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Elof Axel Carlson

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By Elof Axel Carlson

Elof Axel Carlson

Science is a way of knowing based on reason. That aspect of science would also apply to logic or the creation of mathematical fields. But when science is applied to the material world, reason is not sufficient. Modern science includes the use of data from observations and from the use of tools to produce data. A third aspect of science is characteristic of modern science. It is the design of experiments that predict what type of data will be found. 

Science differs from revelation, tradition, authority or religious belief because these nonscientific ways that culture forms often require faith or do not attempt to apply science to their beliefs. This difference in interpreting the world around us allowed scientists to be skeptical, to require evidence and to apply more testing and tools to expand the applications of science to the universe and to life.  

This resulted in many new fields of science. Astronomers purged themselves of astrology. Chemists purged themselves of alchemy. Medicine purged itself of quackery. All sciences rejected magic (except as entertainment) and wishful thinking. 

Modern science arose in Italy in the 1500s.  We attribute to Galileo the origins of modern physics and astronomy. He worked out physical laws for falling bodies or bodies rolling down inclined planes. He introduced the mathematical equations to describe and to predict the time required and the distances involved in projectiles dropped, thrown or shot from cannons. He used the telescope he constructed to detect moons around Jupiter, phases of Venus, Saturn’s rings (they looked like ears to him) and mountains and craters on the moon. 

Modern science arose in Italy because the first universities arose in Italy (the University of Bologna was the first in 1088). The Renaissance began in Italy with increased members of the middle class, formation of large cities, importing of knowledge from trade with Asia and Africa and an accumulation of wealth that was spent on architecture, the arts, hobbies, scholarship and curiosity for those with leisure time. 

Artists like Albrecht Dürer went from Bavaria to Italy to study anatomy. William Harvey went from England to study medicine in Italy (Galileo was on the faculty when Harvey was a student) and brought back experimentation to the human body and the circulation of blood.  

German universities benefited from sending students to Italy. In turn the Italian-trained German professors brought their skills to France. During the Enlightenment, French science flourished with Lavoisier in chemistry and Cuvier in biology. From France, science moved to the United States and the founding president of Johns Hopkins University, Daniel Coit Gilman, went to Europe and designed the American University model for its doctorate. 

For the life sciences he recruited a student of Thomas Huxley’s, H. Newell Martin, and W. K. Brooks, one of the first American students of Louis Agassiz (famed for demonstrating and naming the Ice Age that covered large parts of Europe and North America). Martin and Brooks mentored T. H. Morgan. Morgan, at Columbia University, mentored H. J. Muller; and Muller, at Indiana University, mentored me. 

While where a student goes for a doctorate may vary with time, over the past 500 years, the three features of science – reason, data collection and experimentation have not changed. Instead, they have provided enormous applications to our lives from computers to public health, to air flight, to transcontinental roads and railways. They have extended our life expectancy by more than 50 years since the Renaissance began. They allowed humans to walk on the moon and determine how many children to have and when to have them; and they allow us to eat fresh fruits and vegetables all year round. 

Science has its limitations. It cannot design ideal governments, what values to live by, what purpose we choose for motivating us or supply the yearnings of wishful thinking (we will never be rid of all accidents, all diseases, or live forever). It co-exists with the humanities and the arts in filling out each generation’s expectations.   

Elof Axel Carlson is a distinguished teaching professor emeritus in the Department of Biochemistry and Cell Biology at Stony Brook University.

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Penguins are among the few animals that live in the South Pole. Stock photo

By Elof Axel Carlson

Elof Axel Carlson

Life abounds from pole to pole and from the bottom of oceans to the peaks of Asian mountain tops. It does this by using the air, water and land to sustain life.

For most of the time on Earth life was confined to single-celled organisms, mostly bacteria. They take in water across a cell membrane. Most do not use oxygen from the air. Those that do came later, when some bacteria developed tools to use sunlight to combine carbon dioxide in the air with water to produce food (carbohydrates) and more abundant energy for the cell. They released oxygen and the atmosphere began to accumulate oxygen. 

