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The physiological substrate of the mind in early human
life
As Socrates once said to young Theaetetus, "Thought is a discourse
that the soul holds with herself on the objects she is examining" - a marvelous
definition, never surpassed. Yet it keeps the most wonderful aspect of human
thought in the shadows: the mind's relationship with reality.
Two of the most popular modern theories of the mind are revealing. One
says that human intelligence is just the fruit of chance, the result of the
complex mechanisms of evolution. But if human intelligence were the fruit of
pure chance, how could something so accidental be able to decipher, even
partially, the laws of the universe? This faculty of deciphering the laws of
the universe has given us an enormous yield -we are unleashing the fantastic
power of the atom, we have put our feet on the moon. But to give us those
results, human intelligence had to accumulate fragmentary knowledge from
generation to generation, across millennia. If our intelligence were the result
of chance, how could chance have foreseen these extraordinary uses of the brain
so that evolution could build the organ which would make them possible?
The other opinion is that of Engels, that human intelligence is purely
a consequence of the laws of chemistry and physics: someday, in some corner of
the universe, spirit had to manifest itself because matter and energy are, so
to speak, pregnant with spirit.
Thankfully we are not obliged to choose between these two theories of
the origin of human intelligence, for another solution is open to us: that the
Spirit who manages the universe, who dictated its laws, took the trouble to
build its own likeness into the only living creature able to admire creation.
If we are made with a resemblance to the One who made the laws of the universe,
then the fact that we can have some understanding of the universe becomes
intelligible.
What I propose to do is to make an inventory of this fleshly home
which we inhabit. I will try to detect certain affinities and connections
between the way we are built and the history of scientific discoveries made by
human intelligence. I will not pretend to give historical proof for my
interpretation of certain rather well-known data, but maybe you will forgive me
such boldness if I candidly admit at the start that all my stories are true -
but some of them are truer than others!
Let's consider the origins of mathematics. The handbooks tell us that
geometry was born in Egypt. Long ago floods used to fill the Nile valley every
year, and after the waters withdrew, an unusually level surface was left; what
could be more natural, upon this flat plain, than to sow a few Pyramids! This
is supposed to be how geometry came into being. I doubt it, and I'll tell you
the truer story. Now the truer stories are not always those which are part of
history.
Lovers, as you have probably noticed, spend long hours looking into
each others' eyes. Languages around the world bear witness to this in the way
they name the little round window that is our opening onto the outside world,
the hole inside the iris. In English as in French, we call it the pupil, from
the Latin pupilla, the little girl. All languages use the same metaphor. Greek
uses chorea, which means "little girl." The Spanish are more precise, the nina
del l'ocho, the little girl inside the eye. The comparable Arabic word, Insan
el ein, means "a little being inside the eye," and if you were Iranian, you
would speak of mardomak, "the little one." In every country you would find the
same thing.
Such a convergence owes nothing to randomness and everything to
observation. When the lover looks closely into the eye of the beloved, he sees
his own image reflected on the spherical surface of the cornea. This tiny
figure is so much more brilliant than the dark field of the pupil that it
stands out. MY guess is that women were the first to discover this interesting
property of the spherical mirrors. That explains why most languages say "the
little girl of the eye," and not "the little boy." Love sees a child in the eye
of the beloved; this is a true fact.
But I was telling you the history of geometry. A young Egyptian once
felt in love. He was gifted in mathematics and one day he fell into
contemplation; looking at his beloved very closely, he suddenly discovered the
only surface in the world which could give us the idea of a geometrical plane.
The eye is made up of two spheres, a sphere with a very small radius, the
cornea, and a sphere of a larger radius, the ocular globe. At their
intersection on the outer surface of the eye is a circle on which are anchored
the tiny fibers of the iris. If our Egyptian had been a mechanic, he would have
invented the wheel, a circle from whose center many spokes emerge. But he was
mathematician; he suddenly realized that these fibers are stretched by the
contraction of the orbicular muscle which closes the pupil. Each point of the
iris is thus at the smallest distance possible from any other point of the
surface. Today theoretical geometers would define a plane by the tensorial
calculus; this is what our Egyptian lover did. if schoolboys were only told the
natural history of mathematics, they would appreciate hearing that you can
understand Euclid just in a blink - if you are a lover!
