieces of information.

You must plan experiments on the basis of probability, even bare possibility, rather than certainty.

out precisely as predicted,

this

If an

experiment turns

can be very nice, but

it is

only

The Pla n n ing of Scie nee

a great event

if at

the

same time

a surprise.

it is

measure the quality of the work by the

The

ment.

surprise can be because

some

dicted (in

lines

of research,

You

can

intensity of astonish-

did turn out as pre-

it

per cent

1

119

is

accepted as

a high yield), or it can be confoundment because the prediction was wrong and something totally unexpected turned up, changing the look of the problem and requiring a new

kind of protocol. Either way, you win. I

believe,

on hunch,

that an inventory of

our major

dis-

ease problems based on this sort of classification would

show

a limited

number of important questions

predictable answers carry certainty.

when commissions go

to

work

It

for

which the

might be a good idea,

laying out long-range plans

for disease-oriented research, for these questions to be identified

and segregated from

all

the rest, and the logic of

operations research should be invaluable for this purpose.

There is

will

be

certain and

lots

of disputing

what

among

the experts over what

not; perhaps the heat

and duration of

dispute could be adapted for the measurement of uncertainty. In

any case, once a

set

of suitable questions becomes

agreed upon, these can be approached by the most system-

methods of applied science. However, I have a stronger hunch

atic

that the greatest part

of the important biomedical research waiting to be done in the class

of basic science. There

esting fact relating to

all

an abundance of

is

inter-

our major diseases, and more items

of information are coming biology.

is

from

in steadily

The new mass of knowledge

is

all

still

quarters in

formless, in-

complete, lacking the essential threads of connection,

dis-

playing misleading signals at every turn, riddled with blind alleys.

ible

There are

fascinating ideas

all

over the place,

experiments beyond numbering,

all

sorts

irresist-

new ways move is un-

of

maze of problems. But every next outcome uncertain. It is a puzzling time, but a very good time. I do not know how you lay out orderly plans for this kind

into the

predictable, every

120

of

The Lives of a

but

activity,

I

Cell

suppose you could find out by looking

through the disorderly records of the past hundred years.

Somehow,

the atmosphere has to be set so that a disquieting

sense of being

wrong

tors. It has to

be taken for granted that the only way

is

the normal attitude of the investigain

is

by riding the unencumbered human imagination, with the special rigor required for recognizing that

highly improbable,

same time

maybe almost

true.

Locally, a

good way

to tell

listen in the corridors. If

spoken

as

something can be

impossible, and at the

how

the

work

is

going

is

to

you hear the word, "Impossible!"

an expletive, followed by laughter, you will

that someone's orderly research plan

is

coming along

know

nicely.

Biomythology

The

mythical animals catalogued in the bestiaries of

the world seem, at a casual glance, nothing but

exotic nonsense.

The thought comes

civilized, scientific, technologic society

is

that

Western

a standing proof of

human progress, in having risen above such imaginings. They are as obsolete as the old anecdotes in which they played their puzzling, ambiguous roles, and we have no more need for the beasts than for the stories. The Griffon, Phoenix, Centaur, Sphinx, Manticore, Ganesha, Ch'i-lin,

and

all

the rest are like recurrent bad dreams, and

well rid of them. So

The

trouble

is

we

that they are in fact like

ology

itself, as

are

dreams, and not

and we may have a hard time doing

necessarily bad ones,

may be

without them. They

we

say.

as essential for society as

loaded with symbols, and

myth-

as necessary for the

architecture of our collective unconscious. If Levi-Strauss right,

myths are constructed by a universal logic

language building

itself, is as is

characteristic for

human

The

to

for birds.

stories

but the underlying structure

of the world,

our genes. In

at

is

seem

is

that, like

beings as nest-

be different

stories,

always the same, in any part

any time. They are

like

engrams,

this sense, bestiaries are part

built into

of our inheri-

tance.

There

is

something

crazy animals.

same way.

They

basically similar

are

Bestiaries

all

about most of these

unbiologic, but unbiologic in the

do not

contain, as a rule, totally novel

121

The Lives of a

122

Cell

creatures of the imagination

never seen before.

On

made up of parts

parts that are entirely familiar. is

What

is

we have made up of

that

the contrary, they are

novel, and startling,

that they are mixtures of species. It is

perhaps

this characteristic that

makes the usual

ary so outlandish to the twentieth-century mind.

powerful story, equivalent evolution. it

Never mind

that

way

its

it is

to a universal myth,

is

true whereas myths are not;

with symbolism, and

filled

is

in

besti-

Our most

this

is

the

way

has in-

it

fluenced the mind of society. In our latest enlightenment, the fabulous beasts are worse than improbable

impossible, because they violate evolution.

and they deny the existence of

species,

The Phoenix comes animal,

bird for

all

species.

its

adult

life. It is,

East,

in

and Europe, and

ancient China.

and when

around

it

most

in fact, the

plumed birds. the mythology of Egypt, Greece, the Middle

exuberant, elaborate, and ornamented of It exists

are not

the closest to being a conventional

of

all

—they are

They

dies

itself.

is

it

the same as the vermilion bird of

for five

It lives

all

hundred triumphant

years,

constructs a sort of egg-shaped cocoon

Inside,

it

disintegrates

and gives

rise to

a

wormlike creature, which then develops into the new Phoenix,

ready for the next

five

hundred

years. In other versions

the dead bird bursts into flames, and the

from the

ashes, but the

by an early

new one

arises

worm story is very old, told no doubt

biologist.

There are so many examples of hybrid beings in bestiaries you could say that an ardent belief in mixed forms of

that

life is

an ancient

believed

in, is

human

idea, or that

something

else,

deeply

symbolized by these consortia. They are

turbing to look

at,

dis-

nightmarish, but most of them, oddly

enough, are intended

as lucky benignities.

instance, out of ancient China, has the

The

body of

ered with gleaming scales, a marvelous bushy

hooves, and small horns.

Whoever saw

Ch'i-lin, for

a deer covtail,

cloven

a Ch'i-lin was in

Some Biomythology

and

luck,

if

you got

to ride one,

you had

123

made.

it

The Ganesha is one of the oldest and most familiar Hindu deities, possessing a fat human body, four human arms, and the head of a cheerful-looking elephant. Prayers to

Ganesha

are regarded as the quickest way around obstacles.

