William Blake and Art's Relationship to Science

00:00 L.P. Warren, 95.1 FM, Community Radio at its best. It’s four o’clock. All right, welcome to Politics and Science. I am your host, John Barkhausen, and this is a special edition, starting a little bit early, an hour earlier, and cutting off the previous show with Stonehill and Blue Suede Rock. So thanks to him for making room for this special edition of Politics and Science with Dr. Raymond Peat. Dr. Peat has a PhD in biology and has specialized in physiology, and Ray, are you there? Okay, well, you’re not coming through. Okay, try that again. Hello? Oh, yeah, you’re there. Okay. Yeah, so if you could fill us in maybe a little bit about your background, would be great. Okay, in the 1950s, I started studying Blake around 1958, 01:08 I think, ran across him in a literature course, and wrote a paper on him. No, I meant, yeah, 1958. No, 1955, I think, was when I started with a literature course. And then I started my thesis on him in 1958 and 1959, finished my master’s degree at the University of Oregon with a thesis on Blake. And by chance, I taught a combination of courses, mostly biology, but a painting course or two at a little college in Urbana, Ohio. And then because of mostly political things connected to anti-war, anti-atomic bomb testing in the atmosphere and such, 02:10 I left Urbana and started my own college in Mexico named Blake College, and the government shut that down in 1965. And so I taught linguistics at Montana State for a year and tried to restart Blake College in Oregon. That went on for a couple years with the FBI, constantly watching the students and such. And then I went to graduate school, 1968, at the University of Oregon. And I had been studying in relation to language and Blake’s ideas, theory of knowledge. I had been thinking about concentrating on brain physiology, 03:16 and at the University, I found that that was the most dogmatic area in the biology department other than genetics. NERB theory was sort of a caricature of primitive computer theory at the time. So I found a really physiological area of biology was reproductive and aging physiology. That’s what I did my thesis on. And since then, I’ve just been following up similar ideas, both in theory of knowledge and function of the brain and how the reproductive hormones, for example, affect the brain function. Yeah, and maybe you could say a word or two about a lot of your work 04:20 has been just basically, and from my impression, is collating a lot of the research that’s been done over the last century. And maybe you could say a little bit about that. When I ran into the biological dogmatism of the NERV people, they were basing everything on an all or nothing function of a NERV membrane. And from the reading I had been doing and some experiments, I was very skeptical about the whole membrane control of cell biology. And starting from when I was about eight years old and read about the history of inheritance in the encyclopedias, I saw that there was very good evidence for the Lamarckian type of inheritance 05:27 through the early decades of the 20th century. And it was essentially stamped out by not permitting any more teachers to describe the Lamarckian theory starting in 1947. And that seeing that the modern biology people were explaining everything in terms of genes and membranes, I looked around in the literature contemporary with what we were being assigned and saw that Otto Warburg had solved most of the problems of how cancer develops, for example, on the basis of damage to the respiratory energy producing system. And that was very convincing to me that people were ignoring him 06:36 or denying his work had any validity without even understanding it. They always misquoted and misrepresented it. And at the same time, I ran into the work of Gilbert Ling in the early 1950s and saw that he had demonstrated the irrelevancy of the so-called nerve membrane or cell membrane in general. And his work had basically solved all of the problems that my professors were working on and mystifying really confusing and creating problems where there weren’t any problems. And I wrote to him, I think it was in the fall of 1968, and said, you seem to have solved all of these problems that are confusing my professors. 07:42 And he said, you just don’t understand science. Science is about prestige and money and power. And I’ve written to him for three times over the decades and he’s been very helpful each time. Yeah, I mean, I have his book and it’s way over my head in terms of math and probably other things as well, but he is a brilliant man and just the face of it, his theory of how cells function makes so much more sense. But I think we’re leaving a lot of people in the dark here about what exactly we’re talking about. And I think in general terms, you’ve focused on research that’s been basically not in the media, which is why I think it’s important for you to be on radio stations like this. And by the way, we are having a fundraiser here, 08:44 so if anybody would like to support independent science and free speech and community media, feel free to go to WMRW.org where you can stream the show and you can also make a donation. And we’re grateful for any amount. And thank you for that. But I think a lot of your research, Ray, has been about basically environmental influences on life and countering basically the mainstream science who is saying it’s all genetic. The environment has very little influence on why we get sick or anything like that. Would you say that’s true? Yeah, except that I see the mainstream as having been exactly where I’ve been, except they got shut down financially and in publication. At the same time, Lamarckism was extirpated from high schools and universities. 09:51 The field theory of embryology was definanced and just disappeared, even though it was the mainstream based on soundless facts and the genetic control people. If you look at summaries of the classic papers and genetics, you see how hypothetical and rationalistic it is. It’s sort of like it could happen, approach to science, and they define themselves as a mainstream simply by shutting off publication to the distance. But now it’s coming back. People like Shapiro with his bacterial demonstration of environmental and transgenerational influences. 10:59 John Caron’s is another bacteria person who has kept alive the influence of the environment on inheritance. There’s been a continuous environmental, developmental field approach in all aspects of biology, but they’ve been systematically quieted. And it seems like there’s some ideological reasons we’ve talked about these before, but there’s also some very pointed financial reasons in that if the environment does affect our health, it means that corporations that are polluting that environment are basically doing it at our expense in dollars and also our expense in quality of life because they’re killing us by poisoning. You can see that over and over every generation has its area of concentration. 12:05 The behaviorists, psychologists, basically defended poverty and oppression because they said what happens to the brain of the fetus in utero is purely genetically determined. So the mother can be starved half to death that isn’t going to hurt the offspring. The medical establishment went along with that, justifying basically starvation living for the poorer classes. Yeah, I mean all the science influences public policy in an enormous way and so it has had huge repercussions. The only time I had an actual employment contract was from the Catholic University of Chile and under the government in the early 70s, 13:10 they were encouraged to do research on the influence of economic factors on the development of intelligence. And I got a job directing a project in the influence of nutrition on brain development at the Catholic University in Valparaiso. And that was part of the social change that was shut down in the coup of 1973. And the whole economic, intellectual environment had progressed to that point that they were interested in the fetal influences of nutrition. The American influence wiped that out with Kissinger and Dean of Chait. So you were there for the coup in Chile? No, I didn’t get there. 