Some millennia later Descartes had the admirable idea that any given
point of a plane could be represented by its abscissa and coordinate. You can
repeat this discovery any time you wish. You only need to be in your room,
preferably when you've just woken up. With two fingers stroke your eyelids a
little so that you exert a steady pressure on your eyes. That will produce
phosphene. There is a point at which the pressure will turn your whole field of
vision into a chessboard of tiny squares, some of them brilliant gold, and some
of them dark purple along the vertical and horizontal axes of your eyes. You
will find that the Cartesian coordinate system is pre-printed - wired inside
our eyes. But its discovery needed a doubting philosopher rubbing his eyes to
see: if he had seen well.
If we go a little deeper into the eye, the light will reach the
retina, where we find a sphere divided exactly by a meridian
line(1). The cartographers only needed to drew similar lines of
latitude and longitude to make a sphere like the one already drawn in their own
retinas. If we were to go father and deeper we would see how these impressions
are carried by nervous signals and finally join in the obscure center which
sees. Now if you look carefully at the way the visual cortex is built, you will
find fibrous spaces and lattices in an isomorphic system. One by one, you will
discover all the steps of the modern algebra.
We started our trip from the outside, from the window we have open on
the world. At every step we found that the discoveries of geometry were made in
the same order as the progress of light coming in from the outside. It cannot
be by chance that the history of mathematics recapitulates the sequence of the
steps by which we today, just like all our ancestors, examine the world. In the
development of mathematics we discover progressively the way we were built, the
way we are made.
We could make the same point with other parts of our neurological
anatomy, for example, the inner ear and our equilibrium system. Inside the
three semicircular channels of the ear there are tiny crystals which are set in
motion when we move. These tiny crystals hit tiny cilia and this is what allows
us to keep our balance.
You know the story of Newton sitting under an apple tree and seeing an
apple fall. When he then noticed the moon in the sky, he imagined that it was
falling toward the earth and invented general attraction. That's not the true
story. When you are lying under an apple tree, you don't see an apple falling
down, you hear it. When you hear it crushing the leaves, you suspect there is
some danger that it will fall on your head, so what you immediately do is to
sit up. At that moment the semicircular channels of 'the ear with their
sensitive cilia are simultaneously giving us the sensation of acceleration,
inertia, speed and position in space - all the elements necessary for the law
of general attraction. Great physicists just rediscover the way they have been
made.
In a similar way, neurologicaly speaking, Galileo use the cochlear
system of time-keeping built into his own ears. He discovered gravity by
singing a song! He had a little slide, at the top of which he used to let a
marble loose. Then with a piece of chalk he would put a mark on the slide at
the point reached by the marble when he came to a certain beat in the song he
was humming. We still have in his own handwriting the measurements he made. At
that time there were no clocks with sufficient precision to measure how far the
marble had fallen in a given time. There was no photography, no stroboscopy.
But there was a time-keeping system that we too have wired within our brains,
the one inside the cochlear system, and Galileo used it very cleverly. He wrote
that he first noticed the regularity of the rhythm of a pendulum swinging in a
certain church when he was just seven years old. It all seems very obvious, but
how did he know that the period of the pendulum swings was constant? It was his
cochlear system.
If the great discoveries in physics were made by a kind of intuition
about the neurology of our sensations, mechanics should help us to understand
our whole rational mechanism. Pascal did just that. When he was able to mimic
arithmetic calculation on a machine with rows of wheels and cogs, he
demonstrated for the first time ifs history that it was possible to build into
matter some logic by giving the matter the proper form. That was an immense
discovery. The huge computers of NASA are the progeny of his humble calculating
machine. Within the computing systems presently in use we find curious
parallels to our own make-up. First, there is a pre-established circuitry which
is logical by construction. Secondly, the transmission of signals from one part
of the machine to other specific locations takes place without diffusion of the
signals. Third, the answers of any component are, according to the binary
system, either YES or NO, a binary logic. All the rest is from the devil!
