The Harmonious Orchestration of Life

It is no surprise then, when we consider all of the incredible complexities of life that everything comes down to how the molecules are formed and put together and how they interact inside the living cells and tissues. The basic fundamental secrets of life, we might suppose, are found in how the molecules themselves are formed, how they interact with other molecules in their environment and how they shift and change over the course of their existence. It seems a bit strange, at first, to fathom how all life can be composed of molecules, a bunch of whirling particles following a set of physical laws and fields, and how this can lead to sentient, conscious beings that are self-aware, can act for themselves and have learned enough to discover and ponder the very principles that allow themselves to exist. This might be an open question, yet there is no denying that on the most fundamental level we are composed of molecules and yet we hold within ourselves the breath of life.

On the most fundamental level, all life brings into itself the elements that it needs to sustain life processes and releases the waste products that are generated. For humans these basic elements of life are water, nutrition, oxygen, fuel and waste. Deprive us of any of these elements and we cannot exist. This is universally true, right down to the cellular level. After all, it is within the aqueous interior of our cells that oxygen is combined with fuel to create energy, where nutrients are used to build tissues, organs and systems and where waste is created. Our lungs supply oxygen to our cells, our digestive system provides nutrients and fuels to our cells, our skin, mouths, stomachs and blood vessels absorb the water our cells need. In short, all of the activities we do to sustain our life involves the necessary processes that bring the elements of life to our cells. And then it is within the chambers of our cells that these molecular elements are processed into the molecules that are needed and where the energy is released that is needed to sustain the whole process and where waste products are generated and eliminated. The processes of life are largely performed by self-sustaining, self-actuating molecular engines inside our cells, and the mystery of how this all works and sustains itself resides inside living cells, where the molecular mechanisms of life reside.

The molecular orchestrations of life in our body are performed in perfect rhythm and harmony, every day, all working together to give us this incredible gift of life. In an orchestra there are various types of players each trained to play their instruments with precision and mastery. These players and their instruments can be compared to the masterful, beautifully crafted tiny molecular machines inside our cells. The players in an orchestra gather together with their instruments, poised to perform their parts; the molecular machines in our cells are gathered together, organized and positioned precisely, ready to perform their part. The musical score is then copied and passed out to the various players in the orchestra, similar to the way that the instructions within the DNA of our genes are copied into RNA and passed around to the players in our cells. In the cell, the written music in the score represents the genetic instructions distributed to be performed by the molecular players. Before the conductor steps onto the platform, the players warm up and practice their individual parts, the result is a dissonant jumble of individual musical lines, each conveying some part of a message, disjoint, confusing; there is no unity, order or sense to it.

The conductor then steps up and taps his stand. All the players with their instruments stand at attention and silent anticipation ensues. All attention is on the conductor as he starts the beat and the instruments begin to play their individual parts at the programmed time. Something interesting happens at that point. All of the individual parts come together and start to convey a unified message; instead of individual parts, a harmonious orchestration ensues, each individual instrument now works together with the others to create a much richer and powerful message than would ever be possible with one instrument alone. The individual parts then “make sense” as they are heard along with the other parts. All of the instruments interplay in wonderful synchronization toward a singular purpose.

If an orchestration is successful, a feeling described as “electricity” propagates as instruments, players, orchestra and audience link in to the same beat, the same message, the same emotional response. There is an almost transcendent feeling unifying hundreds of people that are sharing a single message all conveyed by the vibrating air that surrounds them. Most all of us have had this experience at one time or another, regardless of the type of music. This feeling may have more to it than it seems. It appears to be programmed by life itself, it resonates with the harmonious orchestration of life that takes place inside your cells, tissues, organs and systems, trillions of tiny molecular orchestras performing together in remarkable harmony and rhythm, programmed by the “musical score” that is written inside the DNA. The music is passed around inside the cells by messengers, generating and organizing the players and instruments. The music is performed by these molecular orchestras performing the program of life inside the cells. And just like in the orchestra, the real magic happens when a “beat” signal is established and all of these molecular instruments, cells, tissues and systems start listening to each other and acting in harmony, responding to the parts that are being played by the other instruments, each playing their part at the proper time. Isn’t it interesting that this idea of harmonious orchestration even works on the molecular level, in fact on every level, inside your cells, tissues, organs and systems. These harmonious molecular orchestrations inside us allow us to live.

