AUGUST 15, TUESDAY

UNBELIEVABLE

I wake up thinking of genes and the body. Last night I realized that I have often been amazed that a machine in the lab at The Family Health Center could measure about 40 different chemicals in my blood, amazed at how advanced medical technology is, at how smart humans are. And then it occurred to me that somehow it has never amazed me that the body, different combinations of cells banded together into organs could produce each of these different chemicals constantly adjusted at just the right level and send them through the blood to the parts of the body that needed them. My doctor’s job is to read this printout and then prescribe medicines with right proportions of absorbable chemicals to balance out those cases where my body was unable to maintain the right level, often simply because of the deterioration of old age, because of general degeneration my body was beginning to break down. Every year of my 80’s I am given a new helper medicine to keep me going.

But suddenly I realize the real absolute miracle is not human scientific understanding, but the body itself and the extremely complicated way that the body produces these chemicals and distributes them with the entire human process starting with a single minuscule cell, the combination of sperm and egg, encoded with strands of 3 billion pairs of coded instructions in the DNA double helix. That is where all the cells come from guided into organs which mechanically produce all the processes that keep me alive. All that the machine in the basement of The Family Health Center can do is to detect this elaborate miraculous process. When the pandemic came along even all of scientific medical detective work of medicine turned out to be fairly useless and for a while all doctors could do was to flip dying patients from side to side and put them on ventilators to force feed them oxygen hoping that the body could heal it itself, which it often couldn’t. It turned out doctors were ignorant.

My granddaughter just completed four premedicine college years and after a year will start the final 3 years of Medical School to be a doctor. She must know in great detail everything that I have slowly been opening my eyes to in fuzzy fashion. But she never talks about it, probably partly because she finds it too complicated to explain but primarily because when she does talk about it people are unable to comprehend and are bored. She might not even find it miraculous, just something that she has to understand and do well on tests to become a doctor. She is very good at taking tests.

But to me Mukherjee’s Song of the Cell turns everything upside down. How in the world did this giant Rube Goldberg infinitely complicated body come about? How did all these extremely complicated processes revealed in exact levels of chemicals come about. I know that slow motion evolution is the way that it happened, but how did it happen. How did kidneys which dispose of waste through urine come about, how did the extremely complicate eye which allows us to see come about?

The newest medicine is gene replacement. It has taken decades to come up with how to do it. And from whom did the discoverers of gene replacement learn how to locate and clip out and replace genes? From one celled bacteria who had been doing it to protect themselves from viruses for billions of years. But how did bacteria develop the ability to cut strands from the DNA of viruses?

After millennia of believing that there were four humors that were the source of disease and with doctors killing more people than they were saving, often during childbirth, we’ve finally discovered what we are made of and it is simply fantastic, beyond belief. It took forever to figure out how we work internally. But how did the body, itself, develop in such a complicated way that it has taken us forever to figure it out with huge amounts of mystery still unresolved?

And what is very ordinary Bill Mosher to do with this overwhelmingly complicated information?