Most forms of multicellular life use oxygen from the air to provide the energy to sustain their cellular life. Multicellularity permitted specialization of cells to form tissues, and the tissues then permitted organs to specialize in exchanging carbon dioxide (a waste product for animals) for oxygen.

The branching of limbs on trees is efficient to increase surfaced area for gaseous exchanges. So too are the branching of filaments in the gills of fish or the trachea of insects or the branching of the bronchi in our lungs.

When I see a tree, I see those organ systems reaching skyward with terminal leaves and an equally branched underground of roots, which are bringing in water and minerals from the land into which they are penetrated. The artist sees the beauty of the landscape. The mystic feels the awe of the complexity that seems beyond human comprehension. The scientist explores the structures and assigns functions as they emerge through the tools of science and experimentation.

It is as thrilling to me to see the cellular network of living tissues or organs under a microscope as it is to watch the changing scenery of life when driving from Indiana to New York, or taking walks in Amsterdam, Capetown, Samara, the Seychelles, the nature preserves in Kenya or the beaches of Baja Mexico.

I think of life through time as a fractal drawing with many repetitions creating new patterns. All of life requires a few basic activities. Life requires molecules to form membranes. It requires carbon-based compounds to produce the organelles that compose a cell.  All life (except viruses) is cellular. Life requires molecules that can store information to provide the molecules of life — proteins, nucleic acids, carbohydrates and lipids.

I think of the tools of the artist — a palette, brushes, tubes of oil paint, a canvas stretched on a frame, an easel to hold it. The artist can meticulously render a face, a still life or a landscape with the skills of many hundreds of hours of practice. 

Life also uses cellular tools to construct more complex membranes, organelles, chromosomes and vesicles to a symphony of functioning parts. Science enriches our understanding, opens new worlds of the very small and the very large that we do not normally see.  At most, a galaxy other than our own Milky Way is a mere dot in the sky, but close up it has 100 billion stars in it, most of them like our own sun. Our universe has billions of galaxies. 

As I type a page for an article or book, I am aware that I am coordinating the 37 trillion cells composing me. Human life mimics the universe in its immensity as our Earth now contains some 7 billion people. But this is humbled by the immensity of the astronomer’s universe or the biologist’s inventory of our own cells.    

Elof Axel Carlson is a distinguished teaching professor emeritus in the Department of Biochemistry and Cell Biology at Stony Brook University.

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By Elof Axel Carlson

Elof Axel Carlson

The first time I heard DNA enter popular culture was hearing a record played by my son Anders. I heard the refrain, “Hey hey, hey hey! It’s DNA that made me that way.” Anders told me it was from a song called “Sheer Heart Attack” by the rock band Queen (1977).  

Since then that idea has spread from teenage rock fans to the public sphere, and in its modified form, I hear “It’s in my DNA” when a person feels passionately about an idea. Metaphors are part of how we speak but they are not always scientifically accurate. Before the era of DNA (that began with the publishing of the double helix model of DNA in 1953 by James Watson and Francis Crick), a different set of metaphors were in use going back to antiquity. 

Intense belief or fixed behaviors have been attributed to the intestines (I feel it in my gut), to the heart (I offer my heart-felt thanks), to the skeletal system (I feel it to the marrow of my bones), to the blood (royalty are blue bloods and a psychopath’s behavior reflects bad blood) and to the nervous system (argumentative personalities are called “hot headed”). 

Sumerians studied the shape of animal guts and livers to predict the future (haruspicy). Until the Renaissance the brain was thought to be the place where blood is cooled (hence the hot-headed belief). Thoreau was described by one contemporary as sucking the marrow out of life; and blood was considered the vital fluid of life. In the Renaissance the first human blood transfusions were given to provide youthful vigor by old men who believed in rejuvenation.  

When people say, “It’s in my DNA” for a behavior, they are conveying a deeply held belief that it is part of their personality as far back as they can remember or that it is innate. But the evidence for innate human social behaviors is often lacking. There are single gene effects of the nervous system that are well documented such as Huntington’s disease, which leads to dementia and paralysis with an onset usually in middle age. 