Our synapses work in precisely this way. By a very complex process the
end of one nerve cell expels a chemical mediator; the molecule landing upon the
next cell changes that surface so that, one by one, it will engulf certain ions
and not others. The organ of our reason (a device which excludes the fortuitous
and only keeps the deducible) is a particle-counter at a fantastic
velocity.
Step by step we see that a human being is, strictly speaking, an
incarnation of intelligence. And if there is a likeness between a machine and a
human being - for I'm not going to tell you that machines are a model of our
brain - it is because machines like computers have been designed by our own
intelligence, and our own intelligence functions according to the way our brain
was designed. It will then be no surprise if computer-breakdown also mimic some
diseases of the mind. If, for instance, a whole rack of computer hardware has
been burned out, the whole computer becomes dull for the function for which it
uses that rack. In much the same way, if some parts of our brain are destroyed
by the hydraulic pressure of hydrencephaly, or some virus or injury, we have a
deterioration of the brain's performance.
I have given you a picture of how intelligence is built into each
human being. But this very precious quality can be impeded or destroyed, for
example, by drink. With several glasses of alcohol, even the best mathematician
soon becomes unable to extract a square root; but in a few hours, when the
alcohol has worn off, he will be as intelligent as before.
But it is not only a toxin which can blur our intelligence. Things as
simple as temperature can block it. If you have a fever, your thoughts seem to
move too fast to catch. But if your temperature drops below normal, your mind
becomes progressively paralyzed, and at 20 degrees Celsius, there is complete
unconsciousness.
Even when we are not running a temperature our minds only work within
a very narrow range of speed. For example, if we are trying to follow an
argument, we cannot think very, very fast; we have to say this..., then
that..., then that.... We, cannot say that, that, that, that, that - it doesn't
work that way. It takes time to think correctly. But we can't think too slowly
either. Try to go step by step as slowly as you can. Suddenly some other
thought will cross the field of your consciousness and you will lose the thread
of your thought.
It is a fantastic computer we have been given, one which is able to
invent new computers - but we have to learn how to handle it well. This is true
especially nowadays when some people think that children with mental
deficiencies should be rejected. They do not really understand what they are
saying.
Feeble-minded people often have their mouth open and their tongues
hanging out, and their faces give no impression of intelligence. Why?
They do that because they cannot manage everything at the same time:
closing their mouths and also having their tongues inside involves a voluntary
command, not an automatic one. If they want to use what little power they have
to do something in particular, they have to let go of everything else. Well,
all of us do the same thing! Just look at a great artist admiring something
beautiful. His mouth will be open, and sometimes there will even be a little
saliva dripping!
If the eyes are really the mirror of the soul, the whole body is a
house of the spirit. In fact, we are split into two parts. It is extremely
difficult both to use the enormous network that we call the reason with the
hold it gives us on the laws of the universe and the even greater network
called the heart with its surges toward love and hunger and life. The
difficulty of the human condition is that heart and reason do not talk easily
to each other. Every philosopher has found this, and we all know it from
experience: heart and reason do not always live together in mutual
understanding. Our generation is so impressed by the discoveries of the mind
that it stands in great danger of forgetting the other side of reality where
lovers and poets and mystics live. We should never separate heart from reason.
If we do, human intelligence will not survive.
Haut
Beginnings and development of human life
we have been trying to understand how the physiological substrate of
the mind in early human life is a gift of the Spirit inborn in us. Let us now
try to envision the beginnings of human life and the roots of the human ability
to discover the laws of the universe.
It may surprise you, but in genetics we hold that there is no such
thing as living matter. Matter cannot live, it cannot reproduce or be
reproduced. If we have a statue and want to make a replica, we can make a mold
and obtain an exact correspondence between the original and the mold, and then
between the mold and the replica. But what will be reproduced is not the matter
of the original, for the matter we put in tree mold will be plaster or bronze.
What will be replicated is the form which was imprinted on the matter by the
genius of the sculptor.
The same goes for the reproduction of a living creature. It is much
more difficult than producing an inanimate effigy, but the principle is the
same. What is handed from one generation to the next is not the matter but the
information carried by the matter, imprinted on the matter. There is a message
about one meter long written on the DNA inside the head of a spermatozoa, and
another one meter long inside the ovum. I could summarize the whole story
without inaccuracy by saying simply:
At the beginning there is a message.This message is in the life and this message is life.And if this message is a human message, this life is a human
life.
