My blog

Author: dfmd

  • QuantumMind

    The Quantum Mind Black Book

    The quantum mind is a bottom up complex system powered by a quantum force field. It is alive and it is invisible.  My goal here is to sneak up on it and show it to you.

    Bottom up design.

    The classical creation system is top-down.  It was instantiated by the Israelites three millennia ago.They created words and metaphors and cobbled together a description of the human universe as starting with God.  Mankind found itself at the top of the world food chain. Top-down design made sense for us and it still does.  Sun gods riding golden chariots across the sky, other lesser Gods living on mountaintops.

    Nicholaus Copernicus in 1543 posthumously published his book, “De Revolutionibus Orbium et Celestium”.  He basically criticized top-down design which at the time was a quite dangerous deed which is why he said “don’t let anyone read this until I am in heaven”.  (possibly overheard at a book shop nestled near the Frombork Cathedral in Poland). 
    Galileo Galilei was inspired by Copernicus and helped design the telescope. He proved Nicholaus right and ended up under house arrest.  Fortunately, he knew people who knew people which saved him from being conflagrated like a Napa Valley vineyard.

    The resolution revolution.

    When Anton Leeuwenhoek improved the microscope in the seventeenth century, he was shocked to discover that the earth was carpeted with microbes. A hundred years later, Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch tied together microbes and infectious diseases.  And that was only a century and a half ago and was an early vision into the concept of bottom-up design.

    The persistent scientist Charles Darwin catalogued the tree of life and also ignited the creationism debate. Gregor Mendel, a Darwin contemporary mapped the genetics of plants and discovered the binary arithmetic of which Darwin had postulated. In fact, a copy of Darwin’s book, “On the Origin of Species”, was found in Mendel’s library. 

    The good news is you can believe in God and bottom-up design simultaneously. They are not mutually exclusive. 

    Can you have a design without a designer? Can you write a book without a brain? More on that later. We can stare up into the sky at a sunset and resonate with it without ever studying physics or climatology.  I suggest that the emergence of life is driven by quantum forces and want to make the case for this.

    Quantum force field

     For you non-cosmologists, quantum forces are the jiggling protons and electrons, a self-stirring quantum soup.  If you fall for that metaphor you will be close to understanding a bottom up system with its very own power supply.

    Complex System

    Bertram Russell and Alfred North Whitehead wrote an encyclopedia of mathematics.  Therein, they proclaimed that all problems could be solved using natural numbers and then challenged anyone to prove them wrong. Kurt Godel did that by creating complex system theory.  [1]   He used the concept of recursion in his proof.  Basically recursion means, “what goes around comes around”.  In software design one is able to write recursive algorithms.  The idea here is the quantum mind employs recursive algorithms with a vengeance.  More on this later

    Epigenetics

    Gregor Mendel, with his peapods, discovered a binary genetic code. The belief still persists to this day among medical professionals that it is largely a non-modifiable linear deterministic condition. A major discovery of the last decade is that Vitamin D is an epigenetic promoter. Interestingly, few practicing physicians are aware of epigenetics. The cell is covered with signaling platforms floating upon lipid rafts that reach inside through the kinase pathways to the genome.

    An intriguing example of epigenetics is the genodromous (to move from one species to another) migration of Borrelia Burgdorferi. She sleeps quietly in the belly of a deer tick until a gush of mammalian blood floods in.  Epigenetic triggers like Iron, Iodine and Sulfur ignite her energy pathways and she magically changes her clothing.  By swapping out her outer surface proteins (OSPA,B) she cloaks herself for the journey into the rich but dangerous mammalian milieu of natural killer cells and antimicrobial peptides.   Not only does embryonic ontogeny recapitulate phylogeny, it persists throughout life.

    It was discovered that our genetic code has over a thousand Vitamin D receptors. The vitamin D attaches to genes and switches them on and off. In other words, we can plink on the keys of our genetic code and modify the songs to which we must dance. The traditional view of the genetic code is that it is like a roll of music in a player piano. If you get a melodic Scott Joplin tune, you dance easily through life and live long. If you get a dissonant piece of music, your fate is to die young. There are numerous other gene modifiers that are being discovered that prolong life and prevent disease. Many are inhabitants of our food environment.

