Welcome to the Electricity of Life
brought to you by The Thunderbolts Project™
at Thunderbolts.info
In 2011 Jacqueline Barton was awarded the National Medal of Science
for the discovery that DNA conducts electricity
and that DNA damage can be sensed as a loss of electrical conduction.
Some errors such as a mismatch between base pairs
are sensed by special repair proteins.
These repair proteins test electrical conductivity
across sets of hundreds of base pairs at a time
until they arrive at the area of the discordant mismatch.
In our body DNA base mismatches are just a matter of everyday maintenance.
DNA repair is less like a library disastrously misplacing a book,
and more like a regular process checking one's filing and printing out replacements.
Also keep in mind that the scale of reality in which DNA operates
is a radically different existence from anything our human mind is likely to conceive of.
Susan Lindquist, another winner of the National Medal of Science
describes such a world in one of her lectures.
This animation attempts to depict the movement
of various large proteins inside of living cell.
They do not actually act so rigidly and in the end our imagination is not quite ready
to fully appreciate how this scale of reality behaves.
To be at the realistic speed at which it is occurring inside the cell,
we would have to speed that movie up 3 million fold,
so it's actually just plain inconceivable to imagine how fast
proteins are moving around the cell and doing things and this really
is part of life, it informs all of life, all biological systems
have evolved in this way and it makes life possible.
At this very different scale of life our body attacks the very DNA
of invading bacteria with volleys of oxidative stress.
Bacteria produced offenses such as an iron rich protein
in hopes of distracting these oxidative volleys away from their DNA.
Their stance of molecular warfare occurs at speeds beyond our understanding.
A battle of energy at the tiniest scale of physical existence.
To round out this glimpse of the electrical dynamics of DNA
let's review key content from a previous video.
An antenna conducts electromagnetic waves from the environment.
A fractal antenna uses a patterned repeating design
to increase the breadth of frequencies it can respond to.
Reba Goodman was one prominent researcher in the field of epigenetics.
She worked with Barbara McClintock on research that won the Nobel Prize.
Now she's part of the community of researchers who have indicated
that the repeating self-similarity of DNA structure functions as a fractal antenna.
The electronic frequencies it conducts
can perturb one particular sequence with a low electron affinity.
This simple cytosine thymine cytosine thymine sequence,
when its electrons are dislocated, stimulates transcription in regions it inhabits.
For instance instructions for creating a cellular stress protein,
as seen here, labeled as MYC binding sites.
These are the repeating cytosine thymine sequence.
They are located upstream from the promoter
which cues the creation of stress protein HSP 70.
Despite the work of these esteemed scientists and many others
it seems like public narratives of science
don't much discuss the electromagnetic sensitivity of life.
Perhaps this owes to the potential dangers of human electrical infrastructure
and unpopular topic that many scientists have attempted
to bring light to in the Bioinitiative report.
Studying the electromagnetic sensitivity of life
can yield important industrial and ecological wisdom as described in the series
and along with perhaps cautioning us
against wearing a cell phone against her body at all times,
we might come to contemplate much more in electrical terms.
Turning our attention from the very small to the very large,
consider the massive range of scale
over which electromagnetic forces act upon the rhythms of life,
the Aurora is one way our human eyes glimpse the unseen forces that surround us,
and as this planet pulses with enormous currents
there is a pulse life coursing through every forest,
every tree and fern, every sprouting plant.
In every bird, lizard or tiny fly,
billions of microtubules form the ebbing and flowing will of theirselves
and pulse with the computation of electric dipole interactions.
They provide shape to neurons, creating the veins through which cognition may flow.
There is an astounding depth of activity happening within everything that lives
and perhaps between every solar system in which they live.
Thank you for joining me in this series where I present my contributions
as one of the scholars and scientists of the Thunderbolts project.
Next time you look at the night sky or the orchestrated veins running through a plant
or a tiny traveling beetle, remember the electricity of life
that courses through our universe at scales both small and large.
For continued episodes of the Electricity of Life series
stay tuned to
Thunderbolts.info