You will recognize this as an awkward paraphrase of the beginning of
St. John's Gospel. But it is also the beginning of the whole theory of the
transmission of genetic information within living systems. The great surprise
when we are dealing with human beings is that at the beginning, in this little
sphere of one millimeter and a half, all the necessary and sufficient
information to spell out each and every one of the qualities of the person that
nine months later we will call Peter, Paul or Margaret is already there. With
the unfolding of this extraordinary formula written on the first cell we find
that the matter is obliged - forced! - by this information to build an
extraordinarily complex system which has intelligence built into it. If all the
information is already there at the beginning, it means that it is the spirit
which animates matter, and matter which helps the spirit to be manifested. The
old quarrel of materialism against spiritualism is definitely forgone: "Between
Matter and Spirit, it is the Spirit that matters!"
To review with you what we know about the beginnings of this
incarnation of the intelligence, I will use the seven gifts of the Spirit.
The first gift of the Spirit is Wisdom. Wisdom is
the crown of human intelligence, and in medicine it is very obvious why this is
the first gift. In medicine we are obliged from the very start to have the
wisdom to know why we are planning to use a given technique. We need to know
what the goal of our whole discipline is. If we do have not this wisdom, all is
lost.
Let me explain by telling you a story. About forty years ago there
was an abortionist here in the U.S. named Thiersch(2) who was trying
to apply to the destruction of the baby in utero a recently discovered drug,
aminopterin, which blocks the action of a vitamin, folic acid. It is for just
this reason that aminopterin is used against cancer: it prevents the
manufacture of monocarbons, the smallest building-blocks used in the formation
of DNA and RNA, molecules which transfer information from the nucleus to the
cytoplast, and thus make all the functioning of our cells possible. If you
block folic acid by aminopterin, the cell will not be able to reproduce the DNA
and thus will not multiply.
Thiersch assumed that since it prevents cells from dividing, the
baby would stop growing and be miscarried. This is what happens and he killed
around forty babies that way some forty years ago. But some of them survived
for a long time in utero and these showed very severe deformities of the brain
and of the nervous system, spiny bifida or anencephalia because the neural tube
was not entirely closed. In his report on this data Thiersch noted to his great
dismay that although aminopterin was efficient in killing babies in utero, it
was dangerous for the mother (some got dangerous anemia) and produced grave
malformations, so he judged that it was not a good technique. His report got
buried in the literature, and nobody noticed it.
Thirty years later Smithells (1980) and Laurence
(1981)(3) in England noticed that the amount of folic acid was low
in the blood of mothers whose babies showed abnormalities of neural tube
closure (anencephalia or spiny bifida). They got the idea of adding folic acid
to the pregnant women's diet. Nowadays the frequency of spiny bifida and
anencephalia has diminished by factors of 4 to 5 in England(4).
Now if Thiersch had been experimenting on animals to understand the
reason why abnormalities of the neural tube were appearing, he might have
understood that because an antifolic was producing the disease, the prevention
would be to use folic acid. If he had applied the treatment, the prevention of
these terrible malformations would have been used the world over now for fifty
years. Hundreds of thousands of babies would have been saved from terrible
malformation. Yet because he was not trying to fight against disease, but
trying to kill babies in utero, he did not understand what he had under his
very eyes. Because he had published a report that it was inefficient for
abortion, nobody noticed it.
This is a true story: if you do not have the wisdom to know what you
are doing as a doctor, then even if you see the facts, you will not understand
them. No wisdom, no understanding And the Understanding is the
second gift of the Spirit.
Genuine understanding is becoming extremely remarkable nowadays
because a lot of people pretend that the more knowledge we have about the
beginning of life, the less we understand what a human being is. We are told
this every day in every paper. But human nature, really exists, as I tried to
show you before, and we can see it.
