Lives of a Cell Read online

  But there is something else about words that gives them the look and feel of living motile beings with minds of their own. This is best experienced by looking them up, preferably in one of the dictionaries that provide all the roots back to the original, hypothetical fossil language of proto-Indo-European, and observing their behavior.

  Some words started from Indo-European and swarmed into religion over a very large part of the earth. The word blaghmen, for example, meant priest. It moved into Latin and Middle English as flamen, a pagan word for priest, and into Sanskrit as brahma, then “brahman.” Weid, a word meaning to see, with later connotations of wisdom and wit, entered Germanic as witan, and Old English wis to “wisdom.” It became videre in Latin, hence “vision.” Finally, in its suffixed form woid-o, it became the Sanskrit word veda.

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  Beudh traveled a similar distance. With the meaning of awareness, it became beodan in Old English, meaning “bode,” and bodhati in Sanskrit, meaning he awakes, is enlightened, and thus Bodhisattva, and Buddha.

  The sattva part of Bodhisattva came from the Indo-European word es, meaning to be, or is, which, on its way into Sanskrit as sat and sant, also became esse in Latin and einai in Greek; einai became the -ont in certain words signifying being, such as “symbiont.”

  The Indo-European word bhag, meaning to share, turned into the Greek phagein, to eat, and the Old Persian bakhsh (yielding “baksheesh,” and, in Sanskrit, with the meaning of bhage, good fortune, it emerged as Bhagavad-gita (the gita from gei, a song).

  The Hari-Krishna people are chanting something closer to English than it sounds. Krishna, the eighth avatar of Vishnu, has his name from the Sanskrit Krsnah, the black one, which came from the Indo-European word for black, kers (which also produced “chernozem,” black topsoil, by the way of the Russian chernyi).

  There is obviously no end to this; it can tie up a whole life, and has luckily done just that during the past century for generations of comparative linguists. Their science began properly in 1786 with the discovery of the similarity of Sanskrit to Greek and Latin, by William Jones. In 1817, with a publication by Franz Bopp, it became recognized that Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Persian, and all the Germanic languages were so closely related to each other that a common ancestor must have existed earlier. Since then, this science has developed in more or less parallel with biology, but more quietly.

  It is a field in which the irresponsible amateur can have a continually mystifying sort of fun. Whenever you get the available answer to a straight question, like, say, where does the most famous and worst of the four-letter Anglo-Saxon unprintable words come from, the answer raises new and discomfiting questions. Take that particular word. It comes from peig, a crawling, wicked Indo-European word meaning evil and hostile, the sure makings of a curse. It becomes poikos, then gafaihaz in Germanic and gefah in Old English, signifying “foe.” It turned from poik-yos into faigjaz in Germanic, and faege in Old English, meaning fated to die, leading to “fey.” It went on from fehida in Old English to become “feud,” and fokken in Old Dutch. Somehow, from these beginnings, it transformed itself into one of the most powerful English expletives, meaning something like “Die before your time!” The unspeakable malevolence of the message is now buried deep inside the word, and out on the surface it presents itself as merely an obscenity.

  “Leech” is a fascinating word. It is an antique term for physician, and also for the aquatic worm sanguisugus, used for leeching. The two words appear to be quite separate, but there is something like biological mimicry going on: leech the doctor means the doctor who uses leech the worm; leech the worm is a symbol for the doctor. Leech the doctor comes from the Indo-European leg, which meant to collect, with numerous derivatives meaning to speak. Leg became Germanic lekjaz, meaning one who speaks magic words, an enchanter, and also laece in Old English, meaning physician. (In Denmark the word for doctor is still laege, in Swedish läkare.) Leg in its senses of gathering, choosing, and speaking gave rise to the Latin legere, and thus words like “lecture” and “legible.” In Greek, it became legein, meaning to gather and to speak; “legal” and “legislator” and other such words derived. Leg was further transformed in Greek to logos, signifying reason.

