Ray,
My own experience with appendicitis as a boy was quite different.
This was in the days before the National Health Service. After I'd
had three days of increasing pain and being told to tough it out, my
parents finally called the doctor from the local panel (which cost a
few pennies a week) early one evening. Within a couple of hours I was
on the operating table at one of the two charity hospitals in my home
town and woke up the next morning sans appendix. My parents were told
that I had been within hours of dying. Well, that was 70 years ago. I
often wonder what my fate would have been under today's NHS.
Keith
At 14:59 07/09/2012, you wrote:
Hello Keith,
We say that there are no accidents, that everything has meaning and
should be treated with the respect of not messing around until we
know what that meaning is. The appendix is another example. It is
a reset button for the gut. They took my student's appendix out
when she didn't need to. It was a medical mistake. They also
didn't attach a connection to colitis that she had
afterwards. Now she's on drugs for the rest of her life. When
people make money on you being sick, it serves their purpose to
stimulate their profit.
REH
From: [email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Keith Hudson
Sent: Friday, September 07, 2012 2:21 AM
To: RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, , EDUCATION
Subject: [Futurework] Mario Draghi badly needs a tutorial
Announced a few days ago in a flurry of scientific excitement second
only to the recent discovery of the Higgs Boson, an international
team of over 400 research geneticists revealed that our "junk DNA"
is not junk at all. The 97% of our DNA which some scientists
hitherto considered to be useless turns out to consist mainly of up
to two or three million switches (or epigenes) which control the
expression of our 20,000 genes (3% of our DNA). The true situation
in every cell in our body is rather as if the Albert Hall in London
were fitted out as one giant Wurlitzer Organ instead of seating for
an audience.
The implications for future health treatment of many complex
diseases such as multiple sclerosis, heart diseases and cancers are
immense and, already, hundreds of articles and blogs in the media
speak of these. But genes and their epigenetic control switches are
not only responsible for purely bodily functions but also (via our
hormones) for psychological predispositions. Furthermore, epigenes,
like genes, are inherited.
Except that, while genes are inherited for hundreds or thousands of
generations at a time -- for as long as a species remains a species
-- without a great deal of change, epigenes are inherited for much
shorter periods and, to boot, many of them are constantly changing
from one generation to the next. Each of us inherits the bulk of our
epigenes from our parents (50% from mothers, 50% from fathers) but
many epigenes fall away after one or more generations while new ones
are added in the lifetime of every individual. The additions depend
on the specific environment in which the individual grows up.
Thus, identical twins, both born with an identical set of genes and
epigenetic predispositions to this disease, or this or that
behaviour, can change markedly throughout their lifetimes as each
twin leaves his or her family and grows up into the wider adult
environment. One twin with a strong predisposition to diabetes or
schizophrenia may succomb sometime during his or her lifetime while
the other, with an identical and equally strong predisposition, may
avoid the same dire consequences.
All this explains why the disease profile of one long-standing
culture differs substantially from that of another. For example,
people who live in the Mediterranean region are twenty times more
likely to inherit a predisposition to cystic fibrosis than those who
live in Northern Germany. This is due to centuries of different
climates and environments in which they work, and the differential
selection and de-selection of the cystic fibrosis epigene (as well
as hundreds more epigenes). This also explains why
the psychological orientation of Germans is distinctly different
from Grecians, and will remain so. The descendants of a Greek family
which moves to north Germany won't become "authentically" German in
disease or psychological predisposition for several generations
until their inherited epigenes have largely blended with the
majority of Germans around them.
The only way that the 17 countries of the Eurozone can become a
United States of Europe -- which is what senior officials and
politicians want to happen -- is if a common political and economic
environment is imposed on them all by legalistic force and
maintained for at least several generations until a large common set
of psychological epigenes is acquired by all 17 countries by
personal inheritance at birth.
At the very least, this could only be initiated by either civil war
or fighting a war against a third party. These, in fact, are the
only ways that most nation-states have come into existence already
-- and then the new unification subsequently maintained by
legalistic (sometime military) force for at least (history suggests)
a dozen generations or so. (Many nation-states, such as the UK, are
still insufficiently blended and are already falling apart into
previous separate cultures.)
Think on, O Eurocrats (Mario Draghi most of all), you won't succeed
in imposing a common taxation and budgetary authority over the
Eurozone unless you have a civil war or find a common enemy to unite
against. Otherwise, you would avoid a great deal of further
dangerous damage of monetary affairs if you were to consult with any
of the team of 400 research geneticists who have brought off the
most spectacular discovery yet in the human sciences (since
Crick-Watson or Darwin, anyway).
Keith
Keith Hudson, Saltford, England
<http://allisstatus.wordpress.com/>http://allisstatus.wordpress.com
Keith Hudson, Saltford, England http://allisstatus.wordpress.com
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