14:11 Oh, you didn’t? No. Oh, you had the job but you never got there in time? Yeah. Well, I guess there wouldn’t have been a job. Yeah. Well, that’s another reason that was a terrible tragedy, not only all the loss of life and the stealing of their democracy. Yeah, but that happens constantly in the U.S. ever since 1947 seems to be when it started in every field of biology and psychology. That’s right. You’ve discussed the Cold War in biology before. And who wrote that book, Ray? Carl Lindegren. Lindegren, that’s right. Yeah, while we’re accusing Russia of having ideology mixed with their science, we’re practicing it more than anything. Even the humanities were subject to the same influences. 15:16 Linguistics, when Blake College was shut down, I thought I would just simply shift my activity to teaching linguistics. And I saw that the influence of Chomsky with Pentagon funding had spread across the country by the late 1960s. It was getting into essentially every department of the humanities. I taught a course through the Honors College at University of Oregon on interdepartmental conceptions of human nature. And we got speakers from 10 different departments. And each of them said our departmental most important insight to human nature is Chomsky’s generative language theory, speaking of totalitarian cultures. 16:34 Yeah. So we’re on the subject of humanities, and maybe we should get to Blake before the time whizzes by, and we haven’t had time to discuss it. This is a call-in show, but I’d like to wait for a while so we can hear Ray’s thoughts about William Blake, his art, and how art relates to science. And your thesis for your masters, I found it online, Ray, but there’s one copy of it at the library in the University of… Where is it? Seattle University? Oregon. Oregon, thank you. And I don’t think they would allow me to take it out from here. It was called William Blake and the Mysticisms of Sense and Nonsense. Yeah. And I bet it’s interesting reading. I concentrated on his philosophy of epistemology and ontology and ethics, and that idea that he was important in all of those areas guided my thinking in science, 17:55 since it went along with what I had been learning on my own, and that he was putting things together, creating an image of human nature that was very different from anything that dominated our cultural institutions. You were introduced to him in school, you said? Yeah, in our world literature course, when I was a sophomore, I think I started and first read some of his poems and saw that his language, even though they had the introduction to that section, described him as a Christian mystic and had his songs of innocence, I could see that there was irony and complexity in his language that was unique in my experience. 19:02 And so there was a very good, I considered it one of the two or three brightest professors of the college, Arthur Christman, who let me sign up for a course just in Blake for my third year of college. And so I spent that quarter reading people who had commented on Blake, Arthur Pry, and Jacob Brunowski, who happened to be a biologist, commenting on the historical setting, as well as Blake’s own writing. And that pretty much formed my philosophical orientation to read and figure out how Blake fit in with the mainline philosophers, Kant, Hegel, Marx, and Locke, and Hume. 20:14 Blake had commented on several of his contemporary philosophers and pretty much ridiculed them as he did some of the scientists. Since he worked for publishers as an engraver, he was able to be acquainted with the authors that were being published and engraved. And so he and Henry Fusely, the painter, illustrated Erasmus Darwin’s books. And Erasmus Darwin, along with Lamarck, really was the main initiator of evolutionary thinking in biology. His grandson, Charles, sort of degraded the concept and turned it into a kind of imperialism along the lines of Malthus, that stress, capitalism, and imperialism were shaping a lot of Darwin’s ideas. 21:30 In a later edition, Darwin said, well, no, I’m not exclusively saying that competition between species or between individuals is quite natural selection isn’t the only thing. And he said there are other forms of inheritance. And so in a week, secondhand, the way he recognized that his grandfather and Lamarck did have some importance, Samuel Butler, in a couple of books, put down Charles Darwin as a pony for misrepresenting who really thought of the idea of evolution of species. 22:34 Wait a minute, Charles Butler said he thought of the evolution of species? What was that? I didn’t follow what you said about Charles Butler, I’m sorry. Oh, Samuel Butler. I wrote, for example, Unconscious Memory that analyzed the thinking of Rasmus, Darwin, and Lamarck and showed that memory and inheritance are very similar biological processes. And if you look at it in terms of present biology, it would reduce to the idea that genes are always under the influence of chemical modification other than the DNA bases. They’re being methylated, for example, and the way they’re expressed is modified by several different kinds of chemical reactions. 23:44 So it’s a chemical and physical process that blends between memory and inheritance. And Darwin had acknowledged in the idea of gemules something from the whole physiology affecting the inheritance, but Samuel Butler pointed out that Rasmus, Darwin, and Lamarck had been much more coherent in their description of the process. And it turns out that now we talk about it as an epigenetic modification of the DNA and its expression. But for 150 years, the Lamarckian view sort of disappeared from the main currents. 24:45 And I know we’ve talked about this before, but why did everybody come down on Lamarck so much? Was it just to justify the social power structure that was in place? The man who succeeded him at the French institution denounced him and said that basically he was an anti-Christian with his ideas contradicting the Bible. And so there was a lot of Christian theological attack during the 19th century. And the current issue tries to put evolution on the side of progress and science and put religion against all of that, which they were in the case of Lamarck. But with Darwin, Darwin became the imperialist philosopher. 25:56 The strong winning is the direction of progress. So at the time I started graduate school, Conrad Lorenz was about to get the Nobel Prize. There was a whole current in science justifying militarism. Conrad Lorenz was the ideologist of the Racial Hygiene Institute justifying genocide in Germany. And that was really mainline genetic thinking in America and Germany in the 20s, 30s, and 40s. But the defeat of the Nazis made it embarrassing for the Americans to keep using those terms of genocide and so on. 26:59 But by the 60s Lorenz was being rehabilitated and they weren’t talking about his Nazi beginnings and my professors were all basically committed to the same genetic determinism. You can see that tendency in Darwin, the way he considered that even botanical species from England were going to displace native species in New Zealand, for example, the way white people were displacing the brown people. Just a real imperialist racist. During the 19th century a lot of the Christians were going onto Darwin’s side along with imperialism, but the Protestant traditions, the same ones that supported the American Revolution, 28:19 the Great Awakening had a lot of democratic impulses, equality, anti-slavery, and in the 19th century feminism and social equality and so on were part of the Protestant or Christian revival. And William Jennings Bryan against Clarence Darrell was sort of caricatured the backwardness of people who opposed Darwinism. But the trial, the monkey trial, occurred at the height of the eugenics domination of biological thinking. And William Jennings Bryan represented the public common persons and anti-racial thinking with Clarence Darrell siding with the imperialists and racists and Bryan siding with the common person against racism and genocide. 