    Twenty years ago when the genetic code was mapped, the claim was that miraculous breakthroughs would soon follow but unfortunately, the gene map is mostly a generic script. Nobody has found the “Sound of Music” in there yet. To put it another way, analyzing the paint pigments will never yield up a sense of Mona Lisa’s smile.  It does not exist at the pigment level.  Complex systems are hierarchical and scalable. In hierarchical systems, information loss occurs in the transition phase.

    The only way to decode the genome is to give it to the quantum computer inside any human egg and watch it miraculously unfold. Unfortunately, we do not have the tools to observe deeply hierarchical life systems.  There is more parallel processing power in a fertilized chicken egg than in all the computers on the planet.

    After the War, Albert Einstein strolled around the Princeton campus with his friend Kurt Gödel. After Einstein’s cosmic relativity and Heisenberg’s quantum uncertainty, Gödel filled in the vast space between quarks and galaxies with the Undecidability theorem. He laid the foundation for complex system theory. 

    His discovery was based upon the obscure concept of the recursive algorithm (RA).  RA’s are the natural number equivalent of Alice’s rabbit hole. They are bottomless. An RA is a feedback loop.

    The most elegant evocation of Gödel’s work is the idea that, ‘truth is a more powerful concept than proof’.  Is it not intriguing that the most complex system in the universe is a living cell and that it did not even come into being until billions of years after the Big Bang fireworks?  The divine ballet of the genome is a deeply recursive algorithm and Gödel proved that we can never reach the bottom of it. Genetics is the script and epigenetics is the actual performance of the metabolic symphony orchestra.

    Biological systems are

    • highly nonrandom(biochemically individual) and
    • inherently contingent (critically dependent on unknown conditions).

    August 2012

    Quantum Signature

    Star Trek speaks of measuring quantum signatures.  Physicists also speak of them.  I offer an example.
    A morphine molecule travels through a blood vessel and eventually reaches the blood brain barrier (BBB). The brain must be protected and the BBB does that.  There are cells called glia that are servants of the brain.  The brain is the essential ball of neurons which lets us see, hear and taste and moves us on our random walk through the rugged fitness landscape.

    So the morphine molecule shows up and a micro glial police officer says “hold on, have a seat over there and wait”.  After a while, the morphine molecule becomes impatient and slips into the bathroom.  He happens to have a bottle of vinegar with him.  In bioscience, vinegar is called an acetyl group.  The morphine molecule sticks two acetyl groups to himself thereby changing his quantum signature from morphine to heroin (diacetyl morphine).  He walks out of the bathroom, the glial cop sniffs him briefly and says, “okay you can go on into the brain”.  And so begins a disease. 

    The Heroin molecule wanders around and eventually stumbles across a special receptor, the endorphin receptor. 

    The Metabolic Symphony Orchestra.

    I ascend from the depths of sleep.  It is as if the dreams fade behind a curtain. The music changes but never stops.  All the players in the metabolic Symphony Orchestra (MSO) are in unison.  I know this because I am in the control room.  During the night, a foot might complain of being cold and requests help, easy jobs like that, a flip, a blanket toss.  Check the clock, maybe think about bottom-up design and slip back into dreamland.  I am so happy that someone else is conducting the MSO. And who is that? It is the quantum mind.

    There is more processing power in the zygote of Drosophila melanogaster (a fruit fly) than in all the computers on the planet connected together. The quantum mind is invisible. We take it completely for granted.

    I slipped through the doors of my favorite restaurant. Outside the air is dark and chilled.  The warm humid air of the day now paints everything with a misty brush. I am good with that.

    I have been rattling around inside my head all day.  That never really stops though. 

    I think of the phase state transition of water as it goes from vapor to liquid and on, in maybe a month or so, to fluffy snowflakes or stone cold ice. 

    Remember the grade school conundrum when the teacher asked, “which came first the chicken or the egg”?  But then, she never provides the answer.  Eventually you realize she does not know herself.  Later on in a physics class I learned the phase state transition concept.  It explains how things like water molecules can go through phase changes and simultaneously absorb or release energy.