  All this history seems both plausible and creditable, good reading for doctors, but there is always that other leech, the worm. It is not certain how it came. Somehow it began its descent through the language at the same time as leech the doctor, turning up as both laece and lyce in Old English, always recognizable as something distinctly the worm and at the same time important in medicine. It also took on the meaning of someone parasitic, living on the flesh of others. Gradually, perhaps under the influence of a Middle English AMA, the worm was given sole rights to the word, and the doctor became the doctor, out of dek, meaning to accept, later to teach.

  Man is an unchanged word from Indo-European man, meaning just that. But two other important words for man have stranger sources. One is dhghem, meaning earth; this became guman in Germanic, gumen in Old English, then homo and humanus in Latin, from which we have both “human” and “humus.” The other word for man contains the same admonition, but turns the message around. It is wiros, meaning man in Indo-European, taken as weraldh in Germanic and weorold in Old English, emerging, flabbergastingly, as “world.”

  This must be a hard science to work in. You might think that with a word for earth giving rise to one important word for man, and an early word for man turning into the word for the world, you would find a parallel development in other words for the earth. Not so: the Indo-European word ers, which later became “earth,” has evolved into only one animal that I can find mentioned, and it is the aardvark.

  I am glad to have a semipermeable memory after getting into this. If you had to speak English with running captions in your mind showing all the roots, all the way back to Indo-European, you’d fall off the bicycle. Speaking is an autonomic business; you may search for words as you go along, but they are found for you by agents in your brain over which you exercise no direct control. You really couldn’t be thinking Indo-European at the same time, without going speechless or babbling (from baba, meaning indistinct speech, Russian balalayka, Latin balbus, meaning “booby,” Old French baboue, leading to “baboon,” Greek barbaros, meaning foreign or rude, and Sanskrit babu, meaning father). That sort of thing.

  I got into even more trouble while looking into “Stigmergy.” I was looking for other words for inciting and instigating work, and came upon “to egg on.” The egg here comes from ak, a word for sharp, suffixed to akjo in Germanic, meaning “edge,” and to akjan in Old Norse, meaning “egg,” to incite, goad; the same root moves on into Old English as aehher and ear, for ear of corn. (Corn, if you have a moment, is from greno, for grain, which became korn in Old High German, granum in Latin, and cyrnel in Old English, thence “kernel.”) But neither the egg nor the ear from ak are the real egg or ear. The real egg comes from awi, meaning bird, which turned into avis and ovum in Latin (not known, of course, which came first), into oion in Greek, and was compounded with spek (to see) to form awispek, “watcher of birds” which became auspex in Latin, meaning augur.

  The real ear began as ous, then auzan in Germanic, and eare in Old English and auri in Latin; along the way, it was compounded with sleg, meaning slack, and transformed to lagous, meaning “with drooping ears,” which then became lagos, Greek for rabbit.

  There is no way to stop, once you’ve started, not even by trying to round a circle. Ous became aus became “auscultation,” which is what leeches (leg) do for a living (leip) unless they are legal (leg) leeches, which, incidentally, is not the same thing as lawyers (legh).

  That should be enough (nek, to attain, becoming ganoga in Germanic and genog in Old English, also onkos in Greek, meaning burden, hence “oncology”) to give you the general (gene) idea (weid becoming widesya then idea in Greek). It is easy to lose the thread (from t
er, to rub, twist—possibly also the root of termite). Are you there?

  ON PROBABILITY AND POSSIBILITY

  Statistically, the probability of any one of us being here is so small that you’d think the mere fact of existing would keep us all in a contented dazzlement of surprise. We are alive against the stupendous odds of genetics, infinitely outnumbered by all the alternates who might, except for luck, be in our places.