29:49 And he didn’t put it in the proper political language and so he’s been ridiculed ever since as an ignorant person opposing progress. But when you look at it in the context of who the geneticists really were, the people who set up Hitler’s genocide, and you see that Bryan and the Christians were really on the right side. And the side for human rights basically? Yeah, basically. And Blake was at the center of all of those movements that influenced American history and scientific thinking, philosophical thinking in that sort of underground unofficial atmosphere. 30:57 Well, he certainly had an incredibly productive lifespan and both in art. I don’t know if everybody out there has seen his paintings and etchings and drawings, but they’re certainly astounding to look at. And in addition to the artwork, he writes an immense amount of poetry that goes with it. And some of it’s prose too, I suppose, but he’s an amazingly accomplished person from our point of view these days, from somebody who never went to school. Maybe you could comment a little bit on his education, such as it was. Yeah, he went to a drawing school, I think, when he was 10, and then was apprenticed to an engraver when he was 15. And he started associating with the educated people through the engraver when he was an apprentice. 32:00 And was writing poetry in his late teens and early 20s. But as simply a craftsman, he was not really at the center of their movement, which was educated writers who were getting published and having people to illustrate their books. So he knew these people and became friends with some of them, like William Godwin and Murray Wollstonecraft. And Joseph Priestley, the Occident guy, was also the founder of Unitarianism, or one of the founders. And these people were the radicals and progressives who were actually in danger of being imprisoned or killed by the government for their opinions. 33:09 Some of Blake’s acquaintances were tried for treason in 1795. The atmosphere among the people was such that all three of the first ones tried were acquitted by the juries. And the government had other, I think it was 30 other people indicted. They dropped the cases against them because it was getting so embarrassing because the transcripts of the trials were being published. And it was hurting the government to lose the cases and get all of this publicity for the anti-government view. They had a list of 500 they intended to prosecute if they had been winning with the juries. 34:13 And these people were all accused of treason against the king? Yeah, high treason for belonging to the corresponding society, which stayed in touch with the revolutionaries in America and France. And it was treason to express opposition to monarchy. The law actually said it had to lead to armed rebellion, but the prosecutors were bending the interpretation and saying that having a bad attitude was treasonous. Yeah, a rebellious, a violent rebellious attitude. So it sounds like Blake was doing a lot of reading and he was right in the thick of whatever cultural movements were happening at that point. 35:17 Did he read science also? Yeah, his parents were for a time attending the Swedenborgian church. And Swedenborg was a real scientist, did some very hundred year premature nerve research. And so Blake knew a lot about nervous anatomy, biology in general, knew all of the scientists in London really, at least to the extent of reading things that the publishers had. Because so many of them were radicals in opposing monarchy, he was friendly with them politically, but he didn’t accept their rationalistic, stylish way of thinking about reality. 36:32 Presley had some ideas that Blake found scientifically justifiable, such as energy. He presley believed that matter was made up of energy, and Blake saw energy as being the essence of human life, and once referred to being so inspired that sparks were coming out of his fingers. But the main scientific mood of those deists and rationalists was that reason was where attention should be put rather than on experience. And that matter was some sort of an inert something, not having intrinsic energy. 37:41 It was an idea about matter that a lot of people still have that consciousness can’t possibly come out of matter because matter is something that has to be pushed around by extrinsic forces like billiard balls. So Blake was doing better thinking about the philosophy of science than Presley, but especially the worst mechanists. He not only was putting energy into matter, but he wanted to see experience as part of the nature of matter. 38:52 Everything was following the same principles, whether it was a piece of sand or a bug or a person, the energy and interaction were the essential properties of matter and of life. It’s a building of aspect of matter that it actually gains complexities. He sometimes called the principle of life or of knowing the poetic genius, and this he saw as being a universal thing, 40:00 a plant or an animal, its form was expressing its poetic genius. So it was kind of a lively version of Spinoza’s pantheism. He didn’t see any separation between matter, energy and consciousness, and believed that experience, even said experiment, was the true form of knowing. The experiencing person couldn’t derive anything new from previously learned knowledge, and this sort of offended the university educated people who believed that they had learned something important at the university. 41:11 Blake was saying that every moment we’re experiencing something new that is changing what we did know. The canonical knowledge that you get at the university is always necessarily in doubt, but if you can’t doubt from what you experience, you can doubt after doubt everything that people tell you is true, but experience can’t be doubted because that’s what it is. So we have an email question just came in concerning Blake, it’s from Jose Gonzalez, and it says, in your William Blake article you briefly talk about the difference between the craftsmen and the academic. 42:14 Can you go into further detail describing the difference between them and the knowledge acquired by each one? The craftsmen studied etching and dry-plained printmaking for a while to experience something of what he was doing, and I saw that working on a copper plate with a needle and drawing with this very fine point and making fine lines to build up shapes, and after I’d been doing it for a few hours, the sparkly colors of the refraction lines in the copper created sort of iridescent quality, 43:17 and for hours after I’d been working on a plate, I would see that quality in everything I looked at, and Blake described that sort of experience that you enliven your senses by working on something, and that extends to every new experience you have. You’re shaping it yourself while the new stuff is coming in, and the person who works only on the level of knowledge, what the book and the professor say, that builds up a similar set of reflexes in that person, so they go out seeing the world in terms of what the book and the professor have said, so they see the world as talking concepts to them rather than the craftsman feels the world in a century newness corresponding to how he’s been using his body and mind in working, 44:42 so he feels the world working back at him with those same properties that he’s been enlivening. Yeah, that’s interesting. There’s another question you brought up, Blake’s perception of the world when he was working, and Todd Mudd asks via email, the first biography of William Blake by Alexander Gilchrist makes frequent mention of Blake’s hallucinations and visions, and emphasizes the importance Blake and his wife placed on those visions. According to the biography, when Blake wanted to draw a famous historical person, he would act as if its ghost was sitting literally in front of him, sometimes the ghost image wouldn’t come, and Blake would have to wait until its visitation later in order to make the drawing. I think it’s more well known that Blake saw angels as a child and was reprimanded for this revelation. What do you make of Blake’s visions is the question? 