The Amoeba's Secret - English Version started

The Amoeba’s Secret

 

by Bruno Marchal

 

May 19 2000

 

English version by K. Jones

To the memory of my parents

Contents

 

1.      Introduction

2.      The Amoeba’s Secret (1961→1971)

3.      Goedel’s Diagonal (1971→1973)

4.      Blacker than you thought [I] (1973→1977)

 

To be cont.

Chapter 1

Introduction

The mind returns to itself like a glove – Buddhist proverb

Mr Edgar Morin, president of the jury on Le Monde 1998’s University Research Prize, commended the laureates, I amongst them, seeing the happy fortune of our doctoral theses published chez Grasset, that we should have no hesitation in adopting a presentation bearing full witness to the human and personal aspect - all of which decided me to relate it’s entire history.

I should recognise the somewhat special character of the result, but also, and perhaps especially, because of the nature of the path undertaken. I brought up the question of the work’s basis for the first time in 1963, at a school in Brussels. I was eight years old: I do not know if I was particularly precocious or merely highly-strung. In effect the motivation for this work and, for the research toward it commencing in infancy, has always been linked to a fear of death.

There are other more fundamental reasons for my describing this unfolding path, an essential part of which is situated in my earliest infancy:

1.     The work is essentially multidisciplinary. It is situated at the intersection of numerous disciplines – theology, psychology, biology, chemistry, physics, mathematics, information technology – and, suddenly, it is difficult to know with what to begin. Bearing this in mind, the way of kids’ questions is particularly fit for the purpose.

2.     I questioned myself, but rapidly began wondering where the questions came from; a good part of the thesis rests on a process of self-observation. We will see how the thesis is naturally self-explanatory, how it explains its own genesis. An aspect made clearer if one follows, even if only briefly, the path of the kiddies’ questions. I myself profited thereby and ended up with a more polished version of the principal argument. There is no attempt at dumbing-down and the reader can skip any passages judged too technical.

3.     The opportunity to do justice and homage to the great authors and books that stake out my quest, amongst them: G. Ames & R. Wyler, James Watson, Linus Pauling, Michel-Yves Bernard, Lewis Carroll, E. Nagel & J.R. Newman, Jean Ladrière, S.C. Kleene, Bernard d’Espagnat.

4.     …and to recount a Belgian in the best, or universal story in the worst of cases, nothing at all of which is very funny. This story explains why I defended my thesis in 1998 in France. I shall recount these events without hatred or spirit of revenge.

I will tell you in several words even now, the principal result. To begin with, the work presents a proof, which is to say a deductive or, to use heavier terminology, a hypothetico-deductive argument. This signifies there is a hypothesis as much as a “thesis”, in the more technical sense of what is demonstrated from this hypothesis.

By way of proof, I expect that if the reader is not fully convinced of the result after study of the work, he should put up either a non-justified proposition or an error. Note that, concerning deductive work, conclusions never officially carry over to reality. Scientific proofs operate inside the frame of a postulated theory. Science is thus always modest on the subject of its applicability to or its approximation to the real.

The hypothesis is that of Mechanism: the idea that we could be digital machines, in a sense that will be rendered more clearly in due course. Grossly speaking, we would be machines in the precise sense that no parts of our bodies are privileged with respect to an eventual functional substitution: this says that we can survive a heart substitution by the transplant of an artificial heart, or of a kidney by an artificial kidney, etc., inasmuch as the substitution is carried out at a sufficiently fine level. Neither can there be any constraints imposed on the level of substitution chosen. It’s important to remember that I am not going to defend the hypothesis of Mechanism. I only want to pose this hypothesis at the outset. It constitutes the predefined frame of the work¹ [footnote 1]

 

[Footnote 1: Note that the idea of taking Mechanism or Computationalism as a hypothesis seems to be, rather curiously, original. Since Descartes (and even before, notably among the Hindu logicians), there is a staggering amount of literature surrounding the question of Mechanism and the mind, but it is always a question of arguments in favour of Mechanism or arguments against it. Many also think that Mechanism is by itself a solution to the mind-body problem. This, I hope is a strong suit of the current work, to show that Mechanism does not automatically resolve the mind-body problem. On the contrary, it necessitates a reformulation of the problem taking the form of a necessary justification of belief in the appearance of a material world, physical or substantial (to anticipate in one phrase the principal result of the work.)]

