Awesome Biology

Awesome Biology

“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.”
Albert Einstein
In my last blog, I wrote about the sense of awe and wonder that scientist’s feel in the course of their work, and how over time we sometimes lose or forget this motivation that caused many of us to choose a science career. I think it’s easier for cosmologists or astrophysicists, than for biologists, to be in touch with these emotions as they go about their work. How could you gaze upon the vastness and complexity of the Universe and not feel a sense of awe and wonder?
But biologists have their own universe that is no less awe inspiring. I marvel at the beauty and complexity of even the simplest forms of life, and more important, the connections and interplay between organisms. One of the great stories of modern biology—a story that is currently being written-- is the interaction of the biome with our human bodies. There is accumulating evidence that our human immune systems are heavily influenced by the commensal bacteria and parasites living in our gut. There is at least one reported instance of parasitic pig worms, Trichuris suis, ameliorating the effects of autism1. There is a good review on a possible link between gut bacteria and cancer that concludes “Gut microbes are increasingly being linked to medical conditions including obesity, inflammatory bowel disease, diabetes, and cancer.” 2
What is even more remarkable is that our cells may be influenced by miRNA’s carried in exosomes from fetuses, from cell–to-cell, and even from the plants we eat.3
How is it than when we look at the boundaries of life on a fine scale that the boundaries become blurred and indistinct? This is not dissimilar to what is seen in the wacky world of quantum physics where connectivity, action-at-a-distance, and the ability of matter and energy to pop in and out of existence blur the boundaries of even the most fundamental relationships in the physical world.
I once had a physics professor ask me, as a biology major, to define life. I gave what I thought was a pretty good answer, until he began to ask questions like “Is a virus alive?” He concluded by saying that if I could not define clearly what I was studying, then I was wasting my time. Perhaps one of the goals of the modern biologist is to create that definition of life.
Next Blog: Truth and Beauty
1. http://the-scientist.com/2011/02/01/opening-a-can-of-worms/
2. http://the-scientist.com/2011/08/01/sharing-the-bounty/
3. Zhang, L., et al., Exogenous plant MIR168a specifically targets mammalian LDLRAP1: evidence of cross-kingdom regulation by microRNA. Cell Res. 2011