Nervous System Protect & Restore

02:27 The reason I was late getting into biology starting in graduate school in 1968 even though I graduated from colledge in 1956: It was my first experience of biology classes in 1950 and ‘53 that made me think that biologists where, sort of, demented or doing something completely anti-scientific, because, in the 1940’s I had read people, for example, Russian psychologists. In about 1948 I read an article that explained the distribution of chromosomes in the population. 46 chromosomes was the modal number, but there were perfectly healthy people who had 47 or 45, and even some with 2 more, or less. But usually the further you were from 46 chromosomes the more likely you were to have some kind of a syndrome. But anyway, they looked at it statistically and 46 was very clearly the modal (most common) number in the population when they looked at lots of people. But then two years later when I got to highschool biology the textbooks said humans simply have 48 chromosomes period. And then in colledge biology: same thing. Humans have 48 chromosomes. Nothing about statisical variability. It was 1956 before American biologists discovered that we have 46 chromosomes. And the textbooks never made a big thing about why they were 8 years behind other, relatively backward, countries, backward ecconomies, in something that seems as simple as counting chromosomes.

04:50 Anyway, when I graduated from colledge I’d had a very bright literature teacher (literature and humanities), so I decided that, maybe, the real understanding of the world could be by studying literature and philosophy. But when I got to university (this was in the peak of McCarthyism) and the English department was one of the, basically, was cowardly, closed off parts of the university. And I tried several different departments. The psychologists were the best people I could find at the university at that time, and so I almost majored in psychology. But then I found that you had to believe in Watsonian Behaviourism, or at least Skinnerian Behaviourism, to get through the biology department.

05:56 Consciousness was not a reality at that time. And my professors actually explained why you don’t need to use an anasthetic for circumsising babies: because they’re not conscious. And the fact that they writhe around and scream and turn red when they’re being cut, that’s just a reflex. Consciousness develops at the ages of one and a half years when the myelin is completely deposited, and that’s the time at which the brain stop growing. Brain cells multiply (at one time they said) only up until the sixth month of gestation. Then they gradually extended it to a year and half. But consciousness, at that time, was said (if there’s such a thing as consciousness at all) it doesn’t begin until a baby is a year and a half old, when there’s no longer any division of brain cells.

07:05 And, you remember, at that time brain cells didn’t reproduce. Heart cells didn’t reproduce. It was in 1990 when brain cells and heart cells were discovered to be able to reproduce, even in adults. But, one of the other people I read in the 1940’s was L. V. Polezhaev loading Polezhaev, Lev Vladimirovich... , a developmental biologist who had been demonstrating organ regeneration in the 30’s and all through the 40’s, and the brain cells and heart cells can be stimulated to regenerate.

The last ten years or so, the advent of cloning and stimulated regeration and stem cells, and so on, this is causing a lot of termoil in the biological world. You don’t get the sense in the newspapers of what this is doing to professors who— until Dolly, A sheep considered the first cloned animal I guess, there were still people who were saying Dolly was impossible because, in principle, you can’t clone an animal from the somatic cell. You can clone vegetables because they’re different, but people were saying, right into the 1990’s that it’s impossible to clone an animal.

But a guy named Gurdon loading Gurdon, John Bertrand... was cloning frogs and anphibians back in the 60’s. And that was impossible too, because frogs are animals and animals can’t be cloned from somatic cells. So there’s this, sort of, underground of fact in biology that the superstructure mainstream, the people that educate medical students, this reality is something very different from science.

09:12 In the 1970’s all of my professors, I think I heard every one of them at some point say something like “today 100,000 of my brain cells died.” At that time it was 100,000 per day. Previously it was 10,000 per day. But in 1970 an article in Science #32 Which 1970 article in Science explained memory in terms of selective death of brain cells? took advantage of this background: all biology professors believing that their brains were dying massively every day for their life, and of the knowledge that, you know, people used to program computers by punching holes in cards: introducing information by punching out pieces of card, and this article in Science explained memory and learning through the lifespan in terms of selective death of brain cells. If we’re loosing 100,000 brain cells every day, just think of how this compares to a computer where you can punch out hundred’s of thousands of bits of information on each card that you put into the computer. This— I could name probably twenty completely insane ideas that were current in the biological community.

For example, probably half of my biology professors at one time cited a study by August Weismann loading Weismann, August... , #33 Which 1889 or 1890 August Weismann study argued against Lamarckian inheritance by cutting of the tails of 1500 mice? who in 1889 or 1890 cut the tails off 1500 mice over a period of 22 mouse generations, and said this this disproves Lamarckian and Darwinian inheritance, or evolution of acquired traits.

Of course, Lamark loading Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste... — even when I was eight and read this in an encyclopedia it was obvious that Weismann loading Weismann, August... was making propaganda. Because Lamarck said “Animals that strive and adapt, and acquire new traits by this striving adaptation pass some of these traits on the next generation”.

And my parents had some books, including Darwin's loading Darwin, Charles... first editions that had the introductions— like The Descent of Man loading The Descent of Man... had an introduction in which Darwin said “People are saying that I base evolution on the Malthusian loading Malthus, Thomas Robert... idea of the survival of the fittest and elimination of unfit, and so on”. He said “No! Here are the things that I believe account for evolution.” And he named the things that Lamarck loading Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste... and Darwin's loading Darwin, Charles... grandfather, Erasmus Darwin loading Darwin, Erasmus... (was an evolutionist in the 18th century, at the very end of the 18th century). Erasmus Darwin loading Darwin, Erasmus... was saying exactly the same things that Lamarck loading Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste... said. That sexual selection and adaptation and inheritance of acquire traits. Darwin, as late as the 1860’s, said “You’re distorting me. I agree with Erasmus Darwin loading Darwin, Erasmus... and Lamarck loading Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste... on these points.”

