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The Body Electric
be humble before this miracle. We must treat the tissues with sure, deft
gentleness, and above all we must do no harm, for we are nothing more
than nature's assistants."
None of our textbooks could tell us the how and why of healing. They
explained the basics of scientific medicine—anatomy, biochemistry, bac-
teriology, pathology, and physiology—each dealing with one aspect of
the human body and its discontents. Within each subject the body was
further subdivided into systems. The chemistry of muscle and bone, for
example, was taught separately from that of the digestive and nervous
systems. The same approach is used today, for fragmentation is the only
way to deal with a complexity that would otherwise be overwhelming.
The strategy works perfectly for understanding spaceships, computers,
or other complicated machines, and it's very useful in biology. However,
it leads to the reductionist assumption that once you understand the
parts, you understand the whole. That approach ultimately fails in the
study of living things—hence the widespread demand for an alternative,
holistic medicine—for life is like no machine humans have ever built:
It's always more than the sum of its parts.
With delicate lab culture methods we can remove from an animal
certain organs and tissues, such as bone, a heart, a pancreas, a brain, or
groups of nerve cells, keeping them alive for days or weeks. Much of
modern biology in the West is based on the behavior of such isolated
systems, which is assumed to be the same as in the living body. Russian
biology, based on Ivan Pavlov's concept of the body as an indivisible
unit, has always been skeptical of tissue culture results, considering
these "parabiotic" reactions only hints toward definitive studies of the
entire animal. The good sense of this view is shown by the fact that life
tolerates fragmentation very poorly: Except in the simplest species re-
moval of anything more than a few cells always destroys the organiza-
tion, and hence the organism. Even if we could culture separately all the
organs and tissues and then put them together like Dr. Frankenstein's
monster, we would still, at our present level of knowledge, have only a
collection of different kinds of meat, not a living entity. As Albert
Szent-Gyorgyi once wrote, "Biology is the science of the improbable,"
and seldom can we predict new discoveries from what we already under-
stand.
These limitations were clearly recognized by American medicine in
the 1940s, but they seem to have been gradually forgotten. Today most
M.D.'s tacitly assume that once a few blank spots are filled in, the
established basic sciences will be all we'll ever need to take care of the
sick. As a result, they're losing the forest among the trees. Of the disci-