 

The discovery described here is that in this case, that with this hypothesis of Mechanism, physics becomes reducible to the psychology of machines. The “of” should be interpreted in both the transitive and intransitive senses: clearly it is a question of psychology concerning machines as much as psychology inferred or postulated correctly (by definition) by the machines themselves. We will be able, with a little information theory, to define this psychology in the wider sense of the machines’ “self-referentially correct” discourse. Such a psychology appears non-normative: we will see that it makes of us beings vastly less well known to ourselves than we had ever imagined. It constitutes a sort of “vaccine” against the numerous forms of reductionism of human psychology.

The reduction of physics to psychology happens also at the epistemological level: physics effectively becomes a branch of psychology – the science of observable machines – as it does at the ontological level: matter or the appearance of matter emerges from consciousness, from the mind or the mental or even as we will see, of “possible gambles” made by all digital machines.

It seems that what I have succeeded in demonstrating is that to truly take seriously the hypothesis that we are digitalisable machines, is to be forced to recognise a reversal of the naturalist or materialist idea, quite widespread among philosophers, physicians and the man in the street, that physics is the fundamental science to which all the other natural and human sciences - at least ontologically and thus in principle - should be reducible. I summarise this theorem by:

comp  ⇒  reversal

where comp designates “computationalism”, a name often given to “Digital Mechanism” and reversal designates the reversal of psychology with physics. What results is not a primitive matter with consciousness emerging from the organisation of the matter but the reverse: consciousness is now the more primitive and matter, or rather the appearance of material organisation, emerges from all the possible experiences of all the possible consciousnesses; and this in a sufficiently precise sense that derives physics (science of matter) from psychology (viewed as a very general science of conscious experience, or more positively, of stable discourses by the machines themselves: physics, but not geography^2, belonging necessarily to this self-referential discourse, which I will demonstrate.)

 

[Footnote 2: Physics becomes the study of what is a priori observable by every observer. The moon’s existence is not (in all truthfulness) a physical law. By now one might fear that the physical laws lead only to trivial truths, but we will see that the constraints of Mechanism detrivialise this introspective physics.]

 

 At this stage, anyone who for any good reason were to be persuaded of the veracity of contemporary materialism^3, can always surmise that the present work constitutes a rejection of Mechanism. This will nevertheless pose a problem since Mechanism is, implicitly or explicitly, the philosophy adopted by the majority of materialists.

 

[Footnote 3: Throughout this work, “materialism” will be taken in the weak sense of the philosophical doctrine that postulates the existence of a substantial universe (a fact of things obeying laws independent of us).]

 

Concerning my own position on this I remain silent. My philosophical opinions rest and will remain private. In the more technical part of the thesis I nevertheless show that one can already extract enough qualitative and quantitative givens from physics once this is shown to be derivable from machine psychology. We can then confront the results with the usual empirical and modern physical theories – notably quantum mechanics – to start to see an empirical confirmation of this psychology and thus confirmation of the reversal.

By illuminating problems in the interpretation of (quantum) physical facts, this thesis vehiculates a de facto judgment. The judgement that the reversal and Mechanism, its reasoning logic, are plausible.

A final observation concerns rationalism and interdisciplinarity.

This work pleads as “rationalist”. Like Karl Popper, I appreciate the match between rationalism and elitism. Rationalism is a form of hope concerning the reasoning powers of others. It is the hope that the other will have the courtesy to listen to you and accept your results or to indicate to you your errors, or to say to you at the very least that the subject is of no interest to him. Popper writes:

Faith⁴ in reason is not only a faith in our own reason but also – and even more – in that of others.

 

[Footnote 4: French translation of Popper quote suppressed.]

 

Thus a rationalist, even if he believes himself to be intellectually superior to others, will reject all claims to authority since he is aware that, if his intelligence is superior to that of others (which is hard for him to judge), it is only insofar as he is capable of learning from his own and other peoples’ mistakes, and that one can learn in this sense only if one takes others and their arguments seriously. Rationalism is therefore bound up with the idea that the other fellow has the right to be heard, and to defend his arguments. (Karl R. Popper⁵)

 

[Footnote 5: The Open Society and Its Enemies. London, Hutchinson, 1950]

 

I feel in particular, that reason is a universal and, universally profitable. Nothing else like science exists that is clearly separate to all other human endeavours. I merely believe that there are those possessed of a scientific attitude, which is no more than a form of modesty and honesty with themselves and with others. This attitude does not depend on any particular domain. I have a ready-made slogan:

Some gardeners are more scientific than astronomers

And, I might have said astrologers in place of gardeners⁶.