About four years ago, an English gentleman, Mr. Jeffries, invented a
way to split DNA into several pieces and to use a special probe that produces a
pattern typical of a given individual's DNA. It's rather like the barcode on
items you find in a supermarket with lines of different widths and differently
spaced. Just as a computer can tell from the barcode the price and the type of
the item you've bought, we can now recognize each person by the Jeffries
technique.
Two things are absolutely obvious: first, each of us has a unique
genetic barcode (the number of possible combinations is much higher than the
number of people now alive), and second, some bars are inherited from Dad and
other bars from Mom. We can tell whether someone's alleged parents really are
the parents of this particular person; or if there has been some mistake
(whether a mistake of love or a mistake in the nursery), we would find that
some of the bars of the baby could not have come from the father or from the
mother. But if we looked at all the people of the town we would be able to find
out from whom these bars came, beyond any doubt.
Now it is very curious that at the very moment that the laws of
genetics, which have been known for fifty years, can now be used to demonstrate
paternity and maternity beyond any doubt, some people say that we do not know
what human nature is or whether human nature exists. Whenever I meet people who
do not believe that there is a human nature, I sometimes tell an old joke which
contains a lot of truth: I have often seen very learned people in universities
asking themselves very gravely whether very young children are not really some
type of animal, but in the zoo I have never seen a congress of chimpanzees
asking whether their children will grow up to be university professors!
A lot of people will tell you that they cannot really believe that
the tiny little creature inside the womb is really a human being. If you want
to get this information across to them, you might want to remind them that on
this earth there is only one stupid creature who normally practices abortion -
I speak about the kangaroos in Australia. King kangaroos can be just about as
big as human beings - the adults weigh about 75 kilograms - but the uterus of
mother kangaroo is very small - and her brain is very meager. All poor mother
kangaroos have a spontaneous abortion at two months. What is expelled is
exactly the size of the two month old human fetus, a little Tom Thumb about as
big as someone's thumb. This little creature does not look at all like a
kangaroo but like a little sausage. Its limbs are very rudimentary, with just a
tiny claw at one end, and the creature has no knowledge that its mother has a
pouch. But it feels the gravity, because its labyrinthic system is already
there, and as soon as it is expelled, it crawls upward in the fur against
gravity and finds the pouch and falls inside; once inside it takes the tiny
nipple for another seven months.
Now the miracle is that mother kangaroo will not allow any other
animal to go inside her pouch! And if you consider that mother nature takes the
trouble to wire inside the meager brain of mother kangaroo some neurological
signal that makes her able to recognize the kangarooness of this tiny sausage,
I cannot believe that nature hays not given the one and a half liter brain of
the ordinary professor of genetics the ability to recognize the humanity of
tiny humans.
After wisdom and understanding, we need Counsel, -
the prudence to do the best for those under our care. Five hundred years before
Christ, Hippocrates devised an oath in which he said: "I will use my art with
honesty..., I will not give a poison even if asked to do so, and I will not
suggest such a course, and I will not give an abortifacient to a woman." In the
same sentence the wise man of Cos who founded medicine said "no" to both
euthanasia and abortion. For more than 2000 years physicians have sworn that
oath, and only recently in nations long civilized has this oath been denied.
This is a very regressive phenomenon if we remember what an advance this oath
was for medicine.
There once was a city in Greece whose citizens used to examine their
new-borns (they didn't have amniocentesis yet!) to see if the boys were strong
enough to be soldiers and if the girls were strong enough to engender soldiers.
If not, they exposed them in the mountains to be eaten by wild beasts. That
city was Sparta, the only Greek city to use this terrible selection-method. It
is also the only Greek city which has not given humanity any poet, any artist -
not even any ruins! Today on the plain of Lacedaemon there is nothing left.
Genius was extraordinarily present in Greece, but the only place to leave
nothing to humanity was also the only one to kill her own flesh.
Two hypotheses occur to the geneticist to explain this curious
phenomenon.
Perhaps by killing these fragile and weak children, they were
killing their future artists, geometers and poets. Without knowing it, they
were practicing counter-selection. The other hypothesis is that it is because
they were already very dull, they began to kill their own children. Both
hypotheses could have some truth.
