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April 15 - July 10, 2024
dog hobble,
“an entirely independent one, belonging to its own development alone; and an incidental one, in so far as it has become part of a plant.”
A life within a life. An independent living being—a unit—that forms a part of the whole.
both animals and plants had a “common means of formation through cells.”
“aggregate of fully individualized independent beings.”
“elementary particles of organisms.”
Cell biology is inextricably linked with genetics, pathology, epidemiology, epistemology, taxonomy, and anthropology.
Our vulnerabilities are built out of the vulnerabilities of cells.
Life’s definition cannot be captured by a single property.
But how can one find life if scientists are struggling to define the term itself?)
a set of behaviors, a series of processes, not a single property.
To be living, an organism must have the capacity to reproduce, to grow, to metabolize, to adapt to stimuli, and to maintain its internal milieu.
we need the story of the cell to tell the story of life and of our selves.
a cell is an autonomous living unit that acts as a decoding machine for a gene.
They are the central functionaries in biology, the molecular machines that enable life.I
gene without a cell is lifeless—an
A cell brings materiality and physicality to a set of genes.
Cell division is what drives growth, repair, regeneration, and, ultimately, reproduction, among the fundamental, defining features of life.
was “immunological misfiring”—a dysregulation of immune cells.
but viruses are inert, lifeless, without cells.
Vesalius had put human anatomy at the center of medicine.
most diseases were attributed to miasmas: poisonous vapors emanating from sewage or contaminated air.
malaria still carries that history, its name created by joining the Italian mala and aria to form “bad air.”)
each disease was the dysfunction of an individual organ.
Galenists, who believed disease to be a pathological imbalance among four bodily fluids and semifluids referred to as “humors”;
“psychists,” who argued that illness was a manifestation of a frustrated mental process.
epiphenomena—emergent
emergent properties of a deeper underlying dysfunction invisible to the naked eye?
“True knowledge is to be aware of one’s ignorance,”
The world must be measured by eye.
Highbrow science was born from lowbrow tinkering.
“neither a philosopher, a medical man, nor a gentleman.
“was not pursued in order to gain the praise I now enjoy, but chiefly from a craving after knowledge, which I notice resides in me more than most other men.”
Unwittingly, he had inaugurated a new conception of living beings, and of humans.
shattered the past and shaped a new landscape for the future of science.
In the history of biology, there are often valleys of silence that follow the peaks of monumental discoveries.
equal answer exists in the conceptual, or heuristic, changes required to switch from the description of an entity—a
move toward understanding its universality, organization, function, and behavior.
Atomistic claims are the most audacious of all: the scientist is proposing a fundamental reorganization of...
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functional site for all physiological chemical reactions, as an organizing unit for all tissues, and as the unifying locus for physiology and pathology.
discontinuous, discrete, autonomous elements that unify that world.
Bichat, in particular, distinguished twenty-one (!) forms of elementary tissues out of which human organs were built.
“Each cell selects from its surrounding milieu, taking only what it needs,”
“Cells have various means of choice,
“A cell is […] a kind of laboratory,”
He imagined the cell as the site for the reactions that sustain life.
every cell growing in one of my incubators is a lab within a lab.
developing cells arose from the division of preexisting cells—Omnis cellula e cellula,
“an aggregate of fully individualized, independent, separate beings, the cells themselves.”
sweeping and universal principle of biology.II
