Well I certainly set myself up to have to come up with something for this post.  In part I we talked about what is known of DNA and the conventional view that 5% of the genome is the genetic blueprint and 95% of the genome is “junk”, and how the Russian National Academy of Sciences determined that both coding/blueprint AND noncoding/junk DNA were statistically organized along universal linguistic rules.  Who bothers to organize junk?  As I think of it now, it is also true that portions of the “junk” DNA have also been shown to be evolutionarily conserved, i.e. they show up consistently and identically across broad swaths of life.  So, it seems pretty clear to me that “junk” DNA ain’t junk, it’s just tagged that label by defensive Western science that doesn’t know what it does and has nothing bright to say on the subject.  Speaking of bright things to say …

I set myself up when I said I would have weird and wonderful tales to regale you with in this post but I will give it a try.  Did you know that all life emits light?  I don’t mean here the chemoluminesence of say deep sea creatures wickedly snaring their prey, “come to the light little fishy!”  I mean all life emits light, and light in the visible spectrum.

This phenomena, to my knowledge, was first noticed in the 1920s by, surprise a Russian scientist, by the name of Alexander Gurwitsch who named then mitogenic rays because he felt they had a role in regulating cell division (mitosis).  When others couldn’t replicate his findings they were dismissed.  In the 1950s highly respected American chemist, Irving Langmuir declared the whole notion of mitogenic rays, “pathologic science.”

However, in the 1970s a German biophysicist by the name of Fritz Albert-Popp took a new look at the topic.  Dr Albert-Popp worked with a doctoral student, Bernhard Ruth to build an extremely sensitive photo detector, which they accomplished.  Think of it as the best darn night vision goggles you’ll ever see.  They put some leaves in a sealed box, and this is what the detector showed them on the computer screen (see here).

The light was being given off by the leaves in the sealed box.  This type of experiment was repeated with all manner of variations leading Dr Albert-Popp to conclude “We now know, today, that man is essentially a being of light.”

This experimental work is also written up in the scientific literature (see Evidence of Photon Emission from DNA in Living Systems) .  The point I wish to bring out from this peer-reviewed article is that the luminescence is coming from the chromatin, i.e the DNA.  There is so much more to this story and so many different paths to write on that I am almost at a loss where to begin.

One obvious question is that which a contributor to this site noted some weeks back, “where are the photons coming from?”  That is to say where is the flashlight battery?  Just as a few years back I thought fluoride was just fine in water and a year back I had no idea of the literature on vitamin C as a therapeutic, when I read this comment a few weeks or months ago my first thought was “what in blazes is he on about, what light?”  So that comment led to much of the subject matter in this post.  Let’s leave aside the question of where the energy is coming from for the moment shall we, its a great one but there is a lot else to cover.

Okay, so while the emissions of light from cells are very small they are also very coherent, meaning they are organized with respect to wave length and phases of waves.  Being organized they also then contain at least some degree of information.   The phenomena of biophotons is at this point fairly well established and accepted by mainstream science even if it isn’t taught.  Some though have taken the position that these photons are well I guess you might say “junk” photons, random emissions from unknown, poorly regulated metabolic processes, perhaps something akin to a poorly tuned car backfiring as it drives down Mainstreet.  To counter this, Dr Albert-Popp, an invited member of both the New York and Russian Academies of Science, has a rather technical 2003 presentation to the International Institute of Biophysics entitled “About the Coherence of Biophotons”, documenting the evidence for coherence in biophotons. Again, junk isn’t organized.

There is a lot more that Dr. Albert-Popp has researched in this area that could fill many posts, loss of coherence in cancer, ability to predict cancer causing substances through their effect on light, patterns and “seasons” to biophoton emission and one that we will return to in a moment, the potential of biophotons as regulators of internal (and external) biologic processes.

