Who are you to think you play?

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THE LIVES OF A CELL

(National Award Winning Book)

NOTES OF A BIOLOGY WATCHER

Lewis Thomas

We are told that the trouble with Modern Man is that he has been trying to detach himself from nature. He sits in the topmost tiers of polymer, glass, and steel, dangling his pulsing legs, surveying at a distance the writhing life of the planet. In this scenario, Man comes on as a 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 it is illusion to think that there is anything fragile about the life of the earth; surely this is the toughest membrane imaginable in the universe, opaque to probability, impermeable to death. We are the delicate part, transient and vulnerable as cilia. Nor is it a new thing for man to invent an existence that he imagines to be above the rest of life; this has been his most consistent intellectual exertion down the millennia. As illusion, it has never worked out to his satisfaction in the past, any more than it does today. Man is embedded in nature.

The biologic science of recent years has been making this a more urgent fact of life. The new, hard problem will be to cope with the dawning, intensifying realization of lust how interlocked we are. The old, clung-to notions most of us have held about our special lordship are being deeply undermined.

Item. A good case can be made for our nonexistence as entities. We are not made up, as we had always supposed, of successively enriched packets of our own parts. We are shared, rented, occupied. At the interior of our cells, driving them, providing the oxidative energy that sends us out for the improvement of each shining day, are the mitochondria, and in a strict sense they are not ours. They turn out to be little separate creatures, the colonial posterity of migrant prokaryocytes, probably primitive bacteria that swam into ancestral precursors of our eukaryotic cells and stayed there. Ever since, they have maintained themselves and their ways, replicating in their own fashion, privately, with their own DNA and RNA quite different from ours. They are as much symbionts as the rhizobial bacteria in the roots of beans.

Without you could not move a muscle, drum a finger, think a thought. Mitochondria are stable and responsible lodgers, and I choose to trust them. But what of the other little animals, similarly established in my cells, sorting and balancing me, clustering me together? My centrioles, basal bodies, and probably a good many other more obscure tiny beings at work inside my cells, each with its own special genome, are as foreign, and as essential, as aphids in anthills. My cells are no longer the pure line entities I was raised with; they are ecosystems more complex than Tamaica Bay. So who is playing chess here?

Avatar of wasimch

It looks quite fascinating but one has to be philosopher to relate all these

things;the chair ,the universe,membranes,life ,the earth,altogether and especially with chess. Being doctor my understanding regarding mitochondria, centriokes and all other intracellular bodies of an animal are identical wth those of most primitive organism the unicellular form of life. So lets leave these things for related persons and play chess which is a good mental  burns exercise and remember our brain burns lot of calories during a game of chess a good way of shedding extra calories!

Avatar of Lou-for-you

We seem to be too primitive to play chess well. Not sure that my lodgers find that this contributes to their comfort.

Avatar of Ruby-Fischer

My mitochondria are mine. I dont think they are going anywhere else....