Human Molecular Quotes

We humans look rather different from a tree. Without a doubt we perceive the world differently than a tree does. But down deep, at the molecular heart of life, the trees and we are essentially identical.

As novelist Margaret Atwood wrote to explain women’s absence from quest-for-identity novels, “there’s probably a simple reason for this: send a woman out alone on a rambling nocturnal quest and she’s likely to end up a lot deader a lot sooner than a man would.”3 The irony here is that thanks to molecular archaeology—which includes the study of ancient DNA to trace human movement over time—we now know that men have been the stay-at-homes, and women have been the travelers. The rate of intercontinental migration for women is about eight times that for men.4

It is my belief that the basic knowledge that we're providing to the world will have a profound impact on the human condition and the treatments for disease and our view of our place on the biological continuum.

The endless void of space stretched out before it. Millennia had passed as it roared through the plane of the Milky Way galaxy. The awesome ellipse of its original path was continually altered by intermittent proximity to myriad stars. It gave off minute bits of itself as it rocketed silently through the vacuum of space, but still, after all these millennia it was counted large as such things were measured, and the fact that it had never collided with anything else after such a tremendous interval of travel was a mute testimony to the vastness and comparative emptiness of the universe. Much as humans, on a molecular level, are comprised mostly of space not of matter, so the universe, for all its galaxies and solar systems, is comprised primarily of interconnecting emptiness. Dark, colossal, mindless, and mighty in its mass and velocity, it came on and on through space. The great alignment had set it on a new path. Now, one last nudge from the Red Giant in the previous solar system had fixed its new course, on a fateful rendezvous. Though it was oblivious to its own destination and nothing in the universe with awareness had yet detected it . . . Its path was set.

It is remarkable that mind enters into our awareness of nature on two separate levels. At the highest level, the level of human consciousness, our minds are somehow directly aware of the complicated flow of electrical and chemical patterns in our brains. At the lowest level, the level of single atoms and electrons, the mind of an observer is again involved in the description of events. Between lies the level of molecular biology, where mechanical models are adequate and mind appears to be irrelevant. But I, as a physicist, cannot help suspecting that there is a logical connection between the two ways in which mind appears in my universe. I cannot help thinking that our awareness of our own brains has something to do with the process which we call "observation" in atomic physics. That is to say, I think our consciousness is not just a passive epiphenomenon carried along by the chemical events in our brains, but is an active agent forcing the molecular complexes to make choices between one quantum state and another. In other words, mind is already inherent in every electron, and the processes of human consciousness differ only in degree but not in kind from the processes of choice between quantum states which we call "chance" when they are made by electrons.

From a limited pallet of molecular components including cellulose, chitosan, and pectin; the very same materials found in trees, crustaceans and apple skins - natural systems embody an extensive array of functional materials that outperform human engineered ones through their resilience, sustainability and adaptability.

I am a collection of water, calcium and organic molecules called Carl Sagan. You are a collection of almost identical molecules with a different collective label. But is that all? Is there nothing in here but molecules? Some people find this idea somehow demeaning to human dignity. For myself, I find it elevating that our universe permits the evolution of molecular machines as intricate and subtle as we. But the essence of life is not so much the atoms and simple molecules that make us up as the way in which they are put together. Every now and then we read that the chemicals which constitute the human body cost ninety-seven cents or ten dollars or some such figure; it is a little depressing to find our bodies valued so little. However, these estimates are for human beings reduced to our simplest possible components. We are made mostly of water, which costs almost nothing; the carbon is costed in the form of coal; the calcium in our bones as chalk; the nitrogen in our proteins as air (cheap also); the iron in our blood as rusty nails. If we did not know better, we might be tempted to take all the atoms that make us up, mix them together in a big container and stir. We can do this as much as we want. But in the end all we have is a tedious mixture of atoms. How could we have expected anything else?

Mushrooms have taught me the interconnectedness of all life-forms and the molecular matrix that we share,” he explains in another one. “I no longer feel that I am in this envelope of a human life called Paul Stamets. I am part of the stream of molecules that are flowing through nature. I am given a voice, given consciousness for a time, but I feel that I am part of this continuum of stardust into which I am born and to which I will return at the end of this life.

When animals make a stupid mistake, you laugh at them. A cat misjudges a leap. A dog looks overly quizzical about a simple object. These are funny things. But when a person doesn’t understand something, if they miscalculate and hit the brakes too late, blame is assigned. They are stupid. They are wrong. Teachers and cops are there to sort it out, with a trail of paperwork to illustrate the stupidity. The faults. The evidence and incidents of these things. We have entire systems in place to help decide who is what. Sometimes the systems don’t work. Families spend their weekend afternoons at animal shelters, even when they’re not looking for a pet. They come to see the unwanted and unloved. The cats and dogs who don’t understand why they are these things. They are petted and combed, walked and fed, cooed over and kissed. Then they go back in their cages and sometimes tears are shed. Fuzzy faces peering through bars can be unbearable for many. Change the face to a human one and the reaction changes. The reason why is because people should know better. But our logic is skewed in this respect. A dog that bites is a dead dog. First day at the shelter and I already saw one put to sleep, which in itself is a misleading phrase. Sleep implies that you have the option of waking up. Once their bodies pass unconsciousness to something deeper where systems start to fail, they revolt a little bit, put up a fight on a molecular level. They kick. They cry. They don’t want to go. And this happens because their jaws closed over a human hand, ever so briefly. Maybe even just the once. But people, they get chances. They get the benefit of the doubt. Even though they have the higher logic functioning and they knew when they did it THEY KNEW it was a bad thing.

I am a collection of water, calcium and organic molecules called Carl Sagan. You are a collection of almost identical molecules with a different collective label. But is that all? Is there nothing in here but molecules? Some people find this idea somehow demeaning to human dignity. For myself, I find it elevating that our universe permits the evolution of molecular machines as intricate and subtle as we.

A nanometer is so small, you would need to slice the width of a human hair one hundred thousand times to reach a nanometer.

humanity has the capacity to solve all of the problems of the world. But only through unity. Unity is the golden key to the highest kingdom

Here, the results of recent molecular biological studies are illuminating in linking germs to the rise of food production, in Eurasia much more than in the Americas.

I think knowledge is a blessing, not a curse. This is especially true in the case of genetic knowledge. To understand the molecular nature of cancer for the first time, to diagnose and prevent Alzheimer’s disease, to discover the secrets of human history, to reconstruct the organisms that populated the pre-Cambrian seas – these seem to me to be immense blessings.

The irony here is that thanks to molecular archaeology—which includes the study of ancient DNA to trace human movement over time—we now know that men have been the stay-at-homes, and women have been the travelers. The rate of intercontinental migration for women is about eight times that for men.

[W]ithout changing the most molecular relationships in society — notably, those between men and women, adults and children, whites and other ethnic groups, heterosexuals and gays (the list, in fact, is considerable) — society will be riddled by domination even in a socialistic ‘classless’ and ‘non-exploitative’ form. It would be infused by hierarchy even as it celebrated the dubious virtues of ‘people’s democracies,’ ’socialism’ and the ‘public ownership’ of ‘natural resources,’ And as long as hierarchy persists, as long as domination organises humanity around a system of elites, the project of dominating nature will continue to exist and inevitably lead our planet to ecological extinction

Stress can be bad for you. We no longer die of smallpox or the plague and instead die of stress-related diseases of lifestyle, like heart disease or diabetes, where damage slowly accumulates over time. It is understood how stress can cause or worsen disease or make you more vulnerable to other risk factors. Much of this is even understood on the molecular level. Stress can even cause your immune system to abnormally target hair follicles, causing your hair to turn gray.

Remember that your perception of the world is a reflection of your state of consciousness. You are not separate from it, and there is no objective world out there. Every moment, your consciousness creates the world that you inhabit. One of the greatest insights that has come out of modern physics is that of the unity between the observer and the observed: the person conducting the experiment — the observing consciousness — cannot be separated from the observed phenomena, and a different way of looking causes the observed phenomena to behave differently. If you believe, on a deep level, in separation and the struggle for survival, then you see that belief reflected all around you and your perceptions are governed by fear. You inhabit a world of death and of bodies fighting, killing, and devouring each other. Nothing is what it seems to be. The world that you create and see through the egoic mind may seem a very imperfect place, even a vale of tears. But whatever you perceive is only a kind of symbol, like an image in a dream. It is how your consciousness interprets and interacts with the molecular energy dance of the universe. This energy is the raw material of so-called physical reality. You see it in terms of bodies and birth and death, or as a struggle for survival. An infinite number of completely different interpretations, completely different worlds, is possible and, in fact, exists — all depending on the perceiving consciousness. Every being is a focal point of consciousness, and every such focal point creates its own world, although all those worlds are interconnected. There is a human world, an ant world, a dolphin world, and so on. There are countless beings whose consciousness frequency is so different from yours that you are probably unaware of their existence, as they are of yours. Highly conscious beings who are aware of their connectedness with the Source and with each other would inhabit a world that to you would appear as a heavenly realm — and yet all worlds are ultimately one.

