All writers know the column, By the Book, published every Sunday in the New York Times Book Review section. Each week the editors pick a popular writer and ask him or her a fairly standard set of questions that would be impossible for normal people to answer off the top of their heads.
The authors rattle off the names of all kinds of titles and writers and say smart things designed to dazzle the little people who are always starved for an entertaining read.
I’m a pontificator who has never sold a book and never will, most likely. Authors sell their souls to write for money; they do exhausting tours where they answer stupid questions asked by stupid people day after stupid day. From these gatherings of stupidity they hope to sell a few books. It’s stupid.
Through books and other media, the public is exposed to a version of truth filtered by the most powerful people on Earth — to paraphrase Pulitzer Prize winner, Ronan Farrow.
Yes, it’s sickening. People are reading crap; they are immersed literarily in fibs and fabrications, which are shaped to make the world seem less evil, more friendly.
The truth that no wants to hear — I’m screaming it from cell towers to swarming people who seem to lack ears — billionaires have enslaved us. We are living in a gilded prison.
Totalitarianism has already won — not through governments but by supremely advantaged individuals who have no limits on the money they can make and keep — no limits on their power or their reach.
It’s true.
The rest of this essay is a parody of By the Book. The imagined interviewee is Billy Lee, the Pontificator. That’s me.
Billy Lee, the Pontificator
What books are on your nightstand?
I honestly don’t know. Can you give me a minute to run upstairs and look on the floor and my wife’s dresser? I keep current reads close to bed where I do most of my reading. It won’t take long… …
Ok. Thanks for waiting.
“The Periodic Table in Minutes,” by Dan Green; “Genetics in Minutes,” by Tom Jackson; “The Making of the Atomic Bomb,” by Richard Rhodes.
What kind of reader were you as a child? Any favorites?
“The Poky Little Puppy,” by Janette Sebring Lowrey and Gustaf Tenggren was my all time favorite. Mother read it hundreds of times.
I remember being amazed to learn that anyone can dig a hole under a fence to open a world of naughty possibilities. It cost a serving of strawberry shortcake to get caught; it seemed worth it to my little mind.
Your nightstand doesn’t seem to include fiction. What genres do you avoid and which are you drawn to?
I’ve read a lot of good fiction, but most are classics like “War and Peace” by Leo Tolstoy and “Crime and Punishment” by Fyodor Dostoevsky. I would say that Fyodor ruined my interest in fiction. His book was a nightmare that threw me into depression.
War and Peace was different; it taught me how the world works; Leo laid bare the fallacy of the great man theory of history.
But yes, I avoid fiction. As a teenager I read “Atlas Shrugged” by Ayn Rand a couple times. The book ruined my life more than any other work of fiction, because it claimed to be truth. Living life proved it wrong, but its view of the nature of humans derailed me for decades.
I am drawn to books about science and math. Enough said, I hope.
I enjoy history.
“Retribution” by Max Hastings is a block buster about World War II — as is “Devil’s Voyage” by Jack L. Chalker. “This Kind of War” by T. R. Ferenbach is a history of the Korean War that knocked my socks off.
You like history. Is there any history you learned from reading that isn’t taught in school? Anything you learned that’s shocking?
During the 150 years before America became a constitutional republic, two-thirds of all white people immigrated as slaves, who in those former times were called indentured servants. Amazing, right?
They came unchained on boats voluntarily, because life was brutal in Europe for poor people. Their term of slavery lasted seven years and ended with emancipation.
Africans came in chains. They served until they became too frail to work; they were set free to die of starvation. The term used was manumission. Ten percent of African slaves were set free this way by the time America became a republic in the late 1700s.
From before the beginning, America was a slave state. The privileges of freedom were extended to white men who owned property. Only they could vote, but not for Senators. State legislators with approval from their Governors appointed Senators.
The founders enshrined slavery in the constitution. Eighty-five years after its signing, half of all Americans went to war against the other half to preserve slavery, but they lost.
After the Civil War, it took the Confederates twenty-five years to terrorize blacks back into submission. At the same time, northern whites committed a genocide against the native peoples they called redskins.
In the 1900s, slavery was renamed capitalism by industry titans to help them make a more appealing counter argument against a system that was catching fire in Europe called communism.
Communists believed wealth should be produced cooperatively and then shared. The idea of sharing was anathema to slave holders (business owners) who referred to their slaves as workers.
Owners abrogated their obligation to care for their slaves by forcing them to provide for their own food, housing, and medical care out of a tiny stipend they bestowed, which today people refer to as a minimumwage. The owners somewhat derisively called the new rules freedom.
After WWII, the wealthy created what they liked to call a middle class (which included about ten percent of the population) to reward the mostly poor farm boys who had risked their lives to protect them.
After 1980, the entitled kids and grandkids of the aristocracy began to disassemble the system their fathers and grandfathers had built, because they felt that the little people weren’t grateful enough. They called it the Reagan Revolution.
Today, leaders promise to make America great again. No more Negro presidents. No more subsidized health care. No more regulations to protect the disadvantaged. Everyone will stand on their own two feet or perish.
It’s the way it’s always been. The escape to America, it turned out, was an escape from freedom.
The USA is now the most merciless police state in world history. The country is demoralized by a military occupation punctuated by non-judicial executions and excessive displays of military force against civilians.
The occupation of America is undergirded by a nightmarish penal system that locks up millions in high-tech prisons where tens-of-thousands are tortured with solitary confinement.
What is the worst part? The USA is building a wall to lock people in. Soon everyone in the USA will be a prisoner unable to leave. That’s the future.
America is going to create a society that reflects the values of its billionaires and the cartel of foreign oligarchs they call friends.
Guess what? There’s nothing anyone can do about it. Take the pills they give you and pretend life is great.
Try hard to cope, and you just might.
Wow, Billy Lee. Glad you got that off your chest. If you could require the president to read one book, what would it be?
The Bible.
Does he have time? It’s close to 800,000 words — twenty novels. It’s a lot of reading for a man in his seventies who golfs and is known for not reading much.
Who knows how much time any of us have? I don’t.
What book are you embarrassed not to have read yet?
“Moby-Dick” by Herman Melville. I own the book and have read through the first half at least twice. It’s going to sound strange, but I honestly think the book is about homosexuality. There is a scene in one of the first chapters where two men sleep together in the bowels of a boat. They seem to have an affection for each other that, frankly, I find touching.
The title is a little suspicious. Try screaming it three times in a church without offending anyone. Moby-Dick! Moby-Dick! Moby-Dick! It’s hard. It’s a bit of a tongue-twister to boot.
You’re organizing a literary dinner party. Which of three writers, dead or alive, do you invite?
Well, first, I have to get a buy-in from my wife, Bevy Mae. Beverly isn’t going to throw a dinner party just because I say so. But assuming she agrees, I’d invite Michael Faraday, Albert Einstein, and Richard Rhodes.
All three lived on the edge of knowledge where uncertainty rages; where fear can overwhelm the unprepared. Faraday’s The Chemical History of a Candle is one of the best science books about candle flames that I’ve ever read. Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity is a joy that anyone can imbibe in a few short hours if they skip the math and physics. And Richard Rhodes proves in his tomes that any idiot can build and store thermonuclear bombs in their basement.
If you would be gracious enough to permit me a fourth invitee, it would be Che Guevara — probably the best read and most informed writer of all time according to declassified CIA assessments. John Kennedy organized the original Green Berets based on one of his books.
Much of Che’s work is unpublished. His published work is under a suppression protocol inside the USA. Expect releases now that new leadership has risen in Cuba and the United States.
Who would you want to write your life story?
Jesus of Nazareth. People say that he never wrote anything, but he was literate and knew things most folks can only wonder about. Of all public figures past and present, Jesus seems to be the one who understood people best and loved enough to be tender. I don’t think he would humiliate me.
Paul Newman. (January 26, 1925 – September 26, 2008)
What do you plan to read next?
Something I’ve written, probably. I’m the greatest pontificator there’s ever been. Why go out for hamburger when there’s steak at home?
Paul Newman said the same when someone asked why he stayed faithful to his wife, Joanne Woodward. For those who understand what love is, no explanation is necessary.
Everyone wants to live as long as possible, right? Well, maybe not everyone.
Someone confided in me that their nightmare was they wouldn’t die; they would never get respite from an existence that terrified them, that depressed them, that hurt them, that disappointed and discouraged them; that humiliated them; that abused them; that made them wish they were never born.
Another friend confessed that she wished she had never been born because she was afraid to die. The certainty of death made living not worth the trouble. Anxiety about the end of life robbed her of joy. She found that she was unable to kick back and relax, because dark angels circled just outside her field of vision; one day, she was certain, the angels were going to pounce. The end would be brutal.
I remember hearing a story about a young mother who lay dying while her family knelt at her bedside. A scene of sweet-sorrow unfolded as the woman struggled to breathe in the presence of loved-ones. A worried husband, anxious toddlers, her parents, and a few close friends sang hymns to reassure and cast comfort. They clung to one another united by the belief that God would carry momma gently to heaven in his caring arms.
Momma didn’t experience death that way. She bolted up, away from her pillow. She stared wild-eyed at something behind her visitors; something no one saw.
She screamed. No!No! No!
Momma dropped off the bed, slammed to the floor, and rolled onto her back making a loud crack — like a toppled refrigerator. She stared at the ceiling, face frozen, eyes open; crazed, except that now she was dead and too heavy for anyone to move.
Steve McQueen died at age 50 from cardiac arrest at a cancer treatment facility in Mexico in 1980. He made thirty movies; many were blockbusters.
Some people love life and don’t want to leave. I remember Steve McQueen, an actor from yesteryear who had everything to live for. He was a happy race-car enthusiast, a leading man in movies, incredibly handsome, kind, and grateful for every blessing his wonderful life showered on him.
He got cancer. Stateside doctors told him he had no chance. Death was certain. He traveled to Mexico to seek out a cancer recovery center he learned about from friends.
I remember hearing him weep during a radio interview because, he said, the medical director had saved his life. He thanked him again and again. He couldn’t say it enough. I felt touched. He loved life; his gratitude seemed to resonate with the voices of the angels. I would have gladly traded places with him.
Two days later, the newspapers and television news shows reported that he died. What went through his mind when he finally realized that his life wasn’t going to turn out the way he planned?
For people who seek death, death is easy to find — if they have the courage to face what comes after; if the pain of living exceeds the risks of non-existence or the risks of being reborn as someone new or the possibility of falling into the pits of Hell or wherever they imagine might lie the alternative to the pain of life on Earth. Relief is as close as the closeted gun, the nearest bridge, the bottle of medicine in the bathroom cabinet.
I feel bad for people who have been ruined, I do. Far more people kill themselves than are killed by others. No one believes it, but it’s true.
I don’t want to dwell on the ruined, because another class of people — a smaller group, I sometimes wonder — want to live.
The man shown in this pic (from 2011) was active and working at age 106. He and hundreds like him have been the subject of scientific studies about human longevity. They are kind and gentle people who enjoy life by all accounts; they wish only to live as long as possible.
These are the folks who never suffer from depression; experience a major illness; spend time in hospital or prison; lose a child or spouse; worry about the sparkle of a crooked tooth or the part on their head of radiant hair. They don’t worry about any lack of symmetry that might render them unattractive — or about getting their way in life, because they always do.
I want to talk about the powerful, beautiful, effective people who everyone seems to want to be. I want to talk about the happy people like Steve McQueen who will always chase a fantasy, because they want to live in the worst, most desperate way.
I want to talk about the people who freeze themselves in the hope that in a benevolent future they will be thawed, and life will continue; I want to talk about the people who take 150 pills a day to prevent every ailment and strengthen every sinew.
I want to talk about the brilliant, optimistic people who expect that if they can just figure things out the right way, life awaits them for as long as they want it. It’s all up to them. They will find a way to make life last; to achieve an eternal success, because they always have.
Is it time for a reality check?
Is this a good time to reveal some truths? — shocking truths, perhaps, for a few readers? I want to predict our futures — all of our futures — as separate individuals with private lives; and as a species — a species anthropologists describe by the Latin words, homo sapiens, (smart people), which they use among themselves to differentiate you and me from all the other groups of living things we rarely notice or even think about.
Let’s smarten up for a few moments and defend our reputation among the kingdoms of the animals and the plants. Let’s think about best case scenarios for survival and whether we can make our dreams come true.
One statistic to keep in mind that is easily verified (and it might startle some readers): two-thirds of all deaths are not caused by aging.
So let’s move on.
Who wants to start with species survival? Who would rather address the riddle about how to lengthen an individual life?
Ok, the responses I think I hear in my head are nearly unanimous. People want to know how they themselves can live longer, correct? People want to know how long they will live when everything is set right.
So, why not start with a best case scenario for individuals? I promise to address the issues of survival for homo sapiens later, after a few paragraphs more.
Here are some simple, best-case-scenario assumptions:
Assume that disease is eradicated. We reach a state under the protections of ObamaCare (or maybe Trump-Care, who knows?) where no one dies in hospital anymore; all diseases have cures and can be prevented; in fact, disease is eliminated from the face of the earth — no bacterial or viral infections; no malevolent genes gone haywire; no Alzheimer’s or mental impairments; no more skin rashes or herpes or warts or annoying ear-wax that morphs into septic brain infections.