But, by the end of the century Weismann loading Weismann, August... (was typical of the Social Darwinist) said “Malthus had the right idea. That weak people are eliminated, and so, the human species is improved by misery. Poverty, disease and war are improving the human species.”

13:36 A literary critic #34 Which literary critic claims Thomas Malthus was hired by King George III to put down a revolutionary spirit? wrote that he had seen evidence that the King loading Frederick, George William... hired Malthus loading Malthus, Thomas Robert... specifically to help put down the revolutionary spirit. Because the monarchy was realizing that they were in danger, because people were impoverished, diseased and hating to be killed in pointless wars. So he had Malthus say, “It’s good to suffer! Poverty, disease and war are creative. They eliminate the bad stuff.”

And this is— Weismann's loading Weismann, August... mouse tail experiment was just one wildly propagandistic thing that he did to knock down Darwin loading Charles Dawin... and Lamark loading Lamark, Jean-Baptiste... . His main work was counting chromosomes, even though he had such bad vision that he couldn’t use a microscope. In 1890 he determined that the development of an individual from an ovum is possible because the genetic material (such as Mendel identified) is all there in the ovum. And when that fertilized egg divides, each of these subsequent divisions loses some genetic information. And obviously you couldn’t clone from a somatic cell, because not all of the genetic information is there. So he said, “The germ-line is immortal. The body, the soma, is mortal.” And he said, “Each time you differentiate to a new tissue or organ, that’s because you’ve lost some of the genetic information that was in the ovum.”

And remember, this was 60 years before Americans learned to even count the average number of chromosomes in people. A guy who couldn’t use the microscope because of bad eyes created the doctrine of the deletion of information to explain the expansion of complexity from a fertilized egg to an adult organism.

16:16 Weismann loading Weismann, August... said that “Since the body is mortal, it doesn’t have everything it needs to create itself (if you take only one part). So it’s gonna wear out.” (the Wear-and-Tear Theory started there, at the same time). But the mortal tissues of the body aren’t all there, and they’re eventually just going to wear out. Programmed aging essentially derives from this idea of the deletion of information.

16:57 The whole trend of 20th century biology was building on this idea of increasing complexity by deleting information. And so the guy that said, “learning is because our brain is dying”, it was exactly analogous to Weismann's loading Weismann, August... “The organism develops because it loses information.” And in the 50’s there were people who said that you can x-ray bacteria and cause them to mutate into new forms by destroying their genes with x-rays. And this was as weird as it seems. That bacteria that had lost their genetic information were said to have given rise to the next higher complexity in evolution. And all of the phyla of complex organisms were believed by the Weismann loading Weismann, August... principle to have derived from bacteria that had lost information.

That picture of progress through loss, I think traces back to the time that Erasmus Darwin loading Darwin, Erasmus... — he had a slogan painted on the side of his carriage: “From seashells everything comes” (the latin phrase). But that got him in trouble. So he had it painted out fairly quickly. Because people realized that Evolution was contrary to the Creationist doctrine. For example, well into the 19th century, to graduate, or even to study at British universities, you had to essentially sign a loyalty oath that you believed all of the tenets of the Church of England. People like Shelley were not welcome at the English universities.

And earlier censorship was tightening up all through the 18th century. And people like Darwin loading Darwin, Charles... , instead of writing scientific treatises about evolution, as Lamarck loading Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste... did in France (which was relatively loose), Darwin loading Darwin, Charles... wrote a poem about the nature of life and put his ideas of acquired, adaptive, and sexual selection creating evolutionary progress.

The Deists, remember, didn’t want to deal with church officials entering, for example, the investment market, and saying that “God can intervene at any time”. To have anything secure, the Deists wanted, sort of, a mechanical clockwork universe that was predictable so that they could start projects and have confidence that they could finish them without God intervening. And so, they said “God was like a clockmaker who started the world running. And he was such a perfect creator, that he made it so that it would run all by itself forever.” But it was like a clock that he was winding up and setting in motion, and then staying out of it. So, that physicists, and engineers, and anyone could count on certain reliability in the world.

But, as people started working on steam engines and understanding what happens to the energy and the fuel, that the laws of thermodynamics were eventually extracted from understanding how steam engines work. And they said “Well, the nature of reality is that everything is running down in a closed system. It can’t do anything but run down”. And so was physics set on the same kind of path that nothing can be added to the world because that’s God’s province. The only thing that can be done to the world is for it to get poorer, losing information or losing organization, losing energy, gaining entropy. I think this historical picture accounts for why biologists, at the time i was first taking biology courses, why they could believe such impossible to believe things.

22:28 In studying literature, the only person that really appealed to me in English literature was William Blake loading Blake, William... , who in many different places— he had physiological descriptions, for example, the number of nerves in the optic nerve. His count was closer than any count until the electron microscope was developed about 180 years later, or so.

And Blake described evolution. Which, obviously, he was getting these ideas from the culture. Erasmus Darwin loading Darwin, Erasmus... was contemporary with William Blake loading Blake, William... and was a very famous intellectual. And so, there was this oral culture in London and other big cities, in which 200 year advanced ideas in physiology, biology, evolution, development— for example, at this same time, I think was from Swedenborg loading Swedenborg, Emanuel... , the religious leader who was also an engineer and biological experimenter. Swedenborg loading Swedenborg, Emanuel... , I think is where Blake loading Blake, William... got the idea that showed up in his book that the nerves develop and invade the other tissues. This wasn’t demonstrated until, I think, 1911. How the embryo innervates the tissues. That the nerves come from the top and go down into the various tissues. And at late stage of development, innervate the muscles, skin, and so on.