Describing Life — Atoms are Everything

Let there be no mistake, this journey of discovery gets quite interesting as we look at what is really happening inside these incredible bodies that we possess. Things are even more interesting when you are looking at things on the atomic or molecular level. Be prepared to take the red pill and enter the rabbit hole…the path that leads to the reality that awaits.

In my college career, I learned that atoms are governed by a set of quantum mechanical laws and symmetries that determine how atoms are built and can fit together to make molecules. Predictive models can be built, mathematically, to describe how single atoms interact with surrounding atoms. These models make use of the concept of “fields”, like electric fields, magnetic fields, gravitational fields, etc. that describe how atoms interact with each other and the fields that exist around them. The behavior of each particle characterized and influenced by the fields that the particle itself generates and the fields that surround it. In a sense, we can experience this concept by playing with common refrigerator magnets. We notice that if we orient magnets a certain way they will attract each other, by some sort of invisible “field” and yet in other ways they will repel each other, and so there are only a limited number of configurations that allow them to stick together to form structures. Electric fields we observe, by rubbing balloons on cloth, for example, also follow physical laws. These observable but invisible fields are formed from the alignment of trillions of trillions of fields from the individual atoms that make up the objects, each atom possessing its own fields and following similar types of laws.

There are only four types of fields we know of in nature. The “gravitational” field is so weak that you need objects the size of a planet before you can really feel it, but it is far-reaching and stretches across the entire universe. In sharp contrast, the “strong” field only acts over a distance the size of a proton, but is a trillion trillion trillion times stronger than the gravitational field. The strong field sticks the protons together when they get close enough to each other, otherwise the clusters of protons in a nucleus would fly apart. The “weak” field binds electrons and protons together to make neutrons. But the king of the fields, of course, is the “electromagnetic” field that causes the electrons to be attracted to the protons, electrons to repel electrons, and protons to repel protons. The electromagnetic field causes the electrons to move in and buzz around the clusters of protons in the nucleus (that are bound together by the strong fields). The electrons spread themselves out around these clusters of protons to form atoms. All of this amounts to atomic field theory. The combined fields from all these particles inside the atoms also serve to attract and repel the neighboring atoms, and cause the atoms to arrange themselves and “stick” together into structures called molecules.

If we were somehow to look at matter on its most fundamental level, we would see that everything we sense, experience and know to be real is composed of trillions of trillions of fundamental particles that are simply following the governing laws of what is known as field theory. Everything is made of tiny particles floating around in space like electrons, protons and neutrons that are spinning and rotating around each other at blazing speeds. All of these tiny sub-atomic particles cannot be modeled as individual solid objects, they do not have solid boundaries, but are best characterized by the fields that they create and how they interact with each other. What we perceive as being a solid surface is formed because these particles have organized themselves into structures that “stick” together, much like stacking a bunch of charged floating magnets together to form a floating surface of magnets, where the motion of each magnet is restricted by the fields generated by the neighboring magnets.

If we place our hand on a table, or surface, for example, we sense pressure when the electromagnetic fields from the array of atoms in our hands push against the fields from the array of atoms on the surface. As the atoms of the surface are pushed by the fields of the atoms in your hand, the atoms of the surface will slightly flex out of place and push back on the atoms in your hand. Your hand will not be able to go through the surface without breaking the bonds that hold the surface atoms together. If we could somehow magically turn off the electromagnetic fields, there would be more than enough space to allow the atoms in your hand to pass through the atoms of the table. The electromagnetic field prevents this from happening, it both holds atoms together by attractive forces and keeps atoms spaced apart by repulsive forces as well; it acts over relatively large distances on the atomic scale, these fields are sort of like fields from super-charged refrigerator magnets floating in space, strong enough to attract or repel each other even when they are several lengths away from each other.

The field properties that make these atoms align and stick to each other describe and determine all the properties of matter. For example, if the electromagnetic fields from the atoms on the surface of the table were aligned so that they would attract the atoms in your hand, the surface would be considered “sticky” and you might have a little difficulty removing your hand from the table. It is the configuration of atoms bound together in these molecules that gives them their characteristics how they interact with all of the other molecules in their local environment. The way the molecules interact, in turn, determines the properties of all matter and explains on the most fundamental level what all things are and how all things work.