Not

all

mythical beasts are friendly, of course, but even

the hostile ones have certain amiable redeeming aspects.

The Manticore has a lion's body, a man's face, and a tail with a venomous snake's head at the end of it. It bounds around seeking prey with huge claws and three rows of teeth, but it

makes the sounds of a beautiful

Some

silver flute.

of the animal myths have the ring of contemporary

biologic theory,

if

you allow for differences

ancient idea in India postulates an

form of

life

on the

earth, analogous to

earliest prokaryotic

in jargon.

Being, the

our version of the

born of lightning and methane.

Indian Being, undefined and indefinable, finding

alone, fearing death, yearning for

rearranged

in size,

identical halves.

and so on,

down

is

much shorthand

for

is

The

and then

One of these changed

populated. There

myth

company, began

itself inside,

a bull, and they mated, then stallion,

An first

arrangement of membrane-limited nu-

cleic acid, the initial cell,

The

initial

itself

to swell

split into

two

into a cow, the other

changed again to a mare and

to the ants,

and thus the earth was

a lot of oversimplification here, and too

modern purposes, but

the essential

recognizable.

serpent keeps recurring through the earliest cycles of

mythology, always

as a central

symbol for the

life

of the

universe and the continuity of creation. There are two great identical snakes

on a Levantine

libation vase of around

2000

B.C., coiled around each other in a double helix, represent-

ing the original generation of parts of the

first

life.

They

are the replicated

source of living, and they are wonderfully

homologous.

There

is

a Peruvian deity, painted

on a

clay pot dating

The Lives of a

124

Cell

from around A.D. 300, believed guarding farms. His hair braids, with

wings for

to be responsible for

made of

is

snakes, entwined in

his headdress. Plants

of various kinds

are growing out of his sides and back, and a vegetable of

some

sort

effect

is

seems

to

be growing from

his

mouth. The whole

wild and disheveled but essentially friendly.

He

is,

an imaginary version of a genuine animal, symbio-

in fact,

pholus, described in

Nature several years back, a species of

weevil in the mountains of northern

New Guinea that lives

symbiotically with dozens of plants,

growing

and

clefts in its carapace,

rooted

the

all

whole ecosystem of mites,

plus a

bacteria attached to the garden.

omen on

for a good-luck

its

own

in the niches

way down

rotifers,

to

its

The weevil could be evidence;

flesh,

nematodes, and taken

not attacked

it is

and nothing

by predators,

it

else will eat

either because of something distasteful in the

it,

lives a long,

untroubled

life,

system or simply because of the ambiguity.

The weevil

is

only about thirty millimeters long, easily overlooked, but

it

has the makings of a myth.

Perhaps dates.

we

should be looking around for other candi-

suggest the need for a

I

of the old ones.

designed for

and

if

bestiary, to take the place

this function, if you will

you are looking

First

new

can think of several creatures that seem

I

of all, there

is

accept a microbestiary,

for metaphors.

Myxotricha paradoxa. This

zoan, not yet as famous as he should be, telling us everything

are not

cilia at all,

about everything,

It is

in the

The rest

all

—

it is

story told by myxotricha allusive.

of us, and

assembled.

is

cilia

to

once. His at the

be

cilia

base

is

a bacterium.

a company, an assemblage. is

as

deep

as

any myth,

as

This creature has lagged behind the

is still

Our

the proto-

an oval organelle, em-

myxotricha membrane, which

not an animal after

profoundly

all at

but individual spirochetes, and

of attachment of each spirochete

bedded

is

who seems

going through the process of being

gave up any independent existence

Some Biomythology

long ago, and our organelles are

genomes

now

125

truly ours, but the

controlling separate parts of our cells are

still

dif-

ferent genomes, lodged in separate compartments; doctrinally,

we

There

are is

assemblages.

still

another protozoan, called blepharisma, telling a

long story about the chanciness and life.

Blepharisma

is

fallibility

of complex

called that because of a conspicuous

membranes around the oral cavity, which someone of eyelashes (blepbaridos). The whole mythlike tale has been related in a book by Giese. Blepharisma has come much further along than myxotricha, but not far enough to be free of slip-ups. There are three

fringe of ciliated

evidently reminded

DNA

different sets of self-duplicating nuclei, with the

in

each set serving different purposes: a large macronucleus,

governing the events eight or

regeneration after injury, a set of

in

more micronuclei containing

genome needed tiny nuclei

for reproduction,

from which the

the parts of the

and great numbers of

cilia arise.

One part of the organism produces a pinkish pigment, now called blepharismin, which is similar to hypericin and certain other photosensitizing plant pigments. Blepharismin

causes

no trouble unless the animal swims

then the pigment stances, the

grates and

kills

it

outright.

into sunlight, but

Under

certain circum-

membrane surrounding blepharisma

comes independently

disinte-

loose, like a cast-off shell,

leaving the creature a transient albino. At times of famine, a single blepharisma will begin eating

enlarges to an

immense

giant, straight out of

ture

still

itself,

size

its

neighbors;

it

then

and turns into a cannibalistic

any Norse

fable. Evidently, this crea-

has trouble getting along with the several parts of

and with the collective parts of other blepharismae.

There

are

innumerable

plant-animal

mostly in the sea, where the green plant

combinations,

cells

provide car-

bohydrate and oxygen for the animal and receive a share of

energy

in return. It

is

the fairest of arrangements.

When

the

The Lives of a

126

Cell

Paramecium bursaria runs out of food, all he needs to do is stay in the sun and his green endosymbionts will keep him supplied as though he were a grain. Bacteria are the greatest of prises,

on which the

The

ent.

lives

all at

setting

up

joint enter-

of their hosts are totally depend-

nitrogen-fixing rhizobia in root nodules, the myce-

tomes of

and the enzyme-producing colonies

insects,

digestive tracts of

many

in the

animals are variations of

this

meticulously symmetrical symbiosis.

