[FICTION] — An Intro to Paranormal Biology
The following is the transcript, edited for syntax and brevity, of a lecture originally titled “How Cells Socialize: What Our Biology Can Teach Us About Politics,” given by Dr. Marty Windisch on March 12, 2019 at TEDxSpokane.
About six months ago, I received a small package at my office in the biology department of Eastern Washington University, where I am an associate professor. It wasn’t postmarked, suggesting that someone had dropped it off there in person. Inside were a typed letter and two tiny glass vials, one containing a deep red liquid and the other a clear, somewhat viscous one.
The letter was short and to the point. It read: “Dear Dr. Windisch — Amid your regular research, I hope you find time to examine the enclosed samples — at the intra-cellular level, if possible. Once you have examined each individually, I recommend mixing the two and examining the results, again at the intra-cellular level.” Below this text was a phone number with a 509 area code. No name or other identifying information.
As I expected, Googling the number gave me no useful results, but I had to try. I then called the number, but received no response other than an automated message telling me that the mailbox was full. I refrigerated the samples and soon forgot about them, until a couple of weeks later when my summer classes had ended and I found myself with a slow day at the lab. So I had my grad assistant prep a couple of slides from each sample and took a look.
Before I get into what I saw, a brief word about my academic background. As I mentioned, I’m a biologist by trade, specializing in the dynamics of pathogen and host interactions, and how those interactions are affected by evolution. The most immediate application of this is to examine how bacteria and viruses interact with different multicellular species, and how they may make the “jump” in virility from one species to another, such as from pigs to humans. All of which is to say — I’m well-acquainted with the processes by which microbial organisms rapidly shift their genetic makeup so as to thrive in a new host species.
And as it turned out, the samples I had received fit into this pathogen/host dynamic — but in a way I had never seen before and indeed could have never, ever foreseen.
I first examined the red fluid which, unsurprisingly, proved to be blood. Human blood, healthy and overall unremarkable as far as I could tell. Even when I zoomed in to the level of individual cells, I saw nothing remiss. So I moved on to the second sample.
This one appeared to be human saliva, but even from a wide view it was visibly different from the norm in one important respect: I could see no bacteria in it. It probably goes without saying, but our mouths are full of all sorts of cells that aren’t our own, and a single milliliter of healthy human saliva is normally teeming with hundreds of millions of bacteria. Not in this sample, however. That alone was baffling to me. Then I zoomed in to look at the individual white blood cells it contained.
And now I need to make another parenthetical statement: a confession, specifically. I’ve brought you all here under a certain amount of false pretenses, as the title of my talk is almost entirely a lie. I am here to discuss cellular biology, but it is, shall we say, an area of cellular biology that I’ve yet to find any other literature on, one that should not exist. I’m certainly not here to discuss the political implications of cells, although I can’t deny that my topic will likely have major political repercussions, for me at least. I doubt that I will teach or receive funding or publish again after tonight, but over the past six months I’ve come to decide that that is acceptable collateral.
Still with me? Alright, well… here we go.
In short, I found that the white blood cells in the saliva sample had no chromosomes! No DNA or RNA or anything else I could identify as containing genetic information. Yet they were very much alive, buzzing around like kids on a playground. I swear to you that I am not lying, and trust me, I wracked my brain and the internet for weeks after this discovery for a way in which “genome-less” cells could be faked in front of my own eyes. The possibilities are extremely slim, let me tell you.
So, let this sink in for a second. Imagine a car in a scrap yard, gutted of its engine, suddenly up and driving away. Imagine if you received a computer fresh off the assembly line, turned it on, and could immediately surf the web or type documents with it, never having installed an operating system. Flatly impossible. And yet — that’s what I saw. Hordes of tiny little biological computers, chugging away without a single line of code to guide them.
And if you think that’s strange, well — then there’s what happened when, per the letter’s recommendation, I mixed the two samples and observed the resultant solution. What I saw nearly made me pass out. It was mayhem; a cellular circus. The white blood cells from the saliva sample were running amok through the much-larger blood sample, their numbers having apparently exploded. They attacked the normal blood cells in much the same way a virus would — but instead of injecting their own genetic material into the host cells, they seemed to suck out and dissolve the host’s genetic material.
And the way they replicated — new cells suddenly appeared out of nowhere. None of the gradual engorgement, stretching and splitting of mitosis as a parent cell divides in two. Just — bam! At one instant there were two cells, at the next instant four.
Finally — and this was the most relevant observation for my particular area of expertise — the host cells did not die even after being “emptied” of their genomes by the apparently pathogenic cells. Like the impossible white blood cells from the saliva sample, they continued to putter around as if nothing whatsoever was wrong with them.
Needless to say, this all flies in the face of everything we know about cellular biology. The genome is, after all, the cell’s raison d’etre; the beating heart that keeps it alive and also allows it to reproduce. So how can there be cells that live, grow and interact with one another if there’s no genome present to catalyze their activity? How can they metabolize nutrients, or synthesize proteins and enzymes, without any of the amino acid coding that, as far as we know, is essential for them to do so?