45:45 I think it’s that way of thinking which kids normally have, and it gets trained out of them. You can’t use metaphors and imagery too much if the world around you doesn’t like novel perceptions. I mean you have to stick to the conventional images or else you’ll be ostracized. Yeah, and the body has this capacity to concretize to different extents its thoughts, but most people get stuck in the concretizing the thoughts as words, and they start to think of the word as somehow the identity of the concept and the concept as the identity of what’s in the world. 46:53 And if you see that your body can bring up these concrete images, as you think, that gives you a much more fluid attitude towards everything you learn. You see right in front of you your thought process, and the well trained, well educated person sees words as their consciousness, and the words tend to carry with them all of the intentions of the educational system. So that’s the cage that people built in their minds that trapped their whole being in this world of words and concepts. 48:01 I see, so we just sort of get lost in our abstractions. In someone else’s abstractions. Right, okay. And extending those abstractions, and Blake repeatedly emphasized that you can’t get useful knowledge from previously acquired knowledge. I mean words are so tied to images, it seems like, you know, whenever I read something, it brings up an image of some kind, and I would think in a way they go hand in hand. Yeah, it depends on really how you read and how your mind works. For a while I was a major in psychology and graduate school. One of my projects was to do a questionnaire and find creative people versus good students in various departments. 49:05 And the people who were somewhat nonconformist and creative, productive, always turned out to have a different way of thinking, even of dreaming. The most conventional, good student type kind of even have boring language-centered dreams versus the richer, more complex, colored and interesting kind of dreaming and thinking. So they actually think in symbols. Yeah. Oh, go on if you were going to say something. What was that? Were you going to go on about that? No. Okay. Well, I was wondering about, I mean I think the idea of the image is so interesting. 50:07 You mentioned in another show about synetics, I think it was called, some… Synetics. Synetic, thank you. I spelled it wrong. Which, well why don’t you explain what that was? And they used images or metaphors for solving problems. Is that right? Yeah. Which reminds me of Blake somehow. Yeah, the original synetics book by WJJ Gordon was one I was talking about. It has since evolved into some kind of other business. He, in the 50s, developed this group. First they were trying to understand the creative process in art. And they realized that there was no objective way to prove what was better in the art. They went to engineering and things that could have a concrete outcome that they could sell. 51:15 And eventually it turned into working, just solving corporation problems. But while they were developing the technique to understand how the brain is creative, they developed these different ways of using imagery and body feeling, putting yourself into the problem, imagining the problem in different perspectives. And that helped people think out of the box, as they say. Yeah. Yeah. And I was also curious, in the subject of visions, and Blake, I guess he saw them his whole life. And he definitely made good use of them in his artwork. And how do you relate that at all to Carl Jung and his, basically, his popularizing. 52:18 But he seemed to bring to the public’s attention the fact that those images are available to all of us. And they’re, in fact, according to his theory, indicative of basically a whole other level of mental activity, which he called the unconscious, that’s going on within all of us all the time, and driving much of what we do, even though we’re not aware of it. And do you relate that to Blake at all? Oh, sure. I just think Jung didn’t, he was sort of on the fringes of Freudian thinking, but still, I think he was tied to the same culture that affected Freud. And Wilhelm Reich, even though he didn’t talk about images, I think was closer to Blake’s attitude than any of the people in that psychoanalytic culture. 53:21 I see. So, well, how would you rate this, relate the psychoanalytic culture to Blake? It sounds like you’re thinking they’re off base somewhat. Well, the, Freud with his superego and id, the id had to be repressed to form a rational ego. And Wilhelm Reich pointed out that the superego included the Nazis, another absolutely undesirable oppressors, and that the id really had most of what was good in humanity and shouldn’t be repressed. And so Reich had sex political organizations and got in all kinds of trouble in Europe by 54:29 saying that people should be sexually free and combining that with socialistic political ideas. And that the sexual thing came out of Freudianism, but Freud pleased the authorities by saying you must repress it and accept authority. And Blake, according to some of his biographers, who was sexually a very advanced thinker, didn’t believe that women should be the property of their husbands and such. And where would you fit Jung into all that? Because he disagreed pretty violently with Freud about a lot of things. Yeah, I think his emphasis on imagery is very good. 55:32 But he tried to stereotype it into sort of perpetual personality types. And Blake would have said that we have we and worms and everybody has certain properties, but we’re always going someplace new that you can’t say that a person is bound to any one of these personality types. I see. So he didn’t want to put it people in. He didn’t want to stereotype any living thing it sounds like. Yeah, each thing is different in its unique species and individual personality. But within that species and form, every individual is always becoming something new. 56:41 And I think a lot of his epistemology, that basing experience, putting experience as the basis of all knowledge, I think that grew directly out of his thinking about evolution and reading Erasmus Darwin’s thinking about evolution. Blake saw that each thing, the lamb and the tiger, each one had its own character or genius. But each one was also an individual experiencing and has to be free to be itself and to, like the human has to always be exploring, getting new, new century information. 57:55 And how does the image, the idea of the image and the Blake was so amazing with creating these fantastic and yet very specific images and saying basically how he felt the world worked. How does that all relate to his ideas about science? I think Wilhelm Reich, as thinking about science, he said that the people who identify with what Fred called the superego, they went to put all life in spiritual things. 58:56 And that makes them see the body as a worthless lump. And matter versus spirit is an absolute contradiction in that Fredian thinking that Wilhelm Reich emphasized over and over that matter itself is the source of experience and knowledge. And it’s a deformation of personality that makes people think about matter as something else, something outside of consciousness and knowledge. The Kantian idea that the thing in itself is unknowable where Blake and Reich would say that the genius of matter is what knows. 01:00:08 Ideas about resonance and interaction and such, electricity was a great interest in the whole culture, not just in so-called sciences, but the idea of electrical interactions entered into common thinking so that people were getting so-called medical treatments by getting shocked with mild electrical current. So this idea of energy as part of life, some places, Blake said there’s no body distinct from the soul, but other places he identified the body with energy. 01:01:09 What he was denying was that there is this inert nature behind what we experience as nature. There is no such thing as a thing in itself which is this inert, passive matter. He’s saying it’s all energy, not inert. The substance out of which we in the universe are made is something which you can call poetic, genius, or energy, or matter if you don’t get the wrong understanding of what matter means. A lot of his paintings and drawings, he has basically put the human into the spirit. He represents a lot of the spiritual ideas with human figures. 