The Biology of Belief - Bruce H. Lipton [6]
My exploration of the “secrets of life” led me into a research career studying the character of cloned human cells grown in tissue culture. Ten years after my first close encounter with an electron microscope, I was a tenured faculty member at the prestigious University of Wisconsin School of Medicine, internationally recognized for my research on cloned stem cells, and honored for my teaching skills. I had graduated to more powerful electron microscopes that allowed me to take three-dimensional CAT scan–like rides through organisms where I came face to face with the molecules that are the very foundation of life itself. Though my tools were more sophisticated, my approach hadn’t changed. I had never lost my seven-year-old conviction that the lives of the cells I studied had purpose.
Unfortunately, I had no such conviction that my own life had a purpose. I didn’t believe in God, though I confess that on occasion I entertained the notion of a God who ruled with an extremely honed perverse sense of humor. I was after all a traditional biologist for whom God’s existence is an unnecessary question: life is the consequence of blind chance, the flip of a friendly card, or, to be more precise, the random shake of genetic dice. The motto of our profession since the time of Charles Darwin, has been: “God? We don’t need no steenking God!”
It’s not that Darwin denied the existence of God. He simply implied that chance, not Divine intervention, was responsible for the character of life on Earth. In his 1859 book, The Origin of Species, Darwin said that individual traits are passed from parents to their children. He suggested that “hereditary factors” passed from parent to child control the characteristics of an individual’s life. That bit of insight set scientists off on a frenzied attempt to dissect life down to its molecular nuts and bolts, for within the structure of the cell was to be found the heredity mechanism that controlled life.
The search came to a remarkable end fifty years ago when James Watson and Francis Crick described the structure and function of the DNA double helix, the material of which genes are made. Scientists finally figured out the nature of the “hereditary factors” that Darwin had written about in the 19th century. The tabloids heralded the brave new world of genetic engineering with its promise of designer babies and magic bullet medical treatments. I vividly remember the large block print headlines that filled the front page on that memorable day in 1953: “Secret of Life Discovered.”
Like the tabloids, biologists jumped on the gene bandwagon. The mechanism by which DNA controls biological life became the Central Dogma of molecular biology, painstakingly spelled out in textbooks. In the long-running debate over nature vs. nurture, the pendulum swung decidedly to nature. At first DNA was thought to be responsible only for our physical characteristics, but then we started believing that our genes control our emotions and behaviors as well. So if you are born with a defective happiness gene, you can expect to have an unhappy life.
Unfortunately, I thought I was one of those people victimized by a missing or mutant happiness gene. I was reeling from a relentless barrage of debilitating emotional roundhouse punches. My father had just died after a long, pain-fraught battle with cancer. I was his principal caretaker and had spent the previous four months flying back and forth between my job in Wisconsin and his home in New York every three or four