Monday, April 13, 2020

Covid19 : A multifaceted introspection.

Covid19 is now a global issue.Mankind has to contend with it not facing it squarely will only be at the risk of decimating the entire human race.
It has relegated all other issues however important into oblivion.They have all paled into insignificance.
Even if we somehow manage to get over it with bruises and scars with mutilated faces and disfigured  anatomy or maybe dysfunctional physiology unheard of till now biochemistry the life style that we were used to shall never return.
Changes that this virus has brought with itself are there with mankind to stay in our onward journey if at all the journey continues.
We will have to accept certain mistakes that we have committed in the last century.This realization has to dawn sooner than later.
I am listing these mistakes. : 
1.We will have to get closer to Nature from which we have drifted very far and perilously fast.
2.Natural processes are inherently cyclical. In the name of development we adopted the growth model which tends to eject out of the cyclical orbit at a very fast pace leading to catastrophic situations like the present.
Hope Mankind sits to ponder over these issues very soon as things seem to be drifting fast. 
Elaborating on Nature I believe Organic and Nature are almost synonymous. In fact the word organic owes its origin to Life.
Peeping into life processes both inside and outside living cells of all bio diverse life forms we come across organic molecules that we so fondly refer to as bio molecules.These are our life sustainer. 
Fats,Proieins,Carbohydrates are a few of the most important ones that even mid school children have heard of.Nature has created our life processes in a way that allows all food in the above form to be put into the furnace called stomach where the organic is broken up into its essential components to be reassembled in the body into forms that are required by specific cells.Unwanted organic and inorganic molecules are separated as toxic elements and channeled through the liver, kidney,lymphatic,where these are passed through the "sieve" to be sent out as various forms of excretory material.One can imagine the extent of  finesse that Nature gave to all the complicated organic processes by noting that even before final excretion through faeces It provided for a large variety of anaerobic bacteria in the large intestine to extract the last ounce of energy in the form of SCFA. Man is essentially an aerobic creature but Nature allowed its creation to draw energy through anaerobic means by placing such bacteria in that region of the gut.
What man did to Natures design was the following:
1.Convert natural food into chemical preservatives; organic colors that are soothing to the eyes and exhilarating to the tongues but unbearable to the gut.
2.Lower the Ph of the stomach where the food is literally cooked  as a biological process.The cooking that we do in our kitchen which is more of a physical and chemical process and which formed a prelude to the biological process in the the stomach was ceremoniously given a grand farewell.Emerged the fast food culture.
3.The lymphatic channels do not have any pressure device and rely mainly on small time but regular movement of the body parts including breathing.We destroyed all this by equating exercise to calorie.
4.We killed the anaerobic bacteria which was positioned for our help.Thanks to the indiscriminate use of broad spectrum antibiotics. 
All in the name of growth and development.
Hail Economic Growth Down with Human Evolution.
We have made our Biodiversity extinct.Where do we run for help? 

Have we given a thought to the fact that the biodiversity exhibited in this minuscule part of our universe is not seen in any other region.Forget the biodiversity.,even the most primitive unicellular organism which in the last century we viewed as an enemy while scientifically  it is more of a co inhabitant than a rival has not been found in the parts of our universe we have made forays into.Leave aside the bacteria,even a molecule of water is not found on any of the planet or moon our neighbor in space.Remember water is the elixir of life in any form.
This led me to think and possibly investigate reasons which can be ascribed to this uniqueness of this tiny part of the universe.Everything that the Sun spews out is sent all over in the Solar System, entire electromagnetic spectrum,the entire range of charged particles which we collectively call cosmic rays. So how is our Mother Earth different from the other planets?What made our ancestors  refer to Earth as Mother or Life giver?
We all know that mitochondria gives us energy to sustain cellular activity.Do we know that mitochondria though is an organelle of the cell  has entirely different genetic origin.It uses the near visible region of the em spectrum to break the hydrogen bond of water molecules that are present and produced in between the two layers of the mitochondria. 
Mitochondria starts behaving life a battery.
When I investigated further I could see that  during low basal metabolic activity periods like sleeping during night our mitochondria behaved more like a leaky capacitor than a battery with water as the dielectric.
So much for the near visible part of spectrum and water molecules. 
We took all these for granted and started messing up with their basic functions.
We had developed Science to understand the basics of the function  of Nature not to change the basics itself in the race to grow and dominate over our cohabitants  including all forms of Life.
Our belief in human superiority over our"brethren" on earth has alienated us from them.
We may have to learn to cohabit with the others by allowing each their space.
respect for all forms of Life will have to emerge as the new tenet.This should be the path of growth,not the rapacious attitude that we have developed recently as a fast forward towards development. 