Counsel tells us, that every human being must be protected, not
because he is strong, rich, wealthy, healthy, intelligent or powerful, but
simply because each one is a member of our kind. If any other reasoning is
adopted, moral crisis is inevitable. The only way to prevent moral disaster is
to respect each member of our species simply because this creature belongs to
our species.
But to preserve wisdom, counsel and understanding we need the fourth
gift of the Spirit, Fortitude. If we lack fortitude, we will
see the other three collapse - in fact, this is now happening in our own
civilization. A year ago a law was enacted in England and signed by Her Majesty
the Queen of England, that an embryo up to 14 days is not to be considered a
human being and may be used far experimentation. Now this law has not been
publicized in the newspapers very much, in the world, but the only thing which
it forbids is to implant a human embryo in a non-human animal! Thus the
guidelines for such experiments do not distinguish humans from animals!
Now you must remember that in England a law has no power if it is
not signed by the Queen. If this law were telling the truth, it would mean that
the Queen of England was non-human for the first 14 days of her life, and
likewise for her father and for the whole line. But if the line was interrupted
at each generation by an animal for 14 days, then there is now no Queen of
England because the dynastic succession was interrupted. But if there is no
Queen of England, this law was not legitimately promulgated!
This is a bad law and an illogical law, for it starts with a
distortion of the evidence in saying that there is no human being for the first
14 days of life. Now it is not just discourteous to suppose that the Queen of
England was conceived as an animal! It is not true - I am entirely sure she was
conceived as a human being; the contrary would be inconceivable!
This law would also declare the members of Parliament and the Lords
of the High Chamber to have been animals when very young, but I cannot believe
that the destiny of a noble nation should be given to former animals!
Even if laws are voted for and signed by the proper power, they
cannot change the truth. They may be "politically correct," but they are not
really "correct." we need fortitude to resist these lies. There is a man with
such fortitude, the King of Belgium. When the legislature voted to allow
abortion, Baudoin refused to sign. But the legislature was adamant, so he
stepped down from his throne so as to explain why he could not approve a bill
which removed the protection of law from some of his subjects. In his absence
the law was enacted by the government, and then a vote of both chambers was
taken to restore his powers as King. There were some abstentions, but not one
votes against him, even though it was a secret ballot and there are a lot of
people against monarchy in Belgium. But they judged that in conscience this man
was really the king, for he had refused to exclude some of his subjects from
the protection of the law. As the old Latin tag has it, "est regi tueri civet",
the job of the king is to protect the citizens. In democratic countries this is
the duty of the legislators. If they fail to do it, they don't do their
job.
Next we come to knowledge, and science is a good way of acquiring
knowledge. Thanks to my friend Morton Palmer I was called to
give testimony in Maryville, Tennessee in the famous case of the frozen
embryos. My point was to explain that those seven embryos, which we knew to
have been the result of the fertilization of a human ovum by a human sperm,
those of Mary Davis and her husband, could not be animals and that they had to
be human beings. To explain the cryogenic preservation of these embryos, I
noted the relation between the time we measure by a clock and the heat we
measure by a thermometer. Time (tempus) is the flow of reality, and temperature
is just the speed of the molecules. If we lower the temperature, we
progressively freeze time. For those tiny human beings, frozen in a can of
liquid nitrogen, time was frozen, put at a stand-still. The low temperature
arrested their metabolism and those vessel in which we could concentrated
hundreds of such frozen embryos really became for them a concentration can. A
newsman asked if I said "a concentration camp." No, I said, a concentration
camp is a system invented horribly to accelerate death. A concentration can is
a system invented terribly to decelerate life. But in both cases, innocents are
arrested.
We know that they are human beings because we know that they have
in-built the structures of intelligence. At the very beginnings of life the
form and its substratum, the soul and the body, are so intricately entwined
that we use the same term to define how an idea comes into our mind and how a
body comes to life, the conception of an idea and the conception of a baby. It
is not simply an oddity of language, but a wise description of nature, for at
the beginning we are really a tiny bit of matter animated by the spirit.
