Understanding the gene
We have
all heard of so many researches being undertaken at the expense of billions to
discover some new gene or a new protein, and we may ask what the heck? Why do I
care about something like that or why would so many scientists waste at
occasions their entire lives on this. More simply, why do we need to understand
the molecular mechanism of gene expression & the subsequent protein
synthesis? What is the use of any of this? Well quite simply putting, the scope
of it just so large and so expansive. The most ambitious and the most
ridiculous and what some may call the unethical application may be the
discovery of a so called elixir of immortality. The reason I call this
ridiculous and more importantly unethical is that for once I find that there is
no particular use of living forever or even a very long period of time. I
remember a quote I heard some time back which goes like,” it doesn’t matter how
long you’ve lived. What matters is that how you spend your life how short it
may have been”. Many of the inspiring personalities in human history have
proved to us their worth within their short life . srinivasa ramanujan the
mathematical prodigy who lived hardly 33 years, swami Vivekananda , che guevera
,Shelley, bhagat Singh ; all of them had a very short life. But they made most
of it.
But not
trailing off the topic at hand, the reason for my argument is merely not
philosophical or something like, we are going against GOD and all, it is also
scientific. Human life, whatever the reason was assigned a certain period of
viability beyond which no matter how healthy we may have been we die. It is
always been in nature’s best interest to keep a population any population
within certain boundaries. If we go on to see, we find that in nature no
population goes beyond a certain limit. In a jungle the number of the prey far
exceeds the predator not only so that they do not die out soon, but also so
that the predators don’t go without a constant source of food. For every
thousands or so herbivores existing in large area of the forest there are
present only a handful of predators, a pride of lions, a pack of wolves.
Humans
and partially domesticated animals are the only ones that do not fall under
this category. Till the infancy of human
civilization things were pretty much the same for every new members of the
population born a portion died. Nature primarily in form of disease and
secondarily in form of the vectors that spread them kept the population within
check. But once we began to search for ways to change our environment in
accordance to our needs, agriculture, medicines for curing diseases etc things
changed. I am pretty confident in saying that diseases such as plague, the
Black Death or malaria would not have even existed if humans had not provided
them with suitable climate. Death of such a large scale was unheard of in any
natural species, primarily because they existed in scattered communities
preventing the chance of infections. Whatever might have been the case around
the turn of the 19th century medicine advanced enough to eradicate
most of the then known deadly diseases which had previously restricted the
human population. This gave rise to two important consequences. First as we all
are aware of, the then present human population has tripled to almost 6
billion, much more than what can be naturally sustained. And this huge
population exerts considerable influence on the earth’s natural well being.
But
what this has to do with the topic at hand, you may ask; well because by now
you may ask if such large populations are a problem why we don’t have some
control mechanisms to ensure that we don’t go overboard. Well for that we have
to understand what and why life is? It is much more than a philosophical
question. Simply put, life is “the battle of genes”! You see what we know till
date is that when life first came to be, it started off as an collection of
several biomolecules enclosed together in a sea of biomolecules . These
primitive genes fed on other molecules present in this sea for surviving and
replicating .but as we know no resource in nature is unlimited . as time rolled
on the nutrients available began to deplete so the various of the primitive
genes began to compete for the available resources, either by developing more
efficient survival methods to ensure their well being, or by inhibiting the
growth of inhibiters giving rise to one of the most important mechanism of
life, evolution. With competition grew the complexity of the genes. there started
to arise genes with a definite covering and definite structures ,giving rise to
what we know as cells. Some of these cells came together to work more
efficiently for survival . in short anything that that gave a particular gene
an edge over its competitor was utilized . in short the gene began to build
machines for its survival. with time these machines became more and more
complex, interlinked, differentiated. Some began to make their own food out of
sunlight. Their descendants form the class we know as plants and algae. Some
became dependent on them for survival. Hence was established the
producer-consumer relation.
So
there it is. That is what we are. What life is .What the purpose of life is .
Life is genes and the purpose of life is to ensure the survival of the gene.
Those genes that performed well in the race, in their environment survived and
were passed on. Those that were not up to the mark got lost; extinct if you may.
This goes much beyond the extinction of a species.DNA is the genetic material
seen in the lion’s share of life. We may think that it was so from early on.
But no, somewhere early on there might have been other forms of the gene made
of other molecules, other than the DNA. But as we already said these did not
win the race, could not be passed on, and were lost. Human beings are no
exception of this. We also are the culmination of the survival instinct of our
genes. But humans differ from any other gene machines in the fact that we are
self conscious. And we are proving this fact over and over asking why we are
here, why you doing the same thing even this precise moment while reading this.
The human ability to make considerable changes in our environment is what makes
us unique. Our ability to decide, for ourselves.
Let me
finish with these words. It does not matter who we are or why we are, the only
thing that matters is the way we live our lives. Science apart that is the only
fact we need to know.
“Based
on the book “The Selfish Gene” by Richard Dawkins
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