The Biology of Belief - Bruce H. Lipton [8]
Sitting quietly within garden-like island jungles and snorkeling among the jeweled coral reefs gave me a window into the island’s amazing integration of plant and animal species. All live in a delicate, dynamic balance, not only with other life forms but with the physical environment as well. It was life’s harmony—not life’s struggle—that sang out to me as I sat in the Caribbean Garden of Eden. I became convinced that contemporary biology pays too little attention to the important role of cooperation because its Darwinian roots emphasize life’s competitive nature.
To the chagrin of my U.S. faculty colleagues, I returned to Wisconsin a screaming radical bent on challenging the sacred foundational beliefs of biology. I even began to openly criticize Charles Darwin and the wisdom of his theory of evolution. In the eyes of most other biologists, my behavior was tantamount to a priest bursting into the Vatican and claiming the Pope was a fraud.
My colleagues could be forgiven for thinking a coconut had hit me on the head when I quit my tenured position and, fulfilling my life’s dream to be in a rock ‘n’ roll band, took off on a music tour. I discovered Yanni, who eventually became a big celebrity, and produced a laser show with him. But it soon became clear that I had a lot more aptitude for teaching and research than I did for producing rock ‘n’ roll shows. I wound down my midlife crisis, which I’ll describe in more agonizing detail in a later chapter, by giving up the music business and returning to the Caribbean to teach cell biology again.
My final stop in conventional academia was at Stanford University’s School of Medicine. By that time I was an unabashed proponent of a “new” biology. I had come to question not only Darwin’s dog-eat-dog version of evolution but also biology’s Central Dogma, the premise that genes control life. That scientific premise has one major flaw—genes cannot turn themselves on or off. In more scientific terms, genes are not “self-emergent.” Something in the environment has to trigger gene activity. Though that fact had already been established by frontier science, conventional scientists blinded by genetic dogma had simply ignored it. My outspoken challenge of the Central Dogma turned me into even more of a scientific heretic. Not only was I a candidate for excommunication, I was now suitable for burning at the stake!
In a lecture during my interview at Stanford, I found myself accusing the gathered faculty, many of them internationally recognized geneticists, of being no better than religious fundamentalists for adhering to the Central Dogma despite evidence to the contrary. After my sacrilegious comments, the lecture room erupted into shouts of outrage that I thought meant the end of my job application. Instead, my insights concerning the mechanics of a new biology proved to be provocative enough to get me hired. With the support of some eminent scientists at Stanford, especially from the Pathology Department’s chairman, Dr. Klaus Bensch, I was encouraged to pursue my ideas and apply them to research on cloned human cells. To the surprise of those around me, the experiments fully supported the alternative view of biology that I was postulating. I published two papers based on this research and left academia, this time for good. (Lipton, et al, 1991, 1992) I left because, despite the support I got at Stanford, I felt that my message was falling on deaf ears. Since my departure, new research has consistently validated my skepticism about the Central Dogma and the primacy of DNA in controlling life. In fact, epigenetics, the study of the molecular mechanisms by which environment controls gene activity, is today one of the most active areas of scientific research. The newly emphasized role of the environment in regulating gene activity was the focus of my cell research twenty-five years ago, long before the field of epigenetics was even established. (Lipton 1977a, 1977b) While that is gratifying for me intellectually, I know that if I were teaching and researching