Remember, Malthus loading Malthus, Thomas Robert... was not censored. But everyone who had an alternative idea of what’s going on in society and Evolution was likely to get hanged if they were too blatant in their description of things the King loading Frederick, George William... didn’t like. And William Blake loading Blake, William... was tried for sedition in 1804 and after that he was much more circumspect in the way he described his Evolutionary and physiological ideas. They became very hard to interpret. But that was the general situation. That there was this amazingly rich scientific culture that was like a piece of the 20th century set there in 18th century London.

And people that did get published, like Malthus loading Malthus, Thomas Robert... , were the people who were put up to the task for a political reason. When contemporary textbooks write the history of their science, they look at who got published. And physicists, and engineers, and biologists who held the right ideas were the ones who got published. But the really good ideas were things that people talked about in secret. So, the idea of being ahead of your time, it’s really more like being under your time. Because there’s this 200 years of more or less contemporary thinking.

26:15 Other people that I read in the 1940’s, in the time that I was 8 to 12 years old or so. J. C. Bose loading Bose, Jagadish Chandra... was one of the interesting people, who around 1900 had been very popular and exciting as a physics researcher, and a biological researcher, and a radio researcher in England. But after 2 or 3 of his lectures people started thinking about the meaning that he was showing crystals, and metals, and vegetables, and animals all had sensitivity and reactivity. And you can fatigue a piece of metal, for example, and let it rest and it would recover, just the same way a fatigued muscle recovers.

And when the British biologists started realizing the implications of what Bose loading Bose, Jagadish Chandra... was saying, they went back to a more abstract kind of biology and he didn’t give anymore seminars. But he went back to India and Marconi loading Marconi, Guglielmo... sent his men to try to get Bose loading Bose, Jagadish Chandra... to be involved in the Marconi loading Marconi, Guglielmo... radio company, because Bose had invented the sensor for radio detection.

Ordinary sensors at that time had— the sensor would pass a current which would turn a current into a bell that would ring the bell and activate a hammer that would knock the sensor back into a starting position. So, they were, sort of like a Rube Goldberg loading Goldberg, Rube... apparatus. You could only detect a signal as fast as your hammer could re-sensitize the thing. Bose loading Bose, Jagadish Chandra... , by understanding the fatigability and recoverability of material, used metal particles, and mercury coatings, and pressure and such, so that he could tune up his radio sensor and it would spontaneously recover it’s sensitivity, so you could keep sending it a signal and do practical radio communication. And that was one of the devices, if you used it too much, too fast, too long, it lost sensitivity, just the way an overworked muscle or brain loses sensitivity. So he would let it rest, and then it would come back and work like a fresh one, just like resting your brain or muscle.

29:24 One of my next newsletters is going to be on this idea of fatigue, and what it has to do with inflammation, excitation and eventually damage to the tissue and atrophy of the tissue. And as far as I know, the people like Polezhaev loading Polezhaev, Lev Vladimirovich... , they didn’t make any special reference or connection to J.C. Bose loading Bose, Jagadish Chandra... . But these ideas of material substance being sensitive and responsive the same way living substance is, these were in the culture. And A.I. Oparin loading Oparin, Alexander Ivanovich... , who is considered one of the founders of the study of the origin of life— 1924 I think, Oparin's loading Oparin, Alexander Ivanovich... book was, which explained a jelly conception of the origin of life. That organic materials would coalesce spontaneously. And Oparin loading Oparin, Alexander Ivanovich... got his ideas from this Dutch chemist, Bungenberg de Jong loading Bungenberg de Jong, Hendrik Gerard... , who wrote in 1922 a book he called Complex Coacervation, which is like a colloid that reestablishes new equilibria, until you get several phases that are all stable with one another. Some of them love oily materials. Some that are more water-loving. But Oparin loading Oparin, Alexander Ivanovich... and Bungenbergde Jong loading Bungenberg de Jong, Hendrik Gerard... were the pioneers of the gel-conception of cytoplasm, even though there were people who realised that the cytoplasm is a gel, and that the membrane isn’t a necessary component, these people did the thinking and the experimenting that showed how a gel can establish itself, remain in equilibrium, have preference for certain types of material, that it will dissolve oily materials preferentially over watery materials, and that certain salts would be concentrated just passively just in the physical arrangement of materials without any pumps or energy being involved at that stage.

Le Chatelier loading Le Chatelier, Henry Louis... was another contemporary. Vernandsky loading Vernadsky, Vladimir Ivanovich... , the Russian, went around the world. He hoped to get an appointment in the United States, but no one wanted to have a geo-biologist or a bio-geologist on their faculty. So he was mostly working in France and Russia. And he recognized in Le Chatelier's loading Le Chatelier, Henry Louis... Principle (which chemists all know about, but don’t really apply it very far). Le Chaterlier's loading Le Chatelier, Henry Louis... Principle is that when you disturb a system of substance, the substance responds so as to reduce the stress. Vernadsky loading Vernadsky, Vladimir Ivanovich... showed that any energy impinging on any substance creates order of a certain kind, depending on the nature of the energy impinging on the substance. And so, sunlight running through air, or sea water, whatever, organizes that in a certain way, and the energy, by Le Chatelier's loading Le Chatelier, Henry Louis... principle, minimizes the disturbance. And so a continuous flow of energy is going to continuously restructure and reorganize, adding information to the system. When you flow energy through any substance that has any capacity for memory, it’s going to remember that “now this is the second passage of energy”, so it’s never the same as the first passage. The substance remembers by changing its structure.