Moving ahead with the EM spectrum pouring down from the Sun I found that almost the entire spectrum was found in space while only the near visible region reached the earth.
This time it was our atmosphere which shielded our unique biodiversity from those parts of the spectrum that was harmful. Man was happy with its existence along with its "co inhabitants".' Came technology and the other parts of the spectrum began to be produced on Earth mostly in the name of communication.
Man made some effort to protect the human cellular and to some extent its genetic material but completely ignored the other unicellular organisms.Extinction of simpler and less complex species became the order of Nature during that period.Slowly even the more complex than unicellular ones started becoming extinct.The extinction signal  was loud and clear but we ignored it to our peril. 
Result is for all of us to see.Not that man did not understand what was going on.He was aware but he chose to turn a blind eye because economic growth was the reward of becoming blind to adverse consequences. As if this was not enough research  sponsored by agencies that belonged to the category "conflict of interest" were poured out very innocently and benevolently blinding mankind to the impending existential issues of our biodiversity.
Such is the might of these mega corporates that they easily overpower any sane view in the matter.
The fight is slowly becoming one of Economics vs Existence.
Realization has to dawn on mankind that biodiversity will survive as a whole.The complexity of the homeostatic balance is too multivariate for the human mind along with its artificial intelligence to understand this confounding completely.We peel off one mystery when we are faced with another staring and teasingly looking directly into our eyes.
There is no harm in understanding the complexities of Nature but using this to affect it's natural processes adversely in the name of economic development will be detrimental to existence.
Such profound and wise decisions can in the present situation be taken by people who supposedly head State.
Let us pray that such people have the wisdom to see things in  their entirety.

The Almighty created the Sun as a source of Energy for all forms of biodiversity.Let the Sun "lockdown" its activity and the entire lifeform that we human think we are masters of will wither away and that too more rapidly than we can imagine.
Providing energy is essentially what in Chemistry is called Oxidation. Even school children know that oxidation is a process of losing electrons from the fuel.In common terms people say that the fuel has been burnt/oxidized  to produce energy.
What we experience and see around us in nature is that the fuel that gets burnt/oxidized  does not get back to its fuel form to produce energy again.Nature,the master Architect that it is designed Life Processes so optimally that the fuel molecules could get back to it's original form that is the unburnt or unoxidised form of fuel,ready to get oxidized again.
Such is the Thoughtfullness of our mother Nature who created the reverse process called Reduction to optimize  our fuel consumption.
There is another dimension to this process.What I visualized in this cyclical process of oxidation and reduction that Nature designed for all the species of Living forms that it nurtures is that the closer this process is to a reversible one the greater is the life span of that life form.Health perhaps is also dependent on the time gap between the the two processes of oxidation and reduction.
I believe this observation rests on the Principle of Entropy ie the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
We are therefore faced with the process of reduction.This is just the chemical opposite of oxidation.In this process the fuel molecule looks for the electron it lost while burning to get oxidized to produce energy for the life form it serves.
Unfortunately the human body does not either have dumps of free electrons to carry out this process which our doctors very fondly refer to as anti oxidation.
However Nature gave us our planet Earth and made it a huge reservoir of free electrons.The earliest life forms that is the vegetation that preceded the man and animals had their roots formally planted in the earth so that the reduction process went on smoothly without the time lag between oxidation and reduction being more that designed by Mother Nature.
When animals and later Man appeared they too lived on the earth with their bare foot grounded.The dual process which scientist now call redox went on without health issues.
We lost contact with Earth and that was the beginning of our woes.We needed to antioxidant our fuel in our body.Nature gave plants and vegetables for this purpose because these life forms as we have seen get the primary source of anti oxidation from earth itself.
We started relying on chemicals to do the job of antioxidant.
To put all this in short:
1.Mother nature had designed and programmed all its processes like a very caring and loving caregiver.We chose to ignore its mechanism.We lost contact with Earth the primary source of antioxidation. which came for free.
2.We lost contact with Sun the primary source of all Energy which too came for free.
3.We created our own sources of oxidation and reduction which cost us,was not free.We chose to do business in processes that Nature had given us free.
In the language of Science the Carnots cycle runs between two reservoirs,which in bio processes  are Sun and Earth and it is the most efficient  engine.
Nature gave us the two best reservoirs Sun and Earth that too for free.We could live happily between these two reservoirs. Instead we we chose to bypass both and went on creating our own artificial "reservoirs "which came at a cost.
We are paying for it.

~ Abhayanand , Patna