Recently a promising chemical called resveratrol has been isolated. Resveratrol, found in red wine, helps to activate the sirtuin molecule, which has been shown to slow down the oxidation process, a principle component in aging, and therefore it may help protect the body from age-related molecular damage.

The bombs disrupted molecular structures. The cocktails included the distribution of nanotechnology to help to speed up the recovery of the earth - nanotechnology that promotes the self-assembly of molecules. The nanotechnology, speed up by DNA, which is an informational material but also excellent at the self-assembly of cells, made our fusing stronger. And the nanotechnology that hit the humans trapped in rubble or scorched land helped them to regenerate.

You are a collection of almost identical molecules with a different collective label. But is that all? Is there nothing in here but molecules? Some people find this idea somehow demeaning to human dignity. For myself, I find it elevating that our universe permits the evolution of molecular machines as intricate and subtle as we.

Ebola Zaire attacks every organ and tissue in the human body except skeletal muscle and bone. It is a perfect parasite because it transforms virtually every part of the body into a digested slime of virus particles. The seven mysterious proteins that, assembled together, make up the Ebola-virus particle, work as a relentless machine, a molecular shark, and they consume the body as the virus makes copies of itself. Small blood clots begin to appear in the bloodstream, and the blood thickens and slows, and the clots begin to stick to the walls of blood vessels. This is known as pavementing, because the clots fit together in a mosaic. The mosaic thickens and throws more clots, and the clots drift through the bloodstream into the small capillaries, where they get stuck. This shuts off the blood supply to various parts of the body, causing dead spots to appear in the brain, liver, kidneys, lungs, intestines, testicles, breast tissue (of men as well as women), and all through the skin.

no species, ours included, possesses a purpose beyond the imperatives created by its genetic history. Species may have vast potential for material and mental progress but they lack any immanent purpose or guidance from agents beyond their immediate environment or even an evolutionary goal toward which their molecular architecture automatically steers them.

Thus, adult behavior produces persistent molecular brain changes in offspring, “programming” them to be likely to replicate that distinctive behavior in adulthood.76

To your biology, survival of your genes is more important than accomplishment of your dreams.

Nanotechnology will enable the design of nanobots: robots designed at the molecular level, measured in microns (millionths of a meter), such as “respirocytes” (mechanical red-blood cells).33 Nanobots will have myriad roles within the human body, including reversing human aging (to the extent that this task will not already have been completed through biotechnology, such as genetic engineering).

Molecular studies (of so-called mitochondrial DNA) were initially also interpreted in terms of an African origin of modern humans, though the meaning of those molecular findings is currently in doubt.

Unlike an antibody, a gunslinging sheriff itching for a showdown with a gang of molecular criminals in the center of town, a T cell is the gumshoe detective going door to door to look for perpetrators hiding inside.

Graphene consists of a single molecular layer of carbon atoms tightly bonded to form an ultra-thin, ultra-durable sheet. It is almost transparent and weighs practically nothing, yet is the toughest material known to science—

they say that everything in the world is an illusion, that it’s not real. but how’s it an illusion? who’d say those real, material things right there in front of you are fake, right? the form that material things exist in is one way, while the form they manifest in, it turns out, is different. and our eyes have an ability: they can fix the material things in our material dimension so that they appear to be in the state we now see. but actually, that’s not their state. that’s not even their state in our dimension. for example, what does a human being look like under a microscope? his whole body is loose and made up of little molecules, just like grains of sand, and they’re granular and in motion, electrons are orbiting nuclei, the whole body is wriggling and in motion, and the surface of the body isn’t smooth, it’s irregular. the same goes for every material thing in the universe, be it steel, iron, stone, or whatever, all the molecular elements inside them are in motion. you really can’t see the overall form of it, and the truth is, none of those things are static. this table is wriggling too, but your eyes can’t see the reality of it. so this pair of eyes can give you a false image.

Graphene consists of a single molecular layer of carbon atoms tightly bonded to form an ultra-thin, ultra-durable sheet. It is almost transparent and weighs practically nothing, yet is the toughest material known to science—two hundred times stronger than steel and stronger even than diamonds. In principle, you could balance an elephant on a pencil and then place the pencil point on a sheet of graphene without breaking or tearing it. As a bonus, graphene also conducts electricity.

Horses aren’t native to Australia. They are exotic, first brought there by European settlers barely more than two centuries ago. Hendra is probably an old virus, according to the runic evidence of its genome, as read by molecular evolutionists.

Ebola Zaire attacks every organ and tissue in the human body except skeletal muscle and bone. It is a perfect parasite because it transforms virtually every part of the body into a digested slime of virus particles. The seven mysterious proteins that, assembled together, make up the Ebola-virus particle, work as a relentless machine, a molecular shark, and they consume the body as the virus makes copies of itself. Small blood clots begin to appear in the bloodstream, and the blood thickens and slows, and the clots begin to stick to the walls of blood vessels. This is known as pavementing, because the clots fit together in a mosaic. The mosaic thickens and throws more clots, and the clots drift through the bloodstream into the small capillaries, where

Wine tasters will mention all sorts of things they can taste in a fine wine, as if they were a human spectrograph with the ability to sense the molecular makeup of their beverage. Research shows, however, this perception can be hijacked, fooled, and might just be completely wrong.

If the estimated age of the cosmos were shortened to seventy-two years, a human life would take about ten seconds. But look at time the other way. Each day is a minor eternity of over 86,000 seconds. During each second, the number of distinct molecular functions going on within the human body is comparable to the number of seconds in the estimated age of the cosmos. A few seconds are long enough for a revolutionary idea, a startling communication, a baby's conception, a wounding insult, a sudden death. Depending on how we think of them, our lives can be infinitely long or infinitely short.

G. Davies et al., “Genome-Wide Association Study of Cognitive Functions and Educational Attainment in UK Biobank (N=112 151),” Molecular Psychiatry 21 (2016): 758–67; M. T. Lo et al., “Genome-Wide Analyses for Personality Traits Identify Six Genomic Loci and Show Correlations with Psychiatric Disorders,” Nature Genetics 49 (2017): 152–56.

They perform hundreds of critical health tasks. Combined, they can form a powerful antioxidant called copper-zinc superoxide dismutase, or CuZnSOD. It is one of your body’s most potent natural defense mechanisms against aging and molecular damage. Zinc is a key mineral in the support of healthy immune function, energy production, and mood.

But our logic is skewed in this respect. A dog that bites is a dead dog. First day at the shelter and I already saw one put to sleep, which in itself is a misleading phrase. Sleep implies that you have the option of waking up. Once their bodies pass unconsciousness to something deeper where systems start to fail, they revolt a little bit, put up a fight on a molecular level. They kick. They cry. They don’t want to go. And this happens because their jaws closed over a human hand, ever so briefly. Maybe even just the once. But people, they get chances. They get the benefit of the doubt. Even though they have the higher logic functioning and they knew when they did it THEY KNEW it was a bad thing.

Flesh and bone and blood no longer are my makeup. I’m stacks of naught, packed into my being at the molecular level. My skin, my muscles, my organs, my cunt—cells of non-existence, masquerading as bits of human. Touch me, I’ll feel nothing. Bruise me, fuck me, love me—nothing, nothing, nothing. Everything within me has been altered and adapted. There’s nothing real anymore. Nothing solid. Nothing worthy. Only pieces of limbo. Only nihilism. Only nothing. Nothing wrapped securely around my core, an impenetrable seal. Nothing jammed in all my spaces, crammed in tight, protecting the last embers of a once-blazing heart. I’m barely aware of its beat anymorethrough the layers of vacuity, barely feel the steadiness of its pulse.

medical indicators, monitor our health conditions on our phones, and share the data with doctors and researchers. Doudna added that the pandemic had accelerated the convergence of science with other fields. “The engagement of non-scientists in our work will help achieve an incredibly interesting biotechnology revolution,” she predicted. This was molecular biology’s moment.

Man ( the human ego) is not so much destroying the planet as it is destroying itself. The planet will Be Here regardless of human habitation. But human ego is destructive and therefore destroys it's very habitat. Soon when there is not habitat for human ego; the ego dies. What remains is your Being unfettered by the materialistic illusions of what the ancients referred to as Maya

Although Galileo was a devout Catholic, it was his conflict with the Vatican, sadly mismanaged on both sides, that lay at the basis of the running battle between science and religion, a tragic and confusing schism which persists unresolved. More than ever today, religion finds its revelatory truths threatened by scientific theory, and retreats into a defensive corner, while scientists go into the attack insisting that rational argument is the only valid criterion for an understanding of the workings of the universe. Maybe both sides have misunderstood the nature of their respective roles. Scientists are equipped to answer the mechanical question of how the universe and everything in it, including life, came about. But since their modes of thought are dictated by purely rational, materialistic criteria, physicists cannot claim to answer the questions of why the universe exists, and why we human beings are here to observe it, any more than molecular biologists can satisfactorily explain why – if our actions are determined by the workings of a selfish genetic coding – we occasionally listen to the voice of conscience and behave with altruism, compassion and generosity. Even these human qualities have come under attack from evolutionary psychologists who have ascribed altruism to a crude genetic theory by which familial cooperation is said to favour the survival of the species. Likewise the spiritual sophistication of musical, artistic and poetic activity is regarded as just a highly advanced function of primitive origins.

