Cholesterol (orange) buried within the transparent protein, including
interaction with a lipid in the membrane (cyan). Credit: Grace Brannigan
and Jerome Henin, University of Pennsylvania
In a good article on the confusion over cholesterol, Johan Lehrer gets at tendency to assume that when we have a lot of detailed information about something we understand it. We have wheelbarrows of data on cholesterol, but have almost no idea how its related to heart disease. Lerher writes:
Josephine woke up at 6 am this morning and was snuffling snotily. She still hasn’t gotten over her cold. I remembered that there was supposed to be an eclipse that morning and I grabbed my computer to see what time it was. Beth looked at my laptop with appalled dismay as if it was a goat or something I was hauling into bed.
About three months ago my daughter was born, and aside from sometimes looking like ET, and sometimes like Paul Giamatti with a hangover, she was perfect in every respect. Then we noticed that she had some little white patches in her mouth, which I assumed were just fatty milk residue but then had to admit were thrush. Yeasty thrush infection in the perfect baby mouth! Imagine my outrage. It got worse and worse until finally we called the doctor who gave us the Rx for Nystatin, an antifungal. It was this awful, sticky yellow stuff that had a disorienting viscosity and would always drip right when the baby had turned her head. So it got everywhere, and we were supposed to give it every couple of hours, and I felt like I was ruining my daughters palate by making her first significant exposure to a new taste this horrible sugary stuff. Also, it totally didn't work. We fed her the stuff for over a month, carefully spreading it all around. It seemed to fertilize the thrush.
Last summer I made a trip to Kentucky to see what I could learn about an all-but-forgotten part of our medical history. The land on either side of the road grew steeper and greener, and by the time I reached Hyden, Kentucky, I felt I was at the bottom of a well with walls of beech wood and kudzu. This was true Appalachia, where dwellings clung to the rare plot of level ground, a doublewide up on a hillside ledge, a Dairy Queen in the bend of a river, a crook between hills provided enough resting place for the town of Hyden a handful of brick buildings clustered around a crossroads. The house I was looking for was tucked back in the forest, a manorial building of black logs and white chinking that stood above the Middle Fork of the Kentucky River. Hollyhocks were blooming in the yard. It was Mary Breckinridge’s house, and home of the Frontier Nursing Service.
The reason this book is interesting to me is that it gets at the argument that wilderness areas are worth saving when they are sublime. When people are in those high places, the argument goes, they are able to make contact with something profound and this contact is healing in the broadest sense - it improves lives, improves souls, improves us as humans. See Heidi.
But then there is the obvious counterargument that goes: wait a second, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Yosemite may be sublime for you, but maybe an open-pit mine is sublime for me. It would be useful to know if we can move beyond or dismiss either argument. And next, it would be nice to know with some more specificity what we are really talking about with this feeling of the mountain high.
My wife and I are in a childbirth class with a group of about 30 adults, and recently the question of pain came up. One student (apparently a scientist) argued that all pain was indicative of injury—the normal pain of childbirth, even emotional pain and grief involves small tissue damage in the brain. Fascinating! Who knew?
But as I thought about it that night, I found that there was something in the argument that didn’t sit right with me. The next morning I realized what it was: It’s one thing to point out that pain is linked to some kind of cellular rending as a clinical fact, but to claim that all pain is by definition injury is to step out of the magisterium of science and onto my turf—because at that point we are talking about the meanings of words.
The word injury carries with it a strong connotation of wrongness. It comes from the Latin injuria (in = not jus or jur = right, eg justice, jurisprudence). There are some types of pain that don’t feel wrong at all—in fact, they can feel very right. Exercise is one example. I think of the line from Chariots of Fire, when Eric Liddell responds to his sister’s demands that he give up his shot at the Olympics by saying. “God made me for a purpose, but He also made me fast. And when I run, I feel His pleasure.” I wouldn’t call it God, but I certainly have felt an overwhelming sense of rightness in my own running as I push up against the barriers of pain. Injury is an imprecise, misleading word if it describes something that feels right. (NB this is subjective. Running a 60-second 400 meters will be injurious for one person and sublime for another).
More evidence that we are "superorganisms" of many creatures working together and against each other. Bruce German predicted this years ago. The study is pretty basic - they aren't showing that bacteria are responsible for Mozart's musical genius - but it provides proof of concept. There's a good plain-language write up here.