There are also family histories of psychosis and learning difficulties. The fragile X syndrome is one such well-documented condition that leads to low intelligence. But human social traits have lots of inputs from parents, siblings, playmates, neighborhoods, regional culture, ethnicity and national identity.  

Children growing up in poverty have different expectations than children whose parents are well off and send them to elite schools. Each generation uses, as best as it can, what it knows. Our knowledge of many important aspects of life and behavior is incomplete. Hence, we keep modifying our interpretations of how life works.  

Much of what is called evolutionary psychology or genetic determinism will be modified or abandoned in years to come as we learn how our genes use memories and other acquired knowledge to shape our personalities. For many cellular processes we know the flow of information from DNA (genes) to cell organelles to cellular function to tissue formation and to organ formation.  

That detailed interpretation of human behavior is not possible now for social traits. I would love to say, “It’s in my DNA” to write these Life Line columns, but my conscience would remind me that it is based on Freudian “wish fulfillment” and not careful experimentation down to the molecular level.

Elof Axel Carlson is a distinguished teaching professor emeritus in the Department of Biochemistry and Cell Biology at Stony Brook University.

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Giovanni Alfonso Borelli

By Elof Axel Carlson

Elof Axel Carlson

Scientists have a tradition of citing those whose work helped shape their own ideas and experiments. Almost every scientific paper has a list of such journal articles or books cited by the authors of a published article in a peer-reviewed journal. Usually these references are to recent work that the author or authors have read. 

But one could chase back the references of each cited article and keep doing this to work that was published in the 1600s. Before that things get more complicated because science as we know it dates to the Renaissance. Most of those cited names are forgotten to us and we are taught the names of only a few of these many scientists. 

Thus, we single out the major contributors like Galileo and his work supporting the Copernican theory that Earth and other planets move around the sun. We cite Vesalius’s work on human anatomy, the first accurate depiction of the organs of the human body. We also cite Harvey’s work on the circulation of the blood. What these all have in common is the belief that living organisms are like machines and the laws of physics apply to interpreting their structure and function. 

One of the forgotten contributors to this view of life was Giovanni Alfonso Borelli (1608–1679). Born in Naples, he was the son of a Spanish father, Miguel Alonso, and an Italian mother, Laura Porrello. His father had been exiled from Spain for association with a heretic. This led young Giovanni at the age of 20 to change his baptismal name from Giovanni Francesco Antonio Alonso to the fully Italian sounding Giovanni Alfonso Borelli, which was a version of his mother’s surname Porrello. 

At that time Naples was a Spanish colony and Borelli grew up with his sympathies for Italian culture and political rule. He became a mathematician and astronomer first. He worked out the orbits of Galileo’s discovery of the four large moons of Jupiter and showed they were ellipses. He showed that a comet of 1664 had a parabolic path and was farther than the moon, contradicting church belief then that the comets were not as far as the moon. Isaac Newton cited his work.  

Borelli shifted to medicine and showed that the motions of animals was caused by muscle contractions and the mathematics of levers, pulleys and other machines applied to the components of the body that he studied. He rejected the prevailing view that motion was caused by a vital fluid in the muscles coming from nerves by cutting muscles and showing no such fluids were released. Instead he worked out the center of gravity for different activities of animals and founded the field of biomechanics.  

He kept moving whenever his Spanish ancestry was revealed or when he contradicted fellow scientists who clung to Aristotelian theories that Borelli rejected as nonscientific. In his later life while writing his works, he was supported by Queen Christina of Sweden who went into exile in Rome after converting to Catholicism. He taught mathematics in the convent school that she established and she paid for the publication of his book on animal motion that he dedicated to her.  

Elof Axel Carlson is a distinguished teaching professor emeritus in the Department of Biochemistry and Cell Biology at Stony Brook University.

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placozoa

By Elof Axel Carlson

Elof Axel Carlson

Biologists classify living things using a system that Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778) introduced in the 18th century and that has grown in detail over the decades as new forms of life are found and studied. Humans are familiar with being vertebrates (a class of the phylum Chordata). Chordates are animals with a spinal cord, spine or an embryonic structure called a notochord. There are 55,000 chordate species. So far there are 109 phyla covering plants, animals, protozoa, fungi, bacteria and archaea, which are less precisely organized into kingdoms and domains.  