34:35 Water, in the 1930’s and 40’s, water was already being realized to have it’s intrinsic memory and to have long range ordering processes that made water near a surface different from the water at a great distance from the surface. And the water that had been near a surface will remember some of that structuring-effect that it had. For example, where a body of water, or a drop, meets the air, it forms a film that’s tough enough for a bug to walk on. That’s the sort of structuring that happens anytime something different is introduced in the water.

And Vernadski loading Vernadsky, Vladimir Ivanovich... , by applying this principle showed that all substance is, especially wet gelatinous substances, are able to store experience, or store the record of energy that’s has passed through them. A lot of people were thinking about the origin of life in terms of a “warm soup” (is how a lot of American biologists described it.)

36:00 Sydney Fox loading Fox, Sidney Walter... , who was a student of Oparin's loading Oparin, Alexander Ivanovich... and understood de Jong's loading Bungenberg de Jong, Hendrik Gerard... work, and he suggested that maybe life didn’t start in the soup. He thought, possibly, condensing amino acids formed in the clouds, or wherever, might have condensed on the hot volcanic rocks. So he just threw some powdered amino acids on hot volcanic rocks and sprinkled a little bit of water, just enough to make a very viscous gel. And then he scraped the stuff up an hour or two hours later and looked at it, put it in water and looked at it under the microscope. And it had formed something much more specific than the complex coacervates that Bungenberg de Jong loading Bungenberg de Jong, Hendrik Gerard... had studied.

Sidney Fox’s loading Fox, Sidney Walter... mixture of amino acids had spontaneously and almost immediately formed little bacteria-like particles of very uniform size and shape. And when he added amino acids to the watery solution that these were floating in the things would grow, incorporating amino acids into their structure, and even produced offspring. They would reach a certain size and a bud would form.

In the absence of water, slightly moist, hot amino acids polymerize spontaneously into proteins. And those proteins spontaneously form little bacteria-like particles that brake up following the coacervation principle. They are more stable at a certain small size. And those then— the proteins that make up those particles can catalyze reactions, incorporating new amino acids into new proteins allowing them to grow. So, in an hour or two, Sidney Fox demonstrated something very much like the origin of life that Oparin loading Oparin, Alexander Ivanovich... and Bungenberg de Jong loading Bungenberg de Jong, Hendrik Gerard... had just postulated as possible. Sidney Fox loading Fox, Sidney Walter... demonstrated real growing organisms-like things with real proteins spontaneously synthesized.

39:01 The inflammatory process that causes atrophy and inflammation, tumor formation, aging, tissue loss, and so on, this is structurally just like fatigue. And if you imitate— well, if you start thinking of the living stuff as substance rather than information, then if you imagine you‘re a chemist or an engineer with a gob of stuff to analyze, you look at it under different conditions of temperature and pressure, and saltiness, and wetness, the amount of water versus salts. When you look at the living organism or at its cells in this way, as substance, everything gets infinitely simpler.

When you look at it from the Weissman loading Weismann, August... -influenced kind of biology, you have the God-created, infinitely complex genome which is being torn down to create the various structures. But it’s essentially an infinitely complex process that so complicated that you can’t calculate it. But when you look at it from Vernadsky’s loading Vernandsky, Vladimir Ivanovich... , Le Chatelier’s loading Le Chatelier, Henry Louis... and Sidney Fox’s loading Fox, Sidney Walter... perspective, you see that physical processes influence the behavior. And when you look at any condition, such as dementia, cancer, arthritis, epilepsy, paralysis, migraines, emphysema, all of these are physical processes, as well as biological processes. And a common feature that they have is that the cells get too wet. The gel that’s put into a watery solution without enough salt or sugar or things dissolved in water, swells up and can eventually decompose, just from getting too wet.

All of the fatiguing, inflaming, tumor-forming, atrophy-producing biological processes involve this accumulation of water out of control. The gel is no longer in control and excluding watery stuff. The gel is forced to take up too much water. And along with the water it tends to take up random amounts of protein and fat and salts that shouldn’t be there.

For example, the healthy cell excludes calcium and takes up magnesium. If you immerse it in too much water without enough sodium, that alone will cause the cell to take up calcium. And the calcium and the water excite the cell. So, for example, to apply this to epilepsy, if you make a person drink too much plain water it can bring on the seizure. Another way that neurologists can test for epilepsy (they used to do this actually) have a person drink a pint of water, and if they have a seizure that proved they had epilepsy. Or they would have them hyperventilate. And if they had a seizure from hyperventilating that proved they had epilepsy. When you hyperventilate you reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in your blood. That allows water from the blood to move out into the cells such as the brain cells, causing them to swell, get excited and, in the case of epilepsy, it can cause a seizure, or in another situation it can cause cramping, pain.

44:20 Are there any questions or comments up to this point?

Yeah. He referred to God as “old nobodaddy aloft”.

Yeah, but he came from a sect that used language in a particular way. And when you look at the conflicts between two different poems, one where he’s sounding like an Atheist ridiculing a beastly, cruel God he basically says: “That doesn’t exist. The only God is man-like”. So, he was a humanist speaking a very old fashioned religious language.

Yeah. I tried to avoid taking any Genetic courses. I think I did take one. But I’ve read the textbooks they were using in other Genetics courses and one of them was called Classical Papers in Genetics. And I read that just to see what they consider their history to be. Were there some really good Genetics ideas that were apart from this Weismann loading Weismann, August... -Mendel loading Mendel, Gregor Johann... -Morgan loading Morgan, Thomas Hunt... religion? And all of the papers in that book of classical papers that supposedly are the foundation of modern Genetics, all of them said “These data are consistent with the idea that…”. There was no confirmation of an idea. It was simply “it could happen."