Disease is gone. Now take another step. Make a leap of faith. Assume that the genetics of aging is solved and that no one grows old. No one deteriorates. Skin does not wrinkle; no more age spots or rotting teeth; loss of hair and muscle-mass becomes a thing of the past. Aches and pains and constipation and diarrhea and acid reflux — what be them? They gone!
Our long medical nightmare is over, to paraphrase the words of President Gerald Ford on the night he pardoned Dick Nixon so that no prosecutor could ever charge and convict him for being a crook and throwing an election.
OK. What now become the odds for our survival? How long can one person expect to live? I think everyone can see, there’s something we didn’t consider; one thing no one thought of; a missing piece in the puzzle of living-large that is going to leap up and grab each of us sooner or later — unless we live bundled by bubble-wrap in a bunker, miles below the surface of the earth. We all know what it is, right?
It happens when we bike on a country road, and a candy-coking cell-talker in a Corvette runs us over. It happens when we climb Mount Everest (just to cross it off our bucket-list) and whoops! someone in the group forgot to tie their shoelaces. People see a video on the evening news — dead people buried in snow.
It happens when flying an airplane — a flock of geese smashes the windscreen. The pilot gets sucked out the opening — shredded by shards of glass.
We visit an amusement park to thrill ourselves on a ride that throws us upside down and — oops again! — an unscheduled stop; a mechanical malfunction. Two hours later, rescued, we’re vegetables. Homo sapiens don’t do well hanging upside down for long periods.
Yes, the one thing no one counted on is accidents.
Accidents kill a lot of people every single day. And nothing is going to change that fact unless people decide to live in virtual reality and never get off the couch to go outdoors or walk their dog.
Well, every year one person in a thousand dies in a screw-up by somebody, usually themselves. It doesn’t sound like much, but for the person who dies it’s one death too many. Anyone who expects to live 25,000 years should perform a statistical analysis to see what the chances are they will live that long.
Why guess?
The way the math works is this: figure the chances of living deadly-accident-free for one year (it’s 999/1000), then multiply this number by itself for each year of life.
Save time by using the exponent key on a calculator to enter years, anyone who doesn’t want to spend a week multiplying the same number over and over 25,000 times. The result will give the chances for survival over a span of that many years. Try some other numbers to make comparisons.
The bottom line is this: no one has any realistic hope at all of living more than 10,000 years or so. Of the seven billion humans alive today, only one in 22,000 can expect to live to the age 10,000.
A mere 2,000 people out of 7,000,000,000 will survive to see year 15,000. There’s a small chance (one in ten) that a solitary person might make it to 25,000 years, but they will be an outlier; a statistical anomaly. Who wants to be an anomaly? Not me.
In most cases; under the most realistic scenarios, the chances are that everyone alive today is going to be dead at age 25,000 because of accidents alone. They will die healthy though. It might be consolation for some.
No one will make it to year 25,000. That’s my bet. It’s not going to happen 90% of the time.
Accidents happen.
OK. Now that everybody knows that our individual situation is hopeless, what about the survival of our species — the human race (for those who disdain the scientific term, homo sapiens)?
Not sure why this video, but it’s pretty good, so let’s go with it.
I am sorry to report that the survival odds for our species are actually far worse than the odds for our survival as individuals. This depressing fact means that we can totally ignore the individual survival scenario we just took so much effort to describe. If our species dies-off early, individuals are going to die early too.
How can this terrible situation be possible? It seems so unfair.
I’ve been reading the book Global Catastrophic Risks — a collection of essays edited by Nick Bostrom and Milan M. Cirkovic — first published nine years ago (in 2008) when species survival was more certain than it is now. These brilliant men collected essays written by other forward-thinking geniuses who describe in delirious detail thirteen (or so) existential threats to the survival of humans. Some readers might want to review the list.
The authors argue that certain scenarios involving these threats will create an inevitable cascade of events that lead to the melt-down of civilization and a kill-strike against the human-species. I decided to assign a 1 in 10,000 chance of occurrence to each of these 13 catastrophes and crunch the numbers to understand how much danger people on Earth might be facing.
What I discovered scared me.
A super-volcano eruption in Toba, Indonesia 70,000 years ago reduced the population of humans on Earth to less than 4,000. Volcanoes that we know about today, like the one under Yellowstone National Park, might be larger and more dangerous.
For one thing, it’s not possible to know if 1 in 10,000 is an optimistic or pessimistic assessment of each of these risks. Nuclear war might be 1 in 100; climate change — 1 in 50; asteroids — 1 in 50,000; supernovae — 1 in 100,000,000; artificial intelligence — 1 in 10.
Who knows?
Can humans survive 10,000 years without a pandemic or nuclear war? No one knows.
Experts resort to heuristics, which erupt from biases even they don’t know they carry. I suppose a gut-check by an expert has more validity than a seat-of-the-pants guess by a pontificator. I will give you that. But the irony is that no matter who is right, no one will know because we are all going to die.
Evidence in the fossil and genetic record already shows that at least three human-like species are known to have come and gone during the past several 100,000 years or so, including Neanderthals and Denisovans. Extinction of intelligent, human-like species happens more often than not — 3 out of 4 times, maybe more if scientists continue to dig and look.
Number-crunching shows that if my 1 in 10,000 or soyears risk assessments are anywhere close to being realistic, humans have no more than a 1 in 4 chance to avoid extinction during the next 1,000 years. Our chance to survive approaches zero as the number of years reaches into the realm of 5,000 years and beyond.
Humans have recorded their stories for 5,000 years. Some call these stories, history. Sometime during the next 5,000 years, history will end unless humans lower the odds of these catastrophes to much less than 1 in 10,000.
We are truly stupid — dumber than earthworms — to refuse to make the effort to increase our survival prospects by lowering these probabilities, these ratios, to one-in-one-hundred-thousand or better still, one-in-a-million or even better, one-in-one-hundred million. Why not one-in-a-gazillion?
How? It’s the big question.
Reducing odds of catastrophe is the most important thing. It’s urgent. Failure seals our fate.
We search the heavens. No one seems to be broadcasting from out there. Maybe it’s something simple like Miyake events, which some argue make communication infrastructure near stars impossible to sustain.
What science hears is silence… and tiny chirps, yes, but not from crickets.
Today, as I write, the orange man (now blonde) who stole our election on behalf of the Russians held a meeting with Russian diplomats. He allowed only one press organization to cover and release photos. I asked some reasonably well-informed, smart people what press organization they thought it might be. They answered, Fox News.
Of course, their answer was nonsense. Fox News is clueless. It always has been. It’s run by a group of non-native Americans (their countries of origin are China and Australia) who have their own idiosyncratic ideas about what they want the USA to become. Their women parade around on camera half-dressed; recent lawsuits have disclosed that executives use many of them for sex.
They pretend to be patriots and Christians. Of course, anyone who isn’t deaf, dumb, and blind knows they are neither. They aren’t reporters either. Cheerleaders for GOP politicians is a better descriptor.
No, the correct answer is TASS, the Russian news agency, which is an arm of the Russian government. TASS made the press announcements. They released the photographs. And of course, life goes on. No one seems to care. On Tuesday, the FBI director — who led the investigation into ties between our leaders and Russian mafia-oligarchs — was fired.
On Wednesday (today), we learned that it was the president — he remains under investigation — who fired the FBI director; he celebrated by meeting with his Russian friends. They wore black suits, as if to highlight their bonds of power. The president lied, it turns out, about both the process and his reasons — according to members of his own staff, who leaked to major news outlets.
The president’s bodyguard, who delivered the FBI director’s pink slip. Note:on 20 Sept. 2017, the bodyguard left White House service. The Editors
The FBI director learned that he had been dismissed when he saw the announcement on television — the place where most folks get the news they trust most.
Director Comey thought it was a prank. He was preaching to a new class of recruits somewhere in southern California. He read the announcement on the scrolling news ribbon.
Later, the leader of the president’s civilian bodyguards hand-delivered the director’s pink slip. One report claimed that the FBI head hired a commercial aircraft to make his escape home. (ABC News reported that he was able to secure a government plane.)
Unless the Russians go door to door arresting people, no one will ever care — certainly no one in the GOP, it seems. The typical American lives inside a psychotic bubble of evil. Some act like they’ve lost the ability to assess realistic threats to their way of life; to the things they hold dear. They’ve watched too much television, too many movies, too much pornography; they’ve explored too many fake news sites — sites designed by experts to manipulate them into believing absurdities.
The typical American takes too many drugs — some wake up with caffeine and amphetamines; some struggle through stressful work days that last way too long; they sustain themselves by swallowing tranquilizers or derivatives of heroin like oxycodone; some put themselves to sleep with barbiturates or alcohol or both. Some drugs are prescribed; they’re necessary. Others are illegal.
It doesn’t seem to matter. The appetite for drugs is massive; Americans spend billions of dollars each year for drugs they might be better off not taking. They might more realistically assess threats to their freedoms with minds less anesthetized. Feeling good while living in a high-tech prison bult by billionaires is unnatural and, if anyone thinks about it much, sad and more than a little pathetic.
Howard Hughes (1905-1976) inherited the Hughes Tool Company. It became the nexus of a defense contractor empire worth billions of dollars.
Many Americans would strap syringes to their arms if they believed that no one would notice — as did Howard Hughes, the billionaire industrialist from yesteryear. Some readers may recall that our government confiscated his many businesses to make it easier to build and secure our country’s infamous war machine; the process drove Howard insane; he became dependent on drugs only they could reliably supply to keep him docile and compliant. He lived his last days wearing Kleenex boxes on his feet, because the tissues cushioned his arches and comforted him.
Howard Hughes watched movies all day long — movies he once produced; they often featured his long-lost Hollywood friends. When he felt sad, which was often, he tapped the end of the plungers in the syringes strapped to his arms. Sometimes he cried.
The Mormon FBI agents who baby-sat him allowed him to wallow. They left him to himself for the most part. He never traveled unless they took him. He never fled his gilded prison. His addictions made flight impossible. He might as well have been left to die on a sandbar in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. He dropped off the face of the earth. Members of Congress, some of them, worried about him.
The public was asking, Did Howard Hughes die? He had vanished from view like a ghost. No one ever saw him. He must be dead, some argued. Others knew better. They arranged a phone call with his handlers — to allay the fears of those few who believed that bad actors held him against his will. Powerful congress members wanted to know the truth and share it with the public.
During the call — which was broadcast to the world via speaker-phone before a full congressional gathering — Howard said that he was OK. He was alive. Someone asked, almost as an afterthought, if he was happy. His reply stunned Congress into silence. He answered, No… I’m not happy.
The phone called ended, and that was that. A few years later, Howard died. The coroner said that he found broken needles embedded in the bones of Howard’s arms and legs. He weighed less than ninety pounds.
Erich Fromm published the book Escape from Freedom in 1941. It was a required read in my high school during the 1960s, which was a long time ago — for some people. It seems like yesterday to me.
Fromm was a German psychoanalyst who argued that true freedom, if it ever came, would scare people so bad that they would embark on an unhealthy search for security; for certainty. The search would be a kind of escape; a frantic fleeing from the painful dissonance that the dissimilarity between people with disparate values can induce.
This discord intensified inside the USA during the past decade or so. Does anyone really want to go through the list of things that Americans hate about each other? Must I mention gay marriage, abortion, liberal politics, civilian access to weapons of war, religion, race, ethnicity, politics, viewing habits, Facebook rants, Twitter smears, and on and on?
People follow; they unfollow; they block; they unblock. They flip channels. They jump from Facebook to Instagram and back again. Nothing works; nothing helps.
Erectile dysfunction, for example, is a subject that has been thrust into everyone’s faces; into the deepest recesses of our subconscious minds. It’s relentless. It’s been discussed with commercial intensity on every media channel. People who watch sports programming can’t escape it.
No one can turn off the voices that are driving us mad, because the people who manipulate the public don’t agree with our points of view; with our sense of life. Do I suffer from erectile dysfunction? No; Hell no! I wish I never heard the term.
Do I yearn for a leader; a guide; someone to stand things up; to set things right? Yes. Of course I do. But it seems like Christ Jesus is not going to visit anytime soon. Maybe a Second Coming is fantasy. Maybe we’ve been stood up. Maybe we need a Führer. Yeah, that’s it.
I said earlier that I borrowed this essay’s title from the book of the same name published in 1941 by the German-born psychoanalyst, Erich Fromm. I don’t know if the book is required reading today or not; perhaps it should be; better books might have replaced it.
I considered a different title; I did. Maybe the Stockholm Syndrome would have been better. It’s about the ten percent of hostages who take on the values of their tormentors. I thought and thought. No; Escape from Freedom was best.
At least for now.
Billy Lee
Note from the Editorial Board:The details of the life of Howard Hughes included in Billy Lee’s essay are based on his memories of events as recorded in press accounts written and televised in real time as they were unfolding. Billy Lee’s memories do not in every case align with current historical accounts, because the history of Howard’s life has been reconstructed and fictionalized by many sources — according to Billy Lee. Billy Lee believes current accounts are revisionist, and in some particulars may in fact be inaccurate. Billy Lee witnessed the congressional interview with Mr. Hughes as it occurred.
