“I don’t feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am. The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning”
― Michel Foucault
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Scientists at the Gladstone Institutes have discovered that a certain type of DNA damage long thought to be particularly detrimental to brain cells can actually be part of a regular, non-harmful process. [1]
Scientists have long known that DNA damage occurs in every cell, accumulating as we age. But a particular type of DNA damage, known as a double-strand break, or DSB, has long been considered a major force behind age-related illnesses such as Alzheimer’s. Today, researchers in the laboratory of Gladstone Senior Investigator Lennart Mucke, MD, report in Nature Neuroscience that DSBs in neuronal cells in the brain can also be part of normal brain functions such as learning – as long as the DSBs are tightly controlled and repaired in good time.
Learning entails the notion of destruction. Every time you learn something new, what you knew up to then is destroyed. Literally. And this applies even to learning completely new things: replacing “nothing” with “something” is equally “destructive” as a process. What you once knew, what you once were as a human being, is destroyed to give place to your “new self” – ready and equiped with new knowledge and understanding.
Say goodbye to your old self. Say hello to your new “you”.
Infectious bacteria have for the first time been caught performing “biological alchemy” to transform parts of a host body into those more suited to their purposes, by a team in Edinburgh.
The study, in the journal Cell, showed leprosy-causing bacteria turning nerves into stem cells and muscle. [1]
Change is part of the world. And those who do not believe in alchemy, all they have to do is take a look at the world around them. Iron is turning into gold every minute. Substances are transforming into others continuously, via chemical reactions, transmutations, transformations…
But even though “Change” is not even possible (see “change” related articiles in Harmonia Philosophica here and in Blogger – e.g. here), things DO change all the time. They are the same and yet different every moment.
Humans are in need to believe that stability is there.
Humans find it difficult to understand how One can be changing and yet remain the same.
Humans are in need NOT to believe in Alchemy…
All of our cells seem to be the same from a genetical point of view. Yes? No. A new study claims that the majority of the cells in our body have from small to great differenced in their genes, due to changes in the genome as the cells divide. [1] The question of what is the thing that makes us “us” becomes more and more difficult as nre discoveries are made. With a constantly changing brain (see “brain plasticity” in Google or “brain” tag in Harmonia Philosophica portals), being made more out of bacteria and microbes than “normal” cells (see “Human body is 90% microbes and bacteria. Who is in control?“), which anyway have each a different gene pool… Difficult to see what makes me “me”. Or too easy?
TIP: The “solution” to the problem could be that we are not made only out of matter. So something immaterial makes us to be “us”…
