I’ve been giving some thought lately to the concepts of quackery and legitimacy, of reputation and credibility. What is it that constitutes acceptance by the scientific community, and what is it that causes some people to be considered charlatans?

Take, for example, the concept I’ve been discussing recently, that belief determines biology. There is no shortage of disdainful pages decrying this type of nonsense as New Age mysticism.

That belief determines biology may or may not be true. That it is New Age mysticism may or may not be true. What sparks my curiosity, though, is the basis on which these determinations are made, and the messianic conviction with which they are delivered.

For example, there’s nothing New Age-y about the idea that our emotions produce physical consequences. We need look no further than adrenaline to prove a scientifically accepted and tangible mind-body connection.

And quantum physics has certainly shown to the satisfaction of the scientific community that matter is energy, and energy matter—this isn’t new.

Being only the merest layperson in this discussion, I am not trying to make a scientific argument one way or the other. What I am trying to understand, and what I welcome enlightenment on, is what makes one person a revolutionary scientist and another person a quack. I’m trying to understand the process by which some radical ideas are accepted as ‘true’ and propagate memishly throughout laboratories across the globe while others languish in tea rooms and underfunded, second-rate schools.

I’m quite confident that Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping Point arguments and Duncan Watts’ equally convincing counterarguments could offer us some lessons here, lessons about what makes an idea go viral and how much of a theory’s success depends on its timing.

I can only say that I would hope that those in our midst charged with exploring the mysteries of the universe would be the ones with the most open minds, just as I would hope that our politicians would be the ones with the greatest capacity to empathize with people from all walks of life—even (gasp!) those from the other party.

I invite your speculations if you know nothing of the topic, and your well-informed wisdom if you happen to be enmeshed in it. Help me understand the forces at work here, so that we can all become more aware.

On January 28, Hsien-Hsien Lei wrote about the American Journal of Medical Genetics Special Issue on Children and Genetics. One item in particular caught my attention: a discussion of the psychosocial effects of predictive genetic testing in minors:

Harms described included knowledge of future illness, witnessing distress in parents, negative effects on family relationships and friendships, effects upon employment and school, experiencing regret, feeling guilty and having to confront difficult issues…

The study does describe beneficial effects as well. But does the harm that comes from knowing you may contract a disease outweigh the benefits?

In additional, there’s the self-fulfilling prophecy question:

Does a belief that you may contract a disease increase the likelihood that you will?

The work we do at VortexDNA builds on the foundation laid by epigenetics, literally, ‘above-genetics’: the study of the factors that determine whether our genes get turned on or off and how they eventually manifest.

Epigenetics offers an understanding of why people with certain genes get cancer while others remain tumor-free. It brings a greater depth to the notion that we are determined by our genes—in reality, there are myriad factors that contribute to the behavior of each of our genes. Recent science shows quite clearly that we hold a far greater ability than you may have thought to choose how our genes behave.

Bruce Lipton outlines this concept in his book quite clearly. Single cells respond to direct stimuli, like moving toward food or away from toxins. Multicellular communities, like people, behave a bit differently. In order to capitalize on the advantages offered through belonging to a gang, cells agree to answer to a leader: the brain. If there’s a conflict between the cell’s isolated imperative and the brain’s command, the brain wins. As Lipton says:

Our responses to environmental stimuli are indeed controlled by perceptions, but not all of our learned perceptions are accurate. Not all snakes are dangerous! Yes, perception “controls” biology, but… these perceptions can be true or false. Therefore, we would be more accurate to refer to these controlling perceptions as beliefs.

Beliefs control biology!

This concept is tremendously empowering. It means that we’re not subject to the whims of a DNA that we have no control over. It means we can choose the type of life we want to live, right down to our level of health. Our beliefs and our intention are directly causative of our experience.

At VortexDNA, we’ve taken the concept of epigenetics and the relationship between belief and biology, and explored it mathematically. What we’ve found is this:

Human intention is governed by the mathematics of complex systems.

Those same beliefs that control our biology; that same intention that determines our experience, can be expressed mathematically, with predictive characteristics.

