We Can Make If We Try, Just the Two of Us
The untold story of how you were born
You were blind.
The first time you set your foot on this blue space marble is debatable. Is it after fertilization or after birth?
Regardless of the specified point, you were blind.
Lisa Feldman Barrett mentions how blind we all are when we are born. We then begin the task of building experience. We slowly upscale from experiential blindness to acuity.
Our eyes begin to work, and register the being who brought us into this world. Our parents.
All this can be inferred. But if we take a few steps back, there is a shared story in all of us. It includes whales, bats, and surely, I am not joking, Richard Feynman.
First, there was one
For you to be born, fertilization must have happened.
A week later, the process of implantation beings. At this point, you are a ball of cells, surfing through the waves around an environment you wish to feed from.
And feed you must.
The skin you have days after fertilization is divided into two. The outer one does the dirty work. It invades, ingests, and digests. The spoils get shared by the ball of cells inside it.
In literal terms, you establish that you have skin in the game.
As for the digestive process, it’s messy. With time, the ball of cells finds itself in a pool of food.
The mother, all the while, is oblivious to this cellular civil war ongoing inside it. She even supplies the weaponry. In her ovaries, a factory called the corpus luteum produces hormones.
She hormonally finances this cellular warfare. But the war won’t go on for long. The demand you create as you continue to increase in size forces her to seek assistance.
She turns to the only other person who can help her. She turns to you.
Once you have established a good grip on your mother’s uterus, you start forming a placenta.
Then there were two, which somehow was just one
The placenta is the last organ to come out of the mother after giving birth. Its role is so important, it has to exist last even after you have been delivered. For this and many other reasons, it’s an organ of mystery and profound potential in regenerative medicine.
This crucial organ is formed by both the mother and the child. The sperm and the ovum are not the only creators.
The child begins creating at an early stage. Long before it is born. It produces a structure known as the chorionic fondrosum. It is the fetal side of the placenta.
The mother contributes to the other side, known as the decidua basalis. These two components form the placenta.
The placenta is the large organ that is equivalent to what your seven-day-old skin was doing — nourishment. It nourishes the embryo. It nourishes you before you’re born.
But this is not the only role of the placenta. One vital role is protection. It protects you from the mother. It turns out the civil war you started created a grudge. And the immune cells took an issue with this.
There was a cellular mutiny, but later became suppressed
To establish a peace treaty, you and your mother made the placenta. This organ protected you from the immune cells.
Remember you were formed by a male and female cell. You are a foreign being inside your mother. Immune cells would find you offensive.
But your mother’s exceeding love came to your rescue. The love you forged while building the placenta was just the beginning.
Because in this constructive site, there were viruses. Retroviruses.
Then the viruses took over
Proteins of viral origin help in the fusion and formation of blood vessels within the placenta.
I bet you never would have thought viruses helped you come alive, huh?
They did. And they did it without a care for whether you noticed it or not. They might not even know you exist.
Remember the seven-day-old skin? It helped form the pool of food you took in as nourishment. It was facilitated by this viral protein.
Do you also remember the construction you and your mother did to form the placenta? It was also facilitated by the viral protein. The blood transitioning from the mother to the child is vital and would form a basis for understanding the peace treaty you signed with your mother.
Here’s how it goes.
Surprisingly the viruses kept the blood flowing
Blood is pumped from your mother through the big artery, the aorta, all the way to the organs. As it gets to the uterus, arteries narrow and become arterioles. These changes to capillary networks by the time they get into the placenta.
From there they merge into venules and form veins. Veins then carry nutritious, oxygen-rich blood to you. The placenta dissolves this disagreement through a unique circulation formed by you and your mother.
The treaty is so useful, oxygen- and nutrition-rich blood goes through vessels (veins) that typically carry oxygen-poor and nutrition-deficient blood.
Once you have taken enough to your fill, you pee some of it to form your swimming pool (amniotic fluid) and return the rest of the blood through your arteries. The arteries convert into arterioles, then capillaries, which reform into venules and veins and back to the mother’s heart to get oxygenated once more.
This rich network of placental vessels, capillary networks, and blood pools is possible through viruses. The viral protein facilitated all this. Yes, you did generate some material, and so did your mother. But without the virus, it becomes difficult to sustain the bond you nurture inside the womb.
You owe a large part of your love to viruses and their products.
They are not as bad as you have always thought.
This viral protein is seen in all organisms with placentas.
It includes whales, bats, and surely I am not joking, Richard Feynman. The work of microbes is indispensable. You might think you only need your energy-producing microbe (mitochondrion), but you also need a little virus and its resultant work.
The name of this protein is syncytin. It helps in the proper formation of the placenta. Its absence disrupts the normal formation.
The fine print that always gets ignored — This time, don’t ignore it
Viruses were lost in the fine print in the story of your birth.
Just the two of you? Your mother and yourself? Or, in the case of Will Smith’s song, just him and his son? Well, not quite.
It should have been just the three of us.
However, this particular virus does not hold a grudge. It does its job, and it does it well.
Not all heroes wear caps.
Subscribe to the lightest newsletter on the Internet for a one-four-all & all-four-one weekly feed, because all you need is one alternative view, only one, to edge you closer to extreme value creation, but I give you four.