It is in the nature of the human mind to give in, and hold on, to the source of solace with all the might it can muster. Life is hard and any figure that tends to ease the subjective perception of that hardship, attains a high pedestal of utmost reverence in the realm of the individual mind. It all takes place at a molecular level in the human brain with the purpose of self-preservation.

The Melding Plague attacked our society at the core. It was not quite a biological virus, not quite a software virus, but a strange and shifting chimera of the two. No pure strain of the plague has ever been isolated, but in its pure form it must resemble a kind of nano-machinery, analogous to the molecular-scale assemblers of our own medichine technology. That it must be of alien origin seems beyond doubt. Equally clear is the fact that nothing we have thrown against the plague has done more than slow it. More often than not, our interventions have only made things worse. The plague adapts to our attacks; it perverts our weapons and turns them against us. Some kind of buried intelligence seems to guide it. We don’t know whether the plague was directed toward humanity—or whether we have just been terribly unlucky.

A microscopic egg had failed to divide in time due to a failure somewhere along a chain of chemical events, a tiny disturbance in a cascade of protein reactions. A molecular event ballooned like an exploding universe, out onto the wider scale of human misery. No cruelty, nothing avenged, no ghost moving in mysterious ways. Merely a gene transcribed in error, an enzyme recipe skewed, a chemical bond severed. A process of natural wastage as indifferent as it was pointless. Which only brought into relief healthy, perfectly formed life, equally contingent, equally without purpose. Blind luck, to arrive in the world with your properly formed parts in the right place, to be born to parents who were loving, not cruel, or to escape, by geographical or social accident, war or poverty. And therefore to find it so much easier to be virtuous.

The bombs disrupted molecular structures. The cocktails included the distribution of nanotechnology to help to speed up the recovery of the earth—nanotechnology that promotes the self-assembly of molecules. The nanotechnology, speeded up by DNA, which is an informational material but also excellent at the self-assembly of cells, made our fusing stronger. And the nanotechnology that hit the humans trapped in rubble or scorched land helped them to regenerate.

My opponents seemed to be fluent in genetics, molecular biology, and PhD-level horticulture. Played against me were words like “amitoses,” “auxins,” and “zoea”. After a quick search online, I found the stink’s source: the game is filled with cheaters. Turns out, there are multiple hacks giving *players,* and I use that term loosely, the best word to play given all options. After uncovering the scheme, I could only shake my head in disgust at my fellow humans.

A. Okbay et al., “Genome-Wide Association Study Identifies 74 Loci Associated with Educational Attainment,” Nature 533 (2016): 539–42; M. T. Lo et al., “Genome-Wide Analyses for Personality Traits Identify Six Genomic Loci and Show Correlations with Psychiatric Disorders,” Nature Genetics 49 (2017): 152–56; G. Davies et al., “Genome-Wide Association Study of Cognitive Functions and Educational Attainment in UK Biobank (N=112 151),” Molecular Psychiatry 21 (2016): 758–67.

Our understanding of life has only been enriched by the discovery that living flesh is composed of molecular clockwork rather than quivering protoplasm, or that birds soar by exploiting the laws of physics rather than defying them. In the same way, our understanding of ourselves and our cultures can only be enriched by the discovery that our minds are composed of intricate neural circuits for thinking, feeling, and learning rather than blank slates, amorphous blobs, or inscrutable ghosts.

To give up that control is to be left with “the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.”38 A mentally troubled man—he would hang himself two and a half years after the speech—Wallace knew with special urgency the stakes involved in how we choose, or fail to choose, to focus our mind. We cede control over our attention at our own peril. Everything that neuroscientists have discovered about the cellular and molecular workings of the human brain underscores that point.

A microscopic egg had failed to divide in time due to a failure somewhere along a chain of chemical events, a tiny disturbance in a cascade of protein reactions. A molecular event ballooned like an exploding universe, out onto the wider scale of human misery. No cruelty, nothing avenged, no ghost moving in mysterious ways. Merely a gene transcribed in error, an enzyme recipe skewed, a chemical bond severed. A process of natural wastage as indifferent as it was pointless. Which only brought into relief healthy,

But from an evolutionary standpoint, there are good grounds to assert that “language” is indeed a natural phenomenon, which originates in the molecular language of the genome and has found, in the course of evolution, its hitherto highest expression in human language (Küppers, 1995). For evolutionary biologists, there is no question as to whether languages below the level of human language exist; the issue is rather about identifying the general conditions under which linguistic structures originate and evolve.

A major push is under way to figure out the molecular basis of those "critical" or "sensitive" periods, to figure out how the brain changes as certain learning abilities come and go. In some, if not all, of those mammals that have the alternating stripes in the visual cortex known as ocular dominance columns, those columns can be adjusted early in development, but not in adulthood. A juvenile monkey that has one eye covered for an extended period of time can gradually readjust its brain wiring to favor the open eye; an adult monkey cannot adjust its wiring. At the end of a critical period, a set of sticky sugar-protein hybrids known as proteoglycans condenses into a tight net around the dendrites and cell bodies of some of the relevant neurons, and in so doing those proteoglycans appear to impede axons that would otherwise be wriggling around as part of the process of readjusting the ocular dominance columns; no wriggling, no learning. In a 2002 study with rats, Italian neuroscientist Tommaso Pizzorusso and his colleagues dissolved the excess proteoglycans with an antiproteoglycan enzyme known as "chABC," and in so doing managed to reopen the critical period. After the chABC treatment, even adult rats could recalibrate their ocular dominance columns. ChABC probably won't help us learn second languages anytime soon, but its antiproteoglycan function may have important medical implications in the not-too-distant future. Another 2002 study, also with rats, showed that chABC can also promote functional recovery after spinal cord injury.

Only the middle distance and what may be called the remoter foreground are strictly human. When we look very near or very far, man either vanishes altogether or loses his primacy. The astronomer looks even further afield than the Sung painter and sees even less of human life. At the other end of the scale the physicist, the chemist, the physiologist pursue the close-up – the cellular close-up, the molecular, the atomic and subatomic. Of that which, at twenty feet, even at arm’s length, looked and sounded like a human being no trace remains. Something analogous happens to the myopic artist and the happy lover. In the nuptial embrace personality is melted down; the individual (it is the recurrent theme of Lawrence’s poems and novels) ceases to be himself and becomes a part of the vast impersonal universe. And so it is with the artist who chooses to use his eyes at the near point. In his work humanity loses its importance, even disappears completely. Instead of men and women playing their fantastic tricks before high heaven, we are asked to consider the lilies, to meditate on the unearthly beauty of ‘mere things,’ when isolated from their utilitarian context and rendered as they are, in and for themselves. Alternatively (or, at an earlier stage of artistic development, exclusively), the nonhuman world of the near-point is rendered in patterns. These patterns are abstracted for the most part from leaves and flowers – the rose, the lotus, the acanthus, palm, papyrus – and are elaborated, with recurrences and variations, into something transportingly reminisce