And, that’s surprisingly how science has been working in the 20th century. “Consistent with” not “disprove all of the alternatives and leave something that is very convincing.” But, basically just saying “It could happen” in line with this evidence. And often, the conclusion (in the magazine Science) the conclusions often have nothing to do with the data, as if the editor didn’t read the paper.

Yeah. An early stage, when the cells are growing fast, like the fertilized ovum, and early cell divisions, they’re about 92% water. And in an old organism, the water content gets way down to 70% or something like that. But, in 1920, someone found that just putting cells in a hypotonic solution forced mitoses to start. So, when the cell is rapidly dividing, and forming a new organism, the high content of water stimulates this certain kind of activity that, in the context, creates increased mass and complexity.

And when the organism is mature, and doesn’t want tumors popping out everywhere the body fluids cells (intracellular and extracellular) are relatively dehydrated. But you can stimulate regeneration just by increasing the moistness.

In the 1950’s, some magazine described someone who had the end of their finger cut-off at the base of the fingernail. And they kept it sealed and moist and found the finger regenerated. Remembering that 20 or 30 years later I knew 2 people. A little kid who cut off the end of his finger the same way (right at the base of the nail). And a carpenter who sawed off the end of his finger. And both— the kid’s mother put his finger in a ballpoint pen case, so it wasn’t touching anything but the atmosphere was sealed around it. And the carpenter used an aluminum cigar tube to put over his finger. And they now both have perfect normal length fingers. The fingernail looks perfect even though there was no fingernail visible after they cut it off.

So, adults can regenerate nicely formed tissue in a very visible way. Bone, and skin, everything takes on a normal shape. When the conditions are right, I think, besides the humidity, the carbon dioxide that’s kept present in equilibrium with the metabolizing tissue, I think the carbon dioxide, is a factor that prevents it going wild into mere scar formation or tumor formation.

And I think the main function of carbon dioxide is— when sugar is fully metabolized, it all turns into carbon dioxide. And the carbon dioxide can (but doesn’t necessarily) be turned into carbonic acid by combining with water. And so, sugar constantly streaming into the cell means that water and carbon dioxide are going to be constantly streaming out of the cell. And just in terms of binding with water and leaving the cell that’s one way that carbon dioxide, as it’s formed, tends to remove water from a certain compartment.

But carbon dioxide, in itself, is acidic before it forms carbonic acid. And this is another thing where the mainstream culture talks about hydrogen ions as how you conceive acidity. The whole way of talking about it is typically in terms of the concentration of hydrogen ions. That’s what pH means. But the real theory of acidity is just the opposite. It’s the binding of electrons rather than the releasing of protons, or hydrogen ions. And Lewis loading Lewis, Gilbert Newton... was the person who explained the correct general theory of acidity. And so, these are called Lewis loading Lewis, Gilbert Newton... acids. And a Lewis loading Lewis, Gilbert Newton... acid doesn’t necessarily contain any hydrogen or protons. So there’s no pH involved but it still has all the properties of acidity because it is binding electrons. And when you bind electrons you tend to liberate protons anyway. And carbon dioxide then, in itself, when it binds to a protein, is acidifying the protein just by pulling electrons away from the protein.

And when you acidify a gel, the gel being acidic proteins (all biological gels and most gels in general are made with acid polymers) if you acidify a gel it tends to contract. And if you add alkali to it, it expands and swells. So, the acidifying function of carbon dioxide tends to squeeze water out of the cells, just by what the carbon dioxide is doing to the proteins. And so, carbon dioxide is a stabilizing and shaping factor.

Yeah, sugar makes more carbon dioxide per unit of energy. And at high altitude, or in the presence of an atmosphere enriched with carbon dioxide, the cell’s ability to resist fatigue (fatigue being seen as the same as inflammation, swelling, uptake of too much water) in the presence of extra carbon dioxide, or at high altitude where there’s less oxygen pressure so you retrain the carbon dioxide that your tissues produce because it isn’t being competed against by the excess of atmospheric oxygen. At high altitude you retain your own carbon dioxide as if you have an enriched atmosphere of carbon dioxide. At high altitude, or in the presence of carbon dioxide you can work harder and longer without getting fatigued. And I think that’s entirely the effect of carbon dioxide on the water. But there are effects on the ATP Adenosine Triphosphate too.

The equation for making ATP is to dehydrate the precursors. And when you destroy ATP by de-energizing it, you add water (hydrolyze it). And if you look at the equation, if you can just pull water molecules out of the environment ATP would spontaneously form. It wouldn’t take any fancy machinery. Just dehydrating a compartment should cause spontaneous phosphorylation.

And I think carbon dioxide, by its effect on gel, and by taking water out in the form of carbonic acid, I think that’s how the carbon dioxide contributes to raising the energy and endurance of cells.

At high altitudes, In Nepal there was a study (I think it was with 67,000 households) looking for different diseases. They didn’t find any cases of Alzheimer’s, or other dementias. They were extremely deficient in brain diseases in general. But the absence of aging dementia was remarquable. And that’s something that’s been known for over a hundred years, that high altitude populations are very resistant to the diseases of aging, cancer and heart disease, for example.

In New Mexico alone, which is a relatively small population, the figures are very clear that for every 15,000 feet, you get 5 or 10% reduction in mortality from heart disease. And the same with cancer around the world. Insurance companies have known that cancer is relatively scarce in Nepal and Bolivia, and all of the high altitude places.

