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bluegreen17) wrote2011-10-15 08:12 pm
bluegreen17) wrote2011-10-15 08:12 pm
How We Live and Why We Die, by Lewis Wolpert
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thornshar at How We Live and Why We Die, by Lewis Wolpert
thornshar at How We Live and Why We Die, by Lewis WolpertSubtitle: The Secret Lives of Cells. Lewis Wolpert chose a quite grandiose title for what is, in reality, a quite detail-oriented book, more like the subtitle suggests. Which isn't to say it isn't good, or doesn't deliver. If you want to know why we die, you have to know how we live in the first place, and that means we have to know what we're composed of. But don't expect Wolpert to connect the dots for you.
Creepy fact: most of the cells in our body are not ours. They're the bacteria that live in our gut, or the infections that are in our bloodstream, constantly chased and badgered by our immune system, but most of them are just cells that hang out. They take advantage of the fact that the inside of our body is a warm and moist place, with a lot of nutrition being pumped around by our bloodstream, and they are neither helpful (like the ones in our gut that help us digest food) nor harmful (like what we normally think of as an infection), they're just there.
This brings us to the question of how cells which ARE part of us, in the more conventional sense, manage to get along. There's a lot of specialization in cells, and this requires that they cooperate and even coordinate. How can they manage that?
It's not hard to get distracted by thinking about how WE, as humans in a society, manage to cooperate, and even coordinate, and how that's different than cells in a body (or how it's the same). Wolpert manages to stay pretty close to his subject, though. From the first chapter (where he takes us down to an even smaller level, looking at the inside of a cell from the perspective of an individual molecule), through conception and stem cells and aging and cancer and death and back to the very origin of life, he looks at all of these from the cell's eye view.
Sometimes, it's fascinating, looking at a world that is so apparently alien. On a few rare occasions, it's a little more like a biology textbook. Several times, we discover that the way to puncture Wolpert's objectivity as a writer, is to start mentioning anything he considers pseudo-science. He stops short of Dawkinsian levels of apoplexy, but it clearly gets his goat. Most of the time, however, he lectures without preaching, and more than anything he is like the teacher in school who is so enthused about his subject that he carries the class along with him.
In the end, the answer to the question of “Why We Die” which we end up with, is something like, “If you knew what a wonder it is that we live at all, you wouldn't ask.” There are countless things that have to go right for us to wake up still alive every morning that we do, and Wolpert shows us a great many of them, and points out several where we don't even understand yet how it manages to go right. So, after reading his book, you can be a little bit more appreciative that it does go right as long as it does, and that is no small thing.
Creepy fact: most of the cells in our body are not ours. They're the bacteria that live in our gut, or the infections that are in our bloodstream, constantly chased and badgered by our immune system, but most of them are just cells that hang out. They take advantage of the fact that the inside of our body is a warm and moist place, with a lot of nutrition being pumped around by our bloodstream, and they are neither helpful (like the ones in our gut that help us digest food) nor harmful (like what we normally think of as an infection), they're just there.
This brings us to the question of how cells which ARE part of us, in the more conventional sense, manage to get along. There's a lot of specialization in cells, and this requires that they cooperate and even coordinate. How can they manage that?
It's not hard to get distracted by thinking about how WE, as humans in a society, manage to cooperate, and even coordinate, and how that's different than cells in a body (or how it's the same). Wolpert manages to stay pretty close to his subject, though. From the first chapter (where he takes us down to an even smaller level, looking at the inside of a cell from the perspective of an individual molecule), through conception and stem cells and aging and cancer and death and back to the very origin of life, he looks at all of these from the cell's eye view.
Sometimes, it's fascinating, looking at a world that is so apparently alien. On a few rare occasions, it's a little more like a biology textbook. Several times, we discover that the way to puncture Wolpert's objectivity as a writer, is to start mentioning anything he considers pseudo-science. He stops short of Dawkinsian levels of apoplexy, but it clearly gets his goat. Most of the time, however, he lectures without preaching, and more than anything he is like the teacher in school who is so enthused about his subject that he carries the class along with him.
In the end, the answer to the question of “Why We Die” which we end up with, is something like, “If you knew what a wonder it is that we live at all, you wouldn't ask.” There are countless things that have to go right for us to wake up still alive every morning that we do, and Wolpert shows us a great many of them, and points out several where we don't even understand yet how it manages to go right. So, after reading his book, you can be a little bit more appreciative that it does go right as long as it does, and that is no small thing.