The meaning

of these stories

meaning of

as the

may be

same

basically the

There

a medieval bestiary.

is

a tendency

for living things to join up, establish linkages, live inside

each other, return to earlier arrangements, get along, whenis the way of the world. The new phenomenon of cell fusion, a laboratory trick on which much of today's science of molecular genetics relies

ever possible. This

for

its

data,

is

the simplest and most spectacular symbol of

the tendency. In a way,

phenomena, century, for

it

is

the most unbiologic of

myth of the

in living things.

Any

cell

— man, animal,

—given the chance and under the right

fowl, or insect

conditions, brought into contact with any other

ever foreign, will fuse with

from one

it.

Cytoplasm

to the other, the nuclei will

become, for alien

all

last

denies the importance of specificity, integrity,

and separateness fish,

it

violating the most fundamental

a time

anyway, a single

genomes, ready

cell,

combine, and

cell

how-

will flow easily it

will

with two complete,

to dance, ready to multiply.

It is

a

Chimera, a Griffon, a Sphinx, a Ganesha, a Peruvian god, a Ch'i-lin, an

omen

of good fortune, a wish for the world.

On Various Words

The

idea that colonies of social insects are

somehow

equivalent to vast, multicreatured organisms, pos-

and a gift for adapta-

sessing a collective intelligence tion far superior to the

had

its

sum of

origin in the papers of the eminent entomologist,

William Morton Wheeler,

ganism 1950s

the individual inhabitants,

who proposed

this

ranked

many

to the early

entomology,

as a central notion in

ing the attention of

the term Superor-

From 1911

to describe the arrangement.

attract-

nonentomologists.

fascinated

Maeterlinck and Marais wrote best-selling books on the

presumed soul ants

that

must

exist

somewhere

in the nests

of

and termites.

Then, unaccountably, the whole idea abruptly dropped out of fashion and

sight.

almost no mention of scientific literature in

it

During the

made

is

entomology.

past quarter-century

in the proliferation It is

not talked about.

been forgotten;

is

not

it

had become unmentionable, an embarrassment. It is

just that the idea has

hard to explain.

that mistaken,

The

what

to

as

notion was not shown to be

it

in conflict It

all

with any other,

was simply

that

occupying important intellectual ground,

when entomology was emerging

as

at just the

time

an experimental science

of considerable power, capable of solving matters of cate detail, a

It

though

more nobody could do with such an abstraction. There it sat,

nor was

acceptable view of things. figure out

it is

of

intri-

paradigm of the new reductionism. This huge 127

The Lives of a

128

idea

—

Cell

might be self-transcending

that individual organisms

dense society

in their relation to a

by the new techniques, nor did or methods.

It just sat

new experiments

there, in the way,

and was covered

over by leaves and papers. survive, and this

—was not approachable

suggest

it

needed

It

heuristic value to

was lacking.

"Holism," a fabricated word, has been applied to concepts like the Superorganism.

One wonders whether

this

word may not itself have scared off some investigators; it is word with an alarming visage. General Jan Smuts, who invented it out of whole cloth in 1926, might have done better with "Wholism"; it would have served the same

a

etymological purpose and might have been just secular

enough

its

Holism

future.

glossaries but has not yet

naries of English.

the

It

Perhaps

made

is it

in

into

is,

it

there

is

the scientific

most standard

dictio-

got as far as the Supplement volume of

new OED, which

survival.

As some of

to survive this kind of century.

doubt for

it

is

something, but not enough to assure

will die

away, along with Superorgan-

ism.

cannot quarrel with any of

I

on

own, pushing

its

It

may be, though,

it

this. If

an idea cannot

doesn't help; best to

that the

pushing was tried

there.

in the

wrong

it

direction. Colonies of ants or termites, or bees

wasps,

may

in fact

but perhaps that

is

and

be Superorganisms by Wheeler's

social

criteria,

the end of that line of information as far

as insects are

concerned, for the time being.

work

if

better

move

lie

let

you

tried

it

Maybe it would

out on another social species,

easier to handle. Us, for one. It

has long troubled the entomologists that the rest of us

are always interfering in their affairs by offering explanations of insect behavior in

human

terms.

They

take pains to

explain that ants are not, emphatically not, tiny mechanical

models of human beings.

know

for sure about

I

agree with

human behavior

this. is

Nothing

likely to

that

we

account for

On Various Words

what ants do, and we ought business of entomologists.

to stay clear of

As

it;

this

129

the

is

for the ants themselves, they

are plainly not in need of lessons from us.

However,

this

does not mean that

we cannot

take

the

it

some of the collective on human problems.

other way, on the off chance that

may

actions of ants

There are

lots

cast light

of possibilities here, but

if

you think about

the construction of the Hill by a colony of a million ants,

each one working ceaselessly and compulsively to add perfection to his region of the structure without having the

of what

faintest notion

ing out his brief into

what

is

for

life in

is

being constructed elsewhere,

liv-

a social enterprise that extends back

him the deepest antiquity (ants die at the

rate

of 3-4 per cent per day; in a month or so an entire genera-

go on

tion vanishes, while the Hill can

for sixty years or,

given good years, forever), performing his work with lible, all

undistracted

skill in

infal-

the midst of a confusion of others,

tumbling over each other to get the twigs and

of

bits

earth aligned in precisely the right configurations for the

warmth and

ventilation of the eggs and larvae, but totally

incapacitated by isolation, there that

and

like this,

is

We

it is

is

only one

have been working

at

what seems

for

it

generation after articulate generation, and notion if it is

how

it is

done, nor what

ever to be finished. genetically

tive,

nomic of

all

we

We

have

never

let

comes

naturally.

syntax.

We can

one

It is

and

cities

activity

like

species-specific,

do, and

DNA

up;

be

will

eternity,

we have no when finished,

still

the most compulsively collec-

we

civilization after another,

tools

it

programmed,

the things

human

language.

we

for

and auto-

are infallible at

it.

grammar, neurons

It

for

scramble our way through

metamorphosing, sprouting

everywhere, and

all

the time

new words

keep tumbling out.

The words themselves are marvels, each one perfectly its use. The older, more powerful ones are

designed for

The Lives of a

130

Cell

membranous, packed with

meaning,

layers of different

one- word poems. "Articulated," for instance,

first

like

indicated

a division into small joints, then, effortlessly, signified the

speaking of sentences. while

we have them

aware

until the

Some words

in

are gradually altered

everyday use, without our being

change has been completed: the

ly

in today's

adverbs, such as ably and benignly, began to appear in place

of "like" just a few centuries ago, and "like" has since worn

away

to a

changed

mere

suffix.

itself into

By

a similar process, "love-did"

"loved."