01:02:12 It was explicit in saying that you can see the human, if your eyes are properly open, the human existing in everything, meaning that you aren’t degrading something into just matter. I see, in practicing sort of an elitism of living things. The human was, he didn’t limit it to just people even though he, in talking about Jesus, sometimes would say that Jesus was only a man, but he was the best man in the most alive or the most conscious. 01:03:29 I have to say at this point that it’s a 503 and you’re listening to WMRW LP Warren and you’re listening to Politics and Science. My guest today is Dr. Ray Peat, he’s a biologist and a physiologist from Eugene, Oregon. We’re very grateful that he’s on the show today helping us out with our fundraiser. If you like shows like this or if you like music or if you like independent media, please consider going to WMRW.org and making a donation to support this little community radio station that does try to do alternative news and alternative reporting on issues like we’re talking about today. Let’s see, so if people want to call in, I think it’s appropriate. Now if you have questions about Blake and his role in the world and how it relates to science, we certainly welcome your calls and we also welcome calls about any other thing you’d like to talk about. 01:04:35 So, let me see here what I have. I wanted to read a quote from Blake, it’s very short, off of one of his plates that he did his engravings. And it’s from, there is no natural religion and it’s just simply this. Therefore God becomes as we are that we may be as he is. And that seems like a very actually dangerous thing to say when he made that in a way because he’s bringing God down. He’s saying God in a way is created by us. Well, Spinoza said it in a much more boring way. Spinoza was trying to get away from already at that time the concretizing matter in a way that was justifying ways of thinking and ways of being in society. 01:05:47 And when you separate spirit from matter, you tend to metaphorically separate merely working people from educated and powerful people. That’s a tendency that you can see that a thousand years ago the philosophers, mostly Jewish and Arabic or Islamic philosophers were thinking about these issues. The same thing that Aristotle differed from Plato on, Aristotle saw matter as creative and formative containing the formative principle in itself. And a lot of the medieval philosophers were pretty clear in their thoughts on what it means to define matter in one way or another. 01:06:58 And Plato, by putting knowledge in a world of form, relegated human life to the material world which was only temporal and not real. And people like Blake realized still that that’s where the important argument is politics and medical, so-called science, physics. All of these take on an ideological attitude in medicine, its genetics and the cell membrane. In physics, it’s currently a tendency to mystify the whole thing into completely non-experient, quantum, mechanical theories of mysterious interactions that can’t have any understandable base in reality. 01:08:16 But it comes out of their calculations. So it’s all mathematical modeling. Yeah, and that’s exactly why Blake said that when your reason, which he spelled U-R-I-Z-E-N, when your reason is separated from the body and emotions and senses, it becomes tyrannical and stupid. He was referring to the chemists and physicists equivalent of his time. We’re letting the deist idea of God that matter get into their thinking about scientific issues. I’d like to talk more about that, but what I’ve noticed when I looked at Blake and a few books about him is that he was being referred to as a Platonist. 01:09:17 And how do you, is there any accounting for that? Yeah, many of the critical comments that I saw when I was starting to study him, they were complete idiots like the people that edited the book that I ran across in my world literature course. They simply misunderstood anything of his they read. They thought it was nice to include some poems about lambs and tigers and little kids in their anthology. But they totally misinterpreted where Blake was using a word ironically. They took it literally. That’s pretty much the way Blake criticism went until around 1950. 01:10:19 Wow. Are you familiar with one of the paperbacks I have which seems pretty good as by Kathleen Reign? Yeah, she was a pretty good one. Yeah, it’s called William Blake appropriately. And you refer to the deists, were they part of the Enlightenment movement? Could you tell us about that a little bit? They wanted to get a divine right of kings. They wanted to displace monarchy and social hierarchy and so they kicked God out of the world and said he set it running and no longer is intervening. Because the kings were claiming that they were God’s agents and the whole attitude puts the masses of people and animals and matter all into the same lump. 01:11:28 And the degree of closeness to the monarchy was the same as the degree of closeness to divinity. And the monarchy loved to torture and slaughter people for their insults. It was really an absolute and pretty disgusting social system right down into the 19th century. There were still slaughtering people for minor offenses. So the deists basically believed in God but they thought he had just set the whole thing up and then he’d stepped out? Yeah, and they were inviting the king to step out too. I see. But he had given, probably in their minds, I’m guessing they had given man dominion over everything? Yeah. 01:12:29 And did Blaketon entirely disagree with all of the Enlightenment movement? No, everything was towards liberation and realization of the good principles of justice and knowledge and good things. He supported them. He supported the revolutionaries in France and America. And even after Edmund Burke was turning against the French Revolution because he saw it was a threat to his class, not just the monarchy. And Blake and Tom Paine and Joseph Priestley, some of them stayed supportive of the French Revolution. 01:13:37 A lot of the deists were rationalists who wanted to protect their property and take on the role of the monarch after they kicked out the monarch. I see. So deism was fine for justifying a new kind of tyranny. And so Blake was analyzing that process of how reason justifies once it throws off an old tyranny, it becomes a tyrant in its place. And I don’t know how closely connected Blake still was with Tom Paine following Paine’s imprisonment in France. I suspect that George Washington actually was manipulating in a counter-revolutionary way. 01:14:43 I don’t know of any facts to support it, but Paine’s experience in prison was that Washington and his ambassadors were explicitly ignoring the fact that Paine was in prison scheduled to be executed. And Paine got really annoyed with Washington. And after he got out of prison, he wrote a long letter that I think everyone interested in American history should read. Showing that already by 95, George Washington was acting pretty much like George Bush or George III, trying to be a tyrant and very hypocritical and corrupt. Yeah, and I think Paine sort of ended up in very poor in America and ostracized. 01:15:47 Yeah, although he was a deist, that was considered by his opponents and manipulated to equal atheism. And Theodore Roosevelt famously referred to him as a dirty little atheist. Wow. And still, Blake defended him as not being an atheist, and Blake didn’t go along with atheism, but he fully supported Tom Paine. And he was the one that advised him to get out of England, go to France to avoid being tried and executed for his anti-monarchy opinion. And he got out in time to avoid being tried. 01:16:49 I think the government went along, letting him get out of the country so that they could try him in absentia and convict him. Otherwise, he would have been in court eloquently explaining. That makes sense, yeah. And William Blake helped him escape, I believe, right? Yeah. And then he went to France and was arrested after that? Yeah, first he was elected a member of the convention of parliament, even though he couldn’t speak French. He was so famous internationally that he was made the French citizen and member of the government. And the government passed a rule that foreigners couldn’t be citizens, and foreigners were automatically treated as agents of the enemy. 