Well, in order to explain the unbelievable, you sometimes have to accept something else unbelievable, and I think that is what we need to do in this case. What is the history of science, after all, if not that of people having to face that which they previously thought impossible?
So, here we go…
Although the sciences are all founded on the assumption that certain causes predictably lead to certain effects, we are also starting to see that there is a fundamental level of unpredictability at the bottom of our reality. The bedrock of physics, which is itself the bedrock of all other sciences, has come to be based on the quantum behavior of the particles that make up the universe — behavior that doesn’t seem to proceed according to the same laws that govern the rest of the universe.
What does “quantum behavior” mean? To sum up briefly — and a brief summary is all I can give you, as quantum physics is not my area of expertise — almost every branch of science is based on clear relationships between cause and effect. The weather is caused by fluctuations in temperature, air pressure and moisture; the behavior and physiology of animals is caused by unique pressures imposed by their environment; even the rise and fall of the stock market is mapped to consumer trends and international politics.
But when we dig underneath all these sciences, down to the subatomic level, we find that cause and effect goes out the window. An electron is in one spot at one instant, and suddenly appears in a completely different one the next instant. It didn’t move from point A to point B; it just jumped. And jumps aren’t supposed to happen in science. Things don’t immediately switch from on to off, from here to there. Things move and gradually shift instead. Evolution slowly tweaks animal species; your heart rate ramps up as you exert yourself; water heats up, then simmers, then boils.
Yet that’s not the case at the quantum level. At the quantum level, anything can happen, instantaneously and without warning. Thankfully, we find that the unpredictability of the quantum level does not translate to the levels above it. It’s sort of like how a flock of birds moves in the same direction, even if the individual birds within it are flitting around and doing their own thing. Individual electrons may be pinging around at random, but all that random behavior seems to “cancel out” on the whole, allowing the atoms they compose to still act in predictable ways.
But what if that “cancelling out” of unpredictability didn’t happen? What if quantum behavior managed to somehow emerge at the macroscopic level, not just the subatomic one? What if Dr. Windisch, a fully-grown human organism composed of trillions upon trillions of atoms, were to suddenly disappear from this stage and appear on the Las Vegas strip one second from now? If all my electrons conspired at once to shoot me off to some other place?
I think the cells in these samples were an example of just that: a macroscopic manifestation of quantum behavior, apparently able to defy the normal restrictions of cause and effect. This of course begs an enormous question: what organism could possibly be composed of such cells? Where, in the name of God, did that saliva sample come from?
I’ve noticed a number of people walk out as I’ve been speaking. This comes as no surprise, of course; and for those of you who are still here, I guess I must either commend you for your open-mindedness, or fear for your sanity. And perhaps some have just dozed off; I don’t know. But those of you still paying attention may find yourselves sorely tempted to walk out in a moment.
After conducting these observations, I wasted no time in once again calling the number listed on the letter. To make a long story short, I succeeded in contacting the mysterious person who had delivered these samples; and within a week I saw, with my own eyes, the creature they’d come from. And there’s no getting around it — I can’t describe this creature with any word other than “vampire.” I say “creature,” but I can’t resist referring to it as he, rather than “it.”
“He” was a man, and yet… he wasn’t. His veins were entirely empty of blood, for starters. Most of the time. He had to feed on blood from elsewhere, apparently about once a month. Ideally it would be that of a human, but any mammalian blood seemed to suffice in a pinch. In fact his digestive system, such as it was, seemed incapable of processing anything but blood and water. The majority of his insides and outsides had become inert, almost calcified, with the notable exceptions of brain and nerves and musculature. Direct sunlight wreaked havoc on his skin; I assume that solar radiation somehow disrupted the delicate stasis of his anomalous cells.
And he was just the tip of the iceberg. Throughout the following months I would observe, firsthand, hundreds of similar samples from over a dozen similar creatures. Actually, they were sometimes very dissimilar creatures, but they all shared the impossible presence of these “quantum cells.” And they were all organisms not identified anywhere in mainstream zoology, organisms that should not exist. Yet they do.
(chuckles)
Frankly, I’m surprised that our stage manager back there hasn’t come to yank me off yet. I know that most of you likely think that I am insane, or pulling some kind of hoax. But if I were a con artist, don’t you think I’d have more bells and whistles with me to bolster my case? The best I can offer is footage of the instantaneous cell replication I described a moment ago, which I unfortunately could not include in this presentation, as I did not want to risk getting shut down altogether when the fine programmers here at TEDx screened my media submissions.
But come talk to me when we’re done here and give me your contact info if you’d like to find out more, if you’d like to see proof. I hope to post more materials to YouTube in the near future, provided I don’t get immediately blocked or flagged or whatever. I have no idea if people are open to hearing about this. I just know what I saw.
If you’ve stayed this long, thank you. Perhaps you stayed because you have an intuition hiding beneath your bafflement and skepticism; a gut sense that the neat categories and boxes we’ve created to understand the world are just that — our own creation. Science is a house we’ve built ourselves, and if nothing else, I hope that what I have said tonight prompts you to ask — how much of the world is outside that house?