None of the words are ever made up by anyone we know; they simply turn up in the language

Sometimes a

when

they are needed.

word will suddenly be grabbed up and mean something quite strange: "strange" is word today, needed by nuclear physicists to

familiar

transformed to itself

such a

symbolize the behavior of particles which decay with peculiar

slowness; the technical term for such particles

now

is

"strange particles," and they possess a "strangeness num-

bers)." The shock of sudden unfamiliarity with an old, familiar

word

is

something we take

going on for thousands of

A

few words are made up by

eyes, like

in stride;

it

has been

years. solitary

men

in front

of our

Holism out of Smuts, or Quark out of Joyce, but

most of these are exotic and

transient;

it

takes a great deal

of use before a word can become a word.

Most new words are made up from language-making

is

other, earlier words;

a conservative process, wasting

When new words unfold out of old ones,

little.

the original mean-

ing usually hangs around like an unrecognizable scent, a sort

of secret.

"Holism" suggests something because of "holy," although

it

biologically transcendental

was intended more simply to

mean a complete assemblage of living units. Originally, it came from the Indo-European root word kailo, which meant whole, also intact and uninjured. During passage through

On Various Words

several thousand years

it

transformed into

131

hail, hale, health, still

move

specialized, single-purpose

word,

hallow, holy, whole, and heal, and

of these

all

together through our minds.

"Heuristic"

is

more

a

derived from Indo-European wer, meaning to find, then taken up in Greek as heuriskein, from which Archimedes was

provided with Heureka!

There are two immense words from Indo-European, and

bheu,

each a virtual anthill in

itself,

gene

from which we have

constructed the notion of Everything. At the beginning, or

back

as far

as they are traceable, they

meant something

like

being. Gene signified beginning, giving birth, while bheu indicated existence and growth. Gene turned itself succes-

(Germanic) and gecynd (Old English),

sively into kundjaz

meaning kin or later

kind.

Kind was

at first a

an elevated social rank, and

finally

family connection,

came

the Latin gens, then gentle

itself; it

also

genius, genital, and generous; then,

emerged

still

meanbecame

to rest

ing kindly or gentle. Meanwhile, a branch of gene

as

genus,

holding on to

its

became "nature" (out of gnasci). While gene was evolving into "nature" and "kind," bheu was moving through similar transformations. One branch became bowan in Germanic and bua'm Old Norse, meaning inner significance,

it

and dwell, and then the English word build.

to live

into Greek, as phuein,

grow; then

as phusis,

became

Phusis

meaning

physic

became

Both words,

at

You do

cannot

just

moved

word

first

meant

for medicine.

Still

physics.

today's stage of their evolution, can be

taken together to mean, verse.

It

and make

which was another word for nature.

the source of physic, which at

natural science and later was the later,

to bring forth

not

literally,

everything

come by words

in the uni-

like this easily; they

be made up from scratch. They need long

lives

before they can signify. "Everything," C.S. Lewis observed in a discussion

of the words, "is a subject on which there

is

The Lives of a

132

not

much

internal

to be said."

Cell

The words themselves must show the their own

marks of long use; they must contain

inner conversation.

These days

it is

reassuring to

their present meanings,

ics, in

know

our minds, by a sort of hunch, for

words clinging If

you

let

to

them are

your mind

that nature

and phys-

have been interconnected all

these years.

in

The other

a puzzlement, but nice to see.

relax, all the

words

will flow into

each

other in an amiable sort of nonsense. "Kind" means a relation, but

same

it

as the

means "nature." The word for kind is word for gentle. Even "physics," save us,

also

kind of "nature," by

its

nature, and

the is

a

simultaneously, an-

is,

other kind of kind. There are ancient ideas reverberating

through It is

this structure,

very old hunches.

part of the magic of language that

some people can

get to the same place by the use of totally different words. Julian of Norwich, a fourteenth-century hermitess, said

it

so

well that a paragraph of hers was used recently by a physicist for his introduction to a hard-science review of

contempo-

"He showed me a little thing, the quantity of an hazelnut, in the palm of my hand, and it was as round as a ball. I looked thereupon with eye of my rary cosmological physics:

understanding and thought:

answered generally

thus:

What may

it is all

that

this

is

be?

made."

And

it

was

Living

Language

Stigmergy" is a new word, invented recently by Grasse to explain the nest-building behavior of termites, per-

haps generalizable to other complex activities of social animals.

The word

incite to

work," and Grasse's intention was to indicate that

it is

lus

the product of

is

made of Greek

work

itself that

roots

meaning "to

provides both the stimu-

He arrived at this after

and instructions for further work.

long observation of the construction of termite nests, which excepting perhaps a man-made edifices in nature.

ual termite,

city are the

most formidable

When you consider the size of an individ-

photographed standing alongside

ranks with the

New

he

Yorker and shows a better sense of

organization than a resident of Los Angeles.

mound

his nest,

nests of Macrotermes bellicosus

Some

in Africa

of the

measure

twelve feet high and a hundred feet across, they contain several millions of termites, and around

them are clustered

other small and younger mounds, like suburbs.

The maze,

interior of the nests are like a three-dimensional intricate

arrangements of spiraling

dors, and arched vaults, ventilated

There are great caverns the termites

depend

a source of heat.

for the gardens of fungi

on which

for their nourishment, perhaps also as

There

is

queen, called the royal unit,

galleries, corri-

and air-conditioned.

a

rounded vaulted chamber for the

cell.

The fundamental

on which the whole design

is

based,

is

structural

the arch.

133

The Lives of a

134

Grasse needed of such

his

tiny, blind,

Cell

word

and

in

order to account for the

ability

relatively brainless animals to erect

and internal complexity. Does

structures of such vast size

each termite possess a fragment of blueprint, or design, arch by arch, encoded in his

whole

the

is

DNA? Or

does the

whole colony have, by virtue of the interconnections of so

many

small brains, the collective intellectual

power of

a

huge contractor? Grasse placed a handful of termites in a dish

and

soil

made of

fecal pellets (these are

filled

with

lignin, a sort of

micro-lumber) and watched what they did. They did not, the

place,

first

around

behave

at all like contractors.