Competition is the spice of sports; but if you make spice the whole meal you'll be sick. The simplest single-celled organism oscillates to a number of different frequencies, at the atomic, molecular, sub-cellular, and cellular levels. Microscopic movies of these organisms are striking for the ceaseless, rhythmic pulsation that is revealed. In an organism as complex as a human being, the frequencies of oscillation and the interactions between those frequencies are multitudinous. -George Leonard Learning any new skill involves relatively brief spurts of progress, each of which is followed by a slight decline to a plateau somewhat higher in most cases than that which preceded it…the upward spurts vary; the plateaus have their own dips and rises along the way…To take the master’s journey, you have to practice diligently, striving to hone your skills, to attain new levels of competence. But while doing so–and this is the inexorable–fact of the journey–you also have to be willing to spend most of your time on a plateau, to keep practicing even when you seem to be getting nowhere. (Mastery, p. 14-15). Backsliding is a universal experience. Every one of us resists significant change, no matter whether it’s for the worse or for the better. Our body, brain and behavior have a built-in tendency to stay the same within rather narrow limits, and to snap back when changed…Be aware of the way homeostasis works…Expect resistance and backlash. Realize that when the alarm bells start ringing, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re sick or crazy or lazy or that you’ve made a bad decision in embarking on the journey of mastery. In fact, you might take these signals as an indication that your life is definitely changing–just what you’ve wanted….Be willing to negotiate with your resistance to change. Our preoccupation with goals, results, and the quick fix has separated us from our own experiences…there are all of those chores that most of us can’t avoid: cleaning, straightening, raking leaves, shopping for groceries, driving the children to various activities, preparing food, washing dishes, washing the car, commuting, performing the routine, repetitive aspects of our jobs….Take driving, for instance. Say you need to drive ten miles to visit a friend. You might consider the trip itself as in-between-time, something to get over with. Or you could take it as an opportunity for the practice of mastery. In that case, you would approach your car in a state of full awareness…Take a moment to walk around the car and check its external condition, especially that of the tires…Open the door and get in the driver’s seat, performing the next series of actions as a ritual: fastening the seatbelt, adjusting the seat and the rearview mirror…As you begin moving, make a silent affirmation that you’ll take responsibility for the space all around your vehicle at all times…We tend to downgrade driving as a skill simply because it’s so common. Actually maneuvering a car through varying conditions of weather, traffic, and road surface calls for an extremely high level of perception, concentration, coordination, and judgement…Driving can be high art…Ultimately, nothing in this life is “commonplace,” nothing is “in between.” The threads that join your every act, your every thought, are infinite. All paths of mastery eventually merge. [Each person has a] vantage point that offers a truth of its own. We are the architects of creation and all things are connected through us. The Universe is continually at its work of restructuring itself at a higher, more complex, more elegant level . . . The intention of the universe is evolution. We exist as a locus of waves that spreads its influence to the ends of space and time. The whole of a thing is contained in each of its parts. We are completely, firmly, absolutely connected with all of existence. We are indeed in relationship to all that is.

What sets the carbon atom apart is that it is shamelessly promiscuous. It is the party animal of the atomic world, latching on to many other atoms (including itself) and holding tight, forming molecular conga lines of hearty robustness—the very trick of nature necessary to build proteins and DNA. As Paul Davies has written: “If it wasn’t for carbon, life as we know it would be impossible. Probably any sort of life would be impossible.” Yet carbon is not all that plentiful even in humans, who so vitally depend on it. Of every 200 atoms in your body, 126 are hydrogen, 51 are oxygen, and just 19 are carbon.†

I can remember many, many times driving down to the projects telling myself ‘You don’t want to do this! You don’t want to do this!’ But I’d do it anyway.” “[M]y body’s saying no and my mind’s saying no, but … we started all over again. I didn’t need it, I didn’t want it … it’s like some kind of molecular thing in my cells would go for it, you know. I felt like a fucking robot.” “I used to smoke some [cocaine] that wasn’t good, feel sick and want some more. That’s totally fucking crazy. The point that is best learned from the whole experience is the craziness, the completely illogical short-circuiting of the normal human mental process that takes place in obsessive addiction.

Shapiro concludes his twenty-three-page paper with this remarkable statement . . . The take-home lesson of more than half a century of molecular microbiology is to recognize that bacterial information processing is far more powerful than human technology. . . . These small cells are incredibly sophisticated at coordinating processes involving millions of individual events and at making them precise and reliable. In addition, the astonishing versatility and mastery bacteria display in managing the biosphere’s geochemical and thermodynamic transformations indicates that we have a great deal to learn about chemistry, physics, and evolution from our small, but very intelligent, prokaryotic relatives.21

Entirely my own opinion,” said Ivanov. “I am glad that we have reached the heart of the matter soon. In other words: you are convinced that “we” – that is to say, the Party, the State and the masses behind it – no longer represent the interests of the Revolution.” “I should leave the masses out of it,” said Rubashov. […] “Leave the masses out of it, “ he repeated. “You understand nothing about them. Nor, probably, do I any more. Once, when the great “we” still existed, we understood them as no one had ever understood them before. We had penetrated into their depths, we worked in the amorphous raw material of history itself…” […] “At that time,” Rubashov went on, “we were called the Party of the Plebs. What did the others know of history? Passing ripples, little eddies and breaking waves. They wondered at the changing forms of the surface and could not explain them. But we had descended into the depths, into the formless, anonymous masses, which at all times constituted the substance of history; and we were the first to discover her laws of motion. We had discovered the laws of her inertia, of the slow changing of her molecular structure, and of her sudden eruptions. That was the greatness of our doctrine. The Jacobins were moralists; we were empirics. We dug in the primeval mud of history and there we found her laws. We knew more than ever men have known about mankind; that is why our revolution succeeded. And now you have buried it all again….” […] “Well,” said Rubashov, “one more makes no difference. Everything is buried: the men, their wisdom and their hopes. You killed the “We”; you destroyed it. Do you really maintain that the masses are still behind you? Other usurpers in Europe pretend the same thing with as much right as you….” […] “Forgive my pompousness,” he went on, “but do you really believe the people are still behind you? It bears you, dumb and resigned, as it bears others in other countries, but there is no response in their depths. The masses have become deaf and dumb again, the great silent x of history, indifferent as the sea carrying the ships. Every passing light is reflected on its surface, but underneath is darkness and silence. A long time ago we stirred up the depths, but that is over. In other words” – he paused and put on his pince-nez – “in those days we made history; now you make politics. That’s the whole difference.” […] "A mathematician once said that algebra was the science for lazy people - one does not work out x, but operates with it as if one knew it. In our case, x stands for the anonymous masses, the people. Politics mean operating with this x without worrying about its actual nature. Making history is to recognize x for what it stands for in the equation." "Pretty," said Ivanov. "But unfortunately rather abstract. To return to more tangible things: you mean, therefore, that "We" - namely, Party and State - no longer represent the interests of the Revolution, of the masses or, if you like, the progress of humanity." "This time you have grasped it," said Rubashov smiling. Ivanov did not answer his smile.

Because the scientific understanding of manic-depressive illness is so ultimately beholden to the field of molecular biology, it is a world in which I have spent an increasing amount of time. It is an exotic world, one developed around an odd assortment of plants and animals—maize, fruit flies, yeast, worms, mice, humans, puffer fish—and it contains a somewhat strange, rapidly evolving, and occasionally quite poetic language system filled with marvelous terms like “orphan clones,” “plasmids,” and “high-density cosmids”; “triple helices,” “untethered DNA,” and “kamikaze reagents”; “chromosome walking,” “gene hunters,” and “gene mappers.” It is a field clearly in pursuit of the most fundamental of understandings, a search for the biological equivalent of quarks and leptons.

The human race will possess the technology to create God. Why not build this being? Emerging technologies such as nanotechnological molecular manufacturers will likely be so powerful and potentially destructive that it will take God to master them. God may turn out to be inevitable simply in order for the human race to save itself. If virtue as excellence is ultimately identical with evolutionary perfection, then virtue is ultimately identical to whatever leads evolution towards a higher state of perfection. Virtue as excellence is thus ultimately inseparable from evolutionary ethics. Evolutionary ethics ties or morality with whatever is conductive to evolutionary progress. If politics is control over evolution, then is virtue the values that best steer political control over evolution?

The final misconception is that evolution is “just a theory.” I will boldly assume that readers who have gotten this far believe in evolution. Opponents inevitably bring up that irritating canard that evolution is unproven, because (following an unuseful convention in the field) it is a “theory” (like, say, germ theory). Evidence for the reality of evolution includes: Numerous examples where changing selective pressures have changed gene frequencies in populations within generations (e.g., bacteria evolving antibiotic resistance). Moreover, there are also examples (mostly insects, given their short generation times) of a species in the process of splitting into two. Voluminous fossil evidence of intermediate forms in numerous taxonomic lineages. Molecular evidence. We share ~98 percent of our genes with the other apes, ~96 percent with monkeys, ~75 percent with dogs, ~20 percent with fruit flies. This indicates that our last common ancestor with other apes lived more recently than our last common ancestor with monkeys, and so on. Geographic evidence. To use Richard Dawkins’s suggestion for dealing with a fundamentalist insisting that all species emerged in their current forms from Noah’s ark—how come all thirty-seven species of lemurs that made landfall on Mt. Ararat in the Armenian highlands hiked over to Madagascar, none dying and leaving fossils in transit? Unintelligent design—oddities explained only by evolution. Why do whales and dolphins have vestigial leg bones? Because they descend from a four-legged terrestrial mammal. Why should we have arrector pili muscles in our skin that produce thoroughly useless gooseflesh? Because of our recent speciation from other apes whose arrector pili muscles were attached to hair, and whose hair stands up during emotional arousal.