This math can represent the level of alignment between two people. It can determine the strength of a company’s values, or how likely you might be to enjoy a particular book.

Knowing that your beliefs control your biology, would you still choose genetic testing? Would you choose to have your children genetically tested? Or would you invest your effort in consciously designing the life you want?

Summary: This post continues on the discussion of synthetic genomes begun two days ago, and discusses the difference between building DNA and creating life.

Subsequent to the announcement that scientists at the J. Craig Venter Institute had ‘created life’ (which I commented on here), Wired’s Carl Zimmer spoke up as the voice of reason in Artificial Life? Old News:

When and if Venter’s team does create a viable synthetic life form, our ignorance will remain profound. Out of 382 genes that the scientists have identified as potentially essential, 110 of them are absolute mysteries. Scientists have almost no idea what they’re for. There’s nothing unusually mysterious about Mycoplasma’s genes — other species have genomes loaded with genes of unknown functions. Scientists have gotten very good at manipulating genes — at copying them or using them to make biotechnology products like insulin — but they still know relatively little about how genes work together in living things.

Creating a new living thing will just mean creating a new set of mysteries. To solve them, scientists will have to plod away with a vast number of experiments. Only then will they get a deeper understanding of life.

Alexis Madrigal, also of Wired, offered a brilliant follow-up titled, Synthetic Biology: It’s Not What You Learned, But What You Made:

When I interviewed Tom Knight, one of the fathers of synthetic biology, about the international Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) competition, he encapsulated the difference between biologists and engineers with a joke:

The biologist goes into the laboratory in the morning and she discovers that the system she’s looking at is two times as complicated as she thought it was. Great! she says, I get to write a paper. The engineer goes into the lab, gets the same result and says, “Damn. How do I get rid of that?”

One method of reducing complexity is to simply ignore it. The approach is called “black boxing” and it’s common in many types of engineering. A black box is a piece of a system that you view merely in terms of what goes in and what comes out. If you drink five beers (x), you know you will get drunk (y). You don’t have to know all the complexities of what the ethyl alcohol does to your brain, you just know, if X then Y.

A perfect example of “black boxing” is the mechanism the yeast uses to stitch the four long strands of DNA that Venter’s team created into the completed genome. A biologist would probably want to understand how that works. An engineer would take it at face value and say, “Great. Let’s use it.” And that’s what they did.

Have the people at the J. Craig Venter Institute done something difficult and wonderful? Absolutely. Have they created life? No more than a surgeon who detaches siamese twins. No more than a botanist who grafts grapevines. No more than any man and woman who come together to procreate.

My mother, Annemarie Colbin, titled her Ph.D. thesis Wholistic Nutrition: From biochemistry to chaos, complexity, and quantum physics. In it, she built on the framework of Einstein’s wave-particle duality, which essentially says that everything is both a particle and a wave. If everything is both a particle and a wave, she reasoned, then you can have particle nutrition and wave nutrition, particle nutrition being the calories and vitamins and carbohydrates, and wave nutrition being the reason why a pill will never replace a meal made by your grandma.

On her website, she quotes the Dietary Goals for the United States, 1978:

There is no definitive evidence that food composition described solely in terms of all known nutrients would be an accurate measure of total food value.

Craig Venter and his colleagues put the particles together; the waves were black-boxed by yeast and E.Coli. You are more than a mass of bits cooperating obligingly to perform mundane tasks. You too are a wave.

I welcome your reactions.

Summary: This post discusses scarcity economics and explores the possibility that much of what we consider scarce is in fact infinite.

“In order to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe.” -Carl Sagan

“Even the most fantastic endeavor is just a simple rearranging of energy.” -Kaila Colbin

The definition of economics, by Lionel Robbins via Wikipedia:

“…the science which studies human behaviour as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses.”[2] Scarcity means that available resources are insufficient to satisfy all wants and needs. Absent scarcity and alternative uses of available resources, there is no economic problem.