There is no genetic code. Not really. Not in the way most people think. Seasoned, sensible geneticists know it’s true.
Unfortunately, a few immature biologists don’t believe it. They are developing “gene drive” technologies that they hope will enable them to reliably and permanently alter a fragment of “the code” in any life-form that reproduces sexually — to guarantee that the altered piece of “code” will be transmitted to the next generation 100% of the time into perpetuity.
NOTE TO READERS:November 22, 2019: This essay is the longest on the website. To help readers navigate, The Editors asked Billy Lee to add links to important subtopics. Don’t forget to click the up arrow on the right side of the page to return to top.
Deployment of gene-drive technology means that an altered fragment of genetic code can be “injected” into a species, for good or ill, which is permanent and will over a few generations become universal — unable to be suppressed or removed regardless of any natural selection pressures whatsoever — until the end of time.
The changes caused by gene drivers takeover every individual in any species that has been targeted for modification. It takes about 10 generations, give or take. With insects, we’re talking a couple of years; plants, a decade maybe; humans, 300 years or so.
Gene drivers are all about changing an entire species forever and permanently — not just one individual with a genetic disorder, for example, or one generation of plants for another. It’s a higher level of intervention than conventional gene therapies and modifications.
A screw-up can extinguish a species in a relatively short period of time is how I see the danger. Worse, according to the scientists cited by the NYTimes, these genes will migrate into ecological niches, where they will force unintended consequences to the biosphere; worse still, given sufficient time “good” genes are likely to jump species, where they will wreak havoc.
EDITORS NOTE: On 18 September 2020 the website science-news service phys.org published an article titled Biologists Create New Genetic Systems toNeutralize Gene Drives.
According to the article:
The first neutralizing system, called e-CHACR (erasing Constructs Hitchhiking on the Autocatalytic Chain Reaction) is designed to halt the spread of a gene drive by “shooting it with its own gun.” e-CHACRs use the CRISPR enzyme Cas9 carried on a gene drive to copy itself, while simultaneously mutating and inactivating the Cas9 gene.
The system can in principle be placed anywhere in the genome.
The second neutralizing system, called ERACR (Element Reversing the Autocatalytic Chain Reaction), is designed to eliminate the gene drive altogether. ERACRs are designed to be inserted at the site of the gene drive, where they use the Cas9 from the gene drive to attack either side of the Cas9, cutting it out. Once the gene drive is deleted, the ERACR copies itself and replaces the gene-drive.
Both systems have been tested in the lab at a molecular level. The developers have not yet demonstrated that a gene drive screw-up gone wild can be pulled back and eliminated by these systems.
The good news is that scientists are working on the problem. The bad news is that the existence of infant, untested technologies might tempt some to release a gene drive into the wild that will ultimately prove intractable.
EDITORS NOTE: On 6 March 2021 the website science-news service phys.org published an article titled New ‘split-drive’ system puts scientists in the (gene) driver seat. The piece describes new split-gene-drive technology that promises to degrade over several generations to permit engineered genomes to evolve under the rules of natural selection. Such a system, if safely deployed, would help to prevent collapse-of-species and other bad consequences when mistakes are made.
If anybody doesn’t understand what they just read, they shouldn’t worry. By the end of this essay, they will fully grasp why the scientists pursuing this course might be dangerously eager to unleash genetic pollutants that may kill us all — because their love of science makes it difficult to restrain themselves.
Virus stands on cell surface. It will soon inject it’s RNA payload into the cell to take control of its genetic machinery.
These smart people (some might be prodigies for all I know) plan to use gene drivers to exterminate vermin and eradicate insect-borne disease, for starters. They plan to make it impossible for agricultural pests to develop resistance to pesticides.
It all sounds great. But so did using the by-products of nuclear bombs as an energy source for our cities. Ask Japan how their state-of-the-art nuclear energy program turned out. Ask about Fukushima.
Gene-drive technologies are an existential threat to the long-term survival of life on Earth — like those tens-of-thousands of plutonium-loaded thermonuclear missiles, which a number of countries have buried a few hundred feet below the surface of the earth.
The warheads on these missiles are going to rot someday, because no one can take care of them forever, and we can’t get rid of them. Their poisons — the most lethal known; a speck of plutonium dust can kill any human who ingests it — will leach into the soils; over thousands of years percolating plutonium will kill everything.
Genes — bad ones (or very good ones that turn out bad; oops!) — genes that can never die; genes that can’t be suppressed by natural selection; genes that are always passed on to the next generation under every conceivable scenario and every possible pairing of mates (no matter how mismatched) present potential nightmare scenarios for any species that possess them. Errant gene drivers can extinguish some species in a matter of a few years.
It is distressing to think that smart, young adults — I can imagine some younger than 35 who possibly lack basic common-sense — does it matter how smart they are? — might right now be playing around with molecules of DNA they can’t possibly understand fully, because the molecules have a quantum side to their nature that can make their behavior unpredictable; even unknowable.
Young adults are messing around with very complicated structures and processes inside both molecules and cells that they can’t see, even with the best microscopes and the most sophisticated instruments. It’s possible that they might — even with the best intentions; the best lab protocols — screw things up big-time and possibly forever. We need maximum oversight over these researchers and the labs who employ them, now — not tomorrow or next year.
Click on this link to an essay in the science journal Nature, which addresses the issue of gene-driver risk and its management. It is written by someone who seems, at least to my mind, to suggest remedies that are insufficiently robust.
Every biologist knows that “genes” have a mysterious way of migrating between species, crossing boundaries, and behaving unpredictably. They have a way of escaping confinement structures. If folks don’t understand why, what are they doing playing around and calling it research?
Editors Note (May 27, 2017):Here is a link to a May 17, 2017 article in Science News about the role of jumping genes in the expression of genomes, which may be of interest to some readers.
People have claimed for years that recombinant DNA pathogens, retro-viruses and yes, AIDS, escaped from rogue laboratories. Does anyone know for sure? If they do, they aren’t saying.
Anyway, I urge readers to relax for now in the knowledge that they are about to learn some amazing things. I did, writing this essay. And please remember: I am a pontificator, not a scientist.
Links are provided to verify anything written in the essays that people may question. My pledge to readers is, as always, to be as accurate as possible and to correct mistakes should I discover them or find myself corrected by others.
Yes, I can be smart and write good too. Well, I’m trying anyway. Getting it right is important. It’s my highest priority. But sometimes I screw up — usually on some arcane technical detail in an essay about science.
Sometimes the science changes and new facts emerge. When I first published this essay in May 2016 everyone thought the galaxies in the universe numbered 200 billion. As I add this note in May 2018, analysis of the latest pics from telescopes in space suggests that the number of galaxies is closer to two-trillion.
My pledge is to keep my essays up-to-date and to learn enough to fix screw-ups that might be caused by simple ignorance. Readers can help fix errors by sending corrections in comments. Errors in the text will be fixed immediately.
So far, we’ve been lucky. The number of errors identified is amazingly few. In one doozy, I published the picture of a well-known British actress (well-known in Britain) and said it was Rosalind Franklin, the X-ray crystallographer famous for making the images that hinted at the spiral staircase structure of DNA.
Celebrities in Europe (that is, in England) were kind enough to take the time to inform me how wrong I was. I appreciated the feedback and was grateful they didn’t kill me.
I’m joking. The Brits are the kindest and best-behaved people on Earth. I’ve spent enough time in London to know.
The genetic code that everyone talks about lives inside tiny spaces; one way to think about it is to imagine that it lives inside little rooms packed to the ceiling with sacks — bitty-bags stuffed full of strung-together bases — hiding in the center of every cell of every plant and animal (or disbursed throughout the cell in the case of most one-celled microbes).
It isn’t a code at all. It’s a reservoir; an inventory; a collection of templates — most broken into pieces; separated and scattered among the dozens of spiral tentacles in the vast aperiodic-crystal known as DNA.
DNA isn’t exactly a crystal either; not really. Crystals are structures made from regular (periodic) arrangements of molecules. DNA, on the other hand,isa molecule, and it is constructed from strings of chemical bases. It’s found in bundles alongside other DNA molecules. These bundles are called chromosomes.
During part of a cell’s life cycle these DNA strings can sometimes be found tightly wound around little pieces of protein like fishing lines around spinning-reels. It’s a configuration that makes them compact; less intrusive — but easier to see under a microscope when they have been stained.
Inside any particular cell each chromosome of DNA is in some ways a little like a snowflake; within a single cell, no two chromosomes are the same; no two are alike, not even close. But every cell in the body contains the same group of chromosomes; the chromosomes in each body-cell are identical to the chromosomes in every other body-cell, right? It’s not hard to understand.
Bases, by the way, (in case someone might be wondering) are chemical substances that turn into salts when acids are poured over them. Many bases exist in nature, but only four (nucleobases) are found in DNA.
These four bases are essentially one or two rings of nitrogen and carbon atoms with ammonia and vinegar-like side chains attached. Here are links for anyone who wants to look them up: adenine – thymine ; and cytosine – guanine.
A fifth base, uracil substitutes for thymine in RNA, which is a vast assortment of short, single-stranded, DNA-like segments — the cell’s worker-ants who enable cells to perform their many functions. RNA builds genes, moves stuff around, and dramatically speeds up cell chemistry by catalyzing thousands of processes.
Not to digress, but NASA found uracil on the surface of Saturn’s moon Titan in 2012 during a fly-by. It’s something to wonder about.
Caffeine is molecularly similar to the bases adenine and guanine. Bases taste bitter — like the caffeine in coffee. Acids, on the other hand, taste sour — like vinegar. Combine bases and acids (bitter and sour) chemically to make salts, which are substances that taste like the ocean.
This tangled mess is one-celled life, highly magnified. It is varied, imprecise, and invisible to humans. It takes about ten of these microbes (which are about the size of human red-blood cells) to span the width of a human hair; 30 to circumnavigate it. DNA is far smaller. It requires 8,000 tightly wound DNA bundles to span a human hair; 800 to span the length of one of these microbes.
Forgive me for starting simple. Life-sciences are the most complicated sciences of all.
What adds to the difficulty is that in most animals (and all people) the DNA involved in sexual reproduction is configured differently than the DNA in body-cells. It exhibits behaviors a little less like those found in other cells.
In this essay we are talking about animal DNA, usually human, in body-cells — somatic cells; and we are talking about protein production.
A single DNA group inside certain humanbody-cells like liver cells and stem cells (while they undergo the process of replicating and dividing) is composed of ninety-two large molecules called DNA strands, which together warehouse the six billion base-pairs that will populate the genomes of two daughter cells.
During the short-lived interval when cells divide and replicate, dozens of molecules and billions of bases gather themselves into the configuration of chromosome-pairs peculiar to people, which some of us learned about in high school biology.
Most of the time (90% of it anyway) DNA doesn’t divide and multiply; it doesn’t organize itself into easy to recognize chromosomes; in all body-cells except stem cells and liver cells, DNA is the starting material for the making of proteins instead.
Making proteins is the only thing most body-cells do; it starts in the DNA molecules and is the subject of this essay. Cell division and replication is what stem cells do. Links will lead to those subjects for any who might want to learn more.
This essay is not about stem cells, which develop into any and every kind of somatic (body) cell and germ (reproductive) cell. As a pontificator who is not an expert on stem cells, my understanding is that — except for liver cells — somatic cells in mature adults don’t generally divide and reproduce themselves. That function is performed by stem cells, which start at conception and continue through life to replenish the human body.
Stem cells live inside the tissues of adults like seasonings inside cooked beef, is how I imagine it. Check me on this one, experts. Correct me in the comments section. All others read this link on cell differentiation first.
The main point is that human body-cells house 46 chromosomes (called chromatids when they are organized into 23 connected pairs), which contain six billion base-pairs. Reproductive (germination or germ) cells contain 23 unpaired chromosomes that store three billion base-pairs.
Confusing terminology constructed from the Greek language can create stumbling blocks for non-scientists, so I’m reluctant to go there. Terms like diploid, haploid, gamete, and zygote folks can look up and explore on their own. There’s enough that’s fascinating in English. Only tiny, digestible Greek lessons — sparsely sprinkled — will appear in this essay.
Besides unfamiliar vocabulary, another hard concept to grasp is this: inside every animal cell (and plant cell) are hundreds of DNA packed bundles (called mitochondria), where the DNA is not like the DNA in sex-cells or in body-cells either. The DNA in mitochondria matches what one might expect to find in another as yet undiscovered species of bacteria. It’s “coded” differently.
Yes, it’s weird, but there are explanations.
Most scientists today believe that a long time ago cells engulfed bacteria; these foreign migrants from another world (in terms of scale) were simply unable to escape.
Bacteria are small. A thimble-full of dirt can contain 50,000 species. It is amazing to learn that millions of species of bacteria exist in the soils and on the surfaces of plants on the earth.
Thirty-percent of cells in the human body are bacteria. They don’t weigh much, because they are small. It would require as many as 10,000 individuals of some strains to match in size just one of the microbes displayed in the illustration a few paragraphs above.