01:17:59 And he was imprisoned, and Washington wouldn’t do anything to get him out. Some accident prevented his being executed, but finally Robespierre was executed himself and prisoners were released. Wow. Blake was tried for sedition and treason. That’s right, it didn’t. Go ahead. His own view, according to Gilchrist, was that the government had arranged to have this soldier come and make a big drunk riot in his yard to get to incriminate him. 01:19:03 That was just hearsay about Blake’s opinion. It was set up, but the fact was that he got angry. Even though the soldier was much bigger, Blake got furious and frightened the soldier and marched him down the street to the tavern. And the soldier got his buddy to tell the officer that Blake had been damning the king and developed a story, gradually, that he had said he hoped Bonaparte would invade and so on. So he went to trial, but everyone that knew him said they couldn’t imagine that peaceful Mr. Blake could have acted so ferociously and said such things, so he was acquitted. 01:20:18 And according to what I was reading, he was quite shaken by that and changed his tactics a little bit. If they had looked in his papers, they would have, for sure, executed him. I think partly it was government disorganization, and the judge, I think in that case, was himself a former radical, and I don’t know whether he had any influence, but there was such a mood against the king that by that time it was hard to convict people. Well, Ray, is there anything, I have some questions about health issues that people have sent in, and we could go to those. Do you have any summing up you’d like to do about Blake’s role in science? No. Okay. 01:21:19 All right, let’s move on. Then we’re talking to Dr. Raymond Pete here on WMRWLP Warren, and we’re going to switch now to his role as a physiologist. And I’m getting a phone call right now, but I’m going to tell that person that the way to call into this talk show is to call my Skype number, which is 802-526-2326. That’s 802-526-2326, and I’m sorry I didn’t give that out earlier, and I will endeavor to give it out again. So one question is about the ketone diet. It’s popular these days and appears to achieve impressive weight loss results. What’s your opinion on this burning off of stored fat and how it affects your overall health? It’s very stressful to get in that condition for most people. Extreme hypoglycemia is needed, and that typically turns on lots of cortisol production, and that has many undesirable consequences. 01:22:34 But the worst thing is that almost everyone, the older you are, the more polyunsaturated fats you have built into your tissue, and those being mobilized and oxidized damage practically everything. And they interfere with mitochondrial respiration, but they also break down and have caused oxidative damage to everything outside as well as inside the mitochondria. So for a 10-year-old it’s not so damaging because their tissues are usually not so loaded with polyunsaturated fats, but for a 30 or 40-year-old it can be really harmful. Okay, alright. See, somebody use the metaphor of burning fats as like a slow burning log and burning sugars as like burning kindling. What’s your take on that metaphor? 01:23:54 With a good hot fire, you don’t get any smoke burning unsaturated fats, you get very toxic smoke. And a cigarette smoke contains acrylion, for example, which can form acrylamide and other toxins, but the polyunsaturated fats break down into these toxins similar to what you get in smoke. So it’s a good metaphor. You don’t want a slow, smoky, toxic fire. Okay. Heart arrhythmias. What is it and is AFib and tachycardia, does that all fit into that label and what are the causes and solutions? One of the recognized things associated with it is that the blood is usually more viscous than normal, and that makes it slower to refill after the stroke. 01:25:02 And just that viscosity and discrepancy between the pressure going out and the pressure coming in tends to give complex signals to the heart. And that can contribute if the heart is sensitive to new stimulation, it can produce a premature contraction, or it can cause a delayed contraction if the heart is less sensitive. And the things that you have been eating chronically as well as your hormonal balance affect the sensitivity of the heart to stimulation of either the volume of blood or nerve impulses. And the nerve impulses are affected especially by the balance of sympathetic and parasympathetic nerves and the opposing steroids such as estrogen versus progesterone and testosterone. 01:26:17 And high estrogen increases the sensitivity and likelihood to contract. Progesterone desensitizes the heart so that it can build up a bigger charge of blood, have a bigger stroke before it fires and contracts. And too much of the adrenergic side will make it oversensitive and tend to have premature contractions. Too much of the cholinergic side can simply stop the heart and kill you. Okay, so the thyroid sensitizes you to the sympathetic side. And so if you take thyroid suddenly when you’ve been hypothyroid, then you can get tachycardia. 01:27:23 And a person’s liver governs the way the thyroid is working. So a person with liver problems can have periodic episodes of tachycardia when the thyroid suddenly becomes active against a background of extremely high adrenaline. And combinations of high estrogen and low thyroid are very dangerous for the heart. It sounds, even if you’re trying to adjust it, it sounds very difficult to get it right. Well, if you do things gradually, and estrogen has to be kept under control, because as well as exciting nerves and contractions, it increases the tendency to clot. And clotting tends to go with the high blood viscosity and arrhythmia tendency. 01:28:32 So getting your estrogen-progesterone balance is probably the basic thing to work on. Progesterone has a sort of digitalis-like effect of increasing the stroke volume, making the heart work more efficiently with fewer beats. Alright, somebody just wrote in, I’m a bit confused about Ray’s statements about modern quantum physics. The mathematical formalism makes very well-proven statistical predictions about many phenomena, for example, the double slit experiment. The problem is, however, that some people think it’s a complete theory of everything and draw arbitrary conclusions from this formalism about the nature of the universe, adding an element of randomness. So I think it is important to distinguish between the mathematical formalism and the more or less deceptive interpretation of Heisenberg and others. And it’s important, I think, to look around and see the many different interpretations of that slit experiment, and it’s so convincing. 01:29:47 The prediction is there, but the interpretation of what the prediction means is the whole thing. And you can find a lot of very interesting and convincing alternative interpretations. And I would say the problem wouldn’t exist except for Einstein and people of his generation early in the century making a very mistaken, basic assumption about the nature of matter, which is that matter is entirely local. Atomic has no field properties extending electrically beyond individual atomic interactions. And from that peculiar atomic granular nature of matter that they believed absolutely, then to produce the photoelectric effect, light also had to be granular to act locally to displace one electron per photon. 01:31:02 So it’s purely derived from the assumptions that they so firmly believed, which just 15 years later turned out absolutely not to be true. And the quantum thing of non-locality, Michael Polanyi proposed an adsorption, I said that it was very simple, very empirical, and was not compatible with Einstein’s granular theory of matter. But over through the 20s Polanyi’s work went off in different directions to crystals and metal working, crystal bending, breaking energy and so on. Each experiment he did tended to indicate a non-local nature of the energy in solid state metals and crystals. 