One phylum, first discovered in 1883, consisted of just one species until recently. These are the Placozoa (placo = flat and zoa = animal). They are small (about an eighth of an inch or 1 mm) and are roughly disc shaped with three layers. The top layer has cells with a hairlike thread called a cilium. The bottom layer is also ciliated but has additional cells that take in food from the ocean muck on which the placozoa live. The middle layer has amebalike cells and fiber-bearing cells that contract, making the placozoa lumpy in appearance.  

They reproduce by forming a bud that enlarges and eventually pinches off to produce identical twins. In laboratories, some of the placozoa produce sex cells (sperm and eggs), but these rarely survive the embryonic stage with about 150 cells at the time they die. No such embryos are found in samples of ocean sediments where placozoa dwell. Their DNA has been analyzed and it shows they have a past history of doubling their gene number and rearranging the sequences of their genes as they have moved about the oceans for more than 500 million years.  

Today three species are recognized from samplings around the world. They have about 12,000 genes and portions of these they share with sponges (the phylum Porifera) and comb jellies (the phylum Ctenophora).

Note that the placozoa do not have organized tissues (we have epithelial, muscular, connective and nervous tissues), a basic symmetry (we have a bilateral or left and right sides that are roughly mirror images) or body organs (we have kidneys, lungs, internal bones and eyes, ears, a nose and mouth). They have no nerve cells, muscle cells, bony structure, intestines or sense organs.  

What makes the placozoa interesting to biologists in this molecular era is the opportunity to compare the genomes of related phyla and see what genes they have to work out a molecular tree similar to the trees of life that have been worked out by comparative anatomists since Darwin’s theory of evolution provided a model of how to organize life. They represent the launching state of life before the familiar phyla of sponges, worms and more complex phyla appear in the fossil records.  

Most of the familiar phyla appear in the Cambrian era about 500 million years ago, and the placozoa are first seen in rocks designated as Ediacaran, which existed 100 million years earlier. Rocks can be dated by isotopes present in atoms that have decayed over the millennia. 

Of future interest will be identifying genes in later phyla and genes in placozoa and how they function in these different organizations of life. Also, it will be interesting to follow the genes in placozoa and in their ancestors back to protozoa in the animal kingdom. As interesting as placozoa are, they are too small to be adopted as pets in saltwater aquariums and hard to differentiate without a lens from the muck that accumulates in a fish tank.     

Elof Axel Carlson is a distinguished teaching professor emeritus in the Department of Biochemistry and Cell Biology at Stony Brook University.

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By Elof Axel Carlson

Elof Axel Carlson

In 1974 I was a Hill Foundation visiting professor at the University of Minnesota, invited by the History of Science Department to interact with its faculty and students. One faculty member who showed up to my seminar class was Robert Desnick who was interested in medical genetics and he had completed both an M.D. and Ph.D.  

Four years later I arranged with Desnick, who was on the faculty of the medical school, to go on rounds with his pediatric fellows so I could learn what human genetics disorders were like (30 percent of the pediatric patients had some medical genetic condition). I also used my time there to study the genetics of retinoblastoma, a cancer of the eye in children that can affect one or both eyes, and I published two papers with Desnick on that study. I also met Robert Gorlin who had a dental degree and became a world expert on syndromes of the head and neck and whose book on those conditions was a classic (now in its fifth edition).     

I thought about those experiences recently as I read articles in the Public Library of Science (PLoS) on the web about the genetics of the face. All vertebrates have heads with eyes, nose, mouth and ears. I knew from my embryology class as a graduate student that the vertebrate embryo forms a neural tube and one end balloons into a brain. A group of cells along the seamline of the tube migrates and portions of it form the face as do slabs of embryonic tissue that come together to form the skull or cranium. Genes controlling these movements and managing the tissues involved were known from a variety of genetic disorders that Gorlin and Desnick had been following.  

