Welcome to the
Electricity of Life
brought to you by The
Thunderbolts Project™
at Thunderbolts.info
In 2011 Jacqueline Barton was awarded
the National Medal of Science
for the discovery that
DNA conducts electricity
and that DNA damage can be sensed
as a loss of electrical conduction.
Some errors such as a
mismatch between base pairs
are sensed by special
repair proteins.
These repair proteins test
electrical conductivity
across sets of hundreds
of base pairs at a time
until they arrive at the area
of the discordant mismatch.
In our body DNA base mismatches are
just a matter of everyday maintenance.
DNA repair is less like a library
disastrously misplacing a book,
and more like a regular process checking
one's filing and printing out replacements.
Also keep in mind that the scale
of reality in which DNA operates
is a radically different existence from anything
our human mind is likely to conceive of.
Susan Lindquist, another winner
of the National Medal of Science
describes such a world
in one of her lectures.
This animation attempts
to depict the movement
of various large proteins
inside of living cell.
They do not actually act so rigidly and in
the end our imagination is not quite ready
to fully appreciate how this
scale of reality behaves.
To be at the realistic speed at which
it is occurring inside the cell,
we would have to speed that
movie up 3 million fold,
so it's actually just plain
inconceivable to imagine how fast
proteins are moving around the
cell and doing things and this really
is part of life, it informs all
of life, all biological systems
have evolved in this way and
it makes life possible.
At this very different scale of
life our body attacks the very DNA
of invading bacteria with
volleys of oxidative stress.
Bacteria produced offenses
such as an iron rich protein
in hopes of distracting these oxidative
volleys away from their DNA.
Their stance of molecular warfare occurs
at speeds beyond our understanding.
A battle of energy at the tiniest
scale of physical existence.
To round out this glimpse of
the electrical dynamics of DNA
let's review key content
from a previous video.
An antenna conducts electromagnetic
waves from the environment.
A fractal antenna uses a
patterned repeating design
to increase the breadth of
frequencies it can respond to.
Reba Goodman was one prominent
researcher in the field of epigenetics.
She worked with Barbara McClintock on
research that won the Nobel Prize.
Now she's part of the community
of researchers who have indicated
that the repeating self-similarity of DNA
structure functions as a fractal antenna.
The electronic
frequencies it conducts
can perturb one particular sequence
with a low electron affinity.
This simple cytosine thymine
cytosine thymine sequence,
when its electrons are dislocated, stimulates
transcription in regions it inhabits.
For instance instructions for
creating a cellular stress protein,
as seen here, labeled
as MYC binding sites.
These are the repeating
cytosine thymine sequence.
They are located upstream
from the promoter
which cues the creation
of stress protein HSP 70.
Despite the work of these esteemed
scientists and many others
it seems like public
narratives of science
don't much discuss the
electromagnetic sensitivity of life.
Perhaps this owes to the potential dangers
of human electrical infrastructure
and unpopular topic that many
scientists have attempted
to bring light to in the
Bioinitiative report.
Studying the electromagnetic
sensitivity of life
can yield important industrial and
ecological wisdom as described in the series
and along with perhaps
cautioning us
against wearing a cell phone
against her body at all times,
we might come to contemplate
much more in electrical terms.
Turning our attention from the
very small to the very large,
consider the massive
range of scale
over which electromagnetic forces
act upon the rhythms of life,
the Aurora is one way our human eyes glimpse
the unseen forces that surround us,
and as this planet pulses
with enormous currents
there is a pulse life coursing
through every forest,
every tree and fern,
every sprouting plant.
In every bird,
lizard or tiny fly,
billions of microtubules form the
ebbing and flowing will of theirselves
and pulse with the computation
of electric dipole interactions.
They provide shape to neurons, creating the
veins through which cognition may flow.
There is an astounding depth of activity
happening within everything that lives
and perhaps between every solar
system in which they live.
Thank you for joining me in this series
where I present my contributions
as one of the scholars and scientists
of the Thunderbolts project.
Next time you look at the night sky or the
orchestrated veins running through a plant
or a tiny traveling beetle,
remember the electricity of life
that courses through our universe
at scales both small and large.
For continued episodes of the
Electricity of Life series
stay tuned to
Thunderbolts.info