01:32:11 And following that by 1930 there was this new long range interpretation of the energy in matter. And with matter having a wave-like behavior, then you can explain photoelectric processes in terms of one wave interacting with another wave, a sort of tuning of waves in light in matter to each other rather than having to imagine a particular granular nature of light to match your granular nature of metal that you believed in. So the assumptions are so important to the quantum people that they don’t like these critics to say that the assumptions have to be reexamined. 01:33:20 But what they do is to say the critics can’t play in their game. It’s their ball. Michael Polanyi, he was ridiculed by them, wasn’t he? Yeah, and he was so affected by that reaction of the established physicists that even when he became a physics professor he wouldn’t teach his students the true Polanyi isotherm. He taught the stupid Langmuir monolayer isotherm. Yeah, go on, Ray. I was going to talk more about that, but go ahead. Okay, you can if you want. I didn’t mean to interrupt. 01:34:24 The phone is breaking up. Oh, it is? You can’t hear me well? I can’t understand what you’re saying at all. Okay, let’s just see if it recovers. Is it any better now? No, I’ll call you right back, Ray. I still can’t understand anything. It’s just a terrible. Let’s hang up. Can you understand that? I’ll call you back. Okay. Yeah, bye. All right, you’re listening to WMRWLP1 and we’ll get our guest, Dr. Raymond Pete, back on the line as soon as I figure out how to find him. Thanks to people who have donated while the show has been going on. Really appreciate that. And you can do that also if you’d like it, WMRW.org. Hello? 01:35:25 Hello, Ray, you’re on the air. Oh, yeah, I hear it clear now. Oh, good. Got our wires crossed there. Must have been the Heisenberg principle getting in the way. So back to health issues. Unless you wanted to say something else about that question. I was just going to give an example of how the establishment excludes people who talk about evidence too much. Sure. Halton Arp wrote a book, Seeing Red, which describes his experience. He was the person who, I guess about 15 or 20 years ago, was making photographs showing galaxies with stringers of matter between them, showing a connectedness of substance. 01:36:26 But the galaxies had a very great redshift difference, showing that they should be moving at extremely different velocities, even though they were connected. And he made quite a few of those pictures. And he was denied use of the telescopes because the pictures so strongly made fun of the belief in the expanding universe explanation for the redshift. And you just said, I was always wondering what the redshift meant. You said it means that it’s traveling at a high velocity? Yeah, away from us. Like the Doppler effect of sound when a vehicle goes by, blowing its horn, the pitch drops as it passes you. I see. And Halton Arp has a website with some of his more recent comments. 01:37:27 But that’s the general behavior that when you get evidence that is embarrassing to your committed assumptions, you have to stop the person who’s providing the evidence. Yeah, it seems a lot like at the university level. It seems like it’s king of the hill there. You can’t hold departments and all grant grant. That’s, you know, they’ve established income flows from grants. And if you shake that up, you’re really upsetting a lot of people. Once my physiology professor came up behind me and to see how my nerve setup was going. And I showed him that as the microelectrode entered the cell, the voltage went up properly. And I said, and now notice as it penetrates to the other side of the cell, you get a dip, a rise, a dip and another rise. 01:38:34 And when you move the electrode back, you repeat that same pattern of voltage changes within the single cell. And he, at some level, recognized that that violated his whole doctrine of cell voltage, which is that there’s a liquid inside the membrane, which has a voltage difference from the outside. And for each region inside the single cell to have a different voltage, he just turned around and he never spoke to me again. Really? That’s sad and too bad that he couldn’t just take what you found out and go with that. Yeah. Well, people certainly do get attached to their own ideas, I gotta say. Okay, here’s a question, if you’re ready to move on to a health question. 01:39:37 Okay, about neuropathy. Extreme numbness, like in people’s fingers coming and going, what is that indicative of? It’s common in diabetes, but it often happens years before you see the blood sugar becoming what they define as diabetic. So it’s really something other than diabetes. In the case of one hand, for example, it can be one of the tunnel syndromes, either in the wrist or the elbow, sometimes up in the shoulder or neck, wherever the nerve goes through a pinch point. If your connective tissue swells up, the nerve gets squeezed and you get tingly numbness. And if that happens during the night, that’s very common in anyone who has just a slight hormonal imbalance 01:40:48 away from good oxidative metabolism, causing the connective tissues to take up water and swell. And many people who were going to have carpal tunnel surgery, for example, or back surgery or whatever, just by taking thyroid or prenatalone have completely relieved the problem and not needed the surgery. Okay, well, that’s good to know. There’s a lot of interesting work being done on that now, hundreds of relevant papers. The standard medical opinion of peripheral neuropathy is that it’s produced by high blood sugar, even though it occurs before the person has high blood sugar in many cases. Its association with diabetes lets it be blamed on sugar and particular changes such as carbonyl attachment 01:41:57 to proteins, a certain sugar metabolic change in the cell, four or five of their definitions of the cause attributing it to sugar, which are of interest to the pharmaceutical industry because each one of them is an opportunity to develop a drug. But since the same kind of process in the nerve happens way before diabetes sets in and in people who never get diabetes, and it also happens in the brain syndromes, many other lines of research are connecting it to toxins, endotoxins from the intestine, prostaglandins, so that simply taking aspirin can make a tremendous change. 01:42:59 The nitric oxide, which is released from not only smog and cigarette smoke, but from the irritation from intestinal toxins and prostaglandins, and from an estrogen excess and deficiency of other steroids. About 25 years ago, it was recognized that the brain is a major steroid organ, like a giant adrenal or gonad. The brain produces a lot of steroid hormones, and they’re called neurosteroids, but progesterone and DHEA, pregnenolone and progesterone, the main ones are derivatives of progesterone, 01:44:00 but several of the minor steroids are also produced in the brain, and that was recognized as an acceptable science for about 20 years. Just recently, people are now recognizing that peripheral nerves also have their nerve steroids, and are just as dependent as the brain on the right balance of estrogen and progesterone. So perhaps supplementing some of those would help? Yeah, and doing everything that helps the organism to balance the natural production of them. Alright, that’s very useful. Here’s another question from Tyler. Can you explain the role of electrolytes in the body, and specifically how they are associated with fluid balance, regulation, and what the relationship of them being electrolytes to adrenal fatigue? 01:45:08 Let me just read this because I’m messing up this question. Can you explain the role of electrolytes in the body, specifically how they are associated with fluid balance and regulation? The so-called adrenal fatigue in quotes, mentality states that adrenal dysfunction can hamper the body’s ability to maintain an optimal balance of electrolytes, sodium and potassium. If someone is having issues with maintaining a proper fluid balance and has symptoms of frequent urination, and also seems to exhibit signs of minor hypo- or hyper-colemia, potassium, I guess, levels at times, what sort of therapies are available to alleviate these imbalances? The medical dogma is that cells have pumps in their membranes, and that pumps regulate the balance in every cell and in the kidney. 