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43   Each of Us Is a Society
     The Washington Post, Sunday, May 7, 1967

     A human being is a society of living cells, organized in a 
hierarchy of interdependent tissues and organs.

     They perform special roles in the economy of the whole organism
and each cell shows many earmarks of its particular labors.

     Thus a nerve cell may sprout a long cable-like axon to
communicate impulses from the brain via the spinal cord to the
extremities.  A red blood cell will eventually shed its DNA; carrying
oxygen by hemoglobin is too simple a function to require a constant
flow of genetic information.

     A cell in the testis will retain the capacity for rapid
multiplication to assure a life-long supply of potential sperms to
participate in propagation of the species.  In the ovary, the eggs are
pre-formed by the time of birth.  They have the remarkable capacity to
remain dormant for years before being reawakened by a hormonal
stimulus to try the gamble of possible fertilization.

     These specializations are powerful displays of the subordination
of component tissues to the adaptive functioning of the whole
organism.  The unit if evolutionary change -- that is, the quantum
of reproduction and hereditary variation -- is the intact organism. 
Just those variations will be preserved in the DNA of the whole
organism that support its fitness, regardless of the self-immolation
that the DNA may prescribe to some individual cells and tissues.

     Because the whole organism has captured the reproductive process,
total cells like those that make skin, hair and gut lining can be
entrained in a perpetual cycle of growth and rapid death, while others
like heart muscle and nerve may span the lifetime of the body.

     The analogy is sometimes used to justify a totalitarian
organization of society.  But evolution is amoral.  The rigid
hierarchy of somatic cells -- the troops and citizenry of the working
body -- merely shows the consequences, not the ethical value, of an
evolutionary process which already gives absolute priority to the
competitive fitness of the whole organism with no regard whatever
for any individual cell.

     If tissue cells were more educable this would, of course, let
them be more flexibly interchangeable in function, at the price of an
even more complex governing machinery to allocate different cells to
different tasks.  Were the life challenges to a single organism any
more complex than they already are, such a radical reconstruction of
somatic cell relationships might be a necessary condition of survival.

     In fact, this already occurs to a remarkable degree in the
development of the brain.  In this organ, it has been very difficult
to find narrowly delimited functions predestined at birth.  There are,
of course, many exceptions but human personalities have survived
massive excisions of brain tissue.  Other cells learn to take over the
functions of the ones ablated.  Man's highest organ therefore gives
the least support to organicist politics.

     Without intelligent intervention, none of the hundred million
million cells could live independently of the body which they
collectively comprise.  Just 60 years ago, however, Dr. Ross G.
Harrison at Yale University discovered that nerve cells could be
taken out of the body and maintained alive in the test-tube.

     The nutrients, warmth, shelter and control stimuli that the cell
receives from its social intercourse within the body can be replaced
in an artificial environment created by the investigator.  Indeed, he
uses the responses of the isolated tissue cell to test his analyses
of the composition of normal and abnormal body fluids.

     This historic discovery was the focal point of a new era of
experimental biology only just now reaching its maturity.  It also
represents a major fork in the evolution of earthly life, since each
new culture lineage of tissue cells can be regarded as a potential new
species of microbe.

     These species are constrained to live in an artificial world of
glass, synthetic chemicals and distilled water.  But is modern man
very different in his requirements?

     Somatic cell biology also impinges on ethics by challenging the
definability of "man".  It is very difficult on purely scientific
principles to demarcate a person from an aggregate of tissues that
can be sustained separately in the laboratory.

     Biology does not deny personality, but it refuses to give simple,
absolute answers to questions of man's place in society.

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