I am, reluctantly, a self-confessed carbon chauvinist. Carbon is abundant in the Cosmos. It makes marvelously complex molecules, good for life. I am also a water chauvinist. Water makes an ideal solvent system for organic chemistry to work in and stays liquid over a wide range of temperatures. But sometimes I wonder. Could my fondness for materials have something to do with the fact that I am made chiefly of them? Are we carbon- and water-based because those materials were abundant on the Earth at the time of the origin of life? Could life elsewhere—on Mars, say—be built of different stuff? I am a collection of water, calcium and organic molecules called Carl Sagan. You are a collection of almost identical molecules with a different collective label. But is that all? Is there nothing in here but molecules? Some people find this idea somehow demeaning to human dignity. For myself, I find it elevating that our universe permits the evolution of molecular machines as intricate and subtle as we. But the essence of life is not so much the atoms and simple molecules that make us up as the way in which they are put together. Every now and then we read that the chemicals which constitute the human body cost ninety-seven cents or ten dollars or some such figure; it is a little depressing to find our bodies valued so little. However, these estimates are for human beings reduced to our simplest possible components. We are made mostly of water, which costs almost nothing; the carbon is costed in the form of coal; the calcium in our bones as chalk; the nitrogen in our proteins as air (cheap also); the iron in our blood as rusty nails. If we did not know better, we might be tempted to take all the atoms that make us up, mix them together in a big container and stir. We can do this as much as we want. But in the end all we have is a tedious mixture of atoms. How could we have expected anything else? Harold Morowitz has calculated what it would cost to put together the correct molecular constituents that make up a human being by buying the molecules from chemical supply houses. The answer turns out to be about ten million dollars, which should make us all feel a little better. But even then we could not mix those chemicals together and have a human being emerge from the jar. That is far beyond our capability and will probably be so for a very long period of time. Fortunately, there are other less expensive but still highly reliable methods of making human beings. I think the lifeforms on many worlds will consist, by and large, of the same atoms we have here, perhaps even many of the same basic molecules, such as proteins and nucleic acids—but put together in unfamiliar ways. Perhaps organisms that float in dense planetary atmospheres will be very much like us in their atomic composition, except they might not have bones and therefore not need much calcium. Perhaps elsewhere some solvent other than water is used. Hydrofluoric acid might serve rather well, although there is not a great deal of fluorine in the Cosmos; hydrofluoric acid would do a great deal of damage to the kind of molecules that make us up, but other organic molecules, paraffin waxes, for example, are perfectly stable in its presence. Liquid ammonia would make an even better solvent system, because ammonia is very abundant in the Cosmos. But it is liquid only on worlds much colder than the Earth or Mars. Ammonia is ordinarily a gas on Earth, as water is on Venus. Or perhaps there are living things that do not have a solvent system at all—solid-state life, where there are electrical signals propagating rather than molecules floating about. But these ideas do not

In our own bodies, only the liver is capable of limited regeneration, but chop a limb off a starfish or a salamander, and it will grow a new one. We are starting to understand the molecular signals that are used by these species to regenerate limbs in adult life. Mammals seem to only use this signalling pathway during the growth of the early embryo but it is a pathway that may well have the potential to be reactivated. Following surgical removal, the wings can grow back in embryonic chickens when the production of a protein called wnt is switched on. Frog limb regeneration can also take place later in the life cycle when wnt protein is expressed. Tadpoles have this ability but it is normally lost when they metamorphose into frogs. The expression of wnt signalling protein around an injury is thought to cause a reprogramming or transdifferentiation of mature cells into stem cells capable of producing the cell types needed for the limb. Very young children have been known to re-grow severed fingertips, and so there are intriguing possibilities for human tissue regeneration.

First, the “fingers” would face tiny attractive forces that would make them stick to other molecules. Atoms stick to each other, in part, because of tiny electrical forces, like the van der Waals force, that exist between their electrons. Think of trying to repair a watch when your tweezers are covered with honey. Assembling anything as delicate as watch components would be impossible. Now imagine assembling something even more complicated than a watch, like a molecule, that constantly sticks to your fingers. Second, these fingers might be too “fat” to manipulate atoms. Think of trying to repair that watch wearing thick cotton gloves. Since the “fingers” are made of individual atoms, as are the objects being manipulated, the fingers may simply be too thick to perform the delicate operations needed. Smalley concluded, “Much like you can’t make a boy and a girl fall in love with each other simply by pushing them together, you cannot make precise chemistry occur as desired between two molecular objects with simple mechanical motion …. Chemistry, like love, is more subtle than that.

In network models of the interactome, these truncating mutations can be thought of as the removal of one node along with all its edges - a node removal. Nonconservative missense mutations of amino acids in the protein core that lead to major folding problems, protein aggregation, and premature protein degradation can also be modeled as node removals. At the other end of the mutational spectrum are small in-frame indels or missense mutations. These can preserve protein folding, but may modify the active site of an enzyme or affect the binding to another protein or macromolecule. In network models, these mutations, which specifically perturb a single molecular interaction, have been labeled as edge-specific or "edgetic". While investigation of the precise interaction defects associated with point mutations is of course not new, the term edgetic promotes a subtle yet meaningful archetype shift from conventional gene-centered models, which emphasize consideration of which specific edges are affected by a mutation, complement and extend classic gene-centric models, which ascertain only whether a gene product is present or not present and neglect less overt alterations of a given gene or gene product.

The unification of our understanding of life with our understanding of matter and energy was the greatest scientific achievement of the second half of the twentieth century. One of its many consequences was to pull the rug out from under social scientists like Kroeber and Lowie who had invoked the “sound scientific method” of placing the living and nonliving in parallel universes. We now know that cells did not always come from other cells and that the emergence of life did not create a second world where before there was just one. Cells evolved from simpler replicating molecules, a nonliving part of the physical world, and may be understood as collections of molecular machinery—fantastically complicated machinery, of course, but machinery nonetheless. This leaves one wall standing in the landscape of knowledge, the one that twentieth-century social scientists guarded so jealously. It divides matter from mind, the material from the spiritual, the physical from the mental, biology from culture, nature from society, and the sciences from the social sciences, humanities, and arts. The division was built into each of the doctrines of the official theory: the blank slate given by biology versus the contents inscribed by experience and culture, the nobility of the savage in the state of nature versus the corruption of social institutions, the machine following inescapable laws versus the ghost that is free to choose and to improve the human condition. But this wall, too, is falling.

Future visitors from outer space, who mount archaeological digs of our planet, will surely find ways to distinguish designed machines such as planes and microphones, from evolved machines such as bat wings and ears. It is an interesting exercise to think about how they will make the distinction. They may face some tricky judgements in the messy overlap between natural evolution and human design. If the alien scientists can study living specimens, not just archaeological relics, what will they make of fragile, highly strung racehorses and greyhounds, or snuffling bulldogs who can scarcely breathe and can't be born without Caesarian assistance, of blear-eyed Pekinese baby surrogates, of walking udders such as Friesian cows, walking rashers such as Landrace pigs, or walking woolly jumpers such as Merino sheep? Molecular machines - nanotechnology - crafted for human benefit on the same scale as the bacterial flagellar motor, may pose the alien scientists even harder problems... Given that the illusion of design conjured by Darwinian natural selection is so breathtakingly powerful, how do we, in practice, distinguish its products from deliberately designed artefacts?... [Graham] Cairns-Smith was writing in a different context, but his point works here too. An arch is irreducible in the sense that if you remove part of it, the whole collapses. Yet it is possible to build it gradually by means of scaffolding[, which after] the subsequent removal of the scaffolding... no longer appears in the visible picture...

language . . . what exactly was it, and how did it happen? Celeste shrugged. “Some people think it was just business as usual—mutation, adaptation, selection, mutation, adaptation, selection, a slow continuity kind of thing, for hundreds of thousands of years. But other people think it happened incredibly fast, within about forty thousand years. And that this capacity that made it possible—this built-in capacity for the operation that lets us merge expressible things into other expressible things to make more and more complex expressible things—appeared in an instant! Which makes complete sense, even though it could not be more bizarre. One tiny molecular irregularity in one tiny fetus, in a very small population of humans somewhere in Africa! One instant! A universe-altering mutation!” “But what about . . . ,” he began, but ran aground. “What about the other stuff? The stuff we can’t manage to think?” “Yeah,” he said. “Or . . . well, I mean, yeah.” “Uh-huh, that’s a problem. Actually, Friedlander was pretty interested in that. In his opinion, language developed as a way for us to deceive ourselves into believing that we understand things, so then we can just go ahead and do stuff that’s more ruthless than what any other animal does. According to him, we can formulate like a fraction of what’s inside our heads and that what’s inside our heads is mostly . . . drainage, basically, sloshing around, that doesn’t have too much to do with what’s actually out there . . .” They looked at each other, and vague shapes, like amoebas, rose, morphed, blended, and faded between them. “But at least it’s all ours,” she said. “It’s the main unique thing we’ve got. It’s our gift.

