Everything is Chemistry

 

 

It’s an interesting fact that we often don’t appreciate something until we begin to lose it. I notice this phenomenon more as I get older. Last month, one of my eyes decided not to look to the right, so I saw two of everything on my right side. It caused me to remember that with only one eye you have no depth perception. If you reach for a door nob or try to catch something you reach too far or not far enough.  I found myself ignoring my right side, which caused me to run into things, and in the car I constantly had to remind myself to turn my head to the right to avoid driving into something. Fortunately it cleared up after a month or so, but it was scary. The doctor was reassuring. She said, “It was just a small stroke.”  

There are many other examples. I no longer can put off going to the bathroom. A sudden urge is an emergency, and standing up to go makes it even more urgent. I can no longer understand people when they talk to me, and, you may not have noticed, but the closed captioning on TV is often just jibberish. My wife gets tired of repeating herself, and she can’t understand why I can’t just “turn up your hearing aides.” I’m not as strong. I can’t balance without a cane. My joints hurt, and my neck and back. I can’t remember names or words to express myself. I can’t sleep well without a breathing machine which attaches to my face with a tight uncomfortable mask. I don’t get thirsty anymore, so I have to remember to drink. I choke when I swallow so my meals are punctuated by fits of coughing. My eye’s get dry and burn, so I have to carry a bottle of eye drops in my pocket. 

The latest experience that made me appreciate my body, at least the way it used to be, is constipation. I’ve never had constipation, or headaches, for that matter. Oh gosh. I hope that doesn’t jinx me. Anyway, I now have to balance Metamucil and Miralax, eat lots of fiber, and drink plenty of water, even if it means getting up four times during the night to empty my bladder instead of three. I have to pay attention to the consistency of my stool. Is it too hard to push out, too sticky to clean off? Fortunately I don’t worry about how it smells. I lost my sense of smell years ago. This is almost too disgusting to talk about, but I am coming to a point, slowly as it may seem. 

What this brought to mind was how remarkable it is that we’re able to digest all the stuff we eat: from tough meat and fish, to all sorts of vegetables and grain. We do though, and it’s all converted into a solid brown cylindrical mass, uniform, digested, with all the nutrients removed. If you think about it, it’s truly amazing. If I gave you an average meal and asked you to digest it, not just that but remove the nutrients for use, I’ll bet you couldn’t do it, even if you had a complete chemical lab to use, yet our body does it every day, while we’re going about our usual routine, unaware of the miracle we’re witnessing. 

How does our body accomplish this remarkable feat? We now understand, through centuries of scientific research, that the digestive system has acid, strong enough to burn your skin, enzymes, often specific for a certain chemicals. It is full of bacteria which would kill you if they were released into the blood stream, but somehow the intestine shields us somehow from these dangerous substances. Even people with damage to their digestive systems: bleeding ulcers, raw and scarred intestines, almost always manage to digest their food and extract the nutrients they need. 

And all this made me think – why are you not surprised? – of my wise cousin, Steve. He used to say: “everything is chemistry.” From astronomy to geology – Steve is a geochemist – to agriculture, to engineering, to physics, to human physiology -as in digestion- even to psychology. Everything is made of chemicals or produced by the interaction of chemicals. Just think about it. It’s true. But what difference does it make? It seems like an oversimplification. 

If you take what he said seriously though, and think about how every substance, every process, can be broken down into elemental particles or reactions, that is, chemistry- I’m almost there- it makes you humble. 

When I studied medicine, I was amazed at the complexity of the human body: the nerves and blood vessels, the bony structure and how it works to enable us to move in and manipulate our environment. I learned about the complex interaction of hormones, genes, enzymes, about the digestive system, as I mentioned above. And now, almost sixty years later, science has made huge advances. It boggles the mind. The more I think about it the more overwhelming it is. You really have to specialize in order to understand just a small area of medicine, and every area of science is the same: Physics, chemistry, engineering, computer science. 

And how do scientists identify and understand the chemicals that make up each little area of science. By the scientific method. First, a scientist, usually an expert in a small area of science that he or she has studied for years, has an idea. Then he, along with a group of his colleagues, fashions an experiment to test his idea or ‘hypothesis.’

The experiment requires time, money, special equipment, often government approval. If it involves humans, it may have to be performed first on animals, and then approved by an ethics committee before it’s actually performed on humans.  If the experiment gets over all these hurdles the results are submitted to the review board of a scientific journal and if approved, it is published. Then the report is often accompanied by a critical editorial written by a recognized authority in the field, analyzing its strengths, weaknesses, significance, and recommendations for further research. At this point the scientist is just getting started. Other scientists, experts in the same area, often from different countries, publish their own critiques of the study. Others try to repeat the same study to see if they achieve the same results. The process goes on for years and most often the whole idea is discarded. A scientist will consider him or herself fortunate if he makes one significant discovery during his lifetime. 

And that brings me to my point – I’m almost there. Science is so complex; scientific knowledge is so advanced, that the average person, even the exceptional person, can only understand a part of it, and that only if he or she spends years of study. That is why it irritates me when I hear someone discounting the value of immunization, say, or questioning the judgement of a doctor and scientist like Anthony Fauci, one of the most knowledgeable epidemiologists in the world. 

Like my cousin Steve says, everything is chemistry. Everything can be broken down into finer and finer elements and processes, using the scientific method. No one is smart enough to second guess this process. No one is smart enough to disregard the accumulated knowledge of the past. The universe is so complex that even the incredible knowledge we have accumulated over history is still tentative, still being reexamined, questioned by scientists around the world.