     I realized that the answer is, “neither came first” The chicken and the egg are merely different phase states of the same thing. Neither came first. Life came first.  Voila!   Done with that mystery!

    But now back to the restaurant.  The bricks in the sidewalk are drinking up the heat of the day and are letting the water vapor rest, perchance giving a drink to a flower or a tree or a tiny ant.

    But let’s move on into the restaurant.  It is like the ancient metaphor of the Israelites.  I am standing at the Tower of Babel.  Almost nothing is comprehensible. Verbal data streams swirl around collide, transgress, digress and yes also regress. Somebody just spilled her wine and a momentary bubble of quietude entraps me. And then the incomprehensible Babel resumes.

    I see the face of my best friend, her smile is almost blinding. My mind quits bumping around inside itself and orders me to approach.  We slide into adjacent barstools.  Our favorite bartender leaps into action and hands us menus. The background Babel evaporates like a wet towel in the Arizona sunshine.  All goes quite well. It is after all a well practiced food and beverage symphony.  We can chatter together like two parakeets discussing the meaning of life and not worrying about heat regulation, blood pressure regulation or where to store our arms and legs.  Eventually we get a message to quit eating and drinking and ask for the check.

    So who is in charge?  To which I reply the quantum mind.

    Imagine you are a cute blue Basophil (a kind of white blood cell. WBC’s are like the immune police).  Inside you are globs of blue histamine.  You my cute little basophil have the power to create a welt or a runny nose when the brain foolishly decides to eat a peanut or runaround in a field of ragweed.  If you could, you might ask will he ever learn? Has anyone noticed that the brain is capable of making the same mistakes over and over and over again.

    The quantum mind is a cluster of 100 billion quantum processors who are connected through a vast network of signaling molecules each with unique quantum signatures.

    The processors are eukaryotic cells.

    The quantum mind is the intelligence behind intelligent design.

    The quantum mind lives both inside but mostly outside the central nervous system.

    The quantum mind is the conductor of the metabolic Symphony Orchestra.

    The quantum mind owns emotion.

    Mental illness is not contained only in the cranium.

    The central nervous system thinks that it is in charge. That is its neurosis. The ignition of cognition predates the central nervous system.

     

  • Opioid addiction

    Opioid Addiction as an Innate Immune Disorder

    Scientific discovery is a wondrous thing.  It is a linear progression from vacuum to vacuum tubes, from melting sand into glass to constructing silicon wafers and then on to images jumping out of computer screens.  At various times, scientists have proclaimed that we are getting closer to wrapping up all the details. 

    There is a glaring exception to this idea of linear progression.  In living systems, a new discovery sometimes just creates more confusion.   When the opioid receptors were discovered, many thought we were getting close to solving the “pain problem”.  But now we are at the point where opioids have emerged as a greater problem than “the pain”.  My purpose here is to try to untangle this linear messiness and hopefully rescue Opioid Addiction from those who believe it to be a mental illness.[1]

    Scalability

    Living things are scalable. That means they are designed all the way down.  What is visible to the naked eye looks nothing at all like what appears under a microscope.  Even so, the disparate levels communicate seamlessly with one another, or so we believe.

    Man-made objects are not scalable.  Gazing into a Vincent van Gogh painting can create an emotion of “beautiful madness” inside us.  Analyzing its paint pigments on the other hand yields up no such sense.  Its madness simply does not exist at the pigment level. From whence cometh the beautiful madness then?

    Interoception is your brains representation of all sensations from your internal organs and the hormones in your blood and your immune system.  Your river of feelings might seem like it is flowing over you, but you are the river’s source. [2]

    What Dr Lisa Feldman Barrett is saying is that the conscious mind is the recipient of sensations from within us. A sensation is more than just one of the five senses

    Scalability is not just downward and tinier.   It can scale upward into emotions and abstractions that imitate reality and also provide us with an escape from reality. 

    It is not unthinkable that a quantum physicist could make a discovery that applies to cellular biology.
    There exists in living systems a symmetry on a deep level.  For example, enzyme systems coexist with others that have opposite effects

    Opioid receptors

    Let us get specific and examine the metabolic minutiae of the endorphin system.  It is unfortunate that the endorphin receptors got renamed to Opioid receptor.  It hides and obscures their true nature.  Opioid receptors (OR) are sub-micron in size and at least several thousand times larger than a molecule (> 10-10 meters).  Animal design owes much to our plant ancestors. It is not pure accident that a plant can produce the opium molecule that fits nicely onto our endorphin receptors.