Nobody

and gave orders or collected

in place

in

stood

fees; they all

simply ran around, picking up pellets at random and drop-

ping them again. Then, by chance, two or three pellets

happened

to light

on top of each

other, and this transformed

Now

they displayed the greatest

the behavior of everyone.

and directed

interest tive

their attention obsessively to the primi-

column, adding new

pellets

and fragments of earth.

After reaching a certain height, the construction stopped unless another

column was being formed nearby; in this column to an arch, bend-

case the structure changed from a

ing off in a smooth curve, the arch was joined, and the termites then set off to build another.

Building a language

may be something

imagine primitive proto-Indo-European selves clustered

rounded, "bbei, "

say,

like this.

men

One can

finding them-

making random sounds,

together,

sur-

by bees, and one of them suddenly saying

and then the

rest

of them picking

it

up and repeating

"bhei" and thus beginning that part of language, but this a restricted, too mechanistic view of things.

It

makes

is

pellets

out of phonemes, implies that the deep structures of gram-

mar

are

made of something

like

cement.

I

do not

care for

this.

More

likely,

language

is

simply alive, like an organism.

Living La nguage

We

tell

each other

languages, and

I

when we speak of living we mean something more than an mean alive. Words are the cells of

this, in fact,

think

abstract metaphor.

135

We

language, moving the great body, on legs.

Language grows and evolves, leaving

fossils

behind.

The

individual words are like different species of animals. Muta-

Words fuse, and then mate. Hybrid words and compound words are the progeny. Some

tions occur.

wild varieties of

mixed words are dominated by one parent while the other is

The way

recessive.

type, but

it

a

word

is

used

year

this

is its

pheno-

has a deeply seated, immutable meaning, often

hidden, which

is

the genotype.

The language of genetics might be used

some such way to describe the genetics of language, if we knew more about in

both.

The were

much

separate languages of the Indo-European family

at

one time, perhaps

five

thousand years ago, maybe

longer, a single language.

The

separation of the

speakers by migrations had effects on language comparable to the speciation observed

by Darwin on various islands of

Galapagos. Languages became different species, retaining

enough resemblance

to an original ancestor so that the

family resemblance can

still

be seen. Variation has been

maintained by occasional contact between different islands of speakers, and perhaps also by random mutations.

But there

is

something else about words

that gives

them

the look and feel of living motile beings with minds of their

own. This bly in

is

best experienced by looking

one of the

dictionaries that provide

to the original, hypothetical fossil

them up, all

prefera-

the roots back

language of proto-Indo-

European, and observing their behavior.

Some words

started

from Indo-European and swarmed

into religion over a very large part of the earth.

blaghmen, for example,

and Middle English

meant

as ftamen, a

priest. It

moved

pagan word for

The word into Latin priest,

and

The Lives of a

136

Cell

then "brahman." Weid, a word

into Sanskrit as brahma,

meaning

to see, with later connotations of

wisdom and

wit,

entered Germanic as whan, and Old English wis to "wis-

dom."

It

became

suffixed

its

form

hence "vision."

videre in Latin,

woid-o,

it

became the

Sanskrit

Finally, in

word

veda.

Beudh traveled a similar distance. With the meaning of awareness,

it

became beodan

"bode," and bodhati

Old

in

meaning

English,

meaning he awakes,

in Sanskrit,

is

enlightened, and thus Bodhisattva, and Buddha.

The

sattva

European word

es,

into Sanskrit as sat einai in

came from

part of Bodhisattva

meaning and

to be, or

is,

Greek; einai became the -ont

its

way

in Latin

and

which, on

became

sant, also

the Indo-

esse

in certain

words

signi-

fying being, such as "symbiont."

The Indo-European word bbag, meaning to share, turned into the Greek phagein, to eat, and the Old Persian bakhsh (yielding "baksheesh," and, in Sanskrit, with the

of bhage, good fortune, gita

from

get,

it

emerged

meaning

Bhagavad-gita (the

a song).

The Hari-Krishna people to English than

Vishnu, has

as

his

it

are chanting something closer

sounds. Krishna, the eighth avatar of

name from

the Sanskrit Krsnah, the black

one, which came from the Indo-European word for black, kers

the

(which also produced "chernozem," black

way of

There life,

is

topsoil,

by

the Russian chernyi).

obviously no end to

and has luckily done

this;

just that

it

can

tie

up a whole

during the past century

for generations of comparative linguists. Their science be-

gan properly Sanskrit to

in

1786 with the discovery of the

Greek and

Latin,

by William Jones. In 1817,

with a publication by Franz Bopp, Sanskrit,

similarity of

it

became recognized all the Germanic

Greek, Latin, Persian, and

guages were so closely related to each other that a

that lan-

common

ancestor must have existed earlier. Since then, this science

Living Language

more or

has developed in

more

137

with biology, but

less parallel

quietly.

a field in

It is

which the irresponsible amateur can have

a continually mystifying sort of fun.

Whenever you

get the

available answer to a straight question, like, say, where does the most famous and worst of the four-letter Anglo-Saxon unprintable words come from, the answer raises new and discomfiting questions. Take that particular word. It comes from peig, a crawling, wicked Indo-European word meaning evil

and

makings of a curse.

hostile, the sure

becomes

It

then gafaihaz in Germanic and gefah in Old English,

poikos,

signifying "foe."

It

turned from poik-yos into faigjaz

in

Ger-

manic, and faege in Old English, meaning fated to die, lead-

Old English to become "feud," and fokken in Old Dutch. Somehow, from these beginnings, it transformed itself into one of the most powerful English expletives, meaning something like "Die before your time!" The unspeakable malevolence of the message is now buried deep inside the word, and out on the ing to "fey."

surface

it

It

went on from fehida

presents itself as merely an obscenity.

"Leech"

is

a fascinating word.

