life, an incredible machine

Oblivious to me, so many things are happening around me. The oak tree in front of my house is shedding leaves as a signature of fall. At the same time there are so many acorns on the drive way. Each of them has the capacity to give rise to a new oak tree, but they don’t. Most of them will perish or be food for some animal. Inside each there are two tiny cotyledons, surrounding a tiny stem and a tiny root, waiting for the water to germinate. I feel bad for the end of the acorns this way. But that has been the pattern of living beings any way, producing a lot, hoping that some will be able to propagate the species.

I started as a botanist, looking at petals of a flower, looking at the phylotaxy (the arrangement of leaves) and sometimes peeping inside the structure and seeing the cellular organization by staining with various dyes. Then moved into looking the life at the molecular level, sometimes forgetting that the molecules eventually work together to build the structure. Now like many scientists I am looking at life at the structural level, how things have been put together using bioinformatics tools.

The complexities and the precision of cell cycle, proliferation, differentiation, conception, embryogenesis demonstrate the ingenuity of creation. Even at the molecular level how different molecules work in cohort in clock work fashion. Without out knowledge or intervention, stimuli from the environment use our sense organs to send impulses to the nerve terminals to start action potentials via afferent nerves to the right places in the brain to generate right response via efferent nerves. Billions of synapses act together to run every thing smoothly for most of us for most of the time. We carry on this complex complicated machine from our birth until death. By the way, do you realize that the death is also a programmed process?