Well, carbon dioxide is retained. It has an anti-oxidant function. There’s less oxygen but carbon dioxide is— I think carbon dioxide is really what oxygen is being used for. It undergoes chemical reactions, but the production of carbon dioxide, I think, is what really creates the structure of the cell, maintains the gel in the living state and makes the energy hard to deplete.

Just all kinds of muscle and nerve tests— grip strength is stronger at high altitude, even though the oxygen is lower. It’s an example of the toxicity of oxygen, or the anti-toxicity of carbon dioxide.

It’s tending to damage their lungs and make their emphysema worse.

Yeah. I think it’s a similar thing to altitude sickness. Many places are still treating altitude sickness with oxygen. But someone noticed that a device they were taking up on Mount Everest, a plastic bag that they would put the sick person in, zip them in and blow it up with oxygen. They would get better: recover from the mountain sickness. But someone analyzed the air, and they were concentrating their own carbon dioxide in this plastic bag. And so someone tested just having them breathe carbon dioxide at high altitude. And it worked.

I think that’s related to the fact that aging involves a plugging up of all kinds of sensitive points on macromolecules in the cell. That Glycation is something that’s identified with diabetes and Alzheimer’s disease and so on. It means the attachment of sugar-like fragments to proteins, and especially to receptors (or sensitive points in the cell, regulatory points).

And they call it glycation as if it’s caused by glucose. But actually, the oxidized products of polyunsaturated fatty acids are many times more active in causing glycation. And the glycation happens mainly on lysine amino groups of proteins. But you can glycate any molecule that has an amino group. And that pretty well inactivates it.

But the normal function of a good concentration of carbon dioxide is to bind to Lysine groups in hemoglobin. That’s how oxygen is released in the tissues where you need it. Because carbon dioxide comes out of the cells, binds to the lysine forming a carbamino-group on the hemoglobin, acidifying the hemoglobin and making the oxygen available for the cell to get. Then when you get in the lungs with a high oxygen concentration, the oxygen displaces the carbon dioxide. But the carbon dioxide binds that way to insulin receptors, nerve receptors, anything that has a lysine group, carbon dioxide is normally there protecting it, and acidifying it, and stabilizing the structure in sensitive position or condition. And so, just hyperventilating, I think, is contributing to the aging process in which things tend to get glued together by glycation.

Well, I think some of the dehydrations with aging is a normal defensive process. In extracts of tissue, slices and cell cultures, and old animals, and organ treatments, if you inject a hyper-tonic solution which (remember, the hypo-tonic causes tissue swelling, excitation, inflammation), the hyper-tonic solution like sea water, instead of isotonic saline, so called, (sea water is about 7 times stronger than the salt solution of the blood, or even 10 times stronger) but a lot of hospitals are using the concentration of seawater (7 times normal strength) to revive people and it works better than isotonic saline.

And in individual cells, and tissue cultures, and so on, it has an anti-oxidant effect. It protects against oxidation, free radical damage. All kinds of damage are protected by not just concentrated salt (sodium chloride) but concentrated sugar and urea have similar effects in protecting cells. And so i think the dehydration of the fluids with aging, part of that is a defensive reaction.

During a seminar once in 1991, one of my professors said (he knew i had read— unlike the other people at the university) he said “You think that is true that all of these different tissues of the organism are isotonic with the blood?”. And so i went down, and in about an hour found an experiment which took out very fresh snips of tissue and dropped them in isotonic, dull concentration, triple concentration, and so on, solutions, and found that most tissues from an adult organism are stable only at about a triple osmolarity. 2 or 3 times more concentrated than the bloodstream. And so there seems to be something special about the blood that makes us able to handle it at the isotonic, but hypo-tonic to our functioning tissue cells. And i think that’s a barrier of fibrin, largely fibrin on the inside of capillaries interacting with the movement of carbon dioxide out of the cells.

Did you have a comment?

Yea. Caloric restriction reduces the amount of damage to the mitochondria and energy producing system, so that the cells are actually metabolizing at a higher rate than animals that are eating lots of vegetables, and such. The toxins from a freely chosen diet quickly slow down the metabolic rate. And in calves, which are born with very saturated brains because they’re basically getting butterfat incorporated into their brains rather then vegetable oil, their mitochondrias slow down in proportion to the linoleic acid getting incorporated into the mitochondria, in the cardiolipin that regulates the mitochondrial energy production.

And there’s a paper you can find on the internet called “Uncoupled and Surviving”. It’s about a mouse that is naturally very hyper-metabolic, burns energy at a tremendous rate and lives much, much longer than ordinary mice. And that’s the general rule: that the high metabolizers live longer than the low metabolizers. And they tend to have bigger brains.

The biggest fossil brain skull ever found was on Mount Kilimanjaro. And I’ve always thought that that was probably a combination of some kind of a good diet plus the high altitude. Because when you do the opposite, when you increase the oxygen tension, or do any of these things such as disturbing the amount of water the tissue can handle, the brain gets smaller. Radiation causes the tissues to swell and take up water. And the chronic effect is to cause the offspring to have smaller brains.

So I think all of these things: polyunsaturated fatty acids, radiation, estrogen, and too much oxygen, are all doing exactly the same thing. Which is, overexciting the tissue and keeping it from going along the normal path of complexification and adaptive complexity.

No! I’ve always thought Heraclitus loading Heraclitus... had something when he said “dry souls are best”. Heraclitus loading Heraclitus... , the great guy that said “you can’t step into the same river twice”, he also said “dry souls are best”.