On average, though, a typical cell in an animal or plant can be visualized as having about 4,000 times the volume of a typical bacterium. The range of volume ratios varies widely, of course. Nothing is simple, especially in biology. Enough said.
Scientists named the trapped bacteria-like life-forms inside cells, mitochondria, afterthe Greek words for threaded granules; these granulesmake the cells they inhabit more robust, because they act like little batteries, boosting the energy in their adopted homes to help power the many tasks that cells do. Click the video link above for an animation by Harvard University that shows how it works.
Click the link above for an easy-to-understand animation of the overall structure of cells; or this link for a YouTube Video designed to transport viewers through an imaginary, animated world that makes real the complexity of a working, living cell.
And here is a link from Wikipedia, if anyone is confused about the numbers of bases and chromosomes in humans, as many folks seem to be, including myself, sometimes.
It’s confusing, because there are different “codes”, different cell-cycle phases, different collections of DNA molecules in body, germ, and stem cells — and I haven’t even mentioned enzyme catalysis or polymerases (and I’m not going to, either — not just yet anyway — because it will open a big can of worms I don’t want to deal with right now).
Don’t worry, we’ll get to some of it later after I’ve laid a little scaffolding.
But let me say this: without all this complexity, life forms as complicated as human beings would be impossible — codes or no codes.
The tools most people use to do science, especially physics, generally depend on mathematics and rigid, predictable rules. The life-sciences aren’t like that; not at all.
Should my essay devolve into complexity, readers are free to bail. I’m going to try to keep the mysteries of DNA understandable to non-technical people. Who knows if I’ll succeed or not?
DNA can be thought of as a collection of pouches or bags stuffed with billions of copies of four basic substances, called bases. DNA is like a roomful of holiday bags, each filled to the brim with four different kinds of unfinished toys like the ones in Santa’s workshops before Christmas.
Each of the four kinds of toys are strung together in-line, one after the other — in no discernible order — in long, tangled spirals. These spirals are unimaginably long, and there are many dozens of them.
The toys in the DNA sacks are unfinished, unpainted, and undecorated. They really don’t look much like toys at all. In this analogy, the four bases might be imagined as four simple blocks of wood, each a different shape and size. And like I said, there are billions of these blocks, at least in human cells.
Is DNA a big molecule? Yes, I already said that it was. It’s huge. But good luck to anyone who tries to find one. Good luck to anyone who tries to look at one. No one has ever seen any molecule. No matter how large, molecules are too small to see, even with microscopes; and that includes DNA molecules, the largest and most complex molecules in biology.
It takes a combination of high-energy light, amplification, and computer-generated algorithms to produce useful pictures of what scientists think molecules look like. A computer-generated image is not the same as a brain-generated image stimulated by the act of looking at reflected light with a pair of human eyes.
X-ray crystallography was the technique used first to unravel clues to the structure of DNA. From the data collected by crystallography, Linus Pauling shared in 1951 compelling ideas about what he thought the structure was, but he turned out to be wrong. He got protein structure right, but his description of DNA had subtle errors. A few years later, others came up with a structure that has thus far stood the test of time.
In soma (body) cells, forty-six molecules (strands or bags or sacks) of DNA contain the six billion base-pairs (or blocks) of the human genome. Most of the time these strands are loose and disorganized; a diffuse mass of hard-to-see chromatin. (Their form depends on what part of its period the cell cycle is in.)
It has to be this way for the worker elves of the cell to gain access to the bases (the unfinished toy blocks) upon which they will do their work. Only during the process of cell division do these forty-six molecules bind together and curl-up into the twenty-three chromosome-pairs that some readers may have learned about in high school biology class.
Researchers have technologies that can amplify what DNA molecules reveal, which they manipulate with computer algorithms to form fuzzy pictures that are helpful to highly trained analysts; but it’s the best they can do, visually.
An early theorist, Erwin Schrödinger, (one of my heroes) said in 1944 — before anyone knew what DNA was — that it must be an aperiodic-crystal. He gave a series of lectures, which later became the famous booklet, What is Life? It can be purchased for fifteen bucks on Amazon.com.
Schrödinger’s booklet changed the world — it’s one of the most prophetic works I’ve ever read. The tract changed my world view anyway; my view of life certainly.
It turns out, Schrödinger was right. DNA bundles store billions of bases in more-or-less random — but frozen — sequences much like crystals.
Just as molecules arrange themselves inside crystals, the bases inside DNA molecules also have an order, yes, an arrangement for sure, but it’s not a code; it’s not even a cipher; it’s merely a starting point for the most chaotic, complex, and messed-up process in nature — the creation of thinking, speaking, conscious-life (and less capable life) — all formed from a relatively few not-so-simple materials.
Here’s another assertion that might be difficult for some readers to accept. Genes don’t really exist. There are no free-standing genes; certainly not in human DNA, anyway. What scientists call genes must be constructed; they must be built; they must be put together; they must be fabricated, collected, and transported by molecules called RNA and by other processes known collectively as epigenetics. More on epigenetics later.
(Click on this old graphic (from 2004) to get a clearer view.) This illustration is a simplified representation of the chaos going on during arguably one of the simplest of the processes (transcription), which is the starting point for encoding other processes (called translation) that will ultimately lead to the fabrication and folding of proteins.
Most graphics and videos on the Internet seem to buy into a tidy notion that DNA is a code (not a reservoir and a starting point for the fabrication of templates). This notion seems to demand laser-precision and machine-like twelve-sigma reliability during protein synthesis.
Don’t believe it.
Yes, there is no argument; we can improve our chances for healthier lives by cleaning up less-than-optimal base-sequences — which are, as often as not, scattered, scrambled hodgepodges — using, hopefully, gene therapies like CRISPR. (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats)
But until technicians create tools to deal with other processes; until biologists can manipulate RNA itself and learn to change the ”weather” patterns (discussed later) inside cells, physicians will not be able to eliminate many of pathologies that plague our species and lead to diminished health and, for some, death.
RNA in all its forms (and there are many) is itself constructed from scattered templates that are hidden haphazardly like Easter eggs within the billions of bases strewn along the dozens of spirals inside a DNA bundle. RNA first builds itself up by interacting with various sections of base sequences in the DNA and then copies those sequences by borrowing matching freebases, which are floating everywhere in the medium of the cell’s nucleus.
RNA is much shorter in length and less stable than the DNA it models. But it doesn’t mutate as much as folks might expect, because it is also shorter-lived and reproduces less often. It’s more versatile too; more agile, because it is single-stranded; DNA is double-stranded.
RNA, in all its forms, is the workhorse of cell functions; it is both the building material and the construction machinery used in many important cell structures, which perform the yeoman’s task of protein building inside cells.
It seems plausible to me that over a few hundreds-of-millions of years the possibly self-generated RNA sequences may have acquired — through accident, luck, or trial-and-error — the ability to select, copy, paste, and assemble short sections of random DNA bases, which every-once-in-a-great-while actually worked to help build useful proteins that added survival advantages to their evolving hosts.
Maybe RNA designed and built DNA in the first place, which it learned to copy and manipulate. We may never know exactly how.
One thing scientists agree on: one-celled life was already highly developed, complex, and flourishing by the time the new planet, Earth, reached its first billionth year. Earth is four-and-a-half billion years old. Life came on fast during extreme conditions vastly different than now. This fact is amazing. No one understands how.
It has taken an additional three-and-a-half billion years to get to humans and the space-traveling civilizations that seem to dominate the earth today.
Thinking about RNA and DNA can be a frustrating circular process, much like the chicken or the egg problem; which came first? My sense is that most scientists today believe RNA came first, DNA later. Inside our cells, it is impossible to tell, but there is no denying that RNA’s diversity and flexibility make it a most likely candidate.
Many kinds of RNA live inside cells. Some run around doing nothing. They simply try to survive inside the complicated universe that is the typical living cell in every animal, plant, and microbe. They are called selfish RNA.
Most RNA sequences are much less selfish. They are like Christmas elves who work day and night; some to open Santa’s bags to gain access to their contents; others to copy various sections from the strands of blocks inside; others to move the copied sections to an assembly area, where other elves glue the copied segments together to form new sequences — many of which, by the way, are very different from the original sequences that the RNA elves found inside Santa’s gift bags; inside the DNA.
Eventually, messenger elves transport the long strands of little blocks they copied and assembled; they move them away from the center of the cell; out to the gooey regions of the cell beyond its center where other transfer elves are busy assembling (by threes) free-floating blocks (called bases, remember) and attaching these triplet-blocks (called anticodons) to single amino acids. The resulting structures are called transfer RNA (or tRNA, for short).
An amino acid is simply a configuration of carbon atoms with amine (ammonia) stuck to one side and carboxylic acid (vinegar) stuck to another — plus some other simple stuff attached here and there to make each amino acid unique among all the others. Think of an amino acid as a colored necklace bead. Out of the five-hundred or so differently colored beads in nature, transfer elves in humans work with only twenty or so.
Stay with me now. You just read the most difficult sentence in the essay. These amino acids attach themselves like colorized necklace beads to triplet-blocks (called anticodons) according to which of the three blocks (or bases) the transfer-RNA (tRNA) is made from. Watch the video ”From DNA to protein” above to better understand.
In the meantime, while all this other stuff is going on, the messenger elves are directing their long strands of copied-and-pasted blocks (bases) away from the cell’s tiny nucleus (center) toward little triplet-body-handling factories (called ribosomes; ribo for triplet, soma for body), which live in the inner goo (the cytoplasm) of the cell.
Many ribosomes are attached to a winding ribbon-like structure called the rough endoplasmic reticulum. Endo is Greek for inner; plasma is goo; reticulum means network.
At the same time, transfer elves in the goo (cytoplasm) steer their three-blocks-plus-a-colored-beadassemblies — in humans these “three-base” combos and twenty or so colored beads can be arranged forty-eight ways — into the ribosome factories, where they are matched-up to the blocks (bases) in the long strands that are being delivered from the cell’s nucleus (like cars in a choo-choo train) by the messenger elves.
Inside the ribosome factories, the triplet-blocks-plus-one-colored-bead assemblies, which have been constructed and collected by the transfer elves in the cytoplasm, are paired block for block (that is, base for base) to the long train of blocks that were collected, arranged, and carried by the messenger elves from the cell’s center (its nucleus).
As each transfer assembly triplet is matched-up three bases at a time to the blocks in the long messenger train, the single amino-acid bead that the three-block transfer assembly carries is ejected out of the ribosome factory.
Assembly elves — think of them as molecular forces — secure each ejected amino acid bead to the next bead, one after the other — in the exact order demanded by the order (in threes, called codons when located in the messenger RNA) of the bases (blocks) in the messenger sequence — creating as they go an amino-acid-chain, or necklace.
Once the amino acid chain (necklace) is long enough (and remember: there can be as many as twenty-three different colors of amino-acid beads in each necklace, and each necklace can be almost any length at all — up to hundreds or even tens-of-thousands of beads long) elves (molecular forces that work through the micro-scaffolding of the cell) go to work; they transfer the chains to Golgi structures, where they are bundled and folded into the twisted shapes that make them proteins. Like an Amazon distribution center, the Golgi apparatuses deliver the proteins to their destinations.
Like holiday elves, they deliver protein toys to every child’s bedroom in the cell, which in this analogy lie inside the abyss of the cell’s cytoplasm (cyto means cell; plasm means goo).
Some elves might feel compelled to deliver their proteins down the street to other homes (cells) in other neighborhoods by way of certain processes known as cell migrations.
These migrations can bring healing to injured tissues in other parts of the body, among other benefits. However, as I wrote earlier, stem cells that live inside the tissues of the body do the heavy lifting of cell replacement and healing.
Here is a way to visualize a human cell: think of cytoplasm (the cell goo) as the yolk of an idealized egg. A chicken egg is nothing like a human body-cell, but it makes a good model for explanations.
(Click on pic to enlarge.) This drawing is an idealized view of a typical eukaryotic cell, which in this essay is compared to the yolk of a chicken egg. The egg-white is the thin plasma membrane.
The nucleolus (at the epicenter) is a tiny, hard to find collection of proteins, RNA, and DNA at the very center of the nucleus where ribosomes are fabricated, if anyone wonders.
Ribosomes are made entirely from RNA; they are, in fact, one of the most ancient structures in cells; they are essential players in both prokaryotic and eukaryotic (ancient and modern) cells, which I will discuss in more detail soon.
Chromatin (the usually unorganized mess of DNA) lies in the nuclear goo of the nucleus that surrounds the nucleolus.
Remember that ribosomes are the tiny factories, where proteins get their start. Ribosomes themselves move between the nucleolus and the surrounding nuclear goo until they are ejected out of the pores of the nucleus into the goo of the yolk (which in this analogy is the cytoplasm) where many will float freely in an ocean filled with a dozen or more other structures important to cell functions. Many ribosomes attach themselves to the endoplasmic reticulum.
But we’re not concerned about these other structures right now. Proteins are the most essential substances from which our bodies are made.
Some biologists believe that as many as 50,000 different proteins are required to construct a human being. Others say 100,000. The human body is capable of producing two million. Each cell type on its own is capable of making 5,000.
Ribosomes are very important, because it is inside the ribosomes where proteins get started, so we concentrate on them first.
