THE ASCENDANCE OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
SS9
muJation was right on target. Finnish scientists have recently shown that
when humans try to imitate the facial expressions of others, discrete
areas of the brain can be seen to emit metabolic signals: during mimetic
behavior thought is secreted. Indeed, Eric Kandel was awarded the
Nobel Prize in
2000
for showing that the release of neurotransmitters
from synaptic vesicles at nerve terminals is guided by chemical signals
of the sort that control secretion by liver cells. As Mlle. de l'Espinasse
blurted out to Dr. Bordeu in the
Reve d'Alembert,
"I can now proclaim
to all the world that there is no difference between a doctor awake and
a philosopher dreaming."
Diderot, Cabanis, and brain secretion remind me that the history of
Western science ever since Galileo
(eppur si muove!-and
still it moves)
has been enlivened by one-liners coined by philosophers, chemists, and
physicians generally out of favor with the legions of God. For example,
scientists have known for almost two centuries that we turn over our
bodily constituents-fats, proteins, nucleic acids, even bone-at fairly
constant rates. We reduce what we eat until there is "nothing there but
carbon, oxygen, and lime.... " In
1728,
Jacopo Bartolomeo Beccari,
who first discovered that wheat could be broken down into gluten and
starch, asked
"Che cosa siamo se non quello che mangiamo?"
(What
are we but what we eat?) In the same line, Diderot challenged d'Alem–
bert, in his
Reve,
"What do you do when you eat? You assimilate the
food be it vegetable or mineral and make it part of yourself. You make
flesh out of it. You make it become animal and you make it conscious."
Feuerbach had the advantage of German rhyme when he coined the
catchy phrase"
Mann ist was er isst"
(Man is what he eats) in an
1855
book review.
It
was a touch of one-upmanship, because the book he was
summarizing was Jakob Moleschott's popular text on the turnover of
bodily constituents. In that book, Moleschott established the mecha–
nist's motto: "No phosphorous, no thought." We now know that the
mechanist's motto was smack on. Paul Greengard, who shared the prize
with Eric Kandel, showed that the state of phosphorylation of a mole–
cule known as DAPP 32 regulates our moods, our feelings, and our
responses to drugs. These days, "No phosphorous, no thought" sounds
like a
reductio ad profundum.
Thought is not the only process governed by phosphorous. Each cell in
our body learns to interact with its environment by means of metabolic
thermostats set in part by addition or subtraction of phosphorous.
Nowhere is this regulation more critical than in our defenses against
microbes: anthrax, for example. George Bernard Shaw ridiculed a bio–
logical panacea of his day in
The Doctor's Dilemma;
his mocking slogan