Yeah. When I went to graduate school I was intending to become a nerve biologist primarily. And the professor would refer us to articles in journals that seemed pretty irrelevant to the actual problem it was supposed to be solving. But I would look through the same journal and found that there were articles published the same year, that were much better solutions than the professor had referred us to. And eventually, over a period of three or four weeks (first term in graduate school) I saw that Gilbert Ling was turning out more and more often as a person who had solved the problems that were being not solved by the conventional mainline biologists.

So I wrote to him and he answered nicely and said: “You just don’t understand what Science is. Science is about money and prestige and power”.

And he’s the one that developed the glass microelectrode (which used to be called the Ling loading Ling, Gilbert... -Gerard loading Gerard, Ralph Waldo... microelectrode). And he not only developed it, but he decided that it wasn’t measuring the membrane potential, which everyone since him has claimed that it does. He says that there is no membrane potential.

And in my lab with that same nerve biologist, I was using a Ling loading Ling, Gilbert... electrode in a muscle cell on an oscilloscope. And with a micromanipulator, I would move it into the cell and back, different places in the cell. And a professor came by and was watching what I was doing and I said, “Look! Each place in the cell has its own distinct electrical potential.” And he turned so fast he couldn’t look at the evidence. Because if there’s a membrane which is creating the potential, everything inside is a dilute solution: you can’t have regional potentials.

But Gilbert Ling loading Ling, Gilbert... explains why a cell is analogous to a water softener, which retains ions passively(doesn’t expend energy to do that). You can take hair, clean all of the ions out of it, dip it into blood serum, and it will take up magnesium and potassium just like a living cell. But people are still talking about membrane pumps. And at Gilbert Ling's loading Ling, Gilbert... site on the internet gilbertling.org loading https://gilbertling.org... you can read a lot of his papers on how, basically, silly and corrupt mainline biology and medicine are.

He is following up on— A. S. Troshin loading Troshin, A. S.... was, more or less, a contemporary of Gilbert Ling loading Ling, Gilbert... , who wrote a very good book (“Problems of Cell Permeability“), (you can find it in one of the big science libraries here), on the behavior of ions in cells. May be refering to Problems of Cell Permeability loading Problems of Cell Permeability... .

A guy named Veech loading Veech, Richard L.... at the National Institute of (I think it’s) Alcoholism (one of the national institutes), had demonstrated that you can use NMR Nuclear Magnetic Resonance spectroscopy? to measure intracellular pH distinct from the extracellular. And he was the first one I know of who demonstrated that tumors have higher intracellular pH (It’s the extra-cellular acidity that lactic acid causes) but the tumor itself intracellularly is excited, and alkaline relative to normal cells. And excitation of any sort will eventually produce an alkaline field around the nerve or the muscle, as well as swelling. It’s just like any gel that gets alkaline will swell up.

Well, acid, basically, is protective as long as it’s involving carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide is oil soluble, and if you added 1% or so to the air here, we would add it to our blood and soft tissues. It would concentrate inside cells more than in the water. But it would go on increasing for months just breathing the same concentration. It finally builds itself into the bones, strengthens the bones as calcium carbonate before the calcium phosphates form. So we’re as if we’ve been deprived of carbon dioxide chronically. And I think that’s one of the things that causes the tendency to enflame and tumefy and atrophy with aging.

And that’s how Vitamin K works. Vitamin K activates carbon dioxide and helps to integrate it into the bones.

Yea. I have a body bag for watching television. [indicates it comes up to his neck].

The carbon dioxide, while it acidifies inside cells and stabilizes them, it’s regulating, it’s hauling calcium outside cells and helping deposit it in the bones or send things out the kidneys. It’s ability to combine with water and become a counter-ion to metals accounts for, I think, all of the so-called active transport of metals (the active streaming of metals out of cells, or in the cells).

People used the idea of pumps to account for those kidney movements, and so on. Gilbert Ling loading Ling, Gilbert... , several times, has calculated that the cell, just to operate one or two of it’s pumps would need fifteen times more energy that it could possibly derive from the energy available as food and oxygen.

But the blood is alkaline because of the movement of carbon dioxide, keeping the alkaline metals in motion.

About 30 years ago I was thinking about this carbon dioxide thing, and i had mentioned how it regulates brain circulation to one of my nutrition classes. And next week— I had said “soda” (meaning soda pop, as a carbon dioxide source), but next week a girl said that she had given her paralyzed mother, who was hemiplegic from a stroke (6 months she had been half-paralyzed) she gave her aa spoonful of baking soda in a glass of water and in 15 minutes the paralysis lifted.

So, then I started trying it every time i heard of someone who had a stroke. Recently in Mexico, a guy had been, basically, just a wad on his bed for three weeks after a stroke. And a guy gave him a spoonful of baking soda in a glass of water and within a few minutes he could move his hand, and the next day he could walk across the room, but not very well.

And dementia! I’d seen— I think I told you before about the woman who had had epilepsy for 20 years (15 or 20 years). And her neurologist had documented her IQ decline (that was all he did on his annual check-ups) and said she was not to go out of the house by herself she was so demented, she couldn’t find her way home. And she took progesterone and 3 or 4 days later she came back all by herself and she was recovered and able to do everything on her own. She went to graduate school and got her masters degree. Straight A’s!

I tried to get her to go back and talk to him. But in general these people who have these sudden, total recoveries, embarrass their doctors I think. The doctor just doesn’t— like, a guy with Lou Gehrig’s disease (ALS) he had a doctor that said he would work with him, but that involved just watching him rather than actually participating and prescribing. But anyway, this guy was declining along with the other patients in the waiting room that he saw every week. And when he started using niacin, progesterone, light on his head for a couple of hours every day—

Yeah. Well, yeah, just infrared, a clear bright bulb. Anyway, he after a few months of declining started improving. And, I think it was 6 or 8 months after he started, he sent his toilet equipment, wheelchair, and all these things back to the store and showed off that he could do light lifts, went back to work at his company and had no more Lou Gehrig’s disease.

