Thursday, July 12, 2012

Microbial Hermeneutics - 2

Microbes
In the first post of this series we learned that microbes signal one another, that is, they communicate with each other.

In that post we also covered the issue of signal interpretation, that is, discerning which signals to listen to and how to interpret them.

In this post we will take that a bit further, and discuss the findings of science teams we have not yet considered, to learn that microbes actually communicate via a language all their own.

Their language is composed of molecules as words, molecules which the microbes construct within themselves, then broadcast for other microbes to receive, then interpret and act upon.

The importance of this reality cannot be underestimated.

I say this because one of the types of activity that microbes perform is to shape humans in various degrees, both in physical shape and size, including our brains, as well as to influence and/or control some of our behavior, including activating the most extreme behaviors (see Hypothesis: Microbes Generate Toxins of Power - 6).

The video at the bottom of the post has all the detail, since it is a microbiology science presentation by Dr. Bonnie Lynn Bassler, an American molecular biologist who has been a professor at Princeton University since 1994.

She and her team have discovered the "Rosetta Stone" of microbial languages, and can disrupt their hermeneutical processes, to essentially use propaganda to control, to some degree, the behavior of microbes.

The next post in this series is here, the previous post in this series is here.

Additionally, a follow-up interview with Dr. Bassler is here.

I am providing an index into the video which readers can use to focus on any subject more quickly by moving the guide with your mouse to any desired location for quicker review of particular subjects.
Index (time, subject)

00:21 - microbes are oldest life forms on Earth
01:03 - 10 times more microbes than human cells in us
01:31 - 100 times more microbial genes than human genes in us
02:00 - microbes are 99% of our make-up; they keep us alive
02:20 - microbes are vital for keeping us alive and healthy
04:20 - microbes talk with a molecular language
07:50 - quorum sensing (like a census) to know population count
08:20 - Intra species communication (shape of words) dialects
10:50 - microbes communicate with other microbes (multi-lingual)
11:20 - they take a census of all other microbes around them
12:30 - synthetic molecules-words interrupt communication
13:50 - synthetic molecules-words confuse the microbes
15:00 - they have collective, community behaviors
15:20 - microbes made the rules for multi-cellular development
16:00 - microbes invented multi-cellular behavior inside us
17:15 - the team



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