everything does everything and is produced everywhere.

explain.

that was the question on my final exam for the graduate course “psychneuroendoimmunomdulation”, the last of my physiology degree.  it was an essay.  we had two hours.

what we were supposed to describe, with examples, was that no cell’s destiny was certain, that each had in it almost infinite possibility.  a cell that coated an axon so that an  impulse could jump more quickly down  a nerve, in the right environment, could  become a neutrophil, and eat a foreign molecule that dared bob by in the blood.  or it could start secreting growth hormone.  or be part of a memory.  there was evidence, experiments that proved it. it was irrefutable.  each tiny part of us could change its use, given the need. the reasons things were the way they were is because that is how they best worked.

i thought of this last night as i was reading a book whose author again announced the genes as arbiter of our destiny. our amazing DNA record could prove where we came from, what we were, and where we were likely to go.

my view is the other side of that coin.  our genes aren’t what life is about, they are how it gets around.  we are not genetically programmed to do anything.  we program our DNA,  while we can’t change it’s alphabet, we change what is expressed.  stroking a rat, for instance, causes increased production of proteins that otherwise would not be made.  given the impulse, the gene responds.   in the billions of base pairs, the sticky parts of the the threads of genetic information that if unraveled would stretch to the moon and back, is not destiny, but possibility.

the visual world did not manifest because we had eyes.  we developed eyes because there was something to see.  genes do not move through our cells, from one generation to the next, from this continent to the that,  because they are selfish.  they’re not.  they’re thoughtless. life uses them to harness, and explode, the millions times millions of chances that it gets to go on, to move somewhere bright and new.

after Leeuwenhoek, we realized that things were much smaller than we imagined, and  we’ve busied ourselves ever since detailing the infinite number of  tiny moving parts that make up our world and ourselves.  we’ve become so fascinated at our ability to reduce, that we have almost been able to convince ourselves that love is a flush of seretonin and oxytocin and dopamine, or a broken heart, their nadir.  perhaps the truth is that when someone’s heart starts beating pat-pat-pat at the first rings of her telephone, that these hormones are not love’s explanation, but rather  the residue it leaves as it passes through her, to him.

don’t think i wrote that on the exam, but that’s what i learned.

what am i?  in brazil?  i guess i’ve still got some things to learn.  computer. off.