From Physics to Chemistry to Biochemistry to Cells to Systems to Behavior
Posted by N P in Neuroscience on August 2nd, 2009
I present to you a simple argument I’ve heard before.
Everything humans do can be explained as a combination of behaviors they exhibit. These behaviors in turn are caused by the interaction of various systems in the body such as the endocrine, nervous, and reproductive systems. These systems function due to the interaction of the cells which form them. Cellular physiology is determined by a set of biochemical pathways which respond to stimuli from the environment. These biochemical pathways have certain kinetics and thermodynamics which can be elucidated by chemistry. Chemistry is just applied physics.
The Changing Landscape of Medicine
Upon thinking some more about neurological disease and how it is often oversimplified and misunderstood, I thought it might be worthwhile to talk a little about how I think medicine has dealt with major challenges in the past, and how it will have to change to deal with future challenges. This is just a brisk overview with overlapping major points. I will skip over details and perhaps omit things others would consider significant, but it will convey the point that there are different challenges for which one approach alone is not necessarily appropriate.
I find that medicine can be divided into eras with the following major goals: tackling acute diseases and curing infections, managing chronic diseases and keeping degenerative processes at bay, and learning to delay the effects of aging and other (sometimes iatrogenic) byproducts of our medical successes. Each of these challenges is further complicated for both detection and treatment must be made accessible to an ever increasing and changing populations that might be affected by a disease.
Figure 1: Change in causes of mortality throughout the 20th century.
HBO’s Alzheimer’s Project
A former co-worker introduced me to this compilation of documentaries on the HBO website that centered around Alzheimer’s disease. HBO has put together some amazing images with an excellent introduction to what Alzheimer’s is and what scientists are doing in order to study the disease and either halt or reverse it’s progress. The films go from the personal aspects of living and caring for someone with Alzheimer’s to the academic scientific advances. HBO took a very realistic view of disease with this, it exemplifies how a most disease is not a one-dimensional problem to solve, but rather a multifaceted set of challenges that sometimes have no permanent solutoin for those involved with it.
Coverage of this sort would ideally be more common for diseases such as Alzheimer’s, for the media all too often portrays these diseases as having a cure just around the corner. The current sort of exposure unnecessarily romantizes the disease and the science behind it in unrealistic ways and eventually desensitizes the public as no real cure is found time and time again.
There is also a brief yet insightful TED talk on the upcoming neurological epidemic, which brings to light how neurodegenerative diseases will be the next “scientific frontier” in medicine. Ultimately the problems we are fighting are all linked to aging, but that shall be left for another post.
Genetics and History
I had always been intrigued by how phylogenetic reconstruction was used to track down the origin of HIV and how it is used to infer the flow of human populations into their current locations. This sort of genetic forensics parallels evolutionary biology and can become very sophisticated. It reveals much about our past through what is perhaps the most accurate and unbiased historical record, our DNA. I was really excited when a friend of mine in the history department recommended this seminar series to me. It is held by a group of historians who are applying modern methods in human genetics to confirm or reject hypotheses about historical inferences.
I was only able to make it to one talk this year, but it was really good. Noah Rosenberg (coincedentally a graduate of the Rice University Math department) from University of Michigan, Ann Arbor presented his computational genetic evidence for a single founder population crossing the Bering Strait and starting the spread of humans throughout the Americas. You can see more of his work here. Thankfully they podcast everything, so I look forward to seeing the other talks I missed!
My Inspiration to Mathematics
I was reminded the other day that one of the main reasons I decided to commit to a math major was also a book! One of my friends let me borrow Fermat’s Last Theorem, a book about the history behind the proof to the following statement made by Fermat (as stated on Wikipedia):
“If an integer n is greater than 2, then the equation an + bn = cn has no solutions in non-zero integers a, b, and c.”
So basically, when n = 2, we have all the Pythagorean triplets such as 3-4-5 and 5-12-13, but for n > 2, there exist no such triplets for which the equation works out. It seems deceptively simple to show, but the proof took centuries of mathematicians and many advances in the field of mathematics itself before it was proved that the theorem is true.
It was fascinating to me that this problem was simple enough to be understood by anyone who had taken pre-Algebra, but that the solution had stumped many of the greatest minds throughout history. And when I say the solution stumped them, I don’t mean that there isn’t an answer, because it was found 357 years after the problem was posed by a Princeton mathematician, Andrew Wiles, in 1995.
