The Lives of a Cell: List 3

“The long habit of living,” said Thomas Browne, “indisposeth us to dying.” These days, the habit has become an addiction: we are hooked on living; the tenacity of its grip on us, and ours on it, grows in intensity.

Everything dies, all around, trees, plankton, lichens, mice, whales, flies, mitochondria.

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 we have arranged thus far.

One man underwent coronary occlusion with cessation of the heart 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 his way back into life.

In a recent study of the reaction to dying in patients with obstructive disease of the lungs, it was concluded that the process was considerably more shattering for the professional observers than the observed. Most of the patients appeared to be preparing themselves with equanimity for death, as though intuitively familiar with the business.

One elderly woman reported that the only painful and distressing part of the process was in being interrupted; on several occasions she was provided with conventional therapeutic measures to maintain oxygenation or restore fluids and electrolytes, and each time she found the experience of coming back harrowing; she deeply resented the interference with her dying.

I find myself surprised by the thought that dying is an all-right thing to do, but perhaps it should not surprise. It is, after all, the most ancient and fundamental of biologic functions, with its mechanisms worked out with the same attention to detail, the same provision for the advantage of the organism, the same abundance of genetic information for guidance through the stages, that we have long since become accustomed to finding in all the crucial acts of living.

It may turn out, as some scientists suggest, that we 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.

When social animals are gathered together in groups, they become qualitatively different creatures from what they were when alone or in pairs.

Grouped termites keep touching each other incessantly with their antennae, and this appears to be the central governing mechanism.

As soon as they are removed from the group, and the touching from all sides comes to an end, they become aggressive, standoffish; they begin drinking compulsively, and abstain from touching each other.

Sometimes, they even bite off the distal halves of each other’s antennae, to eliminate the temptation. Irritably, settling down to make the best of a poor situation, they begin preparations for the laying of eggs and the taking care of the brood.

The social insects, especially ants, have been sources of all kinds of parables, giving lessons in industry, interdependence, altruism, humility, frugality, patience.

The social insects, especially ants, have been sources of all kinds of parables, giving lessons in industry, interdependence, altruism, humility, frugality, patience.

The social insects, especially ants, have been sources of all kinds of parables, giving lessons in industry, interdependence, altruism, humility, frugality, patience.

The ants were, together with the New Yorkers, an abstraction, a live mobile, an action painting, a piece of found art, a happening, a parody, depending on the light.

...It is not surprising that many analogies have been drawn between the social insects and human societies. Fundamentally, however, these are misleading or meaningless, for the behavior of insects is rigidly stereotyped and determined by innate instructive mechanisms; they show 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.

The Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole is a paradigm, a human institution possessed of a life of its own, self-regenerating, touched all around by human meddle but constantly improved, embellished by it.

Neither the spectacularly eminent men who have served as directors down through the century nor the numberless committees by which it is seasonally raddled, nor the six hundred-man corporation that nominally owns and operates it, nor even the trustees, have ever been able to do more than hold the lightest reins over this institution; it seems to have a mind of its own, which it makes up in its own way.

Neither the spectacularly eminent men who have served as directors down through the century nor the numberless committees by which it is seasonally raddled, nor the six hundred-man corporation that nominally owns and operates it, nor even the trustees, have ever been able to do more than hold the lightest reins over this institution; it seems to have a mind of its own, which it makes up in its own way.

Someone has counted thirty Nobel Laureates who have worked at the MBL at one time or another.

Marine models were essential in the early days of research on muscle structure and function, and research on muscle has become a major preoccupation at the MBL.

Limulus, one of the world’s conservative beasts, has recently been in the newspapers; it was discovered to contain a reagent for the detection of vanishingly small quantities of endotoxin from gram-negative bacteria, and the pharmaceutical industry has already sniffed commercial possibilities for the monitoring of pyrogen-free materials; horseshoe crabs may soon be as marketable as lobsters.

A small boy, five-ish, with myopia and glasses, emerges from the water; characteristically, although his hair is dripping his glasses are bone dry; he has already begun to master technique.

There is no real loss of authority in this, since you get to decide whether to do the thing or not, and you can intervene and embellish the technique any time you like; if you want to ride a bicycle backward, or walk with an eccentric loping gait giving a little skip every fourth step, whistling at the same time, you can do that.

There is no real loss of authority in this, since you get to decide whether to do the thing or not, and you can intervene and embellish the technique any time you like; if you want to ride a bicycle backward, or walk with an eccentric loping gait giving a little skip every fourth step, whistling at the same time, you can do that.

If we were all genetically programmed to play the piano deftly from birth, we might never learn to understand music.

But now the autonomy of this interior domain, long regarded as inviolate, is open to question.

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.

There is already talk of a breakthrough in the prevention and treatment of human disease. According to proponents, when the technology is perfected and extended it will surely lead to new possibilities for therapy.

Now that we know that viscera can be taught, the thought comes naturally that we’ve been neglecting them all these years, and by judicious application of human intelligence, these primitive structures can be trained to whatever standards of behavior we wish to set for them.

My trouble, to be quite candid, is a lack of confidence in myself.

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.

We seem to be living through the biologic revolution, so far anyway, without being upheaved or even much disturbed by it. Even without being entirely clear about just what it is, we are all learning to take it for granted. It is a curious, peaceful sort of revolution, in which there is no general apprehension that old views are being outraged and overturned.

The news about DNA and the genetic code did not displace an earlier dogma; there was nothing much there to be moved aside.

The ribosomes inside the mitochondria are similar to bacterial ribosomes, and different from animal ribosomes.

But this is a sober, industrious field, and the work goes on methodically, with special interest just now in the molecular genetics of organelles. There is careful, restrained speculation on how they got there in the first place, with a consensus that they were probably engulfed by larger cells more than a billion years ago and have simply stayed there ever since.

I did not mind it when I first learned of my descent from lower forms of life. I had in mind an arboreal family of beetle-browed, speechless, hairy sub-men, ape-like, and I’ve never objected to them as forebears.

There is something intrinsically good-natured about all symbiotic relations, necessarily, but this one, which is probably the most ancient and most firmly established of all, seems especially equable. There is nothing resembling predation, and no pretense of an adversary stance on either side.

There is something intrinsically good-natured about all symbiotic relations, necessarily, but this one, which is probably the most ancient and most firmly established of all, seems especially equable. There is nothing resembling predation, and no pretense of an adversary stance on either side.