I am no economist, but that won’t stop me from suggesting that the traditional definition of economics has spilled over into realms of life where it should have no authority, damaging and limiting our abilities to explore our true human potential.

The traditional and simplistic definition assumes that ’scarcity’ is a fact and that resources are fixed. We’ve got a scarce amount of money, of land, of food, of iPods; how are we going to effectively distribute them amongst the scarce amount of people?

This definition immediately instills a sense of fear. How can I make sure I get my piece of the pie? What if I miss out? It is a zero-sum game, where I have to worry more about myself than others, because if they win, I lose. One iPod for every two people: if you get one, I don’t.

Unfortunately, the ‘fact’ of scarcity is often a myth. Take, for example, the world’s food supply. We often assume that there just isn’t enough food for everyone, and hope that genetically engineered superseeds will supercede our inability to provide for the hungry. In reality, according to InfoChange:

Abundance, not scarcity, best describes the world’s food supply. Enough wheat, rice and other grains are produced to provide every human being with 3,200 calories a day. That doesn’t even count ­vegetables, beans, nuts, root crops, fruits, grass-fed meats, and fish. Enough food is available to provide at least 4.3 pounds of food per person a day worldwide — ­enough to make most people fat! The problem is that many people are too poor to buy readily available food. Even most “hungry countries” have enough food for all their people right now. Many are net exporters of food and other agricultural products.

The problem with food isn’t one of scarcity; it’s one of perception and one of prioritization. We can discuss whether or not governments are obliged to provide sustenance to people who can’t otherwise afford it, but regardless of your opinions on the matter, one thing is clear: the problem can’t be solved with more food.

Food is a tangible example, but the concept of scarcity has spilled over into attributes of our lives where it doesn’t belong. A few weeks ago, Mike Masnick at Techdirt wrote a great post called Is Piracy the Leading Indicator of Innovation? In it, he discusses the economics of infinite goods:

Perhaps an easier way of thinking about it is to just shift your thinking about any infinite good. Stop thinking of it as a product to be sold, and start thinking of it as a resource or an input in any other market. If you had unlimited resources that could be used to grow any other market, of course those infinite goods are going to help grow markets. You just need to recognize it’s a non-zero-sum game, thanks to infinite resources.

Here are some examples of things that many people treat as scarce, when in reality they are infinite:

• Happiness
• Curiosity
• Encouragement
• Peace
• Fulfillment
• Self-improvement
• Love

I encourage you all to take more than your fair share of these resources, and I guarantee you won’t be depriving anyone else.

If you’re wondering what I mean, consider the words of Marianne Williamson:

Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you.

Have you ever behaved that way? Run a little slower, didn’t try as hard, kept an idea or two to yourself? I know I have. And we don’t need to; our choice to be our full and glorious selves doesn’t diminish anyone else. As Williamson goes on to say,

…as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.

So what other resources have we been treating as scarce? And how would our paradigm change if we move from the economics of scarcity to the economics of infinite resources?

Or When Science Oversteps Its Bounds

Or More stories destined to serve as the basis of a Will Smith movie

Summary:  This post is my reaction to the news that scientists have built a man-made genome.

Wired offered a breathless report today: Scientists Build First Man-Made Genome; Synthetic Life Comes Next. The New York Times ran the story with the headline: Scientists Take New Step Towards Man-Made Life.

Both publications were talking about a recent scientific achievement: the manufacture of a bacterium genome by sticking together a bunch of smaller gene sequences. This is a big deal because it’s by far the largest genome ever created by man. The Wired story quotes one of the scientists:

“The J. Craig Venter Institute will be able to take a file stored on a computer and using synthetic chemistry, turn that information into life,” said Chris Voigt, a University of California at San Francisco synthetic biologist. “I would be shocked if it doesn’t come out in six months. I think they’ve done it.”

“…Once this becomes routine, it allows us to build whatever genome we want,” Voigt said. “You can design a genome to incorporate a particular chemical process to change what the cells are eating and what the cells are making. You can make robotic cells.”

Am I the only one who suspects that there may be infinite potential ramifications of ‘creating life’ in this fashion, as yet unconsidered by the good folks at the J. Craig Venter Institute?