Think of the cell’s membrane as the “white” of the egg. It surrounds and protects the vital cytoplasm, where the making of proteins takes place.
Of course, the chicken egg analogy had to break down. A chicken egg is surrounded by an oxygen-permeable calcium carbonate (CaCO3) shell. Forget about the shells of chicken eggs. Human soma-cells aren’t protected in quite the same way.
In a chicken egg the nucleus is a little white mass that sits on top of the yolk and feeds on it. The nucleolus is inside that little white mass. So the breakfast-egg analogy falls apart pretty darn fast. It might be more confusing than helpful. I hope not.
A lot more is going on. And — I have to say this — the cells of most microbes (one-celled life, like bacteria and archaea) don’t look like the sunny-side-up cells of humans or most other animals and plants. For one thing, they are a lot smaller.
Bacteria and archaea can be from 20 to 10,000 times smaller than the eukaryotic cells of animals and plants. They lack membrane-bound organelles; they lack a nucleus. They look more like little sandwich bags of loosely cooked, scrambled eggs. Scientists call them, prokaryotes. (It’s Greek, meaning before they became fully formed kernels.) They are the ancient cells.
As for the other structures that live inside our own eukaryotic cells (again, it’s Greek, meaning after they became kernels) — they make a fascinating study, but are beyond the scope of this essay.
Eukaryotes are the modern more advanced cells of all plants and animals. It took two billion years for ancient prokaryotic cells to evolve to the modern eukaryotic cells that first appeared 1.5 billion years ago; it is these cells that congregated and evolved to become the plants and animals of today. Click on the links in this essay — such as the links in nearby paragraphs — to access Wikipedia articles, YouTube videos, and other sources to learn more about them.
Phosphoric acid, which people have used for centuries to remove rust and to fertilize crops makes the DNA supports (or strands) on which hang the rungs of billions of bases. Phosphoric acid is the concentrated, clear syrup that makes Coca-Cola sting the tongue (carbon-dioxide bubbles make Coke sparkle). It’s the acid found inside the nucleus of every cell.
Apatite crystal from Mexico.
Hundreds of years ago phosphoric acid was made from the stone mineral apatite (calcium phosphate) and sulphuric acid — by-products of the mining and smelting of ores. Today the production process is more arcane and efficient.
Phosphorus is arguably one of the most important elements of life. Only magnesium is more important to viability, because the ATP that powers all cells will not work unless it is bound to it. Folks who aren’t eating whole wheat, spinach, black beans, almonds, and peanuts should probably be taking a daily magnesium supplement.
People who eat steak consume goodly amounts of phosphoric acid. Early researchers always found this acid in the center of cells, their nucleus. Scientists called it, nucleic acid.
Much later scientists discovered that the DNA sacks were full of bases, crammed together into tangled masses of long, curly chains they called chromosomes (Greek, for coloredbodies).
Chromosomes stained well during lab experiments, which was fortunate for researchers, because color made it easier to see the chromosomes during the short periods of time when the genetic material in the cell’s center took on its distinctive form from out of the shapeless, invisible chromatin, where it lived.
It is by a curious twist of chemical engineering — to my mind, at least — that the bases don’t react with the phosphoric acid that anchors them. The DNA molecules don’t collapse into little piles of salt, like one might expect. Maybe they should; but on Earth, they don’t.
In this sense — the sense in which our DNA is made from acids and bases — we are salt, or could be; we are potentially a very complicated salt, yes, but a salt nonetheless.
A strong argument can be made that proteins and the polypeptide chains that make them are in fact salts. For reasons known only to biochemists, naming conventions hide this reality.
Amino acids, polypeptides, and proteins are thought of as inner salts and given the name zwitterions, of all things. Salt is at the heart of what and who we might become were it not for idiosyncrasies of nomenclature and the miracle that makes life live.
But to get back to phosphoric acid…
Phosphoric acid (phosphate) sacks (or strands) are loaded with toy blocks (bases), so they need something sticky, like sugar, to keep the blocks from falling out. The D in DNA stands for the sticky stuff — deoxyribose, which means sugar.
This simplified graphic shows sticky sugar (deoxyribose) securing the phosphate rails of a DNA strand to the only two kinds of base-pairs found in DNA — thymine / adenine and guanine / cytosine. The sugar, deoxyribose, forms both a link and a buffer between the acid and the bases; otherwise, the molecule would collapse to become a salt. DNA breaks down completely at 374° Fahrenheit, which is just 72° above the melting point of table sugar. An interesting comparison is the melting point of table salt, which is 1474°F.
DNA is deoxyribonucleic acid.
The sugar and acid, together, form the rails of the famous spiral staircase, upon which the rungs of bases are hung. It’s the most incredible structure in nature. It’s called the double-helix. Some people named Watson, Wilkins, and Crick won a Nobel Prize for figuring it out.
To give readers a sense of scale: If someone were to take the longest strand of the double-helix in our DNA (it’s in chromosome-one) and somehow increased its diameter to one-inch (the thickness of a large garden hose), the DNA strand — when pulled straight — would increase in length to 567 miles (about 40 miles longer than the distance between Nashville and Detroit).
The bases (or toy blocks, as we’ve been calling them) would stack in pairs, eight-pairs-to-the-inch, along the entire 567-mile length of the hose. In this single chromosome, each of the nearly half-billion bases it contains (in 247,199,719 base-pairs) would be about the size of a Tic-Tac breath mint; maybe a bit smaller.
At normal scales, the dimensions are too fantastic to believe. A solitary strand of DNA can’t be seen, even with the aid of most microscopes, but if all the DNA in a single cell could be laid out end to end and flattened to remove the kinks, it would stretch to six-and-a-half feet. 6.5 feet is the length of all the DNA in a typical human cell.
According to Siri, 1E14 cells make a human. It’s “one” followed by 14 zeros. It’s 100 trillion. Other sources say no; the number of cells in a human being is between 15 and 70 trillion. A trillion has twelve zeroes, right?
Do the math. It will show that all the DNA in a single human is enough to spin a strand from the earth to the sun and back 99 to 662 times (which is somewhere between 198 and 1324 astronomical units, right?) depending on who is trusted to do the human cell-count. Does anyone believe it?
An astronomical unit (AU) is simply the distance from the Earth to the Sun. It is the distance traveled by light during 499 seconds, which is 8 minutes and 19 seconds. It’s close to 93 million miles, right?
The point is this: strands of DNA are too thin to see, but in humans their total length is on an astronomical scale that spans two-and-half to sixteen-and-a-half times the diameter of the solar system out to Pluto — a diametral orbital distance that is nearly 80 AU.
It’s a lot of DNA, even if the exact amount is uncertain.
Rosalind Franklin (1920-1958). Franklin received her PhD from Cambridge University at age 25. (Her thesis: The physical chemistry of solid organic colloids with special reference to coal.) Franklin spoke several languages, which opened opportunities for her to work in France, where she acquired the skills in X-ray crystallography that enabled her to advance the world to a new understanding of viruses and the molecules of life — DNA.
Rosalind Franklin, the gifted X-ray crystallographer, who did the experimental research that led to the discovery of the double helix, died of ovarian cancer at age 37. The Nobel Prize Committee has a long-standing policy of not awarding prizes to people who have died. It’s why Irish physicist and mathematician John Stewart Bell didn’t receive a prize for his civilization-changing work on quantum-entanglement, after he suffered a brain hemorrhage and perished in 1990.
In Franklin’s case it was doubly sad, because she was also doing important work on the molecular structure of viruses related to polio (funded by the United States Public Health Service) when cancer overtook her. Once again another scientist — this time her partner, Aaron Klug — received the Nobel Prize that she might have shared.
Had Rosalind Franklin survived to receive two Nobel Prizes — one for her work on the double helix and the other on the structure of polio virus — she would be a household name, like Albert Einstein or Francis Crick or Jonas Salk.
Rosalind lived in a generation and a culture that devalued her; she was a woman who competed with men, some of whom may have undercut her and wanted nothing to do with her, a few admitted. It was a different time, the 1950s. Who knows where the truth lies?
For Franklin, fame-and-fortune wasn’t to be. Blame cancer, a disease of the “genes”, which she sacrificed her life to understand by working daily with the deadly X-rays that helped her unlock the secrets of viruses and, most important of all, to finally pull aside the opaque curtain that was hiding the shape of the molecule of life: DNA.
Once the structure of the double-helix became known, the potential to store information in a molecular bundle constructed like DNA was immediately recognized — and it appeared to be unlimited. It is why everyone at first thought that the DNA molecule must be a code, like an old-fashioned computer tape.
I’ve suggested that DNA is not a code; neither is it a cipher. Some researchers view DNA more as a storage device and a starting point for processes — complicated processes — that have taken place inside every living cell for 3.5 billion years.
Yes, a group of three bases and an attached amino acid, properly transformed and manipulated by RNA elves inside little protein-making workshops called ribosomes, can help to fabricate and string together colored beads to make necklaces (chains). Chains of amino acids (polypeptides) — properly ordered and folded, again by RNA elves — can become proteins.
Scattered DNA base sequences inside a cell’s nucleus, its center, are a starting point for an involved and complicated process of selection, duplication, transformation, and fabrication before anything useful can happen; before proteins can be built and released for living.
To think realistically about life, especially human life, people should remind themselves that two-thirds of their bodies is water; two-thirds of what’s left is protein; the rest is mostly fat.
The interior of a cell is a complicated space. The space between cells is other-worldly.
The process that goes on inside cells, instead of being thought of as a precisely executed computer code, might better be compared to the process of weather found on every planet in the solar system.
Each planet can be identified by its surface weather, which starts from a kit of basic materials, and is amplified by an avalanche of environmental conditions and chemistries, much like the bases in chromosomes, which are selected, copied, shaped and reshaped, configured and reconfigured by RNA elves and other characters we have yet to meet (because the science of the evolving genome — the genetic material — and the phenome — what animals and plants look like — is still young, and scientists understand less than the little they think they know about the complete process, at least so far).
The processes used to construct life forms by starting with the bases in DNA are analogous to the processes astronomers observe on the planets of our solar system, where each planet creates its weather from the matrix of materials and thermal conditions that seems to define it. Each planet in the solar system has a characteristic weather profile that depends on a chaotic interplay of materials and environment unique to that planet.
Earth has weather; so does Mars and Jupiter. Those who study planets know immediately which planet is which, simply by observing its weather. From telescopes on Earth, each planet looks like its weather. Each has its characteristic colors and patterns. Weather is a planet’s phenotype; it’s what folks see when they look.
This mammoth storm on Jupiter looks eerily like structures that are found in living cells. The inset is planet Earth, shown for scale.
That’s how it is with life forms, too. Each life form is the result of weather patterns inside cells, which give each animal, plant, and microbe its unique essence; its physical presence in the larger world where it lives.
It becomes conventional wisdom to think this way about life forms, when one considers that identical twins — two humans who share exactly the same DNA — always display a variety of differences when examined closely.
Identical twins never have the same fingerprints, for example. There are systems of weather occurring around their genetic material in every protein-producing region in their bodies. Epigenetics is the technical term for the study of how it is that variations in phenomes occur in organisms that have identical genomes — that is, identical gene sequences.
Click pic for larger view in new window. (from Wikipedia article, Epigenetics)
The outcomes of these storms are never the same; two supposedly identical children do not always receive the same toys from the RNA elves who rummage through their shared bags (strands) of DNA for the bases they will copy and rework into proteins. Things get mixed up and turned around. One toy gets selected; another doesn’t; one is painted green; another purple.
What I find interesting is this: identical twins get less identical as they age. They are easier to distinguish.
How many of the differences are due to variations in the production of proteins, which occur at the molecular level?
How much of the variation is induced by external stresses on the genome caused by lifestyle differences? How much is driven by an unavoidable drift in the statistics of protein production, which emerge and diverge over time in each phenome of the twins regardless of their lifestyle choices?
An animal cannot be constructed from its DNA alone. RNA elves — millions of them, like colonies of ants — must do their work.
It’s a chaotic process that produces life on the earth. It’s a process that cannot be described or predicted by mathematics. If it could, scientists might take the DNA from prehistoric bones to create the original animals. Jurassic Park would be more than a Hollywood fantasy, which is what the book, movie, and sequels were and are.
An animal cannot be constructed from its DNA alone. A lot more is required than a simple collection of sequences formed from four bases and frozen in a molecule of DNA. A lot more of life’s machinery is required. The RNA elves — millions of them, like colonies of ants — must do their work.
When the work is done, and a protein has been made and delivered, the path back is lost, forever. No way exists — or is even possible — to reconstruct the sequence of bases in the DNA that started the process that built the protein. The process is not backward compatible, according to Matthew Cobb, the British zoologist and historian, in his latest book, Life’s Greatest Secret. Not only are the DNA sequences not reachable from knowledge of the proteins alone, but the processing steps that took place between the protein and the DNA are unknowable.
I don’t want to get too Mathy but think about this: sixty-four three-block (or three-base) sequences can in theory “code” for a mere twenty or so amino acids. It means that as many as three or four of those three-base sequences (the transfer elves we talked about earlier) can “code” for the same amino acid.