It is

for leeching. is

the

worm

like biological

manic

is

a symbol for the doctor. Leech the doctor leg,

which meant to

comes

collect,

with

meaning to speak. Leg became Germeaning one who speaks magic words, an

derivatives

lekjaz,

enchanter, and also (In

mimicry going on: leech

means the doctor who uses leech the worm; leech

from the Indo-European

numerous

sanguisugus, used

The two words appear to be quite separate, but

something

the doctor

an antique term for

worm

physician, and also for the aquatic

there

in

Denmark

lakare.) Leg in

the its

laece in

word

Old

English,

for doctor

meaning

is still

laege,

physician.

in

Swedish

senses of gathering, choosing, and speak-

ing gave rise to the Latin

legere,

ture" and "legible." In Greek,

it

and thus words

became

legein,

like "lec-

meaning

to

gather and to speak; "legal" and "legislator" and other such

The Lives of a

138

Cell

words derived. Leg was further transformed logos,

Greek

in

to

signifying reason.

All this history seems both plausible

reading for doctors, but there

worm.

It is

not certain

how

is

it

descent through the language doctor, turning up as both

and creditable, good

always that other leech, the

came.

Somehow

at the

same time

laece

and

in

lyce

began

it

its

as leech the

Old

always recognizable as something distinctly the

English,

worm and

same time important in medicine. It also took on the meaning of someone parasitic, living on the flesh of others.

at the

Gradually, perhaps under the influence of a Middle English

AM A, the worm was given sole rights to the word, and the doctor became the doctor, out of

dek,

meaning

to accept,

later to teach.

Man

an unchanged word from Indo-European man,

is

meaning

just that.

But two other important words

One

have stranger sources.

is

man

for

dhghem, meaning earth; this

became guman in Germanic, gumen in Old English, then homo and humanus in Latin, from which we have both "hu-

man" and "humus." The

other word for

man

contains the

same admonition, but turns the message around. It meaning man in Indo-European, taken as weraldh manic and weorold ingly, as

in

Old

word

you would

other words for the earth.

which

I

I

later

am glad

in

to

You might

think

one important word man turning into the word development

find a parallel

Not

so:

became "earth," has evolved only one it is

have a semipermeable

you had

in

the Indo-European word

can find mentioned, and

into this. If

in.

for earth giving rise to

man, and an early word for

for the world,

mal that

Ger-

"world."

that with a

ers,

wiros,

in

English, emerging, flabbergast-

This must be a hard science to work

for

is

ani-

the aardvark.

memory

after getting

to speak English with running captions

your mind showing

Indo-European, you'd

all fall

the roots,

all

the

off the bicycle.

way back

Speaking

is

to

an

Living Language

autonomic business; you may search for words along, but they are found for you by

as

you go

your brain

agents in

You

over which you exercise no direct control.

139

really

couldn't be thinking Indo-European at the same time, with-

out going speechless or babbling (from baba, meaning

"booby," Old French barbaros,

in-

Russian balalayka, Latin balbus, meaning

distinct speech,

"baboon," Greek

baboue, leading to

meaning foreign or rude, and Sanskrit

babu,

mean-

ing father). That sort of thing. I

got into even more trouble while looking into "Stig-

mergy."

I

was looking for other words for inciting and

instigating work,

comes from

and came upon "to egg on." The egg here

ak, a

word

for sharp, suffixed to akjo in Ger-

manic, meaning "edge," and to akjan in Old Norse, meaning "egg," to incite, goad; the same root

English as aehher and

ear,

moves on

for ear of corn. (Corn,

if

into

Old

you have

moment, is from grew, for grain, which became korn in Old High German, granum in Latin, and cyrnel in Old Ena

glish,

thence "kernel.") But neither the egg nor the ear

from ak are the awi,

meaning

real

bird,

egg or

ear.

The

which turned into

(not known, of course, which

and was compounded with

came

real avis

first),

egg comes from and ovum

form

awispek,

in Latin,

meaning

spek (to see) to

"watcher of birds" which became auspex

in Latin

into oion in Greek,

augur.

The eare in

real ear

began

compounded with lagous,

as ous,

Old English and auri

then auzan in Germanic, and in Latin;

along the way,

it

was

meaning

slack,

and transformed

meaning "with drooping

ears,"

which then became

sleg,

to

Greek for rabbit. There is no way to stop, once you've started, not even by trying to round a circle. Ous became aus became "auscultation," which is what leeches (leg) do for a living (leip) unless lagos,

they are legal

same thing

(leg)

leeches, which, incidentally,

as lawyers (Ugh).

is

not the

140

The Lives of a

Cell

That should be enough in

Germanic and

genog in

(

nek, to attain,

Old

meaning burden, hence "oncology") eral (gene) idea It is

(

becoming ganoga

English, also onkos in Greek, to give

you the gen-

weid becoming widesya then idea in Greek).

easy to lose the thread (from

also the root of termite).

ter,

—possibly

to rub, twist

Are you there?

On Probability and

Possibility

Statistically, the probability of any one of us being here is so small that you'd think the mere fact of existing

would keep us prise.

a contented dazzlement of sur-

all in

We are alive against the stupendous odds of genetics,

infinitely

outnumbered by

the alternates

all

who

might, ex-

cept for luck, be in our places.

Even more astounding physical terms.

our

is

The normal,

throughout the universe

improbability in

statistical

predictable state of matter

randomness, a relaxed sort of

is

equilibrium, with atoms and their particles scattered around in

an amorphous muddle.

We,

in brilliant contrast, are

com-

pletely organized structures, squirming with information at

every covalent bond. trons at the

We make our living by catching elec-

moment of

their excitement

swiping the energy released storing

it

up

in intricate

probability, by cally,

and

whales,

is

in

at the instant

by solar photons, of each jump and

We

loops for ourselves.

our nature.

To be

able to

do

violate

this systemi-

such wild varieties of form, from viruses to

extremely unlikely; to have sustained the effort

successfully for the several billion years of

our existence,

without drifting back into randomness, was nearly a mathematical impossibility.