In reading the PLoS articles I felt like Rip van Winkle becoming acquainted with a new world that I had slept through. There are now almost a thousand syndromes of human disorders of the head, neck and face. Hundreds of genes involved have been isolated and sequenced. A smaller portion have had their functions worked out. There is one major gene for cleft lip and palate and dozens of other genes that can modify its severity. Some are tied to a vitamin (folic acid) deficiency and may also lead to spina bifida.  

The story unfolding at a molecular level is still in its infancy but enough is known to make some reasonable predictions. In a few decades it may be possible to examine the DNA of persons (even mummies or the bones of ancient humans) and reconstruct on a computer screen the portraits of their faces as adults. I toyed with this possibility in 1968 in a public lecture I gave at UCLA (50 years go by like a flash when you turn 87). Back then it was all based on speculation.

In 50 years, as the PLoS articles demonstrate, the changes in knowledge are accelerating thanks to the zebrafish (Danio rerio) as a model organism for vertebrate embryology. The zebrafish embryo has transparent cells, so one can look at embryos forming and identify each of the cells involved. 

Biologists have known since Darwin’s writing in the 1860s that facial expressions exist among animals, but humans are remarkable in the nuances facial expressions convey — a Mona Lisa smile, a raised eyebrow of skepticism, a pout, a crying child and the contracted muscles of a bigot shouting slurs are only a few of the many ways we read other people’s faces. At present we can only guess how many genes are involved in these facial gestures. A genetic component is involved because identical twins raised apart for many years show remarkable similarity in their facial expressions and mannerisms.    

Elof Axel Carlson is a distinguished teaching professor emeritus in the Department of Biochemistry and Cell Biology at Stony Brook University.

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We are now in a molecular age in which individual genes can be sequenced and their functions studied.

By Elof Axel Carlson

Elof Axel Carlson

You are a multicellular organism. In fact you have about 37 trillion cells. That’s 37,000,000,000,000 if you like numbers. Cells were first described in 1665 by Robert Hooke who looked at cork bark under a crude microscope he had invented. The cells he saw were empty boxes. He believed this was the cause of cork’s buoyancy. 

It wasn’t until the mid-1800s that lenses and stain technology developed to reveal detail inside cells. It also permitted several biologists to promote a theory that all cells arise from pre-existing cells and that organisms are composed of cells. 

In that stage of our knowledge of life, scientists worked out mitosis (how cells divide) and meiosis (how cells form reproductive cells). They learned that chromosomes carried the genes, or hereditary units, that produce all the components and cellular types in an organism. In the last half of the 20th century they learned how to take apart and put together components of the living cell. 

We see multicellular life among plants and animals around us, but we cannot see single-celled organisms without a microscope. Microscopic single cells exist for bacteria, certain algae, certain fungi and most protozoa. The presence of multicellular organisms goes back to about 2.5 billion years ago with filaments of cells in ancient rocks.  

About 20 years ago I was delighted to read about experiments by Nicole King (UC Berkeley) showing that one-celled organisms, similar to those found in sponges, could be selected to join in clumps. That has been greatly extended to algal cells (Chlamydomonas, Volvox) and fungi (yeast). 

William Ratcliff at Georgia Tech recently published results of selection for larger and heavier yeast cells that settled down on the bottom of test tubes. He isolated some that developed adhesions. From continued selection (hundreds of generations of yeast) he obtained some that formed flakelike arms or branches and that reproduced by breaking off branches. 

King, who continues her work, has isolated more than 300 genes associated with multicellularity, many of them found in single-celled organisms. By combining different groups of genes, she can increase the likelihood of producing multicellular units.  

Multicellular organisms can be simple like balls or they can be complex with specialized tissues and organs. They can dig deeper into the earth or extend their range from a few feet to miles or across continents. There have been millions of species that constantly change the way the surface of the earth appears. We are now in a molecular age in which individual genes can be sequenced and their functions studied. 

If I see a picture of myself, I see my surface of skin and hair clothed or unclothed. With X-rays I can see my bones, but not as well as a human skeleton mounted in an anatomy laboratory. I have seen what my tissues look like from a box with a hundred or more slides that I studied at NYU as an undergraduate. 