Reminder: four bases are all the choices DNA offers. Taken three at a time, they are more than enough to “code” for twenty or so amino acids. Get out the calculator, those who don’t believe it. 4 X 4 X 4 = 64. As mentioned earlier, humans have acquired over the eons 48 three-base combinations to work with. Bacteria, for another example, have 31 according to Matthew Cobb. We need less than two dozen.
Amino acid sequences long enough to form proteins can be hundreds to tens-of-thousands of acids long.
Forget about how amino acid chains get folded properly to make proteins. How can anyone work backwards from a protein formed from thousands of amino-acid beads — each one of which was secured to any one of three or four different 3-way combinations of bases (or blocks) — and then go about the task of reconstructing from all those possible combinations the exact sequence of bases (or blocks) in the original DNA, which more than a few random RNA sequences interacted with to make their choices from billions of bases in the first place?
Take a breath. There isn’t enough time in the history of the universe to figure it out for the tens-of-thousands of proteins that it takes to make a functioning animal or plant.
Raise the number “three” (or four, or five, or six, or two; it doesn’t matter) to the thousandth power on a calculator, those who may be having trouble accepting a possibly demoralizing fact. Most calculators will spit out the word, OVERFLOW. The number of possible sequences is impossibly large. It might as well be infinite.
This is the genetic code. I guess I should show it. (Click the pic for a clearer view.) A lot of folks worked on it; it was a pinch point; a roadblock that once slowed progress toward the understanding of what makes life live; how cells behave. Now that it’s known, is anyone sure it is the only code? The answer is, no. Variations have already been found in nature — at least 15 so far with more expected as researchers continue their work.
It seems likely that the ”code” has changed in dramatic ways since the first primitive cells formed 3.5 billion years ago. British zoologist, Matthew Cobb, has suggested that words like ”code” and ”information” might better be thought of as mere metaphors when applied to the machinations of complex molecules like DNA and RNA, which — can we admit? — operate on quantum scales for which we humans have no natural intuition.
There are thousands of chains of all different lengths and folding patterns. No one is going to reverse-engineer the DNA of a life-form as complex as a human being from its proteins; nor from its RNA elves; nor from its essential enzymes and catalysts; not anytime soon; not ever. It goes for dinosaurs, trees, or any other reasonably complex living thing — now or from the distant past.
Why do we have to reverse-engineer? Why not read the instructions right off the DNA itself? By now most readers must be starting to understand that the sequences necessary to build proteins are scattered among billions of bases. We can’t find the right ones in the right order. It’s not possible; not for creatures as complex as humans or dinosaurs.
Even if someone could reverse-engineer DNA sequences from proteins, how would they construct and organize the ant-like colonies of RNA elves that must sort through the DNA bases to select and build the right sequences; how do they identify and isolate the sequences necessary to build and orchestrate, for example, the tens-of-thousands of enzymes that are required to give researchers any chance at all to build a functioning human-being or even a prehistoric dinosaur?
It gets more complicated.
Those who don’t believe it might want to read about CNVs, or copy number variations, that disrupt the probabilities that certain base-sequences in genes can be fabricated in the same way time after time. Click the link.
It’s a form of change that has nothing to do with mutations or inheritance. It is more related to the untidy mess that three billion base pairs make whenever they get together to do anything at all. It’s a genetic Woodstock of variation, where almost anything can happen and sometimes does.
Now might be a good time to mention that there are virus infections that can alter the DNA in cells. These viruses are called retroviruses, because they reverse the DNA to RNA transcription process described earlier by introducing an enzyme into the cells they infect. This process is disease producing — it causes cancer — and destroys the host animal (or person) if left untreated.
The enzyme, reverse transcriptase, has become a tool that molecular engineers now use to modify organisms in experiments. Enough said. The weeds of molecular biology grow thick and deep.
This is the inverse genetic code. I might as well show it, too. (Click the pic for a clearer view.) Tables like this one make the ”code” appear to be comprehensive and far-reaching. Some readers might be surprised to learn that only one or two percent of the bases in human DNA are ever copied by RNA to make proteins.
Tables like the one above make the ”code” appear comprehensive and far-reaching. Some readers might be surprised to learn that only one or two percent of the bases in human DNA are ever copied by RNA to make proteins.
Added to 2% for protein synthesis is 8% to make little pieces of RNA that oversee and coordinate the process of protein-making — like colonies of swarming ants. The rest of the bases (90%) do other things; maybe — many of them — do nothing at all. No one is really sure what they do or don’t do.
Geneticists used to believe they could clone animals from their DNA sequences alone. Yes, there once was a cloned sheep named Dolly. Some readers may have read about her.
After many heart-breaking failures, researchers managed to take the DNA from the mammary gland of one sheep, inject it into the nucleus of an egg from a second sheep, and implant this DNA cocktail into the womb of a third. By some miracle, Dolly was conceived and born, on July 5, 1996.
Dolly (5 July 1996 – 14 Feb 2003). Pic by Tony Barros, Sao Paulo, Brazil.
Sheep live twelve years, on average. By Dolly’s fourth year arthritis crippled her. At year seven researchers euthanized her; she had developed a chronic and incurable lung disease.
Dolly was the recipient of arguably the best healthcare any sheep ever received in the history of veterinary medicine. She didn’t do well. Click this link for an update on the Dolly research.
For the sake of complete accuracy, permit me to admit that no one I know clones sheep anymore. There are too many failures. The failure rate for clones is right around 100%.
Some breeders claim to clone horses, which they sell to folks who hope to increase their odds of winning races. I can argue that their definition of cloning differs from science, and the proof is that the horses have noticeable differences which negatively impact their ability to win.
Clone researchers, as far as anyone knows, have never used DNA alone, anyway. All borrow the enzymes, RNA, ribosomes, and other cell structures of other life forms to incubate the DNA they play with to try to create “artificial” life.
Mitochondrial DNA is unreachable. It is produced only in the ovum of the female. Mitochondrial DNA carried by sperm is miniscule in amount and quickly identified and destroyed in the fertilized egg.
Any technique that involves in vitro fertilization can bypass this natural process and inadvertently scramble the DNA in mitochondria. It can be debilitating, even disease producing.
Any technique that swaps out nuclear DNA while avoiding mitochondrial DNA doesn’t get to the power source of cells — a major enabler of stamina and endurance. In racehorses, the role of mtDNA is probably crucial, it seems to me.
My point is that duplicating a DNA sequence is not enough to produce an identical copy of an animal as complex as a sheep, horse, or human. Too much other stuff is going on during reproduction that is not controllable or even known.
And speaking of enzymes, can we please not go there? I’m reminded of Chris Farley in the 1992 movie, Almost Heroes.
Does anyone remember?
His tutor asks him to learn the symbol for lowercase A. ”What do you want from me?” Chris bellows while rolling his eyes and clawing his hair. ”You want my head to explode?!”
Well, no, of course not. But for those who have to know more, why not push ourselves just a little bit harder? May I point out the obvious? Enzymes speed up chemical reactions. A chemical reaction that might under normal circumstances take years can be reduced to milliseconds by an optimally configured enzyme.
Some enzymes are made from RNA; most are proteins; in fact, most proteins are enzymes; they all get their start from sequences of bases hidden deep within the mountains of DNA inside our cells. These bases are selected, copied, and transformed into their many convoluted shapes for a very special reason: to help accelerate over 5,000 processes inside cells.
Without these highly specialized structures, metabolism would grind to a halt; DNA and RNA would acquire all the mobility of a conga-line of standing stones; cell processes would freeze into a petrified forest of non-living complexity. Life as we know it would be impossible, code or no code.
This is XNA. I’m told it’s less messy and easier to manipulate than DNA. It’s very good at being loaded with code and used as a storage device for information.
Here is a good question: Has any research team ever created artificial life in a laboratory?
Craig Venter, who has been interviewed on 60 Minutes and appeared in several Ted Talks videos, says that he has. He oversees a number of research labs funded by big oil and the government. His labs write computer code to generate base sequences, which they construct and then inject into yeast (among other techniques) to produce life-forms that they hope will someday lead to biofuels and greenhouse gas inhibitors.
Among other accomplishments, one of the labs, the Craig Venter Institute, is known to have introduced a gene from the bacteria, escherichia coli, into the earth’s toughest microbe, “Conan the Bacterium” (Deinococcus radiodurans), to create microbes that can detoxify radioactive wastes at nuclear facilities.
So, the answer to the question about whether anyone has ever created artificial life must be, probably not, not really — not from scratch, anyway. Yes, people have done amazing things. No one has created life without using existing life to do it, though. The process is too complex. On Earth, it has taken 4.5 billion years.
Many argue that life fell to Earth from the stars. Even Earth itself might not have been able to ignite the spark that led to humans and all the life we know.
In 2012 a different group of researchers did find a way to arrange a set of different bases inside DNA-like molecules called XNA. But it was a way of coding sequences only; it didn’t produce or even arrange proteins into anything that could be called, alive.
The “X” stands for the Greek word, Xeno, which means “other.” XNA is other nucleic acid.
An informed reader told me that in fact a protein was made from a sequence of XNA in 2015. If true, the future of genetics could get interesting in coming decades.
XNA is at the very least the precursor, many hope, for long-term storage of massive amounts of information in small, stable molecules — demanded now by data-churning behemoths such as CERN, home of the world’s most powerful particle-collider, located in Geneva, Switzerland.
Just because artificially constructed molecules like XNA can store useful information does not mean that DNA does the same. People have imagined meaning into the bases of DNA, which they simply don’t have — to help better understand their function and to more effectively manipulate them — for good or ill.
Another development in 2012, which some readers may remember, is that researchers learned to use a process known by the acronym CRISPR to change the sequence of bases in stretches of DNA. They adapted an immunization process that bacteria use to kill viruses and defend against subsequent attacks.
Click on the pic to open a more readable image in another tab.
Bacteria use CRISPR to suck the DNA out of an attacking virus, which they store in a kind of library for future reference. If a bacterium survives and the virus dies, somehow the bacteria is able to develop a quick-kill strategy that it will use whenever it is invaded by more DNA that matches a copy in its collection.
Researchers learned to create novel CRISPR DNA based on the system used by bacteria. They then attached RNA guides and cas9 protein shears to the sequences. They learned to deploy the assemblies to search and destroy bad DNA; and to insert designer DNA in its place in the cells of plants and animals; even humans.
These scientists insist that gene “therapies” are necessary, because the fact is: DNA is defective — most of it, anyway. Very few humans are symmetrical, attractive, disease-free, smart, emotionally stable, long-lived, or any other desirable trait anyone might want that is driven by how humans are built, or how they are “coded” at a molecular level.
Crisper video published October 25, 2019 on YouTube.
Gene drivers (mentioned in the first paragraphs of this article) are being developed in coordination with CRISPR techniques to enable changes to DNA molecules that will be permanent and transmittable 100% of the time. Their success will depend on how well lab technicians understand what is going on inside the molecules of life; and inside our cells.
Editor’s note:In January 2018 some researchers admitted that problems related to positional locating have created a roadblock to success for CRISPR technologies. They hope to solve the difficulties soon to avoid a catastrophic failure in the application of this heralded gene-altering process. One process under development that seems to promise more precision and speed is to use electro-magnetic positioning in place of viruses.
I believe we need to slow down and learn more before we unleash immortal genes into the biosphere that no one can pull back and which may turn out to be harmful despite best intentions. Asilomar style conferences that lead to best-practice regulations with the force of international law behind them are desperately needed to control biotechnologies that are quickly getting out-of-hand and beyond the control or understanding of government and politicians.
It is quite certain that PCR technology (polymerase chain reactionamplification), which scientists use to amplify into a viewable goo the molecules of DNA-style life might be misleading folks into believing that DNA-style life is all there is.
Earth could be infested with non-DNA based life, but no one will know until other technologies capable of detecting and amplifying it are developed and perfected.
People need to remind themselves that we are talking about molecules here — molecules of life that can’t be seen — even with help of the most sophisticated microscopes. Everything science knows comes from amplification techniques and mathematical analyses. I hope someday to write an essay on the techniques scientists use to tease out what they know for sure about these next-to-impossible-to-observe molecules.
Serious scientists refer to the possibility for the existence of non-DNA style life as the “shadow biosphere.” If this non-DNA life interacts with our own in a symbiotic way, the potential for harm, it seems to me, increases the more lab technicians play around with molecules they don’t fully understand while they remain oblivious to life they can’t detect, because they lack appropriate laboratory tools and techniques.
An even messier problem is “dark DNA”. It’s DNA that can’t be found, though tests clearly show it must exist for certain cell processes to work right.
Some researchers argue that as many as twenty thousand proteins are manufactured in humans that, when they search the human genome, they can’t find the sequences that are required to be there, somewhere, to enable the proteins to be built. I urge readers to click this link to learn more about this potentially serious inability of sequencers to decode DNA accurately and completely.
No one knows what they don’t know; and what they don’t know can kill us all, if lab workers aren’t cautious. Researchers know they don’t know stuff — important stuff if they intend to play around with gene drivers and CRISPR induced gene sequencing.
Researchers might be walking through a genetic minefield but are so eager to cross that they ignore the dangers of amputated limbs; the loss of sight and hearing; the possibilities for disfigurement to the genomes and phenomes of species like our own, which all people may one day come to regret.