    A central concept of opioid drugs is “tolerance”.  Everything we used to know about tolerance was derived from observing humans and questioning them.  Recently, studies on the submicron cellular level are telling a different story.  Opioid induced hyperalgesia (OIH) is another example of a visible world concept.  If one carefully interrogates an opioid addict, they usually express awareness of OIH on an emotional level. [3] Pain management doctors on the other hand mostly know it exists but do not sense it in their patients.  In a cognitively dissonant way, they simply treat it by increasing dosing.

    Toll receptors

    Research indicates that a great deal is happening in addiction that goes well beyond opioid receptors.   Toll receptors  were first discovered forty years ago inside fruit flies.  To everyone’s surprise, we also found them inside our brains.  Ancient single celled creatures dealt with an existential question.  When a molecule comes floating past, should it be eaten?  If they ate the wrong thing it could kill them.  They possessed an ancient Toll like receptors that would sniff out what floated past and determine if it could be eaten. 

    Clearly a correct diet is also vital to our survival.   So what do the Toll like receptors (TLR4) in our brain think of opium?   The short answer is that they do not like it.  In an unfortunate subset of mice and humans, they even hate it and react violently to it.  That reaction has a famous name, “withdrawal”.  Heroin does not just sit down on the endorphin (opioid) receptor. Our TLR4’s also grab it and set off an alarm. The alarm consists of a storm of molecules called cytokines and has names like interleukins. [4].[5] [6] [7]    The genetic basis of opioid addiction is determined by our innate immune system.
    The classical concept of the brain is it is a bundle of nerves located in different rooms with names like Amygdala, Hippocampus, Cerebrum and Cerebellum.  A realization is gradually emerging that there is a wireless brain in which messenger molecules (cytokines) quickly spread out like the packets on the internet. The prime initiators of these cytokines are a vast array of brain cells called Astrocytes.  Astrocytes even outnumber our neurons.  They come in different flavors. An important member of this family is the microglia.  They are the brain police. They are part of our innate immune system and are constantly trying to protect us.  Microglia have TLR4 receptors that are constantly sniffing around for molecules trying to sneak past the blood brain barrier.  There are other receptors like Pattern Recognition Receptors (PRR) that also excel at seeing pieces of bacteria.

    All these different and new pieces to the opioid story fall under the general name of the central immune system.  Opioid addiction is a disease of Central Immune Signaling

    Yes some people have an innate immune system that reacts strongly to opioids.  Opioid addiction has more to do with peanut allergy than it does with mental illness.  So instead of having to carry an Epipen like the peanut allergy people, opioid addicts should carry a Narcan syringe.

    So now we come to a strange irony.  The cure for withdrawal is the thing that triggers it in the first place. Please ponder on that.  Heroin both causes withdrawal and also “cures” it.  Addiction is a mental hamster wheel.

    Opioid “tolerance” should instead be called intolerance.  This raises an existential question.  If our Innate Immune System (IIS)  rejects them, why are we prescribing them?  Their ability to create persistent changes in our psyche that leads to long standing maladaptive behavior called opioid addiction (OA) has created an urgency about elucidating the cellular biological basis of OA. 

    All opioids are not equal. Some like methadone and Buprenorphine cause less intolerance.  Patients develop a dose ceiling for them unlike heroin of which most addicts can never get enough.  The heroin high is largely a myth.  Addicts consistently report that after the first week, the high disappears and is replaced by climbing out of a hole back to normal.  “Chasing the dragon”, the mythical and ephemeral heroin high, is the road to opioid overdose and death.

    The “endorphin high” achieved by exercise is the absolute most a heroin addict can hope for.  It is what brings them back to normal and allows them to show up for work each day.

    Chirality

    Chirality is the property of handedness.  For some unknown reason, most humans are right handed and for another unknown reason living things produce only left handed amino acids.  In 1848 at the age of 25, Louis Pasteur discovered molecular chirality.[8]  How then does one tell if a tool (like a monkey wrench) is left or right handed? If the tool is symmetrical in any of its three planes, then it is not chiral (handed).  Look at some tools and find their symmetrical plane.  In biochemistry, a left and right enantiomer is one of the two stereoisomers of a molecule.

