The Biology of Belief - Bruce H. Lipton [20]
CHAPTER 2
IT’S THE ENVIRONMENT, STUPID
I will never forget a piece of wisdom I received in 1967, on the first day I learned to clone stem cells in graduate school. It took me decades to realize how profound this seemingly simple piece of wisdom was for my work and my life. My professor, mentor, and consummate scientist Irv Konigsberg was one of the first cell biologists to master the art of cloning stem cells. He told me that when the cultured cells you are studying are ailing, you look first to the cell’s environment, not to the cell itself, for the cause.
My professor wasn’t as blunt as Bill Clinton’s campaign manager, James Carville, who decreed, “It’s the economy, stupid,” to be the mantra for the 1992 presidential election. But cell biologists would have done well to post, “It’s the environment, stupid,” over our desks, just as the “It’s the economy, stupid” sign was posted at Clinton headquarters. Though it wasn’t apparent at the time, I eventually realized that this advice was a key insight into understanding the nature of life. Over and over I learned the wisdom of Irv’s advice. When I provided a healthy environment for my cells, they thrived; when the environment was less than optimal, the cells faltered. When I adjusted the environment, these “sick” cells revitalized.
But most cell biologists knew nothing of this wisdom of tissue culture techniques. And scientists moved sharply away from considering environmental influences after Watson and Crick’s revelation of DNA’s genetic code. Even Charles Darwin conceded, near the end of his life, that his evolutionary theory had shortchanged the role of the environment. In an 1876 letter to Moritz Wagner he wrote: “In my opinion, the greatest error which I have committed has been not allowing sufficient weight to the direct action of the environments, i.e., food, climate, etc., independently of natural selection … When I wrote the Origin, and for some years afterwards, I could find little good evidence of the direct action of the environment; now there is a large body of evidence.” (Darwin, F 1888)
Scientists who follow Darwin continue to make the same error. The problem with this underemphasis on the environment is that it led to an overemphasis on “nature” in the form of genetic determinism—the belief that genes “control” biology. This belief has not only led to a misallocation of research dollars, as I will argue in a later chapter, but, more importantly, it has changed the way we think about our lives. When you are convinced that genes control your life and you know that you had no say in which genes you were saddled with at conception, you have a good excuse to consider yourself a victim of heredity. “Don’t blame me for my work habits—it’s not my fault that I’ve been procrastinating on my deadline … It’s genetic!”
Since the dawning of the Age of Genetics, we have been programmed to accept that we are subservient to the power of our genes. The world is filled with people who live in constant fear that, on some unsuspecting day, their genes are going to turn on them. Consider the masses of people who think they are ticking time bombs; they wait for cancer to explode in their lives as it exploded in the life of their mother or brother or sister or aunt or uncle. Millions of others attribute their failing health not to a combination of mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual causes but simply to the inadequacies of their body’s biochemical mechanics. Are your kids unruly? Increasingly the first choice is to medicate these children to correct their “chemical imbalances” rather than fully grappling with what is going on in their bodies, minds, and spirits.
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