Add to this the biological member of our own species billion at the is

improbability that makes each

unique. Everyone

moment, which describes

is

one

in 3

the odds. Each of us

a self-contained, free-standing individual, labeled by spe-

141

The Lives of a

142

Cell

protein configurations at the surfaces of

cific

able by whorls of fingertip skin,

cells, identifi-

maybe even by

special

medleys of fragrance. You'd think we'd never stop dancing. Perhaps

born into

we

all,

raised in

it,

we do

not surprising that

is

it

surprised. After

we become

it,

acclimated to the

tude, like natives in the Andes. Moreover,

the astonishment

is

transient,

go back

cles will all

it

all

later

alti-

know our

that

parti-

random.

we

we seem.

the absolute, pure entities that

sense of ordinariness, and

we

and sooner or

to being

Also, there are reasons to suspect that

Despite

more

not live

are used to unlikelihood. Being

are really not

We

have some

tends to diminish our surprise.

the evidences of biological privacy in our cells

all

fragment of cell membrane

and

tissues (to the extent that a

will

be recognized and rejected between any conceivable

pairs is

among

the 3 billion, excepting identical twins), there

a certain slippage in our brains.

claim with certainty to his

open

the earth, erything.

brain

one, in

fact,

can lay

with anything like the

by fingerprints or tissue antigens.

specificity stipulated

The human

No

own mind

is

the most public organ on the face of

to everything, sending out

To be sure,

it is

hidden away

internal affairs in secrecy, but virtually

in

messages to ev-

bone and conducts

all

the business

is

the

direct result of thinking that has already occurred in other

We

minds.

pass thoughts around,

from mind

to

mind, so

compulsively and with such speed that the brains of mankind often appear, functionally, to be undergoing fusion.

This

is,

when you

think about

it,

really amazing.

The

— marvelous old free-

whole dear notion of one's own Self willed, free-enterprising, lated island of a Self

We

do not

—

is

autonomous, independent,

iso-

a myth.

enough to displace some equivalent of radioacof human thought that are con-

yet have a science strong

the myth. If you could label, by tive isotopes, all the bits

stantly adrift, like plankton, all

around

us,

it

might be

possi-

i

On

and

Probability

143

Possibility

ble to discern

some

but, as

seems almost entirely random. There has to

it is, it

sort of systematic

be something wrong with

we

view.

this

order

It is

in the process,

how

hard to see

could be in possession of an organ so complex and

intricate and, as

and be using

occasionally reveals

it

on such a

it

so powerful,

itself,

scale just for the

production of a

kind of background noise. Somewhere, obscured by the snatches of conversation, pages of old letters, bits of books

and magazines, memories of old movies, and the disorder of radio and television, there ought to be more intelligible signals.

Or

perhaps

we

are only at the beginning of learning to

use the system, with almost

all

our evolution

ahead of us. Maybe the thoughts

around from mind simultaneously

at

to

mind,

as a species

we generate today and

still

flick

up

like the jokes that turn

dinner parties

in

or the sudden changes in the way

Hong Kong and we wear our

Boston, or

hair,

all

the popular love songs, are the primitive precursors of more

come

later,

through

shal-

complicated, polymerized structures that will

analogous to the prokaryotic

low pools

in the early

cells that drifted

days of biological evolution. Later,

when the time is right, there may be fusion and symbiosis among the bits, and then we will see eukaryotic thought, metazoans of thought, huge interliving coral shoals of thought.

The mechanism

is

there,

and there

is

no doubt

that

it is

already capable of functioning, even though the total yield thus far seems to consist largely of

be said that we've been

at

it

bits.

After

all, it

has to

for only the briefest time in

evolutionary terms, a few thousand years out of billions, and

during most of

this

time the scattered aggregates of

human

thought have been located patchily around the earth. There

may be some dating a

laws about this kind of communication, man-

critical

efficiency.

Only

density and mass before in this

century have

it

can function with

we been brought

close

The Lives of a

144

enough

Cell

to each other, in great

numbers, to begin the fusion

around the earth, and from now on the process may move very rapidly.

There

goes well, quite a

if it

is,

Already, by luck,

we have

look forward

lot to

exchanged thought into today's structures of science.

mind

It is

done by simply passing the

to mind, until

the final selection,

The

something

all

real surprises,

on grounds of which

few of

these,

set us

comes out

They have

sorts of

emerged

is

of

from other minds, and

Fugue and the

wings, apposing thumbs,

new

St.

so that what

this,

new

and what

in music. In this

Matthew Passion were,

human

for the evolving organism of

it,

novel, and filled with

were primordia

in the current

human thought

slightly different recep-

meaning. Bach was able to do

sense, the Art of

makes

We have already had

machinery for processing

to rejoin the flow

and

fitness.

field

tors for the information cascading in slightly different

art

around from

back on our heels when

sweeping across the

periodically, like comets.

bits

like natural selection

they occur, will always be the mutants. a

to.

seen the assembly of particles of

thought, feathered

layers of frontal cortex.

But we may not be so dependent on mutants from here

more of them around than we is more crowding, more unrestrained and obsessive communication, more open channels, even more noise, and a bit more luck. We are simulon, or perhaps there are recognize.

What we need

taneously participants and bystanders, which role to play. ter; this is

and give

As

participants,

what we do it

room

is

we have no

as a species.

my

advice.

is

a puzzling

choice in the mat-

As bystanders, stand back

The Worlds Biggest Membrane

Viewed from the distance of the moon, the astonishing thing about the earth, catching the breath, alive.

is

The photographs show

moon

surface of the

in the

is

is

that

it

pounded

foreground, dead as an old bone.

Aloft, floating free beneath the moist,

of bright blue sky,

the dry,

gleaming membrane

the rising earth, the only exuberant

thing in this part of the cosmos. If you could look long

enough, you would see the swirling of the great

drifts

of

white cloud, covering and uncovering the half-hidden masses of land.

If

you had been looking for a very long,

geologic time, you could have seen the continents themselves in motion, drifting apart afloat

by the

beneath.

fire

It

on

their crustal plates, held

has the organized, self-con-

tained look of a live creature, full of information, marvel-

ously skilled in handling the sun. It

takes a

biology.

membrane

You

storing precisely the

measured inside.

to

make

sense out of disorder in

have to be able to catch energy and hold

shares.

A

needed amount and releasing does

cell

Each assemblage

is

this,

it

you have

to

in

and so do the organelles

poised in the flow of solar energy,

tapping off energy from metabolic surrogates of the sun. stay alive,

it,

To

be able to hold out against equilib-

rium, maintain imbalance, bank against entropy, and you

can only transact

this

business with

membranes

in

our kind

of world.

