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kilkennyobserver.ie
The Kilkenny Observer Friday 05 November 2021
Science & Wellbeing EVERY morning we wake up and find we are still here. Another day another dawn — breathing, eating, and working so you can keep breathing, eating and working. Basically, you are trying to hold it all together while having a little fun. Then, after about 16 hours, you will drop back into bed with one day less left in your life, knowing you have to repeat the whole thing again tomorrow. This is the reality, in one form or another, for every human being on the planet. It has also been the reality, in one form or another, for every human being since we emerged as a separate species some 200,000 years ago. What is it all about? What is it all for? Is there a mystery of life? Can science answer this basic weirdness, or is there a fundamental mystery of life? Once I did a public debate with a guy who was into transhumanism (which essentially holds that one day we will merge with computers). He was adamant that ultimately science would explain all facets of the world. In the end, nothing would remain hidden before its allilluminating gaze. But this is an omission is an understanding of what explanations are for and the limits of what they can do. Can science explain life? The answer someday will be “mostly yes,” if what we are aiming for are the processes at work in life. Science has already successfully deployed the technique of reduction to see the building blocks of life. Reduction means looking for explanations or successful predictive descriptions of a system by focusing on its smaller-scale constitutive elements. If you are interested in a human body, then reduc-
Can science answer this basic weirdness, mystery of life?
tions lead down from organs to cells to DNA to genes to biomolecules and so on. That approach has obviously been spectacularly successful. It has not, however, been enough. The frontier now seems to be understanding life as a complex adaptive system, meaning one
in which organisation and cause occur on many levels. It is not just the atomic building blocks that matter; influences propagate up and down the scale, with multiple connected networks from genes to the environment and back. Information may play an essential role here
in ways that do not occur in non-living systems. But the deeper question remains: will this ongoing process of explanatory refinement exhaust the weirdness of being alive or the mystery of life? We humans invented the marvellous process called
Prozac could be now used to treat blindness PROZAC is a widely used antidepressant. Data indicates that the drug could be used to prevent blindness due to macular degeneration. Getting a new drug approved by the various global regulation bodies can take more than a decade and cost hundreds of millions, if not billions, of euro/dollars. Much of that time and cost goes toward the meticulous process of showing the drug is safe. Some scientists are hoping to streamline this process by discovering unknown therapeutic activity in drugs that are already FDA approved. ‘Repurposing’ drugs in this way can reduce the cost and time for new treatments to reach the market, as it is not necessary to demonstrate safety rigorously a second time. The best- known example of drug repurposing is sildenafil (Viagra), which was originally used to treat
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Ah, sweet mystery of life, I hear you calling ...
high blood pressure and angina, until it was shown to have highly marketable side effects. A new study from the University of Virginia School of Medicine suggests fluoxetine (Prozac) could be repurposed to prevent age-related macular degeneration (AMD), which is the leading cause of irreversible blindness among those over age 50 and affects an esti-
mated 200 million people worldwide. Those who suffer from AMD experience slow vision loss due to the death of retinal cells. This death is driven in part by the accumulation of RNA transcripts of Alu elements, segments of DNA that were once considered “junk” but have been shown to contribute to biological functions and diseases. As Alu-encoded RNA moleculesbuild up in a cell, they set off a “danger alarm.” This signals to the cell that it is unhealthy, and it initiates a cascade of events that lead to the cell’s death. Despite dozens of clinical trials, no treatment has yet proven effective at stopping this process. When the research team began their hunt for a drug to repurpose, they did not examine every FDA approved drug (which number about 1,300). Instead, they looked for approved drugs
that were structurally similar to a specific small molecule, CY-09, which prevents the danger alarm from sounding. They found that CY-09 and fluoxetine share a molecular structure: a (trifluoromethyl)phenyl branch. The team of researchers studied two health insurance databases containing data on over 100 million Americans. They found that patients who were taking fluoxetine were 15 percent less likely to develop AMD than patients who were not. This discovery is important for the drug development pipeline, as it further bolsters confidence in a successful market release. Given that fluoxetine has already been shown to be safe in humans, the researchers hope these findings will allow them to quickly begin performing randomised controlled trials of fluoxetine for the treatment of AMD.
science to understand the patterns we experience around us. We did this because we are curious creatures by nature and because we also hope to gain some control over the world around us. But here is the key point: experience is always more than the explanation. (That is the takeaway from a philosophical thought experiment called Mary’s Room.) The direct, unmediated totality of experience can never be corralled by an explanation. Why? Because experience is the source of explanations. “Experience” can be a difficult position for discussion. It is so close and so obvious that, for some people, it does not seem like anything at all. But for many across the whole of existence, it has been a central concern. For the philosophies of classical India and Asia, it was always the starting point. For philosophers in the West, it made its most recent reappearance as a topic in the works of William James and “phenomenologists” like Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau- Ponty. For all of these thinkers and writers, experience was not something that could be taken for granted — it was the ground from which all other questions became possible. Sometimes it has been called “presence.” Sometimes it has been called “self-luminosity.” Stephen Hawking even acknowledges it when
he asked, “What puts the fire into the equations?” That fire is experience. It is the verb “to be,” and the only way into being is through experience. The key point here is that direct, lived experience is not amenable to explanation. We can theorise about perception and cognition. We can do experiments to test those theories. But even if we gave you an account of what every nerve cell in your brain at every nanosecond was doing, it would still not be experience. It would be nothing more than a list of words and numbers. Your actual and direct experience of the world — of the tart taste of an apple or of looking into the eyes of someone you love — would always overflow the list. There would always be more. That is because explanations always take some particular aspect of lived experience and separate it out. Explanation is like the foreground. But experience is beyond foreground and background. It is an inseparable holism, a totality that does not atomise. It is not something you think in your head; it is what you live as a body embedded in surroundings. That is how every moment of our strange, beautiful, sad, tragic, and fully amazing lives is revealed moment by moment. Explanations may help in specific circumstances, but they can never exhaust that ongoing revelation that is the mystery of life. Is life a mystery? It is good to remember Søren Kierkegaard’s famous admonition: “Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.” This perspective does not diminish science in any way. That is because our experience of science itself heightens our appreciation of the world, like the rush you feel when you understand why the sky appears blue or blood appears red. So yes, life is a mystery, but that does not mean we are left in ignorance. Like a skier effortlessly driving down a steep slope, or a pianist bringing us a beautiful sonata, we can know this mystery but not with words, equations, and explanations but by living it thoroughly with body and heart and mind.