As we have attempted to visualize what things might look like if we were the size of an atom, it may be helpful to realize that the electrons are moving at several million miles per hour on the average, the atoms on a surface are interacting with each other over a million million times a second and a typical inch of surface is tens of millions of atoms long. Anything large enough to see, like a speck of dust in the sunlight, consists of many trillions of atoms and anything large enough to feel, like a salt crystal, consists of a billion billion atoms. You need to realize that everything is extremely small and extremely fast on the atomic scale. The surface of your table on an atomic scale would look like a vast system of mountains and valleys made of vibrating molecules stretching off into infinity in all directions.

This visualization will help us understand the true nature of the molecular forms of life in our cells as we dive into the inner workings of life and the signaling networks that hold it all together. Let there be no mistake, this journey of discovery gets quite interesting as we look at what is really happening inside these incredible bodies that we possess. Things are even more interesting when you are looking at things on the atomic or molecular level. Be prepared to take the red pill and enter the rabbit hole…the path that leads to the reality awaits.

The Breath of Life

The complexity and beauty of life are transformative. Just a moment’s contemplation of your own hand, observing the complex structure and functionality, the blood vessels, the hair, skin, skeletal structure, joints, the ability to make it respond to your every command, can invoke a sense of the wonder of how it all works. If you take the time to look closer, with a magnifying glass or microscope, you will see things you might never knew existed: vast fractured landscapes, hills and valleys. You may see things that make this supposedly familiar part of you seem foreign: strange, moist valleys, dry wastelands, tiny creatures moving about. In truth, you would have to spend about a month of exploration just getting to know the back of your own hand, and that is only the top layer of the skin, saying of nothing of the wonders that exist beneath the skin.

Certainly, this concept applies to more than just your hand, the same could be said of all life. In all honesty, a true understanding of how life works requires a much closer view inside the structure of living things, past the tissues, down into the cells, past the living cell structures and past the bustling activity of thousands of different cellular components, down to the smallest elements of the working internal machinery. It is here where the secret of life resides and where we might find our answers to how all life works. Most scientific investigation of things on this small of a scale is relatively recent. When my father was born, simple, basic cell structure was first being investigated. When I was born, DNA and its function were first being explored.

During my lifetime, knowledge has grown exponentially to the point where we have mapped the whole human genome and now know almost 1% of the internal workings of a cell. The acquisition of knowledge is a noble and worthy pursuit, embodying the greatest accomplishments of this century. Discoveries are being made daily. My children will possibly live in a day where the majority of fundamental cellular microbiological mechanisms will be known and much of the secret of life revealed.

How and where will the secret of life be found? In my youth I was taught that an atom was the smallest fundamental unit of all matter. In my young mind, I reasoned that the mysteries of how all things work must be found in the atom. I was so enamored by this concept that I ended up studying atomic physics in college and later went on to earn my Ph.D. in that field. The answers to the universe, I thought, must be found in how the atoms work. After all, there only exist a grand total of less than 100 stable types of atoms. Out of those there are only 20 or so necessary for life processes and the vast majority of the molecules of life are combinations of Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen, Nitrogen, Phosphorous and Sulfur, only 6 of them. In the innocence of youth, I reasoned, it should not be too hard to figure out how everything works, it’s like putting together tinker toys or Legos where only a few different types of Legos exist. I may have underestimated just a bit how many different things you can build with just this limited set of “Legos”.

Preface — The Journey

We truly live in exciting times, where the mysteries of the ages are finally being peeled back and revealed. At present, the acquisition of knowledge is dizzying, quickly outdistancing our ability to assimilate it and apply it to real-world problems. From 1650 through 1750 there was only one scientific journal published. Ever since about 1785 (about 10 generations ago), the number of scientific journals started doubling every 22.5 years consistently. In the early 1900’s there were only 250 journals, with about 7,000 articles published per year, including articles by Albert Einstein and Max Planck that have changed the very world in which we live. In 2009 there were over 12,000 journals and over 1 million articles. Every month, over a 100,000 scientific articles are being published, each representing months of laboratory work, amounting to millions of months of scientific work that is published and available to us each and every month.