    In 1963 a drug called Thalidomide was introduced as a treatment for the morning sickness of pregnancy.   The Thalidomide was a racemic mix.  Racemic means that it was a mix of both left and right handed molecules.  The left handed version caused an epidemic of birth defects while the right handed version cured morning sickness.  This ignited extensive research by the Pharma industry.[9]  Unfortunately, even pure enantiomers when introduced in vivo can undergo rapid racemization.[10]

    Methadone is a racemic mix with an extensive history as a treatment for opioid addiction.  Enantiomeric methadone has become a subject of research.[11]  It has been known since 1988 that opioid receptors have a mix of stereo selective and non-stereoselective sites. [12] [13]  Left handed methadone protects against heroin while the right handed kind does not.   Buprenorphine is a pure stereoisomer.  That is why smaller doses of it are required.

    Addiction the sixth sense. 

    I once had a shot of IV Morphine prior to a surgical procedure.  It made the air thick and I felt myself falling back into me. Three hours later, I vomited.  If that is what heroin is like, I would ask for a refund.  Vicodin takes away pain but the pain comes back worse (opioid induced hyperalgesia). 

    Some say, “with the first shot of heroin you are hooked”.  I do not believe that for a second.

    After interviewing hundreds of heroin addicts in depth, I find them all to be unique and  similar to one another.  Almost none drink alcohol, almost all smoke cigarettes. What does that mean.  The extant literature ignores these signs.

    The genome (genetic code) is sensate.   Our cells are covered with receptors that talk back to and advise the genome.  It listens and reacts.  We can sense molecules.

    A fundamental message in Medicine is that people are highly diverse.  Addiction is also diverse.  The opioid receptor lets the genome sense the Metabolic Symphony Orchestra.

    Heroin is invisible to the five senses. It enters stealthily and embraces a receptor that is a direct line to our genetic code.  It triggers a cascade of feelings and emotions inside our conscious mind. It has as much to do with the five senses as a Picasso painting has to do with a paintbrush. Addiction is a sixth sense that ignites and expands us and then steals away like a shifty politician,

    “Sometimes I wait for it, quiet like a beggar waiting for the bus the exhausted air a window to frame my watching, and it comes to me like a crazy corner of the eye conjuring, strutting like a thief in drag.
    I glimpse the odd indescribable loveliness of happiness like seeing Icarus tumble from the sky wings dripping wax as casually as sweat beading away from a body in the desert.  A molten pool to gather broken bones in after his inevitable descent.”
                        Brita Finlayson        2006

    Douglas R. Finlayson MD  August 2020

    [1] Maha Elsayed, Pierre Magistretti:  A new Outlook on Mental Illness: Glial involvement beyond the Glue.
    Front Cell Neurosci  2015; 9:468

    [2] Lisa Feldman Barrett PhD: How Emotions Are Made.  Houghton Mifflin, Harcourt 2017

    [3] Personal observations through interviews with opioid addicted patients.

    [4] Mark R. Hutchinson, Yehuda Shavit, Peter Grace, Kenner Rice, Steven Maier, Linda Watkins (2011)
    Exploring the neuroimmunopharmacology of Opioids: Review of mechanisms of Central Immune Signaling.
    Pharmacological Reviews 63:772-810 2011.

    [5] Milligan ED, et al (2000) Thermal hyperalgesia and mechanical allodynia producedby intrathecal administration of the human immunodeficiency virus-1 (HIV-1)envelope glycoprotein, gp120. Brain Res 861:105–116.

    [6] Milligan ED and Watkins LR (2009) Pathological and protective roles of glia in chronic pain. Nat Rev Neurosci 10:23–36.

    [7] Watkins LR, Hutchinson MR, Milligan ED, and Maier SF (2007b) “Listening” and“talking” to neurons: implications of immune activation for pain control and increasing the efficacy of opioids. Brain Res Rev 56:148–169.