I have lived through the discoveries of identifying my genes as made of DNA, and we are now capable of sequencing them and understanding what they do. Each finding adds to both our medical knowledge for pathologists and to basic science in understanding how a living organism works.  

I would not be surprised to see experiments that will produce synthetic multicellular organisms using genes from different organisms to produce differentiated cells for each task desired. It will be a biological engineering that goes beyond applications to the pharmaceutical industry. Think of them as microscopic or miniature tools. Imagine tools snipping away tumors less than a millimeter in diameter. Imagine such tools extracting and expelling miniature pellets of gold and rare metals from ocean water. 

For those who worry about unintended consequences of applied science, two things are important to consider. Such experiments should be well regulated by ethical and safety review boards by universities, hospitals and corporations. The odds of such synthetic organisms are remote. Similar safety concerns in the 1980s accompanied the development of genetically modified bacteria and yeast cells, which today continue to produce human insulin for diabetics, human growth hormone for children with pituitary hormone deficiencies and hundreds of other modifications.  

Elof Axel Carlson is a distinguished teaching professor emeritus in the Department of Biochemistry and Cell Biology at Stony Brook University.

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By Elof Axel Carlson

Elof Axel Carlson

It is impossible to know ourselves in all the aspects of our lives that we can examine. But we can know a lot about ourselves through science. 

I will start at the level most of us operate in — the macroscopic world in which we see ourselves as a person. I see myself as an old person, almost 85 years old. I see myself as a male, a husband, a father (three out of six of our children still living). I also see myself functionally — I am a scientist, a geneticist and historian of science.  

I have 12 grandchildren and three great-grandchildren. I am an American, born and mostly raised in Brooklyn. I did my undergraduate work at NYU. I got my doctorate at Indiana University with Nobel laureate H. J. Muller. I presently live in Bloomington, Indiana. I have sailed around the world twice teaching on board Semester at Sea. I have had 12 books published. I loved teaching and doing research at Queen’s University in Canada, at UCLA and at Stony Brook University. 

Biologically I have some knowledge of much of my gross anatomy and as a biologist I have some familiarity with my organ systems and how they work. I have observed some of my cells under a microscope when I took a course on histology at NYU as an undergraduate and I prepared slides of my blood. I have seen my 46 chromosomes when I had my karyotype taken some 50 years ago at UCLA. I have not yet had any of my 20,000 genes sequenced. 

But even if I had my entire genome sequenced, I know that no one reading those sequences would be able to infer my life described in the first three paragraphs of this essay because our social traits are largely acquired by where we grow up, the circumstances of our lives in the generation in which we are born and a good measure of luck.

 It was luck that gave me an opportunity to read classical literature aloud for five years to a blind teacher in my high school.  It was luck that made me meet the person to whom I am now married, and Nedra and I have had 58 wonderful years together.  

I am part cyborg with eye glasses (for reading), cataract-free plastic lenses in my eyeballs, six implants in my jaws and two hearing aids. I have the benefit of an altered immune system created by vaccinations that have spared me from diphtheria, typhoid fever, smallpox, pneumonia and many varieties of influenza. I’ve lived through measles, mumps and chicken pox without bad outcomes. When traveling around the world, I prevented malaria by taking daily Atabrine pills. I would probably have died 10 years ago had there not been statins to regulate my cholesterol metabolism.  

I know how I am connected in many ways. My biological ancestors are Swedish on my father’s side and Ashkenazic Ukraine on my mother’s side. My intellectual pedigree through Muller I have traced to Darwin, Newton and Galileo. It made me aware of how few compose the world of scholars in the immense diversity of humanity. 

I owe to many books aspects of my personality, values and goals in life. From Goethe, I have a Faustian personality and try not to repeat my activities each year. From Montaigne I learned to write personal essays. From Samuel Pepys I learned to keep a diary (over 100 volumes and still going). From Freud I learned to sublimate my discontents into works that enrich civilization. From Darwin I learned how all of life is connected and can be related to the past through his theory of evolution by natural selection. 

From Socrates I learned the importance of trying his credo, “Know thyself.” From Job I learned the inscrutability of fate and how limited is our control over our lives. From Kant I learned that ethics and moral behavior can be constructed from reason. From Epicurus and Epictetus I learned that one of the great benefits of life is choosing well and using, as best we can, what talents we have within the limits imposed by society’s circumstances. 