When

the earth

membrane,

came

alive

for the general

it

began constructing

its

own

purpose of editing the sun. 145

The Lives of a

146

Cell

Originally, in the time of prebiotic elaboration of peptides

and nucleotides from inorganic ingredients

in the

water on

the earth, there was nothing to shield out ultraviolet radiation except the water

The

itself.

first

thin

from the degassing of the earth

entirely

atmosphere came as

it

cooled, and

there was only a vanishingly small trace of oxygen in Theoretically, there could have been

oxygen by photodissociation of water vapor light,

in ultraviolet

but not much. This process would have been

limiting, as

Urey showed,

since the

it.

some production of

wave

self-

lengths needed for

photolysis are the very ones screened out selectively by

oxygen; the production of oxygen would have been cut off almost as soon as

it

occurred.

The formation of oxygen had photosynthetic

cells,

environment with but shielded

to await the

emergence of

and these were required

to live in

an

sufficient visible light for photosynthesis

at the

same time

Berkner and Marshall calculate

against lethal ultraviolet. that the

green

cells

must

therefore have been about ten meters below the surface of water, probably in pools and ponds shallow

strong convection currents

(

enough

to lack

the ocean could not have been

the starting place).

You

could say that the breathing of oxygen into the

mosphere was the around and say can have

it

result

that evolution

either way.

at-

of evolution, or you could turn

Once

was the

result of oxygen.

it

You

the photosynthetic cells had

appeared, very probably counterparts of today's blue-green algae, the future respiratory in place. Early on,

around

1

when

mechanism of the earth was set up to

the level of oxygen had built

per cent of today's atmospheric concentration, the

anaerobic

life

of the earth was placed

inevitable next stage

oxidative systems and

in jeopardy,

and the

was the emergence of mutants with

ATP. With

this,

we were

off to an

explosive developmental stage in which great varieties of respiring sible.

life,

including the multicellular forms, became fea-

The World's Biggest Membrane

Berkner has suggested sions of

new

life,

that there

like vast

were two such explo-

embryological transformations,

both dependent on threshold levels of oxygen. 1

147

The

first,

at

per cent of the present level, shielded out enough ultravi-

olet radiation to permit cells to

move

into the surface layers

of lakes, rivers, and oceans. This happened around 600 million years ago, at the beginning of the Paleozoic era, and

accounts for the sudden abundance of marine kinds in the record of this period.

curred

At

when oxygen

this time,

sufficient

of

all

burst oc-

rose to 10 per cent of the present level.

around 400 million years ago, there was a

canopy

to allow life out of the

From here on

land.

fossils

The second

water and onto the

was clear going, with nothing to

it

restrain the variety of life except the limits of biologic inventiveness. It is

another illustration of our fantastic luck that oxygen out the very bands of ultraviolet light that are most

filters

devastating for nucleic acids and proteins, while allowing full

penetration of the visible light needed for photosynthe-

sis.

If

it

had not been for

semipermeability,

this

we

could

never have come along.

The

earth breathes, in a certain sense. Berkner suggests

that there

may have been

cycles of

oxygen production and

carbon dioxide consumption, depending on relative abundances of plant and animal ing periods of apnea. tion

life,

with the ice ages represent-

An overwhelming

may have caused

the level of

richness of vegeta-

oxygen

to rise

above

today's concentration, with a corresponding depletion of

carbon dioxide. Such a drop

in

carbon dioxide may have

impaired the "greenhouse" property of the atmosphere,

which holds

from the

in the solar heat

earth's surface.

The

otherwise fall in

lost

by radiation

temperature would

in

much of living, and, in a long sigh, the of oxygen may have dropped by 90 per cent. Berkner

turn have shut off level

speculates that this their size

is

what happened

may have been

all

to the great reptiles;

right for a richly

oxygenated

The Lives of a

148

Cell

atmosphere, but they had the bad luck to run out of

Now we are protected narrow rim of ozone, ventilated,

air.

against lethal ultraviolet rays by a

thirty miles out.

We

are safe, well

and incubated, provided we can avoid technolo-

gies that might fiddle with that ozone, or shift the levels of

carbon dioxide. Oxygen

we

let fly

green

not a major worry for us, unless

is

with enough nuclear explosives to

cells in the sea; if

we do

that,

kill

we

of course,

off the

are in for

strangling.

hard to feel affection for something as

It is

sonal as the atmosphere, and yet there

and product of life is

as

a miraculous achievement.

designed to accomplish ture.

it is

as

it is,

wine or bread. Taken

imper-

totally

much

all in all,

a part

the sky

works, and for what

It

as infallible as

it is

anything in na-

doubt whether any of us could think of a way to

I

improve on

it,

beyond maybe

shifting a local cloud

from

The word "chance" does not

here to there on occasion.

serve to account well for structures of such magnificence.

There may have been elements of luck chloroplasts, but

in the

emergence of

once these things were on the scene, the

evolution of the sky became absolutely ordained. Chance suggests alternatives, other possibilities, different solutions.

This

may be

true for gills and swim-bladders and forebrains,

matters of detail, but not for the sky. There was simply no

other way to go.

We

should credit

it is

uct of collaboration in

all

It

breathes for us, and

sure. limits

what

for

it

perfection of function,

it

far

it

is:

friction.

does another thing for our plea-

membrane and

Without

and

of nature.

Each day, millions of meteorites of the

for sheer size

and away the grandest prod-

fall

against the outer

are burned to nothing by the

our surface would long since

this shelter,

have become the pounded powder of the moon. Even

though our receptors are not there

is

in knowing random noise of

comfort

head, like the

sensitive

that the

rain

enough

sound

is

to hear

it,

there over-

on the roof

at night.

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F.,

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P. E.,

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and

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Morowitz, H. J., Energy Flow tion as

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Earnest Proposal

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L.,

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Hara, T.

J.,

Wolstenholme, G.

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E.

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F.,

and Koster, H. D., "Sweat

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Animal

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1972. Whittaker, R. H., and Feeny, P.

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Cambridge, Mass.: Har-

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