In our modern world, it has come to a point where our very survival depends on the ability to utilize these newly discovered technologies for our benefit, we rely on them more and more in order to continue to thrive. We rely on the transportation technologies that carry supplies, the plastics and new materials used to build our cars, containers and houses, the semi-conductor technologies that run our computers, cars, phones, TV’s etc. We also rely on the energy, electricity, oil, nuclear, solar, etc. that is needed to carry on all the activities of life every day. Along with the incredible benefits these technologies bring, there are also some liabilities; with solemn realization we are finding that misuse of these same technologies can also serve toward our destruction. In our pursuit of dominance, we have developed nuclear bombs that can destroy even our most modern and advanced cities in the blink of an eye.

Our journey of discovery is, in every sense, a human journey, embodying the principles of the human equation that we are learning along the way: human struggle and striving, the indomitable human spirit, mixed in with greed, strife and suffering. As our knowledge increases, seemingly without bound, in true exponential fashion, in conjunction with the power it provides us to change our environment, there is a real concomitant need to master the human equation, for with great power comes great responsibility and the stakes are getting much too high to ignore. With the knowledge that we presently have in agricultural sciences, for example, it is within the realm of possibility, given what we have on hand today, to adequately grow and distribute sufficient food to feed all of the people in the world. If it is not lack of technology that prevents us from doing so, then what is it? As knowledge increases past the point where we are able to understand the very nature of life itself, then the really difficult questions will begin to surface. I yearn, with all that is human within me, to believe that we will be ready and willing to face our own humanity as we travel along the journey of life into a promising future.

In the upcoming century, one of the most worthy pursuits, almost to the point of being revered as sacred, is to unravel the mystery of what makes us live. Can we really understand the physical principles upon which life is based well enough to grasp the very nature of our own life? We are already on the pathway and, barring global calamity, we will amass enough knowledge in the next 50 years to get a good picture of the nature of our own being on a physical level. What advantage is this knowledge going to give us? When we have half of the picture, to what end will we use this knowledge? Will it be utilized, even unknowingly, to promote destructive efforts?

I take some comfort in that the evolution of knowledge is based on principles that require constructive efforts and misery and destruction are based on ignorance. Scientists must spend years acquiring the knowledge, which requires development of the strikingly human characteristics; the hunger to know the truth and more importantly the dedication to study and research in unveiling the truth. These same human elements that enable scientific development are those that will help us overcome differences and move toward a bright future. The possession of such a desire leads to knowledge and self-actualization and the lack of such proves self-destructive and must ultimately diminish. These are the very principles and laws that allow for our existence, that allow us to adapt and live, the physical laws that govern how our body works and how we thrive. As we discover these principles, let us not think that we are greater than them, let us not think that we can govern them, let us reverence them and search for greater understanding, let us discover and conform to true principles and enjoy the life that has been given us and that exists in such great harmony and abundance around us.

And So It Begins…

It is now mid-January 2014, a few weeks after I had planned to start a science-related blog. The experiences that I have had on Facebook have been more than ever expected. It has been quite an experience, to say the least, to connect with friends and their families on Facebook and see some of what is taking place in my friends’ lives and to receive such warmth, love and encouragement from so many, yet I cannot hold back any longer to get to some of the good stuff out about my thoughts on some of the current happenings in the science. Facebook, per se, is probably not the right place to post thoughts on such topics at any depth, except perhaps for personal feelings about the same. This blog, I hope, will provide deeper forum where such things can be discussed in more detail. I hope that it will be informative and enjoyable to read through, also. Many of these emerging technologies are more than just interesting. We are discovering the true nature of life, of light, of everything, the implications are astounding.

This first week I hope to post some of my thoughts on the field of atomic physics (my passion and specialty, my Ph.D. is in this field) as it relates to the truths we observe around us. I hope to lay a foundation of understanding for some of the greatest discoveries that are being made in science during my generation, all having at their core the humble atom, the constituent of everything. This knowledge has applications that are as far-reaching as the universe itself, especially in its ability to give us the power to understand life and all of its implications. I am certainly not opposed to exploring the implications of our new-found knowledge, as it will grant us the power to mold our future and should be carefully explored. Our philosophies and morality should also be subject to careful exploration. A better understanding of the human equation will shape our future especially as our acquired knowledge reaches toward the infinite. We have acquired power to create and to destroy, let us use this power wisely.

Warm Regards,

-Gary

Dr. Gary Samuelson

A Journey of Discovery