This, in turn, has given us a “unified theory of aging” that brings the various strands of research into a single, coherent tapestry. Scientists now know what aging is. It is the accumulation of errors at the genetic and cellular level. These errors can build up in various ways. For example, metabolism creates free radicals and oxidation, which damage the delicate molecular machinery of our cells, causing them to age; errors can build up in the form of “junk” molecular debris accumulating inside and outside the cells. The buildup of these genetic errors is a by-product of the second law of thermodynamics: total entropy (that is, chaos) always increases. This is why rusting, rotting, decaying, etc., are universal features of life. The second law is inescapable. Everything, from the flowers in the field to our bodies and even the universe itself, is doomed to wither and die. But there is a small but important loophole in the second law that states total entropy always increases. This means that you can actually reduce entropy in one place and reverse aging, as long as you increase entropy somewhere else. So it’s possible to get younger, at the expense of wreaking havoc elsewhere. (This was alluded to in Oscar Wilde’s famous novel The Picture of Dorian Gray. Mr. Gray was mysteriously eternally young. But his secret was the painting of himself that aged horribly. So the total amount of aging still increased.) The principle of entropy can also be seen by looking behind a refrigerator. Inside the refrigerator, entropy decreases as the temperature drops. But to lower the entropy, you have to have a motor, which increases the heat generated behind the refrigerator, increasing the entropy outside the machine. That is why refrigerators are always hot in the back. As Nobel laureate Richard Feynman once said, “There is nothing in biology yet found that indicates the inevitability of death. This suggests to me that it is not at all inevitable and that it is only a matter of time before biologists discover what it is that is causing us the trouble and that this terrible universal disease or temporariness of the human’s body will be cured.

In the fall of 2006, I participated in a three-day conference at the Salk Institute entitled Beyond Belief: Science, Religion, Reason, and Survival. This event was organized by Roger Bingham and conducted as a town-hall meeting before an audience of invited guests. Speakers included Steven Weinberg, Harold Kroto, Richard Dawkins, and many other scientists and philosophers who have been, and remain, energetic opponents of religious dogmatism and superstition. It was a room full of highly intelligent, scientifically literate people—molecular biologists, anthropologists, physicists, and engineers—and yet, to my amazement, three days were insufficient to force agreement on the simple question of whether there is any conflict at all between religion and science. Imagine a meeting of mountaineers unable to agree about whether their sport ever entails walking uphill, and you will get a sense of how bizarre our deliberations began to seem. While at Salk, I witnessed scientists giving voice to some of the most dishonest religious apologies I have ever heard. It is one thing to be told that the pope is a peerless champion of reason and that his opposition to embryonic stem-cell research is both morally principled and completely uncontaminated by religious dogmatism; it is quite another to be told this by a Stanford physician who sits on the President’s Council on Bioethics. Over the course of the conference, I had the pleasure of hearing that Hitler, Stalin, and Mao were examples of secular reason run amok, that the Islamic doctrines of martyrdom and jihad are not the cause of Islamic terrorism, that people can never be argued out of their beliefs because we live in an irrational world, that science has made no important contributions to our ethical lives (and cannot), and that it is not the job of scientists to undermine ancient mythologies and, thereby, “take away people’s hope”—all from atheist scientists who, while insisting on their own skeptical hardheadedness, were equally adamant that there was something feckless and foolhardy, even indecent, about criticizing religious belief. There were several moments during our panel discussions that brought to mind the final scene of Invasion of the Body Snatchers: people who looked like scientists, had published as scientists, and would soon be returning to their labs, nevertheless gave voice to the alien hiss of religious obscurantism at the slightest prodding. I had previously imagined that the front lines in our culture wars were to be found at the entrance to a megachurch. I now realized that we have considerable work to do in a nearer trench.

I simply find it impossible to believe that the human drama of the centuries, with its quest for meaning and beauty and truth, has no deeper root than molecular mutations.

Liquid water has importance as a solvent, a solute, a reactant and a biomolecule, structuring proteins, nucleic acids, cells and controlling our consciousness. In the meanwhile, water makes up over about half of us and the most abundant solid material and fundamental to start formation. There is a hundred times as many water molecules in our bodies as the sum of all the other molecules. Life cannot evolve or continue, or in other words, everything is nothing without water. Thus, we say that water plays a central role in many of the human activities. However, we nearly always overlook deep researches in the structure and properties of water and the special relationship it has with our lives.

All experiences, emotions, behaviors and beliefs, that make us humans, are the creation of various intricate and inexplicable molecular interactions within the brain.

wondered about consciousness as a kind of “continuous fabric” that allows you to go “anywhere under certain conditions.” Paul’s response was complex. He agreed with what I said, but added, “At the same time, you get, like it flexes in. Your energy, you could, when you die, you’ll like retract a little bit to that core consciousness, and the memories of who you are still very much here and very much incorporated into that energy. Very much so! And it goes back into the whole and the whole grows back again and then you come back . . . The memories are there, but it’s kind of like you push back out again, and you take form again . . . you seem like you feel that independence because you’re so focused into one direction, into one purpose, like coming back molecularly and drawing from everything, drawing from all because of what you’re connected to . . . The lines that you have to where you’re really from are ominous power. It’s enormous! But, like, since you’re pushing forward you forget what’s behind you. That’s what I think held me. I think those are those cords, in a way, that I’m feeling behind me, maybe. I’m not sure.

Whereas chemistry reaches down into physics for its explanations (and through physics further down into mathematics for its quantitative formulation), it reaches upwards into biology for many of its most extraordinary applications. That should not be surprising, for biology is merely an elaboration of chemistry. Before biologists explode in indignation at that remark, which might seem akin to claiming that sociology is an elaboration of particle physics, let me be precise. Organisms are built from atoms and molecules, and those structures are explained by chemistry. Organisms function, that is, are alive, by virtue of the complex network of reactions taking place within them, and those reactions are explained by chemistry. Organisms reproduce by making use of molecular structures and reactions, which are both a part of chemistry. Organisms respond to their environment, such as through olfaction and vision, by changes in molecular structure, and thus those responses—all our five or so senses—are elaborations of chemistry. Even that hypermacroscopic phenomenon, evolution and the origin of species, can be regarded as an elaborate working out of the consequences of the Second Law of thermodynamics, and is thus an aspect of chemistry. Some organisms, I have in mind principally human beings, cogitate on the nature of the world, and the mental processes that underlie Chemistry and are manifest as these cogitations are due to elaborate networks of chemical reactions. Thus, biology is indeed an elaboration of chemistry. I shall not press the view, whatever I actually think, that all matters of interest to biologists, such as animal behaviour in general, are also merely elaborated chemistry, but confine myself to the assertion that all the structures, responses, and processes of organisms are chemical. Chemistry thus pervades biology, and has contributed immeasurably to our understanding of organisms.

It’s easier to like animals than people, and there’s a reason for that. When animals make a stupid mistake, you laugh at them. A cat misjudges a leap. A dog looks overly quizzical about a simple object. These are funny things. But when a person doesn’t understand something, if they miscalculate and hit the brakes too late, blame is assigned. They are stupid. They are wrong. Teachers and cops are there to sort it out, with a trail of paperwork to illustrate the stupidity. The faults. The evidence and incidents of these things. We have entire systems in place to help decide who is what. Sometimes the systems don’t work. Families spend their weekend afternoons at animal shelters, even when they’re not looking for a pet. They come to see the unwanted and unloved. The cats and dogs who don’t understand why they are these things. They are petted and combed, walked and fed, cooed over and kissed. Then they go back in their cages and sometimes tears are shed. Fuzzy faces peering through bars can be unbearable for many. Change the face to a human one and the reaction changes. The reason why is because people should know better. But our logic is skewed in this respect. A dog that bites is a dead dog. First day at the shelter and I already saw one put to sleep, which in itself is a misleading phrase. Sleep implies that you have the option of waking up. Once their bodies pass unconsciousness to something deeper where systems start to fail, they revolt a little bit, put up a fight on a molecular level. They kick. They cry. They don’t want to go. And this happens because their jaws closed over a human hand, ever so briefly. Maybe even just the once. But people, they get chances. They get the benefit of the doubt. Even though they have the higher logic functioning and they knew when they did it THEY KNEW it was a bad thing.