  Even more astounding is our statistical improbability in physical terms. The normal, predictable state of matter throughout the universe is randomness, a relaxed sort of equilibrium, with atoms and their particles scattered around in an amorphous muddle. We, in brilliant contrast, are completely organized structures, squirming with information at every covalent bond. We make our living by catching electrons at the moment of their excitement by solar photons, swiping the energy released at the instant of each jump and storing it up in intricate loops for ourselves. We violate probability, by our nature. To be able to do this systemically, and in such wild varieties of form, from viruses to whales, is extremely unlikely; to have sustained the effort successfully for the several billion years of our existence, without drifting back into randomness, was nearly a mathematical impossibility.

  Add to this the biological improbability that makes each member of our own species unique. Everyone is one in 3 billion at the moment, which describes the odds. Each of us is a self-contained, free-standing individual, labeled by specific protein configurations at the surfaces of cells, identifiable by whorls of fingertip skin, maybe even by special medleys of fragrance. You’d think we’d never stop dancing.

  Perhaps it is not surprising that we do not live more surprised. After all, we are used to unlikelihood. Being born into it, raised in it, we become acclimated to the altitude, like natives in the Andes. Moreover, we all know that the astonishment is transient, and sooner or later our particles will all go back to being random.

  Also, there are reasons to suspect that we are really not the absolute, pure entities that we seem. We have some sense of ordinariness, and it tends to diminish our surprise. Despite all the evidences of biological privacy in our cells and tissues (to the extent that a fragment of cell membrane will be recognized and rejected between any conceivable pairs among the 3 billion, excepting identical twins), there is a certain slippage in our brains. No one, in fact, can lay claim with certainty to his own mind with anything like the specificity stipulated by fingerprints or tissue antigens.

  The human brain is the most public organ on the face of the earth, open to everything, sending out messages to everything. To be sure, it is hidden away in bone and conducts internal affairs in secrecy, but virtually all the business is the direct result of thinking that has already occurred in other minds. We pass thoughts around, from mind to mind, so compulsively and with such speed that the brains of mankind often appear, functionally, to be undergoing fusion.

  This is, when you think about it, really amazing. The whole dear notion of one’s own Self—marvelous old free-willed, free-enterprising, autonomous, independent, isolated island of a Self—is a myth.

  We do not yet have a science strong enough to displace the myth. If you could label, by some equivalent of radioactive isotopes, all the bits of human thought that are constantly adrift, like plankton, all around us, it might be possible to discern some sort of systematic order in the process, but, as it is, it seems almost entirely random. There has to be something wrong with this view. It is hard to see how we could be in possession of an organ so complex and intricate and, as it occasionally reveals itself, so powerful, and be using it on such a scale just for the production of a kind of background noise. Somewhere, obscured by the snatches of conversation, pages of old letters, bits of books and magazines, memories of old movies, and the disorder of radio and television, there ought to be more intelligible signals.

  Or perhaps we are only at the beginning of learning to use the system, with almost all our evolution as a species still ahead of us. Maybe the thoughts we generate today and flick around from mind to mind, like the jokes that turn up simultaneously at dinner parties in Hong Kong and Boston, or the sudden changes in the way we wear our hair, or all the popular love songs, are the primitive precursors of more complicated, polymerized structures that will come later, analogous to the prokaryotic cells that drifted through shallow pools in the early days of biological evolution. Later, when the time is right, there may be fusion and symbiosis among the bits, and then we will see eukaryotic thought, metazoans of thought, huge interliving coral shoals of thought.

  The mechanism is there, and there is no doubt that it is already capable of functioning, even though the total yield thus far seems to consist largely of bits. After all, it has to be said that we’ve been at it for only the briefest time in evolutionary terms, a few thousand years out of billions, and during most of this time the scattered aggregates of human thought have been located patchily around the earth. There may be some laws about this kind of communication, mandating a critical density and mass before it can function with efficiency. Only in this century have we been brought close enough to each other, in great numbers, to begin the fusion around the earth, and from now on the process may move very rapidly.