The New York Times piece has the grace to mention some of the challenges ahead:

In any case, there are many hurdles to overcome before Dr. Venter’s vision of “life by design” is realized. The synthetic genome made by Dr. Venter’s team was not designed from scratch, but rather was a copy, with only a few changes, of the genetic sequence of a tiny natural bacterium called Mycoplasma genitalium.

Moreover, Dr. Venter’s team, led by a Nobel laureate, Hamilton Smith, has so far failed to accomplish the next —and biggest — step. That would be to insert the synthetic chromosome into a living microbe and have it “boot up” and take control of the organism’s functioning.

Interesting phrase, that: “take control of the organism’s functioning.” In The Biology of Belief, the book I mentioned yesterday, Bruce Lipton, Ph.D. argues that the nucleus (where the genome lives) couldn’t possibly be considered the ‘brain’ of a cell:

Following enucleation [removal of the nucleus], many cells can survive for up to two or more months without genes. Viable enucleated cells do not lie about like brain-dead lumps of cytoplasm on life-support systems. These cells actively ingest and metabolize food, maintain coordinated operation of their physiologic systems (respiration, digestion, excretion, motility, etc.), retain an ability to communicate with other cells, and are able to engage in appropriate responses to growth and protection-requiring environmental stimuli.

Unsurprisingly, enucleation is not without side effects. Without their genes, cells are not able to divide, nor are they able to reproduce any protein parts they lose through the normal wear and tear of the cytoplasm. The inability to replace defective cytoplasmic proteins contributes to mechanical dysfunctions that ultimately result in the death of the cell.

…If the nucleus and its genes are not the cell’s brain, then what exactly is the DNA’s contribution to cellular life? Enucleated cells die, not because they have lost their brain but because they have lost their reproductive capabilities. Without the ability to reproduce their parts, enucleated cells cannot replace failed protein building blocks, nor replicate themselves. So the nucleus is not the brain of the cell—the nucleus is the cell’s gonad!

If the genes are not the brain, but rather the reproductive organs, what are the implications for creatures ‘designed’ with man-made reproductive systems?

Consider this other excerpt from Lipton’s book:

…biological dysfunctions can result from miscommunication anywhere within these complex pathways. When you change the parameters of a protein at one point in such a complex pathway, you inevitably alter the parameters of other proteins at innumerable points within the entangled networks… Notice that proteins within one functional group, such as those concerned with sex determination…, also influence proteins with a completely different function, like RNA synthesis (i.e., RNA helicase). “Newtonian” research scientists have not fully appreciated the extensive interconnectivity among the cell’s biological information networks.

In my PMP training, we learned a formula to calculate communication pathways: N(N-1). If you’ve got five stakeholders you have to communicate with for a project, and they can all communicate with each other as well, then the total number of pathways is 30: five stakeholders plus you equals six (N), times 5 (N-1).

If all the proteins in the body are connected to all other proteins, and there are roughly 100,000 proteins in the body (according to Lipton), then the number of pathways is, oh, somewhere around ten billion.

I’m no geneticist, and I’m aware that my calculation is incredibly simplistic. But my question is valid: do you think that the simultaneous and interconnected interactions among all these proteins are fully understood by the people creating synthetic life?

What is your reaction to this story? Does it scare you? Does it excite you? Should these scientists be given medals and extra funding, or forced to shut up shop?

I’m about midway through Bruce Lipton’s book, The Biology of Belief, and it’s incredibly exciting. The biology is exciting, the possibilities are exciting, and the alignment with VortexDNA is beyond exciting. Bruce is a cell biologist by training; he’s taught at the University of Wisconsin’s School of Medicine and conducted studies at Stanford University’s School of Medicine.

His primary and emphatic message, shown in the video below, is that our beliefs control our DNA and the functions of our bodies.

The video is a bit long, but it’s well worth the hour if you are at all interested in this topic.

Meanwhile, in the creating-your-reality department, it turns out he’s just moved to New Zealand. I’m gonna go look him up