    [8] Hegstrom R., Kondeuti K.: The Handedness of the Universe.  Scientific American January 1990

    [9] Eriksson T. et al.:  Clinical Pharmacoloogy of Thalidomide. Eur J. Clin Pharmacology. 2001 Aug;57(5):365-76  PMID 11599564

    [10] Jacques V et al.: Differentiation of antiinflammatory and antitumorigenic properties of stabilized enantiomers of thalidomide analogs.  Proc Natl Acad Sci 2015 Mar PMID 25775521

    [11] Moryl N. et al.: A phase I study of D-Methadone in patient with chronic pain.  J. opioid management 2016 Jan 12(1) 47-55  PMID 26908303

    [12] Shibinga NE, Goldstein A.: Opioid peptides and opioid receptors in cells of the immune system. Annu rev Immunol 1988. 6:219-249.

    [13] Guo-xi Xie, Goldstein Avram et al.: Chimeric opioid peptides: Tools for identifying opioid receptors types.  Proc Natl. Acad Sci. Apr 1990. Vol 87 pp 3180-3184

  • Lymes Disease Concepts

    Genodromous migration of borrelia

    Lymes Disease Concepts

    Lymes disease is caused by a bacterium called Borrelia Burgdorferi. An important test in its detection is the Western Blot test.  For the test, a large number of the bacteria are grown in a culture medium. A chemical is then added that causes the bacteria to break apart (lyse). At the same time, they are shaken violently to speed up their disintegration. The pieces are then poured onto a thin layer of gelatin.

    An electric current is applied to the gelatin. The different pieces start moving through the gelatin. The lighter smaller pieces move more quickly. The end result is that the Borrelia is spread across the gel according to weight/density. The different sized pieces are then identified as bands.  Three important bands are:
    P23  Outer Surface Protein A   (OspA)
    P31  Outer Surface Protein B    (OspB)
    P34  Outer Surface Protein C    (OspC)

    A government committee decided which of the bands were significant. The committee excluded two bands, bands P31 and P34. Vaccine manufacturers held patents on those bands.  

    1. A person who receives the vaccine would test positive for P31 and P34.
    2. “Therefore”, nobody should be tested for them.

    That makes no sense unless you are a patent holder.  P31 and P34 as outer surface proteins are most visible to the immune system and were considered the best candidates for stimulating an adaptive immune response. A person infected by a tick would likely produce detectable P31 and P34 antibodies. 

    The Lymes vaccine was approved and then released to the market in the late 90s. After four years, Merck withdrew it because it was defective and numerous lawsuits claimed it was harmful. 

    Genodromous Migration

    Hominids have struggled with the genodromous migration (inter-species movement) of parasites.  Our blood is replete with essential elements that ignite the epigenetic transformation of Borrelia.  When the tick drinks from a deer, horse or human, the blood arrives in the Tick’s belly.  The Tick saliva interferes with blood clotting. It begins drinking for many hours.

    those essential elements trigger changes in Borrelia that prepare it for long-term habitation in a new host.  

    The fish people (Ichthyologists) created an interesting word: anadromous.  It means upward migration of fish.  Oceanic creatures swim upwards into the estuaries of the great rivers and encountered new variables such as freshwater and bears.  According to Darwin, the survivors found a new home. 
    Some turned around and swam back to the ocean (catadromous or downward migration), while others basically just swam around from place to place (Epidromous). 

    Mammals have developed the ability to incorporate important elements into their metabolism.  Things like Iron, Iodotyrosine, thiols, sterols and vitamins are enzyme cofactors and DNA signaling molecules that trigger changes.  They also transform Borrelia.   This transformation helps it to survive and evade host immune detection by switching its outer garments (its outer surface proteins.)    The physical migration from a tick at sixty degrees ambient temperature to a warm blooded mammal ignites epigenetic changes. 

     Borrelia transforms its outer coat.  