  There is, if it goes well, quite a lot to look forward to. Already, by luck, we have seen the assembly of particles of exchanged thought into today’s structures of art and science. It is done by simply passing the bits around from mind to mind, until something like natural selection makes the final selection, all on grounds of fitness.

  The real surprises, which set us back on our heels when they occur, will always be the mutants. We have already had a few of these, sweeping across the field of human thought periodically, like comets. They have slightly different receptors for the information cascading in from other minds, and slightly different machinery for processing it, so that what comes out to rejoin the flow is novel, and filled with new sorts of meaning. Bach was able to do this, and what emerged in the current were primordia in music. In this sense, the Art of Fugue and the St. Matthew Passion were, for the evolving organism of human thought, feathered wings, apposing thumbs, new layers of frontal cortex.

  But we may not be so dependent on mutants from here on, or perhaps there are more of them around than we recognize. What we need is more crowding, more unrestrained and obsessive communication, more open channels, even more noise, and a bit more luck. We are simultaneously participants and bystanders, which is a puzzling role to play. As participants, we have no choice in the matter; this is what we do as a species. As bystanders, stand back and give it room is my advice.

  THE WORLD’S BIGGEST MEMBRANE

  Viewed from the distance of the moon, the astonishing thing about the earth, catching the breath, is that it is alive. The photographs show the dry, pounded surface of the moon in the foreground, dead as an old bone. Aloft, floating free beneath the moist, gleaming membrane of bright blue sky, is the rising earth, the only exuberant thing in this part of the cosmos. If you could look long enough, you would see the swirling of the great drifts of white cloud, covering and uncovering the half-hidden masses of land. If you had been looking for a very long, geologic time, you could have seen the continents themselves in motion, drifting apart on their crustal plates, held afloat by the fire beneath. It has the organized, self-contained look of a live creature, full of information, marvelously skilled in handling the sun.

  It takes a membrane to make sense out of disorder in biology. You have to be able to catch energy and hold it, storing precisely the needed amount and releasing it in measured shares. A cell does this, and so do the organelles inside. Each assemblage is poised in the flow of solar energy, tapping off energy from metabolic surrogates of the sun. To stay alive, you have to be able to hold out against equilibrium, maintain imbalance, bank against entropy, and you can only transact this business with membranes in our kind of world.

  When the earth came alive it began constructing its own
membrane, for the general purpose of editing the sun. Originally, in the time of prebiotic elaboration of peptides and nucleotides from inorganic ingredients in the water on the earth, there was nothing to shield out ultraviolet radiation except the water itself. The first thin atmosphere came entirely from the degassing of the earth as it cooled, and there was only a vanishingly small trace of oxygen in it. Theoretically, there could have been some production of oxygen by photodissociation of water vapor in ultraviolet light, but not much. This process would have been self-limiting, as Urey showed, since the wave lengths needed for photolysis are the very ones screened out selectively by oxygen; the production of oxygen would have been cut off almost as soon as it occurred.

  The formation of oxygen had to await the emergence of photosynthetic cells, and these were required to live in an environment with sufficient visible light for photosynthesis but shielded at the same time against lethal ultraviolet. Berkner and Marshall calculate that the green cells must therefore have been about ten meters below the surface of water, probably in pools and ponds shallow enough to lack strong convection currents (the ocean could not have been the starting place).

  You could say that the breathing of oxygen into the atmosphere was the result of evolution, or you could turn it around and say that evolution was the result of oxygen. You can have it either way. Once the photosynthetic cells had appeared, very probably counterparts of today’s blue-green algae, the future respiratory mechanism of the earth was set in place. Early on, when the level of oxygen had built up to around 1 per cent of today’s atmospheric concentration, the anaerobic life of the earth was placed in jeopardy, and the inevitable next stage was the emergence of mutants with oxidative systems and ATP. With this, we were off to an explosive developmental stage in which great varieties of respiring life, including the multicellular forms, became feasible.