01:46:10 These pumps are especially important because they regulate the ion balance in the bloodstream and thus in the whole organism. But Gilbert Lange’s work shows that the pump concept in the membrane is simply irrational, wildly unrelated to the evidence, and his explanation condensing it is that the cytoplasm, the whole cell substance, is like an ion exchange resin. When you soften your water, you put sodium, charge the resin with sodium, and then the hard water containing calcium and magnesium displaces the sodium from the resin simply because it has a higher affinity, 01:47:16 and acid will compete against the sodium. So you have a hierarchy of ions with any given solid state material that can absorb water that will prefer and exclude different ions. And when the cell substance is acidified, it prefers potassium because of the ratio of the size of the ion and the charge distribution on the surface of that size. Comparing sodium to potassium, potassium prefers the solid material with a lower electron concentration. And if the cell pH rises, the electron concentration on the given protein increases, 01:48:22 and in that state the sodium ion is preferred and the potassium is displaced. So the main thing which determines in the healthy cell that the acidic pH is the oxidation of fuel producing not only ATP but carbon dioxide. And the carbon dioxide is itself an acid even in the gaseous form that’s Lewis acid. And as it ionizes and leaves the cell, it takes ions along with it to maintain electrical balance. You have a steady streaming out of the cell of carbonic acid and an associated positive ion. So if you slow down the production of carbon dioxide and the production of useful energy as ATP, 01:49:32 the pH rises not only because less CO2 is being produced and dragging the base minerals, the alkaline minerals out of the cell, but lactic acid is formed and in leaving the cell, it takes protons out with it, making the cell more alkaline. And that alkaline condition prefers sodium. And specific clear experiments, for example, the salt gland of a turtle’s eye or reptile’s eye, different kinds, can excrete salt. They eat a salty diet and they have to get rid of excess sodium. They have glands up around their eye that excrete such a concentrated salt solution 01:50:33 that they get crystals running down their nose. And the mechanism there is the same thing, carbon dioxide leaving the gland, taking sodium out with it. So that’s a way to visualize what’s happening in every cell. And in a low thyroid state, you have many imbalances. Every cell is tending to take up sodium and calcium to lose potassium and magnesium. But in the liver, in the kidney, those same processes work as in the salt gland. And the condition of being low thyroid means that you lose sodium because you can’t put it back into the bloodstream from the urine. 01:51:36 The reverse process of a salt gland is putting it back into the bloodstream as needed so the urine can be relatively dilute. And so a low thyroid person will tend to put more sodium into the urine and make their blood relatively dilute. And that leads to swelling of the tissues. But the swelling really started back in the cell which became alkaline because any shift that increases the electron density and alkalinity, whether it’s an ion exchange or a cell, it will make that cell take up water, hydrating the gel. So it isn’t just the kidney that’s losing sodium and retaining water. 01:52:43 It’s that every cell in your body is suffering the same thing when you’re respiring, producing enough CO2. Wow, so that’s quite a series of effects it has. So you would say that perhaps taking thyroid or increasing your salt and mineral intake would help? Yeah, but the salt will help the low thyroid person. They call it inappropriate secretion of antidiuretic hormone syndrome. But it’s, I think, basically a hormone imbalance starting with thyroid, but then the adrenal hormones are involved. When you lose too much sodium, your albastrone increases in the adrenal 01:53:45 and that tends to exchange magnesium loss for sodium loss. And so it can keep you going in the absence of sufficient dietary sodium. But the increasing albastrone has its hormonal effects shifting even your parasympathetic nervous system balance and causing all kinds of inflammation progression towards fibrosis. Heart failure almost always involves too much effective albastrone. All right. So we’re running out of time here. We only have six minutes left and I have too many questions. We may have to do this again sometime. In fact, one of these questions is about Gerald Pollack and Gilbert Ling, 01:54:48 and I’m going to have Gerald Pollack on the show in a couple weeks. So Andre, sorry, we’re not going to deal with that today. Thank you for your question, but we will get to it, I hope. I hope everyone has a chance to look at some of Gerald Pollack’s videos. They’re just great, very impressive things that he’s doing with water. Yeah, it is. It’s very hopeful, I think, because it’s a very exciting new approach to how water affects us all. I think it’ll prove to have, I mean, it’s a carry on of Gilbert Ling’s work. And it’s up Gerald Pollack, I think, is very good at explaining it. Something that Dr. Ling, as a lay person, I had trouble understanding it. So I thought maybe this question here, we have a little bit of time left. We have like four minutes, and it also relates to the cell. 01:55:54 And the mitochondria and our energy mechanism. It’s from Tony. She says, or he says, Dr. Pete, you mentioned that if the cell gets damaged in the mitochondria, for example, too much calcium without other protective minerals or too much pufas, polyunsaturated fatty acids in the diet, it dies, the cell dies. So is the body able to make new cells to sustain energy? Is this person left with less cells to make ATP and will possibly continue life with less energy, even when they are eating carbohydrates, fruit, sugar, and less starch? Will this person be able to recover with efficient glucose metabolism or have to live with the lactic acid glycolysis like a diabetic? Yeah, the mitochondria themselves can be repaired and induced to multiply in an individual damaged cell. And a dying cell can be replaced from stem cells or adjoining cells, 01:57:02 given the proper conditions. And there was a demonstration of old people whose muscle mitochondria lacked all of the necessary DNA for proper mitochondrial functions. So it looked like their mitochondria were simply on the way to dying. But just by having them do some weightlifting, concentric weightlifting, not the kind that stretches your tight muscle, but the kind that only has weight when the muscle is contracting. So with a few weeks of concentric muscle building, they were able to find new mitochondria in their muscle cells with all of the proper DNA. So apparently the few good mitochondria they had left were multiplying and taking over. 01:58:09 So something as simple as concentric exercise can restore old and damaged cells. And if the whole cell dies, then a whole new cell with good mitochondria can replace it. There were experiments taking samples from people’s facial skin and finding a lot of mutated damaged cells from exposure to the sun. And when they were kept out of the sun for several weeks completely covering the skin so it wasn’t getting ultraviolet damage, their mutated skin cells disappeared. Stem cells had taken over and replaced skin cells with good cells. So pretty much stopping the continuing damage and giving the cell the necessary stimulation and work to do things will repair themselves. 01:59:16 That happens even to the brain and in far advanced cases. I’ve seen people come out of dementia and epilepsy and very, very far advanced things. Well that’s really, really hopeful Ray and we have exactly about 10 seconds left so I’ll have to let you go. Okay. Thank you so much for being on today, we really appreciate it. Okay. Okay, thank you. You can find out more about Ray at raypeat.com, that’s R-A-Y-P-E-A-T dot com. R-A-Y-P-E-A-T dot com and you’ve been listening to Politics and Science on W-M-R-W-L-P-1. The previous show.