The central corporals in this pitched battle are cells—cells dying in tissues and organs, and cells regenerating tissues and organs. Return, for a moment, to the notion of homeostasis—the maintenance of a constancy in the internal milieu. We first evoked this idea to understand how the cell maintains its internal fixity. We then used it to understand how a healthy body adjusts to metabolic and environmental changes—salt load, waste disposal, sugar metabolism. We apply it, now, to the maintenance of balance between injury and repair. Death—the most absolute of absolutes—is, in fact, a relative
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