No human is perfect. Sometimes our imperfections are caused not by bad stretches of DNA but by naughty RNA elves who copy less than optimal sections of bases, which they hammer together into less-than-optimal genes, which can screw-up a sequence of amino acids. The RNA elves end up making defective proteins that pollute cells, damage our bodies, and make our lives miserable.
To the extent that these screw-ups are the result of a lousy sequence of bases in our DNA, perhaps these patterns will be able to be altered using CRISPR technology (if anyone can get it to work right), which is likely to increase the odds of inducing better outcomes. But many screw-ups, perhaps most, are not caused by poorly sequenced genes constructed from DNA.
Many problems result from bad choices made by some arbitrary RNA elf, for example, who might have decided, perhaps, to cut and paste a random mix of bad sections it rummaged from the DNA strands; its errors and mistakes might not always be able to be located, identified, and repaired successfully. Renegade RNA elves are hard to track down and kill; at least so far.
Some problems can be caused by all kinds of things not related to DNA, like temperature, quantum effects, and cosmic radiation, including sunlight. The number of things that can go wrong with the weather-environment inside cells is enormous. Copy number variations in gene sequencing is another problem area that I mentioned earlier.
Safety and reliability are probably the two most important reasons why our haystacks of six-billion DNA bases hide a mere twenty-one thousand so-called genes, most of which are scattered in pieces throughout our vast DNA bundled-network.
Those few sequences that are important for survival are less likely to be attacked and mutated if they are surrounded by sequences of little or no value to survival and good health. Base-sequences essential to life hide within chromatin like proverbial needles in a haystack.
Dolphins have noses but can’t smell; they lack olfactory lobes. Sequences in their DNA have been identified that resemble corrupted versions of sequences related to olfactory lobes in other mammals.
Big chunks of DNA are thought to be junk — relics left behind by billions of years of evolution and change. Junk DNA could be a legacy of screw-ups and obsolescence. Dolphins, for example, have noses, but can’t smell. They seem to have a lot of corrupt DNA sequences related to smell, which are broken and don’t work due to neglect and disuse.
Humans are no different. We have DNA we no longer use. Through disuse, our base sequences, some of them, get corrupted over time, some think, and become unusable. The base sequences don’t get up and go anywhere, though. They just hang around, paralyzed, doing nothing. They become unrecognizable to the RNA elves, who learn somehow to avoid them.
Mitochondria and bacteria don’t seem to have much, if any, junk DNA, but humans, like other animals and plants, have almost no nuclear DNA that isn’t junk. It’s kind of mysterious.
A Russian agronomist from the Soviet era, renown in his time as an expert on the cultivation of wheat, Trofim Denisovich Lysenko, believed that plants and animals which were unlucky enough to find themselves subject to environmental stresses could draw on reserves from a pool of what is today called junk DNA to change their hereditary direction and enhance their survival odds. His idea has yet to be discredited.
The simple onion has 16 billion base pairs in its DNA. The loblolly pine tree — it’s an important source of lumber, which thrives in southern swamps — houses 22 billion. Humans have 3 billion.
EDITORS NOTE:As of January 2018, a Mexican salamander that can regrow limbs (the axolotl) has been sequenced. It is known to have 32 billion base pairs.
What do all these bases code for? They code for nothing, apparently. Maybe they are a warehouse of survival tools left behind as the distant past of billions-of-years ago gradually transforms itself into now; our miraculous present.
Another compelling idea that occurred to me as I wrote this essay is that the tangled mess of unused DNA in every plant and animal might have grown both in volume and complexity during ancient times — quite apart from environmental pressures on the life-forms themselves.
Could massive DNA growth have preceded evolution to enable and accelerate biodiversity during unforeseen environmental catastrophes?
It’s important to find out, because statistical studies on the rate of mutations seem to support the idea that mutational frequency cannot be the primary driver of species differentiation. Mutation rates are too low; the process is a snail’s pace compared to what is needed to transform a chimpanzee for example into an orangutan; or primates of any kind into humans.
Is it possible that mammoth reservoirs of disorganized and unused bases grew and multiplied inside the nuclei of ancient cells — like molds in petri dishes — to fuel bio-explosions of diversity and complexity when conditions were right? It’s a thought.
An abundant supply of unused DNA combined with aggressive colonies of swarming RNA segments might help to explain rapid, diverse bio-blooms (and even account for absences in fossil records) that seem to have occurred during the Cambrian era — to cite one example out of many.
The world’s smartest people are just getting started in the field of molecular genetics. Despite all that others have learned, much remains to know; more, much more, remains to discover and understand. Secrets hide in the complexity that are certain to better explain how biodiversity bloomed on planet Earth.
DNA bases are not a code, it seems to me; they are simply a platform for departing mRNA trains that, when properly coupled, can become assembly templates for chains of amino acids — complex assemblies of molecules that depend on very many processes and structures to have even the remotest chance of being transfigured by ribosomes into a seeming infinity of unlikely proteins — matrices of proteins and other structures, which have risen from the dust and the seas like the miracles of angels; an endless froth of bubbles; a deluge of structures that have over eons shaped the messy, sometimes ugly, often beautiful human beings and all other life on our planet; our home; our beloved Earth.
Adam Rutherford, the British geneticist said, ”This is the definitive history of arguably the greatest of all scientific revolutions.”
Life’s Greatest Secret is a must read for anyone who is interested in the science and history of the human genome. We strongly advise our readers to buy and read this important book. Billy Lee has read it twice, marking it up each time with magic-marker and margin-notes. It is a science blockbuster; a fantastic book written in an engaging, easy-to-understand style.
Miguel Angel Asturias won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1967 during my freshman year at college. I must have been chasing girls the day of the announcement. I just don’t remember him. Until a few months ago, I didn’t know who he was.
While doing research on the Cuban Revolution and its leaders for recent blog-posts, Miguel’s name kept popping up here and there in various contexts, so I decided to learn more about the author by trying to take an inside-the-cover peek into his signature book, Men of Maize, on Amazon.com.
Was Asturias really that good that he could win a Nobel prize? What did he write about?
Miguel Angel Asturias, I’d already learned, was born in Guatemala and wrote in Spanish — a language I didn’t read or speak. I was able to find some English translations of his books on-line, but they seemed to be scarce and out-of-print.
On Amazon.com, Men of Maize(Hombres de Maiz) cost $50 — in used condition, of course. “Like-new” copies priced-out at over a hundred dollars. The titles didn’t feature Amazon’s inside-the-cover functionality either, so my free peek inside-the-cover strategy just wasn’t going to work.
Other books by Asturias were also unavailable in English, although a beat-up library copy of Strong Wind (Viento Fuerte) turned up on-line for sale at ten bucks. I decided to buy it and then search through libraries on-line for Men of Maize. It turned out that a solitary university library, which happened to be located nearby, owned a solitary English language copy, so I drove over to check it out.
Miguel Angel Asturias; born 19 Oct 1899; died 9 June 1974
According to the inside cover, the library acquired the book in 1993, the same year Hombres de Maiz was translated into English and incorporated into UNESCO’s World Heritage historical book collection. It had been forty-four years since it was first published, in Spanish. The librarian — who must have jumped out of her chair to place the order — probably thought the book would become a big hit among the institution’s forty-thousand English readers.
Sure enough, according to the book’s ledger, someone or other had already borrowed the award-winning novel five times: June 1996; February 1997; February 2001; July 2003; July 2009. And now a sixth borrower was stepping up to the plate — that would be me — to end the book’s most recent six-year no-hitter. Unless the forty-thousand folks who used the student library were reading it in Spanish, Corn Men wasn’t doing so good, not where I lived, anyway; not in English.
How does a critically acclaimed once-upon-a-time international best-seller written by a Nobel Prize winning author (unavailable in USA bookstores) generate a paltry six library reads in twenty-two years at a major university library that is also serving the public? I don’t know.
I took the book home to study it. Here is the opening sentence: Gasper[pronounced Jasper, like the blood-stone] Ilom lets them steal the sleep from the eyes of the land of Ilom. Ok, not sure what this is about, I’ll keep reading. Gasper Ilom lets them hack away the eyelids of the land of Ilom with axes…Huh? Gasper Ilom lets them scorch the leafy eyelashes of the land of Ilom with fires that turn the moon to furious red…Mmm. Keep reading. Keep reading. OK. End of page one. Gasper stretched himself out,…bound in sleep and in death by the snake of six-hundred-thousand coils of mud, moon, forests, rainstorms, mountains, lakes, birds, and echoes that pounded his bones until they turned to a black frijol paste dripping from the depths of the night.
Gerald Martin, translator.
Page one, I soon learned, was the weakest page in the book. On page two and beyond, the novel began to rise into a tour de force, a masterpiece, which had been lovingly captured and transformed into English by translator, Gerald Martin.
Asturias, I discovered, wrote in a style that critics would later call magic realism. It’s the style of One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Gabo), which also won a Nobel Prize and is required reading in many university literature programs. Gabo published his book in Argentina during the same year that Asturias won his Nobel Prize (1967).
For those familiar with Gabo’s book, it’s use of language is shallow compared to that of Asturias — though it is a fun and light-hearted read; I would say it is more entertaining to average readers interested in plot over word-play and character development. Gabo referred to his book as a kind of inside joke written for friends.
Whatever style anyone chooses to label Corn Men, Miguel Asturias was clearly a genius who knew unusual stuff, and he could write. That’s my view, anyway. His writing stands alone. Critics have compared him to Keats and Joyce, but I say, no. Those authors can sometimes depress the reader with their pedantic displays.
Not Miguel. He was humble, brilliant, knowledgeable, and direct. He didn’t grandstand. He didn’t show-off. He painted with a preternatural palette to portray ways of being which were lucid and compelling; and fabulously unusual. His writing sometimes took my breath away, because it was original, unpredictable, and paradigm-shattering.
Only Shakespeare himself rewires the brains of his readers like Asturias, I thought. Yes, references to Mayan culture might be arcane. But they didn’t impede the flow of the story or obscure its meaning. They simply provided rivulets to explore for those readers who might like to learn more than they know.
Popol Vuh is Mayan scripture. It contains accounts of creation, ancestry, history, and cosmology. It even references a great flood.
My interest in Corn Men, after reading it, has less to do with the story itself, or its backstory, than with its use of language — though all of it is incredible. For example, the Guatemalan writer — a Sorbonne trained ethnologist and bonafide expert in Maya culture — spent forty years transcribing and translating into Spanish the Mayan “bible”, Popol Vuh (Book of the People). His knowledge of Mayan culture saturates the novel.
Miguel Angel Asturias lived and breathed Guatemala, which for him sheltered a personal treasure-cache of Maya ruins, history, legends, culture, writings, and artifacts. Asturias was in love with all of it.
Guatemala should be of interest to all Americans, as well, because it is central to recent US history. In 1954 Guatemala became the second of several modern democracies the United States chose to overthrow. (The first was Iran, in 1953.)
Encouraged by the easy success of its military takeovers, the USA used Guatemala as a base of operations to try again, in 1961, to seize control of Cuba, but its Bay of Pigs invasion (modeled after its strategy in Guatemala), failed.
The USA was undeterred by miscalculation. It learned from its mistakes, made tweaks in its planning and, by the middle 1960s, began overthrowing governments in the Americas and around the world to further its economic and strategic interests.
Like falling dominoes, countries like Chile, Nicaragua, Panama, South Vietnam, and Iraq (there were others) fell to USA backed military coups and takeovers, until President Obama put a stop to it all in 2008. (Two exceptions continue to be Afghanistan and Syria, where takeover planning and operations are ongoing.)
Editors Note:As of 25 May 2018 destabilization of countries the USA dislikes seems to have resumed as a cornerstone of its foreign policy, which is to dominate all countries on the earth. The policy is called strategic strangulation; it’s like waterboarding except that it’s inflicted on countries; it’s being applied against Cuba, North Korea, Iran, Venezuela, Brazil, Turkey, and many others — which some readers won’t have any trouble identifying. Readers should keep in mind that everything changed when the GOP and its Russian-Israeli backers seized power in the manipulated and rigged election of November 2016. Billy Lee published this essay during the final years of the Obama presidency.
Current problems in socialist democracies like Brazil, Columbia, and Venezuela appear (on the day of this writing) to be the work of wealthy power-brokers working outside the influence of traditional government agencies long associated with destabilization programs; the CIA and its labyrinth of agricultural-aid programs seem to be playing historically minor roles at the present time.
Jacobo Arbenz, Guatemalan President, 1951-1954
Not so in 1954. Back then USA proxies overpowered the popularly elected Guatemalan President, Jacobo Arbenz and forced him to stand naked before reporters before they put him on an airplane and threw him out.
They then stripped another prominent Guatemalan, our writer Miguel Angel Asturias, of his citizenship and expelled him (along with hundreds of his friends and acquaintances) from the country he loved.
Soon, over one-hundred thousand citizens fled to neighboring countries, after they learned that the military government was “disappearing” opponents — a terrifying practice that would spread to other USA backed dictatorships, like Argentina, in the decades to come.