And baking soda and salt and sugar is another thing. Sugar stops the excitotoxic process. Works with niacin to stop the lipolysis that produces the fatty acids that activate the excitotoxic process. And so, sugar and salt, and baking soda, and breathing in a paper bag, and getting a lot of light, and taking thyroid and progesterone, it— the only thing wrong with it is that some of the people recover so fast that no one believes they could have been terminal.

Ok the hardware store, or a chicken store, you can get these things called infra-red light bulbs. They have a cone-shaped, aluminized reflector, and a clear front, and they cost about 3 dollars. And they just run— they’re designed to run at 130 some volts, and so at 120 Volts they put out a lot of infra-red and red light compared to ordinary incandescent bulbs. And that’s good enough. It saves— what? 3800 dollars cheaper than— yeah.

That’s just the reflector. But it has a part from [inaudible]

Yeah. Coconut oil is anti-inflammatory. If lookup— if you put “EFAD” (essential fatty acid deficiency) into PubMed search loading https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov... , you’ll find that animals that are deficient in the so-called essential fatty acids (they have none of those fats in their diet) are hard to kill with endotoxins, or mechanical trauma, or a variety of poisons. They don’t get arthritis or inflammatory diseases from the normal causes.

So, coconut oil, and butter, and the waxes from sugar cane, and bees waxes are being used for the same protective, anti-inflammatory effect. The fats that we make based on palmitic acid (which is found in butter and coconut oil) these are anti-inflammatory things. The mead acid and it’s derivatives are powerfully anti-inflammatory. And when we eat vegetables and vegetable oils, we stop making these anti-inflammatory substances, and instead make the prostaglandins and inflammatory things.

And one of the differences between palmitic acid and linoleic acid is the (besides their effect pro- and anti-thyroid, and pro- and anti-testosterone/progesterone, and so on) the cell tends to take up more water when it has polyinsaturated fats just because the double bond tends to associate with water more easily than the purely hydrocarbon-saturated fatty acids.

Yep. Full-spectrum doesn’t stimulate— for example, the ultraviolet stimulates your production of Vitamin D. But ultraviolet and blue light are both toxic, for example, to the retina. Blue light is destructive to the retina and one of the main things that causes blue light and ultraviolet light to be toxic are the polyinsaturated fatty acids because they react with high energy radiation.

Gail loading Sforza Brewer, Gail... and Tom Brewer loading Brewer, Tom... , man and his wife couple who wrote a book on What Every Pregnant Woman Should Know loading What Every Pregnant Woman Should Know... about nutrition or something like that. And he had two associates, Shanklin loading Shanklin, Douglas R.... and Hodin loading Hodin, Jay... , who wrote a Maternal Nutrition and Child Health loading Maternal Nutrition and Child Health... more technical than the Brewer’s wrote, about the importance of salt in preventing high blood pressure in pregnant women.

Salt restriction is pretty sure to cause hypertension in pregnancy. And so, I made the analogy between premenstrual syndrome and pregnancy, and suggested that women who swell up before their period try eating as much salt as they crave during that time (and usually they crave extra salt like pregnant women). And when they ate lots of salt they didn’t swell up.

So then, my old friends that were taking high blood pressure stuff, I suggested that they try the same thing. And I found that other people had tried that and saw that a salt-restricted diet raised adrenaline, made them have insomnia, as well as high blood pressure. And when you gave them more salt you lowered their adrenaline, and generally tended to lower their blood pressure.

A man named McCarron loading McCarron, David A.... demonstrated that calcium deficiency is more important than sodium excess. But extra-sodium and calcium really will protect you against most high blood pressures.

It’s good to use natural foods. Like lots of milk for the calcium. Lots of fruit for the potassium, and any source you can get sodium (sea water, if you like).

To a great extent, one salt can substitute for the other, because it’s the ionic strength and the osmolarity that’s important, and—

Yeah. Sea salt without additives is a good, practical source.

And in— an English woman doctor who went back to her native Mongolia, where they averaged 30 grams of salt per day, she gave blood pressure tests to everyone she could find. And couldn’t find a hypertensive person, all the way up into their 90’s. She didn’t say anything about the rest of their diet, but I think that’s an example that even 30 grams is compatible with good health.

And there have been studies recently of treating ulcers with different concentrations and ten times isotonic is curative for ulcers. Stomach ulcers included. Likle sea water tends to be strong enough to help cure stomach ulcers.

Oh! Well coffee is our richest nutritional source of magnesium (as a single source).

Yeah. Caffeine, I think of it as a vitamin because it so closely fits into our system of uric acid and so on. And, empirically, the people who drink the most coffee tend to have the best health, the lowest cancer, and heart disease, and so on.

It can’t if it makes you hyper-ventilate. If you use a [inaudible] it helps you burn sugar (specifcally) so it helps to acidify your cell.

For about, I guess, 15 years I ate a quart a day and it didn’t effect my weight, but when I added about an ounce of coconut oil my weight went down in spite of eating the same quart of ice cream plus an ounce of coconut oil.

But then Peninsula Creamery over here got squeezed out of the market by evil distributors. And so, then I went to Breyers (which was the next best thing) but then Bryers started adding horrible gums to make the product have a long shelf-live. And so, there’s only one or two flavors of Bryers that are still really edible: vanilla and French vanilla.

Yeah.