In vitro fertilization has made it evident that the beginning of our
lives can happen at other places than the female womb. Conception takes place
at the moment of sperm's envy within the ovum; it is not related to any later
process, such as implantation. In this field there are some important phenomena
just now being discovered. At the very start of the process, right after the
sperm has entered the ovum but when there is still no mixture of the nucleus of
the ovum and the nucleus of the sperm, there are still two cells. There never
is a one-celled living system. Chromosomes of each pronucleus divide and
migrate upon a common spindle, so that there is a split into two cells; then a
division into four, into eight, into sixteen. This process has been known for
about fifty years, but we have not understood why they then suddenly press
together to make a little ball smaller in diameter than the zona pellucida, the
'plastic bag' that is the wall that protects the embryo's developing life.
This "compaction" is very intriguing, because if you look at the
geometry, you find seven cells at the equator, three at the top, three at the
bottom, with three left for inside. These three cells will build the tiny
astronaut while the thirteen surrounding ones will build his space/time
capsule.
Now this explains something about the attempts to mix cells from
different embryos. Suppose we put a few cells from a black mouse and a few from
a white one inside the same zona pellucida. Most of the time the experiment
fails, but sometimes it results in a mouse with fur like a chessboard of black
and white. The experiment has been done with three, and then you can get a
mouse with three different cell-lines. But you never get more than three
cell-lines, no matter how many source-cells you introduce. The number of cells
that can cooperate to build the body is three and no more.
Now we know by experiment that these three inner cells will produce
the embryo while the others make the surroundings, the placenta and the
amniotic bag. On the other hand, if for some reason these early cells do not
compact at 16 and do so only at the next division when there are 32, there will
be six cells in the middle; three of them could build an embryo and the other
three another embryo, a set of identical twins. Twinning is possibly just an
error of counting. This error indicates the intelligence built into the
counting function of the first cell.
Another very interesting discovery was revealed only a few months
ago in a fantastic talk Foidart, a Belgian doctor, gave at the French Academy
of Medicine. He discovered that the hemoglobin of an embryo is different from
the hemoglobin of a fetus.
It has long been known that at two months the tiny human being has
produced the amniotic bag and the chorionic bag all around herself. What
Foidart found is that the mother's blood does not enter the intervillous space.
Up to the third month of pregnancy the embryo does not receive oxygen from the
mother through a true placental oxygen exchange-system. The books say this, but
the books are wrong, and Foidart has demonstrated it. Only in the third month
does maternal blood enter this space and thereafter the child receives its
oxygen directly from the mother's hemoglobin. But during the first three months
it receives oxygen diffused in the special liquid of the intervellous space,
not by a direct transfer from the mother. This is possible because a special
type of hemoglobin (the embryonic hemoglobin) is able to withdraw oxygen from
the liquid rather than by exchange with the red globules of the mother. This
means that in the future, when a baby is growing inside the Fallopian tube (and
there is great danger that the tube will rupture, with death for mother and
child unless we operate), there will possibly be a way to nourish the baby in a
special liquid so that it can survive until transplantation to the womb. This
has not yet been achieved so far as we know, but the discovery of Foidart now
makes it theoretically feasible.
However, the side-effect of this discovery is that it may became
possible to sustain fetal life for two to three months in vitro when the right
fluid becomes available. I hope we do not do this, but it would show one thing:
the baby is not just a part of the mother's body. If the bottle were to
pretend, "This baby is my property", nobody would believe the bottle!
The sixth gift of the Spirit is Piety, but piety is
not in fashion today. In particular, the piety of children toward their parents
is not expected, at least in the world of television, but there is piety in the
genetic world. We have learned that in the sperm some stretches of the DNA are,
so to speak, underlined by a process we call methylation of cytosine. All male
reproductive cells show the same stretch of DNA underlined. Likewise, all
ovules have the same stretch underlined, but women underline a different
segment than the men. Like an intelligent student who underlines what is
important for the next examination, the sperm and ovum underline what must be
used very soon at the beginning of life, what is underlined in the male is the
way to build the membranes and the placenta, and what is underlined in the
female is the way to build all the small pieces with which the baby will build
himself. Now if at fecundation the male nucleus is expelled and only the female
egg is left to divide, there will be no human being. It will start to make
spare pieces: tissues, skin, nails, but all in total disorder. On the contrary,
if only the male chromosomes are there, it will produce membranes, vesicles,
and so on, but none of the actual parts of the baby. Thereby we have a kind of
proof that even in the first cell, this little sphere of one millimeter and a
half, a division of labor like the division we know so well in adult life is
already written inside this miniature system. The male is to go hunting and to
build the hut, the mother is to tend to the baby. It was a touch of piety in
this entirely materialized world that geneticists discovered that at the very
beginnings the, father was transmitting how to build the hut while the mother
was transmitting how to behave as a baby.