Miguel’s exile (to Argentina and Chile) lasted eight years during which the United States transformed Guatemala into a training ground and staging area for CIA backed militias tasked to, among other things, protect dictators allied with American businesses, hunt down and kill leftist revolutionaries (one of them, Che Guevara), and capsize popularly elected socialist governments, like those in Chile and Nicaragua.
Maya Pyramid in the city of Tikal, Guatemala
As I said before, my interest in Corn Men lies beyond its compelling story and backstory. Yes, it is a novel about the indigenous Indians of Guatemala, who believed their skin was made of corn. Yes, it describes the marginalization and suppression of a native people by modern hi-tech agribusiness, which viewed corn as nothing more than a crop that could be sold.
Corn could not be one’s personal identity, the northern white-men of agribusiness insisted. Corn did not, could not, envelop, protect, and nurture ones soul.
According to the leaders of big agribusiness, corn was something to eat, nothing more. The Mayan Indians knew better. Corn was sacred. Corn was people. They were made from it.
Corn Men don’t remember.
Cross-cultural differences as wide as these, though fascinating, always seem to lead toward tragedy. On the book’s final page, in the epilogue, in the last paragraph, at the last sentence, Asturias shows us the horrific result: a degraded world where corn men become ants. They work on utopian ant farms harvesting kernels of corn. The glory and the magic of living inside skin made of corn has been flayed away.
The thrill of being Corn Men, the joy of being a fruit-like part of the earth, is not even remembered. From now on, corn men are worker ants. It becomes all about the work. It’s all about producing corn, selling corn, eating corn, buying corn, maybe even popping corn. It’s no longer about being corn.
Or is it?
Gerald Martin, the translator, thought Asturias may have intended the last paragraph to show that in the distant future the Indians would actually triumph; their descendants would win their fight to be corn people by establishing a kind of worker’s paradise; a communal corn-based utopia; a society based, presumably, on communism, where they would toil like joyful ants.
Who knows? Asturias never said. His ending remains ambiguous, open to interpretation and discussion. Good literature is like that, it seems.
The dilemmas which Asturias described are thought provoking for sure, but what made me love Corn Men was Miguel’s way with language; the way he used language to paint the surreal internal realities of the many indigenous persons he described. The literary techniques and devices he employed to craft the landscapes, animals, people, and action in Corn Men are complex, varied, and thrilling to encounter and embrace, at least for me.
To my mind, Miguel’ s prose is amazing, wondrous, dense, and sophisticated. Gerald Martin, his translator, preserved and amplified it all in a resplendent English version in 1993, which is the one I read.
Below are my personal picks of phrases from the book, Corn Men, (my proletarian version of the title) to give flavor to uninitiated readers; to acquaint them with the astonishing author, Asturias. And, as always, please, feel free to click on the links in this post to learn more.
Billy Lee
What follows are assorted tidbits from a few chapters in the 1993 Gerald Martin translation of Hombres de Maiz, by Miguel Angel Asturias, first published in 1949. Billy Lee hopes these vivid constructs will stimulate interest in the book for all those folks who like to write and read.The Editorial Board
…rabbits…turned into stars…
…word of the earth turned to flame by the sun almost set fire to the maize-leaf ears of the yellow rabbits in the sky…that planted themselves in the sky, turned into stars, and faded into the water like reflections with ears.
…rivers stagnant with wakefulness…
…he was swallowed by a toothless half moon which sucked him from the air, without biting him, like a small fish.
…ground sticky with cold…
…fingernails heavy as shotgun slugs…
…liquor…the water of war…
Gasper grew older as he talked…
His head fell to the ground like a flowerpot with buds of tiny thoughts.
His thoughts passed out of his ears…
…her hair combed by Gaspar’s teeth…
She shrank back like a blind hen.
A handful of sunflower seeds in her entrails.
…river that…rots…for wanting to sleep…
…river that sleeps as it flows and opens its eyes in the pools and rots for wanting to sleep…
…the earth that falls from the stars…
…creamy skies and butter rivers running low…
…shadow hard as the walls…
…gun fully loaded with seeds of darkness…
…skin like old bark, his hair sticking out over his forehead like the tip of a sucked mango…
…dog dyed red with ringworm…
…face the color of vinegar scum…
…shadowy corpses scattering handfuls of maize down from the sky in torrents of rain…
…firefly wizards…
…firefly wizards, who dwelt in tents of virgin doeskin…
…the mud gets more wrinkled year by year, like an aging face…
…sound of his breathing like water falling on porous earth…
…meat contorted in the fire as though the animals had come back to life and were being burned alive…
…boiling fat made rain bubbles in the tortilla dishes…
…men and women trembling like the leaves smacked by machetes.
…saffron colored mountains bathed in turpentine down to the valleys…
…baked puff-pastry faces…
…white root poison…
…sob chilled his nostrils…
…old fool…afraid of everything…
…his fears were just that, the tremors of an old fool who, because of his age, was starting to be afraid of everything.
…crawling children and warm legs…
Candy rosaries like sugared cartridge belts around young bosoms.
…a swarm of locusts on fire…like golden hailstones with wings…
…skeleton light of fireflies…
…deer like lunar sawdust in the fragile light…
…jaw trembling like a loose horseshoe…
…darkness streamed out of the anthills…
…everything was on fire…like the light at the beginning of the world…
…everything was on fire, without giving off either flame, smoke, or any smell of burning. The candle glow of the fireflies streamed down from his hat, behind his ears, over the collar of his embroidered shirt, over his shoulders, up the sleeves of his jacket, down the backs of his hairy hands, between his fingers, like frozen sweat, like the light at the beginning of the world, a brightness in which everything could be seen…
Without saying a word he started bleeding away inside.
…as his voice turned flesh and blood in the cartilage of his nose, mid sobs and thick snuffles…
Senor Tomas, who sat on his leather stool and sucked in his tears, with his back to the door…
…the fire followed on behind with a rush, like a shaggy dog wagging its tail of smoke at him.
…it’s dangerous to contradict what lunatics or lovers say…
Roads of white earth are like the bones of all roads that fall dead at night. …They remain unburied to give passage to souls in torment…
…fire is like water when it flows…
Fire is like water when it flows, no one can cut it off.
…smoke swirling like milk…
…his sigh dropped from the tip of his spurs like tears, almost like words.
…wrapped in their ponchos like mummies…
…the earth was a huge nipple…
The sun, blear-eyed, could hardly see.
Stones from agave slings hummed through the razor-sharp air in the sun-toasted silence of the ripened fields…
Through the tattered lip his incisors, like two enormous nose drips, thrust forward a ridge of cold laughter.
…gums nailed down with stumps…
Madmen and children speak the truth.
…spines…hidden like jaguars…
…sarespino bushes, which by day seem to keep their spines hidden, like jaguars, and bring them out as it grows dark to wound those who pass by.
…echo of the bells that toll for the dead down in the town until they make everyone dizzy, tilan-tilon, tilan-tilon…
The hands of those who snap the maize plant so the cob will finish ripening are like the hands that break the sound of bells in two, so the dead person will ripen.
…the running of the rats, real persons to judge from the noise they made, as though they were moving furniture, were the last things she heard.
…lighter sneezed sparks as the flint struck the steel.
…sparks that sailed…like little partridge eyes to set alight the gold-starched clothes of dry sun and dry moon, dry salt and dry star, of the maize-fields.
…flowers like doomed flags crawling with insects…
…darkness in the clear light of liquor, a luminous liquid which coats everything inside you black as you swallow it, dresses you in mourning inside.
…spurs speaking to the stallion in telegraphic, star-like language.
Death is the dark betrayal of the liquor of life.
Two thin burned legs inside a petticoat of ash, a head with no ears and a small lock of hair, also of ash, and a few curled fingernails, was all that could be lifted from the ground where Vaca Manuela Machojon had fallen.
The waters of the river would cheep at the edges of the pools, like little chicks.
…speaking as though he were killing lice with his teeth…
…her soul…pleading for relief…
…her soul bulging out of her aged, deep-set eyes, pleading mutely for relief…
…tidal waves of weeping that makes everything salty, because tears are salty, because man is made salty by weeping from the moment he is born…
…jasmine-colored teeth…
…a body that goes out of tune, my son, is no good anymore for this life…
…its blood of red citrus juice bathed the moon…
…the madman’s vision is like a mirror broken inside him and in the pieces he sees what he saw whole before.
…he turned his head with the eyes of a boiled crab…
Musus tried to control his horse, sitting up like a flea in the stirrups, buttocks-battered by the trot.
…hoofs echoed like pewter-pots…
…his eyes were fixed on a long serpent of trees which seemed to be crawling between the mountains with the sound of thunder.
Don Chalo…bellowed at him with his mouth open up to his eyes, and such force of lungs that the sound even poured out of his nose.
The sonorous blood clots of his laughter could not be heard, but it was joyful paint that splashed over his face…
…clotting blood of the red moon…
…the thick clotting blood of the red moon…
…dark forest which stank of horses…
…you could hear something like the boiling fizz of water produced by the stubborn flight of insects…
…flea-bitten nag which paid no heed to word or spur once it became stuck to the ground with the glue of weariness and the thin gum of darkness that was half a dream.
…his ears hummed as though he’d been dosed with quinine…
…silver-coin necklaces of clear water and mountains of leaves that woke at each disturbance, each gust of wind with the clamor of a swarm of locusts sandpapering the air.
…carpets of dry pine needles, rivulets which the shine of the moon turned into navigable rivers of white honey along bare hillsides surrounded by pine groves…
The stallion tossed its head as it felt the splash of large drops of white moon.
…sprinkle of limy light…
Pine cones like the bodies of tiny motionless birds, sacrificed birds petrified with terror on the ever convulsing branches.
…hands…like spiders….
The hands of the second lieutenant looked like scuffling spiders beneath the play of lights and shadows.
The light and shade had awoken the itching of the mange between his fingers.
Air and earth, as the riders advanced, seemed to be folded in dark and luminous pleats, blinking, and the stones and black spinebushes gave grasshopper leaps.
…the brightness that was coming at them now, gropingly, mid a beautiful darkness, seemed more like a star in the sky forgotten there since the beginning of the world.
…they could hear the tinkling of stones as they sang beneath the horses’ hoofs.
The rocks, faintly orange in color, were reflected in the film of moon and water that covered them like the surface of a mirror…
…meteors falling with their tendons bleeding light…
…the collapse of a vegetable being which no longer has the will to resist the onrush of the wind.
They literally merged their necks with the necks of their horses, to offer the least resistance, and because contact with living, sweating animals which smelled like sacks of salt afforded them the vague security of companionship in the midst of danger.
…that man whose pale blue eyes shown like crystals of fire…
…squirrels…chewed on cheerful thoughts…
…distant howling of coyotes in lunar syrup, squirrels gnawing with laughter as they chewed on cheerful thoughts…
The moon had fallen with its slow decaying light in a convex sky weepy with night dew.
Suffocating suphur fumes in which diseases seemed to float…
…whiplashing of the fierce wind…armed with razor leaves.
Black wasps smelling of hot cane liquor fleeing from honeycombs the color of excrement sown in the earth, half honeycomb, half ant’s nest.
Little streams of weeping, like brown sugar water, ran through the dust of the roads on his cheeks.
…it grows chill, like the fur of a dead animal, at night.
I picked you up and brought you back to life by blowing on you like a fire when all that’s left is a spark.
…fireflies played at little candles in the darkness. If only Goyo Yic could have seen just one of those small greenish lights, the color of hope, which lit up his pockmarked face, dry and expressionless as cow dung.
…sticks sounded like snapping guitar strings on the docile backs of the oxen…
To hear them speak was better than charity now, in his solitude, when to hear a voice in his house he had to talk to himself, and it’s not the same at all when you talk to yourself, it’s a human voice, sure, but it’s the voice of a madman.
…people…made from hillside earth…
People from the highlands smelling of wool, crags, and black poplars. People from the coast stinking of salt and sea sweat. People from the east, made of hillside earth, giving off an odor of tobacco, dry cheese, yucca paste and corn starch, and people from the north smelling of drizzle, mockingbird cages, and boiled water.
The blind man heard the sky palpitate like some feathered creature, and a strange itching troubled his groin and nipples, as if his sweat were eating away his courage as acid corrodes metal.
…time, which passes without us noticing: as we always have time, we don’t realize we’re always short of it, was how Culebro explained it to him.
…knees deadened from so much kneeling, hands dripping the white smallpox from the candles they held in bundles…
What color is weeping? he cried, stretched out on the ground, and in the same cry, with the very ache of his weeping, he replied, It’s the color of white rum!
White copal, which is the mysterious white brother to rubber, the black brother, the darkness that jumps.
…a woman who is truly loved cannot be seen…
A woman who is truly loved cannot be seen, she is the flower of the amate, seen only by the blind, the flower of blind men, men blinded by love, blinded by faith, blinded by life.
…let himself be bathed, one of those moonlit nights when everything looks just as it does by day, in the tree milk that flows down from the machete cuts in the bark of the moon, that light of copal the wizards cook in receptacles of dream and oblivion.
The woman made a sound of splintering teeth, grinding them, and of bones straining in their joints, stretching out, curling up, crushing her face with tears, which interlocked the sorrow of sinfulness to her placid smile of contentment.