 

[Footnote 6: One can consult a fine book by Suzanne Blackmore In Search of the Light for an example of a scientific contribution to parapsychology, albeit somewhat negative.]

 

Today a kind of artificial chasm is maintained between the human sciences and the exact sciences. To combat the so-called elitist usage of mathematics, a minister of politics⁷ was struck by the notion of suppressing numerous hours devoted to maths in diverse sections of secondary teaching.

 

[Footnote 7: This idea was defended by Claude Allègre, explored in his book The Defeat of Plato (Fayard, Paris, 1995) and applied when he ascended to the post of Education minister.)]

 

In the same way, more and more hours of maths teaching are being taken away from the human sciences. This can only finish by discouraging teachers from teaching by demonstration – meaning explanations – of formulas in mathematics courses. One would presumably do the opposite, short of teaching other mathematics in the human sections.

The prohibition on the generalised use of deductive or interrogative reason, and on mathematics itself, contributes not only to rendering the human sciences less exact and the exact sciences less human, but also especially to rendering the human sciences less human and the exact sciences less exact, as should be clear from a reading of the present work.

Note that I do not claim that reason is everything, or that it is a kind of universal panacea. I only say that reason, properly considered, should stand as the first rung of courtesy, permitting evolution and progress in the research of knowledge. Short of making courageous “backflips” from time to time, as in revising one’s beliefs or abandoning a prejudice, this is how things should be.

Reason is not sufficient for progress in knowledge. There must also be inspiration, attention, imagination, bravery etc. While reason is not of itself sufficient, it is necessary to communicate results to others.

Again concerning interdisciplinarity,  I often like to cite Descartes. He wrote:

One must therefore be convinced that all the sciences are so linked together that it is easier to learn them all at the same time, than to isolate each from the other.

I hope that the present contribution will illustrate to what extent Descartes was inspired on this point. As with the collaborations on quantum mechanics of Einstein, Podolski and Rosen on the one hand, and of Bell on the other, this work should also illustrate the artificial character of the frontier between science and philosophy, or even between science and theology. We will return to this point.

Any traces of eventual frontiers existing between the sciences and the philosophies rest ultimately on philosophical postulates, avowed or not.

The advantage in my briefly recounting to you the pathways taken by my still-young thoughts, lies in the fact that children are naturally interdisciplinary: they have not yet submitted to that form of brainwashing known as “academic specialisation”. Children will always pose questions without fear of where they might be putting their feet.

Chapter 2

The Amoeba’s Secret

(1961 → 1971)

what am I doing here in these miasmas

tiny little Lilliputian

seized by terror, sometimes by asthma

before these tonnes of thingumajigs

Gaston Compère, “Geometrie de l’absence”

 

What follows evidently constitutes a partial view of the past. I am not telling my life-story,  merely those sparse events that illustrate the threading of the ideas and questions that together form the origin of the discovery.

Certain paediatricians claim that the first metaphysical crisis, or the first anxious moments concerning death, occur in children around age 4. Perhaps. I remember well the terror that invaded my mind day and night, and I demanded all manner of assurances from my parents that I would wake up the following morning.

With the well-intentioned care of silencing any woes in children, parents are apt to tell stories. As I was born in Germany, a nanny would regularly read to me in German many folk-tales, mainly those of the brothers Grimm, although I am not so certain that these offered me any appeasement concerning my worries.

It must have been at around the age of 5 or 6 when as I remember, doubtless by a sort of absent-mindedness or simply out of fatigue since I assailed him with questions remorselessly, that my father informed me that Saint Nicholas did not exist.

“And Father Christmas?”

“Him neither” my father replied, sadly noting my incredulous and king-hit countenance. Thus collapsed my first theory – or ontology, mythology, theology, belief, dream…call it what you will; at this age, any precision on my part had been premature.

“And the fairies?” I pleaded.

“Them neither”

“But, come on – the angels and all that…?”

Here I could see that I had come once again to pose my father an embarrassing question. After a long drawn-out sigh, he explained to me that really he believed in none of it – in angels or in God, but that my cousins and uncles and aunts believed it all. This astonished me all the more in that fairies were for me no more than female angels equipped with magic wands. I liked fairies and angels because they could fly (had I gone on to develop this tendency I might have become an aviator), but in the main because fairies and angels were immortals.

