The Lives of a Cell: List 4

We explode clouds of aerosol, mixed for good luck with deodorants, into our noses, mouths, underarms, privileged crannies—even into the intimate insides of our telephones.

Staphylococci live all over us, and seem to have adapted to conditions in our skin that are uncongenial to most other bacteria.

Only a few of us are plagued by boils, and we can blame a large part of the destruction of tissues on the zeal of our own leukocytes.

Hemolytic streptococci are among our closest intimates, even to the extent of sharing antigens with the membranes of our muscle cells; it is our reaction to their presence, in the form of rheumatic fever, that gets us into trouble.

Leukocytes become more actively phagocytic, release lysosomal enzymes, turn sticky, and aggregate together in dense masses, occluding capillaries and shutting off the blood supply.

Complement is switched on at the right point in its sequence to release chemotactic signals, calling in leukocytes from everywhere.

Pyrogen is released from leukocytes, adding fever to hemorrhage, necrosis, and shock.

Bang has shown that an injection of a very small dose into the body cavity will cause the aggregation of hemocytes in ponderous, immovable masses that block the vascular channels, and a gelatinous clot brings the circulation to a standstill.

The mechanism is itself quite a good one, when used with precision and restraint, admirably designed for coping with intrusion by a single bacterium: the hemocyte would be attracted to the site, extrude the coagulable protein, the microorganism would be entrapped and immobilized, and the thing would be finished.

Just recently, to correct some of the various flaws, inequities, logistic defects, and near-bankruptcies in today’s health-care delivery system, the government has officially invented new institutions called Health Maintenance Organizations, already known familiarly as HMO’s, spreading out across the country like post offices, ready to distribute in neat packages, as though from a huge, newly stocked inventory, health.

Just recently, to correct some of the various flaws, inequities, logistic defects, and near-bankruptcies in today’s health-care delivery system, the government has officially invented new institutions called Health Maintenance Organizations, already known familiarly as HMO’s, spreading out across the country like post offices, ready to distribute in neat packages, as though from a huge, newly stocked inventory, health.

Sooner or later, we are bound to get into trouble with this word. It is too solid and unequivocal a term to be used as a euphemism and this seems to be what we are attempting.

We are still beset by plain diseases, and we do not control them; they are loose on their own, afflicting us unpredictably and haphazardly.

We are still beset by plain diseases, and we do not control them; they are loose on their own, afflicting us unpredictably and haphazardly.

Some of the believers among us are convinced that once 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 everything from weak kidneys to moroseness.

I will bet that if you got this kind of information, and added everything up, you would find a quite different set of figures from the ones now being projected in official circles for the population at large.

Others are social only in the sense of being more or less congenial, meeting from time to time in committees, using social gatherings as ad hoc occasions for feeding and breeding. Some animals simply nod at each other in passing, never reaching even a first-name relationship.

We have names to label each as self, and we believe without reservation that this system of taxonomy will guarantee the entity, the absolute separateness of each of us, but the mechanism has no discernible function in the center of a crowded city; we are essentially nameless, most of our time.

We are not mindless, nor is our day-to-day behavior coded out to the last detail by our genomes, nor do we seem to be engaged together, compulsively, in any single, universal, stereotyped task analogous to the construction of a nest.

There are, to be sure, superficial resemblances in some of the things we do together, like building glass and plastic cities on all the land and farming under the sea, or assembling in armies, or landing samples of ourselves on the moon, or sending memoranda into the next galaxy.

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

The specifically locked-on antigen at the surface of a lymphocyte does not send the cell off in search of something totally different; when a bee is 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.

A dead bird is an incongruity, more startling than an unexpected live bird, sure evidence to the human mind that something has gone wrong.

We will have to give up the notion that death is catastrophe, or detestable, or avoidable, or even strange.

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, more efficiency, less unpredictability.

More probably, the end is a sigh. But then, if the air is right and the science is going well, the sigh is immediately interrupted, there is a yawping new question, and the wild, tumbling activity begins once more, out of control all over again.

Even the new jargon is disturbing: it hurts the spirit, somehow, to read the word environments, when the plural means that there are so many 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.

But now, just when the new view seems to be taking hold, we may be in for another wrench, this time more dismaying and unsettling than anything we’ve come through. In a sense, we shall be obliged to swing back again, still believing in the new way but constrained by the facts of life to live in the old.

Here we are, practically speaking twenty-first-century mankind, filled to exuberance with our new understanding of kinship to all the family of life, and here we are, still nineteenth-century man, walking boot-shod over the open face of nature, subjugating and civilizing it.

You’d think, if they were simply examples of the common essence of mankind, they’d seem more recognizable. Instead, they are bizarre, anomalous.

I have known my share of peculiar, difficult, nervous, grabby people, but I’ve never encountered any genuinely, consistently detestable human beings in all my life. The Iks sound more like abnormalities, maladies.

Each Ik has become a group, a one-man tribe on its own, a constituency.

When he stands at the door of his hut, shouting insults at his neighbors in a loud harangue, he is city addressing another city.

For all the new knowledge, we still have formidable diseases, still unsolved, lacking satisfactory explanation, lacking satisfactory treatment.

It has been our perpetual habit to try anything, on the slimmest of chances, the thinnest of hopes, empirically and wishfully, and we have proved to ourselves over and over again that the approach doesn’t work well. Bleeding, cupping, and purging are the classical illustrations, but we have plenty of more recent examples to be embarrassed about.

It has been our perpetual habit to try anything, on the slimmest of chances, the thinnest of hopes, empirically and wishfully, and we have proved to ourselves over and over again that the approach doesn’t work well. Bleeding, cupping, and purging are the classical illustrations, but we have plenty of more recent examples to be embarrassed about.

It had its beginnings in the final quarter of the last century, and decades of the most painstaking and demanding research were required before the etiology of pneumonia, scarlet fever, meningitis, and the rest could be worked out.

It had its beginnings in the final quarter of the last century, and decades of the most painstaking and demanding research were required before the etiology of pneumonia, scarlet fever, meningitis, and the rest could be worked out.

Locally, a good way to tell how the work is going is to listen in the corridors. If you hear the word, “Impossible!” spoken as an expletive, followed by laughter, you will know that someone’s orderly research plan is coming along nicely.