The Human Heart CONSIDER, FOR example, the human heart and its accompanying circulatory system. The human heart is vastly superior to any human artifact. Every second it undergoes a cycle of contraction and expansion, and beats continually and faithfully for the duration of a human lifetime. It starts beating in the womb and in eighty years will beat about two billion times. The cardiac muscle itself consists of an interconnected syncytium of billions of muscle cells specially adapted to resist fatigue and contract autonomously without external activation or control. Within the cardiac muscle cells there are trillions of tightly packed molecular arrays of contractile filaments whose regular rhythmic lengthening and shortening generate the cardiac cycle. At rest each of us needs about a fourth a liter of oxygen per minute to satisfy our energy needs.30 This involves the movement every minute of one hundred trillion oxygen molecules across every square millimeter of the alveolar surface of the lungs. And with every contraction the heart pumps one hundred billion red blood cells through hundreds of kilometers of tiny capillaries.31 Coursing through the capillaries in the lungs, each of these tiny nano-machines carries one billion molecules of oxygen (O2) from the lungs to the tissues, each loosely bound to an iron atom in the hemoglobin. By the heart’s unceasing activity it ensures a bountiful supply of oxygen to provide us with the vital energy of life. The red cells themselves, no less than the heart, are also miracles of bioengineering. During its 120-day lifetime in the circulatory system, each red cell makes hundreds of thousands of circuits, covering hundreds of miles. It is only because the red cell membranes are uniquely soft and strong—one hundred times softer than a latex membrane of comparable thickness but stronger than steel32—that they can withstand these repeated deformations as they squeeze though the smallest capillaries, which in many cases have a diameter of five microns, almost half the diameter of the average red blood cell.

molecular genetic studies show that there has been an acceleration of human adaptive evolution over the past 40,000 years, and especially during the past 10,000 years

In science lies the seeds of spiritualism and in spiritualism, the sprouting of science. The energetics sacrifice of an individual atom for the greater good of the molecular system, those various examples of resonance for greater stability, reflects an harmony for the greater good that is at the very basis of the ethos of our ancient Vedas and Sanaathana Dharma - Loka Samastha Sukhino Bhavantu .. In that greater universal good lies our own good... Dr Sivaram Hariharan

Mushrooms have taught me the interconnectedness of all life-forms and the molecular matrix that we share,” he explains in another one. “I no longer feel that I am in this envelope of a human life called Paul Stamets. I am part of the stream of molecules that are flowing through nature. I am given a voice, given consciousness for a time, but I feel that I am part of this continuum of stardust into which I am born and to which I will return at the end of this life.” Stamets sounded very much like the volunteers I met at Hopkins who had had full-blown mystical experiences, people whose sense of themselves as individuals had been subsumed into a larger whole—a form of “unitive consciousness,” which, in Stamets’s case, had folded him into the web of nature, as its not so humble servant. “I think Psilocybes have given me new insights that may allow me to help steer and speed fungal evolution so that we can find solutions to our problems.” Especially in a time of ecological crisis, he suggests, we can’t afford to wait for evolution, unfolding at its normal pace, to put forth these solutions in time. Let the depatterning begin. As

Although Sanger Sequencing is still used, it is now increasingly being replaced by newer technologies that are developing at an astounding pace. These technologies, collectively referred to as next-generation or high-throughput sequencing, allow DNA to be sequenced much more quickly and cheaply. The Human Genome Project, which used Sanger sequencing, took ten years to sequence and cost 3 billion US dollars. Using high-throughput sequencing, the entire human genome can now be sequenced in a few days at a cost of 3,000 US dollars. These costs are continuing to fall, making it more feasible to sequence whole genomes.

The DNA sequence between humans is 99.5 per cent identical and it is the remaining 0.5 per cent which provides the diversity we see between individuals.

Although molecular biology was not born in 1953 with the discovery of the structure of DNA by Watson and Crick, its elucidation has provided the molecular biologist with tools and techniques that have propelled the science forward. All the information required to make a human being is contained in a single cell. The molecules comprising this fertilized egg will organize the development, sustain the life, allow for the reproduction of, and ultimately execute the demise of an individual. Molecular biology is the study of the way in which molecules function to organize life. Remarkably, the same molecules and principles lie at the heart of all the life sciences, as they control the fundamental machinery of cells. The field of molecular biology concerns macromolecules such as nucleic acids, proteins, carbohydrates, and fats, and their interrelationships, that are essential for life itself.

Quantitative Techniques for Biological Systems, Human Anatomy, Molecular Control of Metabolism and Metabolic Disease, Topics in Cell and Regenerative Biology Stem Cell Seminar

rate at which our bodies transform this energy is 10.5 million joules divided by 86,400 seconds, or about 120 watts (where 1 watt = 1 joule per second). Far from illuminating a whole city, a human being has about the same power rating as one light bulb.

Robert A. Freitas Jr.—a pioneering nanotechnology theorist and leading proponent of nanomedicine (reconfiguring our biological systems through engineering on a molecular scale), and author of a book with that title150—has designed robotic replacements for human blood cells that perform hundreds or thousands of times more effectively than their biological counterparts. With Freitas’s respirocytes (robotic red blood cells) a runner could do an Olympic sprint for fifteen minutes without taking a breath.

Steele and other scientists investigating half-eaten acorns have found that an acorn has more fats, which squirrels like, in its top half, and in its bottom half, around the embryo, there are more tannins, which squirrels dislike. Tannins—the same chemicals that make wines “dry”—are poisonous in high concentrations. They are a mainstay of plant chemical warfare, used by everything from apples to persimmons. That feeling of all the moisture being sucked out of your mouth when you bite into an acorn or an unripe apple comes from the tannins you’ve just released, which act as molecular vacuum cleaners, hoovering up all the proteins that make your saliva feel slippery. Unlike squirrels, humans can’t eat acorns without processing the tannins.

We are a species that delights in story. We look out on reality, we grasp patterns, and we join them into narratives that can captivate, inform, startle, amuse, and thrill. The plural—narratives—is utterly essential. In the library of human reflection, there is no single, unified volume that conveys ultimate understanding. Instead, we have written many nested stories that probe different domains of human inquiry and experience: stories, that is, that parse the patterns of reality using different grammars and vocabularies. Protons, neutrons, electrons, and nature’s other particles are essential for telling the reductionist story, analyzing the stuff of reality, from planets to Picasso, in terms of their microphysical constituents. Metabolism, replication, mutation, and adaptation are essential for telling the story of life’s emergence and development, analyzing the biochemical workings of remarkable molecules and the cells they govern. Neurons, information, thought, and awareness are essential for the story of mind—and with that the narratives proliferate: myth to religion, literature to philosophy, art to music, telling of humankind’s struggle for survival, will to understand, urge for expression, and search for meaning. These are all ongoing stories, developed by thinkers hailing from a great range of distinct disciplines. Understandably so. A saga that ranges from quarks to consciousness is a hefty chronicle. Still, the different stories are interlaced. Don Quixote speaks to humankind’s yearning for the heroic, told through the fragile Alonso Quijano, a character created in the imagination of Miguel de Cervantes, a living, breathing, thinking, sensing, feeling collection of bone, tissue, and cells that, during his lifetime, supported organic processes of energy transformation and waste excretion, which themselves relied on atomic and molecular movements honed by billions of years of evolution on a planet forged from the detritus of supernova explosions scattered throughout a realm of space emerging from the big bang. Yet to read Don Quixote’s travails is to gain an understanding of human nature that would remain opaque if embedded in a description of the movements of the knight-errant’s molecules and atoms or conveyed through an elaboration of the neuronal processes crackling in Cervantes’s mind while writing the novel. Connected though they surely are, different stories, told with different languages and focused on different levels of reality, provide vastly different insights.

With the importance of resetting the entropy each time a steam engine goes through a cycle, you might wonder what would happen if the entropy reset were to fail. That’s tantamount to the steam engine not expelling adequate waste heat, and so with each cycle the engine would get hotter until it would overheat and break down. If a steam engine were to suffer such a fate it might prove inconvenient but, assuming there were no injuries, would likely not drive anyone into an existential crisis. Yet the very same physics is central to whether life and mind can persist indefinitely far into the future. The reason is that what holds for the steam engine holds for you. It is likely that you don’t consider yourself to be a steam engine or perhaps even a physical contraption. I, too, only rarely use those terms to describe myself. But think about it: your life involves processes no less cyclical than those of the steam engine. Day after day, your body burns the food you eat and the air you breathe to provide energy for your internal workings and your external activities. Even the very act of thinking—molecular motion taking place in your brain—is powered by these energy-conversion processes. And so, much like the steam engine, you could not survive without resetting your entropy by purging excess waste heat to the environment. Indeed, that’s what you do. That’s what we all do. All the time. It’s why, for example, the military’s infrared goggles designed to “see” the heat we all continually expel do a good job of helping soldiers spot enemy combatants at night. We can now appreciate more fully Russell’s mind-set when imagining the far future. We are all waging a relentless battle to resist the persistent accumulation of waste, the unstoppable rise of entropy. For us to survive, the environment must absorb and carry away all the waste, all the entropy, we generate. Which raises the question, Does the environment—by which we now mean the observable universe—provide a bottomless pit for absorbing such waste? Can life dance the entropic two-step indefinitely? Or might there come a time when the universe is, in effect, stuffed and so is unable to absorb the waste heat generated by the very activities that define us, bringing an end to life and mind? In the lachrymose phrasing of Russell, is it true that “all the labors of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins”?