    Genodromous Migration of Borrelia

    Genodromous is a neologism (new word), which means I made it up.  Geno- is race or species, and
    -dromous means movement or  migration. They originate in Greek. Anadromous is a neologism invented by the ichthyologists to describe the upward migration of fish from the ocean into the estuaries of the rivers.  Catadromous is downward migration back into the ocean. I thought I would toss Genodromous into the word pool using Wikipedia. After about a week, wiki notified me that an ichthyologist had fished it out again. I appealed and actually spoke with an ichthyologist with a measured British accent. I explained that ana- and genodromous could coexist just like kinetic and aesthetic coexisted. They were after all just metaphors sharing a Greek suffix. No, he said.  I was bemused, chastened and amused.   I perceived it as cognitive dissonance, a struggle between his brain and his quantum mind.

    Bacterial genes encode not just for winter coats, but also an outer covering that allows them to glide more effortlessly inside humans.  

    The tick must remain attached to a mammal host for part of the day before it can become infectious.  During that time, the Borrelia can go through thirty generations of reproduction that would take humans 1000 years.  It is evolution writ small.  Bacteria can express important design changes through these successive generations.  The concept of a persistent infection is hinged on the idea that the prokaryote can evolve itself in a hostile environment that provides a rich supply of nutrients to sustain itself.

    After many hours of feeding, the Tick stops sucking blood and flow reverses.  The Borrelia spirochete is a swimmer and has tiny oars called flagella.  It can swim through the skin of the victim.  A classic sign of Lymes Disease is the “Bullseye rash”.   The innate Immune System does not recognize the invader in its camouflage, a new Outer Surface Protein Coat.  

    The “New Outer Coat” is invisible to the innate immune system.  The Bullseye rash is proof of that.  For many hours, the Borrelia swims through the skin and no redness (inflammation) is visible. The outer red ring of the bullseye rash tells us that the immune system has woken up and is attacking the borrelia. 
    The borrellia can also produce a slime in which it hides from the immune cells. Antibiotics can diffuse through the slime and attack the borrelia.

    Prokaryotes created themselves over 4 billion years ago.  They are single celled creatures that use DNA to reproduce.  What is emerging however, is the concept that DNA is also a signal processor.  The cell is covered with signaling platforms floating upon lipid rafts that reach inside through the kinase pathways to the genome (DNA).

    It receives messages from its environment and is able during its life to modify its journey across a rugged fitness landscape.  Gregor Mendel, with his peapods, discovered a genetic code.  The code fits nicely into binary number theory.  After Mendel’s  passing, a book written by Charles Darwin was discovered in his library.  He was a generation after Darwin and was obviously familiar with the “Voyage of the Beagle”.

    The belief still persists to this day among medical professionals that it is largely a non-modifiable deterministic condition. Interestingly, few practicing physicians are aware of epigenetics.  A simplistic model of methyl groups attaching themselves to genes and smuggling themselves into their progeny misses the point that genes are actually signal processors, tiny quantum computers. 

    In other words, we and also parasites can plink on the keys of the genetic code and modify the songs to which we dance. The traditional view of the genetic code is that it is like a roll of music in a player piano. Epigenetics is the key to understanding living dynamical systems and how the music of the metabolic symphony is written.  It applies to ticks, as well as humans.  

    Douglas R Finlayson MD October 2013.

  • For your Sins

    Three Millenia ago, the Israelites began creating the metaphors that described the
     rise of humanity out of the Stone Age and provided the word tools for our emergent minds. For this sin, taking away the dialogue from oligarchs and giving it to ordinary people they were reviled.


    .A decade ago, Sheila and I walked the pastures and through the ancient stone buildings of my mother’s ancestral Irish farm. My Grandfather Moses O’Rourke was born on the farm and in 1900 set sail for America to leave the English Tyranny behind him.

    A Local farmer asked me,  “So, what is your job?” I replied, “medical doctor”, to which he said,  “Ah, for your sins“.    We giggled about that for years and finally Sheila figured it out.  “You have to tell people things they don’t want tohear.”

    Humans have been enslaved by their own kind since before the Israelites told the story of it.  And now, Israel is under attack again or has it just never ended?  The Wars continue like some recurring madness.  Name the years, 1914, 1939, 1948, 1967 and the list continues along with the USA invasions in the Middle East and Afghanistan.
    Who can keep count?  Perhaps, we are not that interested. We study the Crusades, Mongols, and Ottomans only in arcane books and classrooms inside old schools.  Have you read the Art of War by Sun Tzu? Please do.

  • Alternative Medicine