I think of myself as composed of layers of units. I am a unique organism. I have numerous organs that compose my physical being. I am composed of several trillion cells. 

The gene activity in my body and mind are in constant associations with past, present and anticipated activities of cells, some switched on, others off, and at different times and in different places in my body. It is a biological symphony of which I am mostly unaware.  

My cells have organelles that are also working on and off to make molecules, digest molecules and recycle molecules.  My organelles are composed of macromolecules whose organization and function have been worked out mostly since I was born. I know nothing of my life at the level of individual atoms save for those that are passing through membranes and ion channels or transported by proteins in my cells. 

I also know an important lesson of life. There is an enormous amount we do not know and humility alone should restrain us from acting as if we have certainty on our side, especially if our beliefs lead to intentional or unintentional bad consequences.  Know thyself may and does celebrate life but it can also be taken as a warning.  

Elof Axel Carlson is a distinguished teaching professor emeritus in the Department of Biochemistry and Cell Biology at Stony Brook University.

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in Greek mythology, he Caucasian Eagle was tasked by Zeus to torture Prometheus every day.

By Elof Axel Carlson

Elof Axel Carlson

Science is a way of knowing. In today’s world it is based on reason, experimentation, technology and a belief that the natural world can be explained without invoking the supernatural as an explanation. Components of this definition of science have been around ever since humans formed communities and left traces of their daily lives in caves, burial sites and waste disposal sites.  

But in oral lore and written accounts more than 2,000 years ago, three supernatural explanations were used to explain how science arose. In Genesis, we are told the story of Adam and Eve and how Eve was tempted to eat of one of two forbidden trees in the Garden of Eden. Eve and Adam ate of the fruit from the tree of knowledge. For this disobedience Adam and Eve were cursed with a life cycle ending in death as well as pain and a struggle to survive.  

We owe to Greek mythology two different ways knowledge came to humans. Prometheus felt sorry that humans were helpless victims of difficult environments and he gave them a tool, fire, to warm themselves and make their own tools and form a civilization. For this, Prometheus was punished and chained to a rock by Zeus and had an eagle devour his liver every day only to have it regenerate at night.    

The other Greek myth involves Pandora who was given guardianship of a closed box containing the environments of the future. Her curiosity got the best of her and she opened it, shutting in hope and releasing all the ills of the world — disease, hunger, war, failure and madness.   

Note that the biblical version uses material reward (appetite or self-indulgence) as the motivation for disobedience. Adam and Eve and all of humanity to come are punished for their act. Note that Prometheus, not mankind, is punished for giving a tool to humanity. Note that Pandora’s curiosity is blamed for the ills of society.  

These three mythic views of how knowledge came to humanity reveal a tension between the world seen by those invoking the supernatural and the views of those who innovate, who explore their curiosity about the world and who show how to apply knowledge to advance human happiness and desire for improvement of their circumstances.  

The tension between religion and science is not a winner takes all choice with either one side or the other being correct, historically or in practice. Scientists can betray the ideal of science through fraud, conflict of interest or indifference to real or possible bad outcomes of their work. Religious or not, humans frequently rationalize their behavior.  

It is the Prometheus version of the gift of fire to make tools and apply science to human welfare that most scientists would favor. Science is seen as a way of describing the world and changing harmful environments into safe ones. It is a tool that leads to new knowledge and experiments and endless applications.   

In Pandora’s universe curiosity is not seen as beneficial. It is seen as a dangerous behavior leading to the release of the evils of this world. What kept us safe before Pandora was some supernatural box in which those evils were contained. Pandora, like Eve, could not resist satisfying her curiosity. But unlike Adam and Eve, she was not looking for a material benefit symbolized by forbidden fruit.  

Note the role of compassion in the motivation of Prometheus. Note the lustful anticipation in Eve’s gullible acceptance of the snake’s guile and to the sexual nature of knowledge reflected by Adam and Eve making clothes as their first act after eating the fruit. Note the lack of forethought to unintended consequences in Pandora’s opening the box.  