Before that though, we really don’t understand light at all either, it is a mystery.  We pigeon hole the experimental difficulties a bit by calling it the “wave/particle duality” of light.  Basically one can set-up an experiment which demonstrates that light is a particle (the photoelectric effect if I am not mistaken) or that it is a wave, but how can something be simultaneously both particle and wave?  One odd extension of this is that an apparatus can be constructed where a single “photon” or particle of light is shot through a slit in some lead and is detected to land straight across from where it was shot.  If a second slit is put next to the first in the right place it will create what is called an interference pattern such that a “wave” of light will be disrupted by the two slits.  If one now fires a “photon” or particle of light with the second slit in the right place it is detected to land not in a straight path but in that area which would occur from a wave that was interfered with by passing through the two slits.  If it is a “photon” or particle, who told it that there was another slit next to the one it was passing through?  There is lots of stuff like this in quantum mechanics, really without the necessary background it is hard to tell when one isn’t just delving into Madame Yankovic’s New Age Tarot card readings territory.  I do wonder sometimes though whether those quantum physicists don’t just get together over a bottle of whiskey and joke amongst themselves, “I wonder if we could get anyone to believe this … no, no its not far enough out there, let’s try this one out on them!”

Alright let’s talk about something quite strange that I am a little more comfortable with.  The way we are currently described, we shouldn’t work, we shouldn’t be alive.  I don’t know of a particular paper on this, though I have heard it expressed as a problem, but when you give it a bit of thought, it is quite obviously and commonsensically a big, big problem.

Let’s think of a beachball and now fill it with water.  Let’s take some dye and shoot it in the blowhole and consider how fast that dye will disperse.  The beachball is a cell and the dye a molecule.  The dye is to give an idea of random, “Browian movement” dispersion.  While this problem applies to all cellular molecular interactions for a good example let’s consider the construction of a protein.  The mRNA transcript diffuses out of the cell nucleus into the cytosol, which is the majority of the cell volume.  Instead of one dye there are thousands or tens of thousands of molecules in the cytosol.  One of the larger of these is the ribsome.  The mRNA, there is no chaperoning or active transport said to be going on, must drift up to the ribsome, it must also drift up in the correct orientation that the two molecules come together such that the mRNA will now be read like a cassette in tape recorder.

I apologize that I must get a little more technical at this point, (for some background one can look at the intro to genetics series here).  The mRNA codons represent the 20 amino acids.  There are then, what about 60? (don’t get me started on mRNA homonyms, i.e. how is there contextual reading of a start codon versus an amino acid?) so about 60 transfer RNA anticodons (the tRNAs minus the start and stop codons).  These tRNAs are floating around the cytosol and must through diffusion mate with the correct amino acid amongst thousands of molecules.  Not only that but for the current lock and key or induced fit theory there is an active site to each molecule, thus both the anticodon tRNA and the corresponding amino acid must bump each other in the correct three dimensional configuration for them to join, again there is no active transport or chaperoning said to be involved.  Once a tRNA has its corresponding amino acid payload it must randomly diffuse to the ribosome at exactly the correct time and correct orientation to be of use to be implemented into the growing protein chain.  This doesn’t have to happen once, but tens or hundreds of times for a given protein and hundreds of thousands or millions of times per minute, in each of billions of cells, for any organized metabolism.  Yes, given ten million years a cell might end up with an insulin molecule, but these processes are up regulated and down regulated on a dime.

I believe we are likely basically correct in our current description of what is happening with protein production in a cell.  But we are describing what we don’t understand, by our current model it shouldn’t happen, not in a million years.

Again, I’ve heard of this as a problem, but don’t know the literature, still, this doesn’t seem an overwhelming problem for computer modeling, look at the volume of the cytosol, the various concentrations of molecules, the various potential combinations of molecules, the necessary three dimensional configurations and energetics involved in bonding and the expected, undirected, diffusion rates of various molecules in water at body temperature.

Let’s wrap things up here, darn it, I didn’t get to the Chesire cat.  I do wonder whether the scientist who talks about “phantom DNA” might even be pulling our legs, but I’ll try and wrap up the series soon.

Ciao,

Paul