The fervour accompanying these events may be deceptive. If it expresses nothing more than the zeal with which the countries of the East are casting aside the bonds of ideology, or if it is a mimetic fervour - a tribute, as it were, to those liberal countries where all liberty has already been traded in for a technically easy life - then we shall have found out definitively what freedom is worth, and that it is probably never to be discovered a second time. History offers no second helpings. On the other hand, it could be that the present thaw in the East may be as disastrous in the long term as the excess of carbon dioxide in the upper atmosphere, that it may bring about a political greenhouse effect, and so overheat human relations on the planet that the melting of the Communist ice-sheet will cause Western seaboards to be submerged. Odd that we should be in such absolute fear of the melting of the polar ice, and look upon it as a climatic catastrophe, while we aspire with every democratic bone in our bodies to the occurrence of just such an event on the political plane. If in the old days the USSR had released its gold reserves onto the world market, that market would have been completely destabilized. Today, by putting back into circulation their vast accumulated store of freedom, the Eastern countries could quite easily destabilize that very fragile balance of Western values which strives to ensure that freedom no longer emerges as action but only as a virtual and consensual form of interaction; no longer as a drama but merely as the universal psychodrama of liberalism. A sudden infusion of freedom as a real currency, as violent and active transcendence, as Idea, would be in every way catastrophic for our present air-conditioned redistribution of values. Yet this is precisely what we are asking of the East: freedom, the image of freedom, in exchange for the material signs of freedom. This is an absolutely diabolical contract, by virtue of which one signatory is in danger of losing their soul, and the other of losing their creature comforts. But perhaps - who knows? - this may, after all, be the best thing for both sides. Those societies that were formerly masked - Communist societies - have been unmasked. What is their face like? As for us, we dropped the mask long ago and have for a long time been without either mask or face. We are also without memory. We have reached the point of searching the water for signs of a memory that has left no traces, hoping against hope that something might remain when even the water's molecular memory has faded away. So it goes for our freedom: we would be hard put to it to produce a single sign of it, and we have been reduced to postulating its infinitesimal, intangible, undetectable existence in a (programmatic, operational) environment so highly dilute that in truth only a spectre of freedom floats there still, in a memory every bit as evanescent as water's.

had never really thought about this last until I took a graduate level course in developmental biology, which forever changed my appreciation of the miracle of birth. In this course I learned what’s known about how a fertilized egg becomes a human baby at the molecular level. The more I learned about it, the more impossible it seemed. How does an organism convert food into the raw materials necessary to make more of itself? How could something as complex as a human being—as a human mind—be built up from a single magic cell? The answer, of course, is that it can’t be. Can. Not. Be. Of all the impossible things I can imagine, this is the most impossible of all. Trillions of cells, specializing and working in concert, all arising from a single cell. More than a hundred billion neurons all spawned from this same humble beginning, all in the right configuration to produce consciousness. It was utterly absurd.

Human dynamism cannot be manipulated or switched on like that of a machine. It cannot be engineered or programmed. Human beings are created, not constructed – that is why they love to create their own reality. Human action cannot be explained by the laws of thermodynamics or by that of molecular biology. The wellspring of human action comes from the human spirit. The dwelling space of this spirit is our being.

In the dimension humans inhabit, there are no physical laws—only mental laws. Atomic and molecular combinations hold within them the mystery of the void; the mystery they dreamed. These particles don’t really exist; what lies behind these mysteries is mental, astral, causal and other types of more purified information not understood by the human brain. In the individual’s dream, mental laws prevail. One may experience gravity, walls, other objects, but these are no more than mental constructions.

(Female) I experienced what I can only describe as pure awareness, though not self-identified. An awareness that travels in search of more, ever increasing, ever expanding and unattached – free of any limit, binding or density. It was pure awareness moving through space, though not like a dark starry sky, rather like the intervals between everything all combined. The “I” or “me” was gone. It was an experience of no individuality yet I had very definite awareness and full existence. I said “I need help” – expressing a desire for the attention of others to enable me to focus, maneuver and navigate in such an unknown dimension. With the group attention, we journeyed to the “left-overs” of God, as Carlos Castaneda put it, or the outer limits of God. Then jointly we journeyed beyond, co-creating, co-realizing and traveling – exploring out into the very “nothing” beyond the universe, and then into the somethingness of form, like the energy of somethingness at the atomic or molecular level. We began recapitulating the evolution into form, rapidly entering all phases and kingdoms – the elemental, mineral, vegetable, animal…each with a new found awareness, understanding and capability. An experience of “Hey, look what I can do” of grand proportions. Each evolution finding itself, experiencing the opportunity of intention – particularly in the human form, and delighting in it, deliriously and hysterically. It literally cracked me up, through all the episodes of evolution.

A key point in Dr. Lipton’s astute explanation of biological activity is that at any one time, cells—like the entire human organism—can be either in defensive mode or growth mode but not both. Our perceptions of the environment are stored in cellular memory. When early environmental influences are chronically stressful, the developing nervous system and the other organs of the PNI super-system repeatedly receive the electric, hormonal and chemical message that the world is unsafe or even hostile. Those perceptions are programmed in our cells on the molecular level. Early experiences condition the body’s stance toward the world and determine the person’s unconscious beliefs about herself in relationship to the world. Dr. Lipton calls that process the biology of belief. Fortunately, human experience and the ever-unfolding potential of human beings ensure that the biology of belief, though deeply physiologically ingrained, is not irreversible.

Vast quantities of government money went into research and development of drugs and food founded on chemistry and mass production. Regulations changed to support corporations and eliminate herbs. At the same time, there was a fundamental change in medicine. Drugs became molecularly specific weapons directed against germs or specific molecular lesions. Herbs, suited to general physiological imbalances, no longer fit the prevailing view of the human body.

single fertilized human egg cell knows how to start dividing. How to convert raw materials it finds in its environment into copies of itself. Growing from one cell into trillions. And talk about complexity. Each division requires the cell’s machinery to find the molecular constituents needed to assemble all the ingredients of the cell, including all three billion letters of DNA. Which, if typed out, would fill hundreds of printed volumes. And which has to be copied with near perfect fidelity.” The major paused for effect. “And if this isn’t impressive enough,” he continued, “the cells are also able to change form on command. At some point in the process, some of them morph into heart cells, some eye cells, some blood cells, and so on. How?” he asked. “Who the hell knows?” he continued, answering his own question. “Most impressive of all, the cells can construct a working human brain, hundreds of billions of neurons strong.

Molecular biology could read notes in the score, but it couldn’t hear the music.

P2 - We are well on the way in a number of areas. Both billionaires and big Pharma are getting increasingly interested and money is starting to pour into research because it is clear we can see the light at the end of the tunnel which to investors equates to return on investment. Numerous factors will drive things forward and interest and awareness is increasing rapidly among both scientists, researchers and the general population as well as wealthy philanthropists. The greatest driving force of all is that the baby boomers are aging and this will place increasing demands on healthcare systems. Keep in mind that the average person costs more in medical expenditure in the last year of their life than all the other years put together. Also, the number of workers is declining in most developed countries which means that we need to keep the existing population working and productive as long as possible. Below are a list which are basically all technologies potentially leading to radical life extension with number 5 highlighted which I assume might well be possible in the second half of the century: 1. Biotechnology - e.g stem cell therapies, enhanced autophagy, pharmaceuticals, immunotherapies, etc 2. Nanotechnology - Methods of repairing the body at a cellular and molecular level such as nanobots. 3. Robotics - This could lead to the replacement of increasing numbers of body parts and tends to go hand in hand with AI and whole brain emulation. It can be argued that this is not life extension and that it is a path toward becoming a Cyborg but I don’t share that view because even today we don’t view a quadriplegic as less human if he has four bionic limbs and this will hold true as our technology progresses. 4. Gene Therapies - These could be classified under the first category but I prefer to look at it separately as it could impact the function of the body in very dramatic ways which would suppress genes that negatively impact us and enhance genes which increase our tendency toward longer and healthier lives. 5. Whole brain emulation and mindscaping - This is in effect mind transfer to a non biological host although it could equally apply to uploading the brain to a new biological brain created via tissue engineering this has the drawback that if the original brain continues to exist the second brain would have a separate existence in other words whilst you are identical at the time of upload increasing divergence over time will be inevitable but it means the consciousness could never die provided it is appropriately backed up. So what is the chance of success with any of these? My answer is that in order for us to fail to achieve radical life extension by the middle of the century requires that all of the above technologies must also fail to progress which simply won't happen and considering the current rate of development which is accelerating exponentially and then factoring in that only one or two of the above are needed to achieve life extension (although the end results would differ greatly) frankly I can’t see how we can fail to make enough progress within 10-20 years to add at least 20 to 30 years to current life expectancy from which point progress will rapidly accelerate due to increased funding turning aging at the very least into a manageable albeit a chronic incurable condition until the turn of the 22nd century. We must also factor in that there is also a possibility that we could find a faster route if a few more technologies like CRISPR were to be developed. Were that to happen things could move forward very rapidly. In the short term I'm confident that we will achieve significant positive results within a year or two in research on mice and that the knowledge acquired will then be transferred to humans within around a decade. According to ADG, a dystopian version of the post-aging world like in the film 'In Time' not plausible in the real world: "If you CAREFULLY watch just the first