The last gift is Fear, not fear of technique, but
fear of the misuse of technique. For if we forget that we are creatures, if we
lose our respect for the Creator and play at being the Creator, then His
creatures will be endangered. What we need to fear is a bad use of our powers,
especially given the exponent increase in these powers in, say, tree time since
I was a student. Genetics has changed in fantastic ways which no one foresaw,
and the dangers grow greater every day. For example, some people have proposed
a kind of miniaturized cannibalism: to inject fetal brain tissue into the
brains of those affected by Parkinson's disease. But the reports on this in the
newspapers are wrongs it doesn't work. There is no one who has ever been cured
by that technique, but a tremendous number of fetuses between two and four
months have been vivisected so that their brains could be taken alive and their
living cells alive injected into the brain of Parkinson's patients. Why, this
total lack-of respect for new human beings seems like something straight out of
one of Hitchcock's horror movies, and it even turns out that the name of the
doctor who developed the technique was Hitchcock!
Other developments are more hopeful. Sullivan, for example, has been
able to make an artificial pancreas by inserting pancreas cells from a cow into
a special capsule and injecting it into a dog whose pancreas he has removed.
Because they are embedded in a special membrane which prevents the spilling
over of the antigenes of the cow, insulin is produced and those dogs are now
living with an artificial pancreas long after they should have died of
diabetes. It has not yet been tried in humans and it will probably take another
year of experiment before becoming available as a treatment in our species.
There are also examples to show that one does not have to manipulate
human embryos to attempt a cure for a disease like cystic fibrosis of the
pancreas, whose detection in utero now leads to killing so many babies by
abortion. It has been found possible to manipulate a type of influenza virus so
that within this virus a gene can he activated to produce the
a-1-antitrypsin which a baby
suffering from pancreatic cystic fibrosis cannot produce. They have made it
work in dogs and I supposes that it will not be more than a few years until it
becomes available for human use.
Yet another opening is the marvelous discovery by the Italian
Tramontano, who has found a way to teach a body how to make an enzyme which the
body is unable to make because of a genetic failure. It works not by changing
or manipulating the genes, but by using the antibody system. When an enzyme
changes one molecule into another to make a specific chemical reaction, this
molecule takes a very special shape that we call its "excited" shape that is
quite different from the molecule's normal shape. It is very unstable and
occurs only when the molecule is inside the crevice of the right enzyme. Now
the genius of Tramontano's idea is to build a molecule which has the same
geometry and the same electrical properties as the "excited state" but is
stable. This is some very complex synthetic chemistry, but he achieved it. If
this molecule is injected into an animal, the animal will make antibodies and
these antibodies will make the needed reaction. He called them "catalytic
antibodies" - remember the name Tramontano. You will see it in the newspapers
several years from now when he gets the Nobel Prize. By this technique, without
endangering anyone, we will someday be able to teach to a person whose genetic
structure is unable to make a certain reaction how to build the necessary
antibodies. What a marvelous way of using the built-in intelligence already
inside our bodies.
There is a Latin phrase about this final gift: "timete dominum et
nihil aliud" - fear God but nothing else. If we biologists remember that, we
will not play Cod or disrespect those who have been made in his image and
likeness. If we have this fear, then humanity has no need to fear technical
progress; genetics will remain the honest servant of medicine. But if we forget
it, then there will be great reason to fear an extremely powerful but denatured
biology. We already possess a very clear yardstick to measure our progress or
regress. If we use it, we will be the good servants of the human family, but if
we forget it, we will be its dangerous enemies. A very simple phrase which
judges everything :What you have done to the smallest of mine, you have done
unto me.
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