While all generations of humanity have faced similar hardships of finding food, building shelters, raising a family and finding meaning in their lives, different generations have interpreted knowledge and its applications in many ways. But all three ancient views of the acquisition of knowledge share a belief, regardless of its origins or its occasional shortcomings, in the importance of knowledge and technology in order to live a better life.    

Elof Axel Carlson is a distinguished teaching professor emeritus in the Department of Biochemistry and Cell Biology at Stony Brook University

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The flowering plant Amborella trichopoda is the oldest ancestral form of the angiosperms .

By Elof Axel Carlson

Elof Axel Carlson

Flowering plants are familiar to us as bouquets and garden plantings that delight us as they emerge in spring and summer. They are collectively part of the angiosperms, which also include familiar trees with generous-sized leaves that are shed in the fall.

They first appear in the fossil record about 130 million years ago. For those not familiar with how old life on Earth is estimated to be by biologists, that is about 60 million years before the dinosaurs went extinct.

Ferns, mosses and conifer trees (like gingkoes) existed long before the angiosperms. If the angiosperms are arranged in a sequence from oldest to most recent types, the oldest ancestral form of the angiosperms alive today is found in the Pacific Ocean on New Caledonia, an island northeast of Australia and northwest of New Zealand. That flowering plant is known as Amborella trichopoda.

A lot has been learned about the biology and history of Amborella. Its pollen, or ovule, has 13 chromosomes (and thus its leaf, stem and root cells have 26 chromosomes each). The Amborella ancestor gave rise to 250,000 species of flowering plants. About 75 percent of them have seeds with two fleshy modified leaves called cotyledons.

If you eat a fresh green pea from a pod and look at it before you pop it into your mouth, it has two halves, which is why you call it split pea soup when you cook a bag of dried peas.

The flower of the Amborella trichopoda

The DNA of Amborella has been worked out. It has 870 million base pairs. These are organized as 25,347 genes. Shortly before Amborella arose, it had experienced a doubling of its chromosome number. No major changes have occurred in its chromosomes since that event. Its nuclear genes have few inserted repetitive sequences. But, curiously, its mitochondrial DNA has many horizontally transferred genes from algae, mosses and lichens.

The ancestral genome of the angiosperms can be inferred because the major branches of the angiosperms share that core set of genes. This will allow botanists and chemists studying plant evolution to work out the functions of these shared genes as well as the distinctive genes that gave rise to the six major branches of flowering plants.

Quite different is the loblolly pine. It is a gymnosperm rather than angiosperm. They have a much longer history on Earth than the angiosperms. The conifers are the most familiar of the gymnosperms whose seeds are “naked” and enclosed in cones. Imagine the pine cones used in foods and compare them to the peas and beans in your soups.

The loblolly pine can live up to 300 years.

The loblolly pine, or Pinus taeda, is a common pine tree found from Florida to Texas and as far north as New Jersey. The trees can live 300 years and they are a major source of industrial lumber and paper pulp. The name loblolly is from an English idiom for food boiled in pots producing soups, broths or porridges. It has the largest known genome of any living organism, 23.2 billion base pairs (about seven times more than human cells and about 22 times that of Amborella. Unlike Amborella, 82 percent of its DNA is repetitive (formerly called junk DNA) caused by infectious insertions of tiny sequences of DNA. It has 50,172 genes in its pollen, or ovule, genome and they are located in 12 chromosomes per gamete.

One of my six students who got their doctorates with me at UCLA, Ronald Sederoff, pioneered the molecular biology of woody plants using the loblolly pine. He devised a technique to insert genes into woody plants, enabling his laboratory to study how wood is formed and how genes could be studied without waiting many years to study their genetics.

I was very pleased to learn that he was the recipient of the Wallenberg Prize, which is given by the king of Sweden for a contribution to plant biology, a field that is usually overlooked in the Nobel physiology and medicine prize. He attended the ceremony in Stockholm last October.

Elof Axel Carlson is a distinguished teaching professor emeritus in the Department of Biochemistry and Cell Biology at Stony Brook University.

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