The book (and a documentary by the same name) goes through the history of the theorem and the stories of the mathematicians who tried to solve it. It inspired me to pursue the field because there is a sort of magic and beauty to how mathematics works. Math is a product of the human mind but can be manifested in many practical applications. Each field of it ties into other fields in unexpected ways, giving one the suspicion that there really does exist an underlying structure to the universe. The journey to solving the math problem is far more cumbersome than the answer itself, many times the answer seems obvious once stated, but the proof of it may take weeks to understand. It is this sort of feeling that answers to complicated problems exist out there and that man can figure them out that convinced me I wanted to study the field.
Some other interesting “get you excited about math” books I’ve found since then include (in increasing order of mathematical sophistication):
- A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper
- One, Two, Three… Infinity
- Journey Through Genius: The Great Theorems of Mathematics
- Euclidean and Non-Euclidean Geometry: Development and History
- All the Mathematics You Missed: But Need to Know for Graduate School
I recommend them all, especially for the “armchair mathematician.” I figure, why bother doing Sudoku puzzles as you grow older when you can just learn new maths?
My Inspiration to Biology
I read on Jason’s blog about how he became interested in biology for the first time, and it brought back fond memories of my own. Why, I was at the Borders in the Huntington Mall in WV during the senior year of my high school days… and I was browsing some books until Genome by Matt Ridley hit me as an interesting title. In 23 chapters he covers the range of topics in and issues surrounding the field of genetics. He goes from the science (in a very layperson friendly manner) to clinical issues to even larger issues such as eugenics and free will.
I was blown away by this book back then, and I realize, it’s still quite an impressive work now (granted some of it is outdated now). It made me want to be a geneticist, and that eventually led me to choose biochemistry as my major. Now, going into my graduate work, I may very well end up working in that field trying to elucidate the gene networks which underlie diseases with complex mechanisms and deceptively oversimplified phenotypes. It would be a cool way to come full-circle, no?
Praise for NPR!
I just got into West Virginia today (surprise Mother’s Day visit!) and hung out with my parents as well as my neighbors and some old friends who are still around. When I was visiting my neighbors, I brought up the fact that I used to despise NPR. I mean, I perceived it as this station with monotonous newscasters continuing on and on about topics that were of absolutely no concern to me. Then, somewhere along my college career I realized I had totally misperceived NPR! I believe it was actually thanks to iTunes and the ability to podcast NPR shows that really revolutionized my views.
Since then I’ve subscribe to:j
- Wait Wait, Don’t Tell Me
- All Songs Considered
- World Cafe
- Fresh Air
- Health and Science News
- Science Fridays
- This I Believe
- This American Life
- Story of the Day
- World Story of the Day
You can get them all here. With all of these podcasts I am endlessly entertained by the high quality programming in addition to the richness that it adds to my life by informing me of what’s going on, introducing me to new ideas, and exposing me to new music that I can enjoy!
Sustainable Societies
“Now is the time when we must break away from a society which favors mass production and mass consumption. In my view, we must develop a “new 21st Century System of production and consumption” that will be friendly to our global environment, and that make the transition to a sustainable society.”
-Yasuo Fukuda, Prime Minister of Japan at the Science and Technology in Society forum
I was talking with a friend the other day about how I felt so much of our society was not sustainable, and I recall mentioning that it is partially because we have this mass production and consumption mind-set that is primarily driven by the desire for continual growth and profit. I’d have to say I’m extremely impressed with the qualitiy of the statement made by the Japanese Prime Minister. I’ve never really heard a politician in the US suggest anything along those lines, in fact, if they did, they’d probably be dropped by all the corporations that fund them.
Acknowledging knowledge of the unknown
I have recently been reading a lot of ScienceBlogs articles which are responses to writings by individuals who present faulty knowledge on subjects such as evolution, math, logic, and science in general (Pharyngula; Good Math, Bad Math; and Respectful Insolence are examples). I noticed that I naturally tend to believe some writers and disbelieve others after reading just a few paragraphs. This led me to ponder what feature of their writing led me to this sort of judgment without having read their entire article or rant or whatever it might be.
I figure, it must be something similar that leads me to believe what a person is saying or whether I should trust a person in general from having a few conversations with them. Of course in reading somebody’s writing or in listening to them speak, I can definitely make false judgments so clearly my method is not perfect (I doubt a perfect method exists, as you are always acting on incomplete information, even after you’ve read an article and checked the facts behind it, you do not know what the person was thinking and in what context the piece was written in).