By now I had realised that adults could have differing beliefs. I found this profoundly shocking. If my cousins could believe in angels, was it not my right to also believe in them, as well as in fairies?

My father explained to me that it was surely my right after a certain fashion, to believe in whatever I wanted to believe, but that it was by no means evident that to do so would be in my best interest.

To believe in false propositions is to invite deception and disappointment. I found entirely pathetic the notion of believing in the false, and the whole thing gave me the shudders. From this moment on, I would try to adhere to the rule: avoid at any price belief in falsity.

The truth, evidently, can give rise to fear. In particular the idea that I was a mere mortal seemed to me to be at the very limits of the acceptable. But the idea of believing in falsity out of fear of the truth worried me all the more. I therefore made promise to myself to always search for the true, fearsome as this may well turn out to be. To know would seem even better.

To know is better: agreed. But is this even possible? Surely it cannot be easy.

To start with, I observed that during nightly dreams I was able to believe in just about any falsity. In addition, I suffered sleep problems, like many kids, something confirmed by electroencephalography. My dreams were abnormally realistic. This hyperrealism was fine in the case of lovely and pleasant dreams, but it became truly worrisome in the case of strange dreams and nightmares. Doubts arising from dreams, even concerning the possibility of knowing truth, will play a role in the story that occupies us here. There is nothing original in any of this; the metaphysical role of dreams appeared with the Hindu idealists, Plato, Descartes, Berkeley, as I would learn later on.

There followed the problem of a divergence of opinion between my father and my uncle. Before, everything was simple: a proposal was true if and only if my father asserted it¹.

 

[Footnote 1: I express myself here in adult language; at the time I would have been hard-pressed to formulate such a proposal in this way.]

 

Since he had evinced several seconds of doubt over the existence of angels and told me that my uncle himself believed in them, I truly wondered just whom I should believe over this.

 

I asked my uncle why he believed in angels. He replied, inasmuch as I can recall with any precision, that his belief was based in the fact that his parents believed in them, also his grandparents, etc. I found his reply frankly troubling. In effect, if his ancestor had been mistaken, this mistake would be propagated from generation to generation. I came to admire my father’s placing in doubt his own parents’ beliefs, and I decided to never believe in a proposition under simple pretext that it had been announced by a trusted person or family-member. I had hit upon what one now calls the principle of free will, a founding principle of the Free University of Brussels, the university where my father concluded his juristic studies after a learning spell with the Jesuits. I have no doubt that he may have influenced me.

I asked my father why he did not believe in angels and fairies (I could not have cared less about St Nicholas and Father Christmas because to my mind they were not even immortals). He responded by saying that having thoroughly searched everywhere, no one had encountered them anywhere. There followed a deluge of revelations: we live on a ball suspended in space, we have already orbited it etc. It seemed like no place existed for fairies and angels.

In order to not run the risk of believing falsity, my interest in imaginary beings slid over to a pronounced interest in animals, for whose existence nobody had even the slightest doubt. Returning to Belgium from Germany, my parents bought a small hobby-farm in the country to which we would go during vacations and on the weekend. I passed a lot of time observing swallows, butterflies, ants etc. When observing an animal, for example, a butterfly, I identified body and soul with this butterfly. If it flew, it was I who flew, if it gathered pollen, it was I who gathered pollen and it was I who became intoxicated by the multiple nectars of the flowers of the fields.

One day, I pointed to a white butterfly and exclaimed to my sister and brother “Look! This butterfly, I recognise it, it’s me; I have been this butterfly for several weeks now.” And they, with a delicacy well known amongst siblings, broke the news to me that this was not possible “because butterflies only live for one day.”

This came as quite a shock. It reminded me that if swallows and butterflies flew, like angels, they were none the less mortal for it, like me. They did seem though, to live a much shorter life than I, which I found disturbing.

At this time, whenever I identified with an animal, the identification took place in real time: I did not yet imagine from the butterfly’s point of view that one day could appear very long. Thus, if a butterfly truly lived but one day, due to my identification with it, I also lived but one day and no longer. And this was no laughing matter. I became maniacally obsessed with the maximum life spans of animals. Every time I heard of a new animal I would ask about its longevity. I was rather disappointed to discover that, on the whole, large animals lived longer than the small ones with which I had been identifying almost exclusively since I myself was of small stature at this time.

It was then that I made an authentic and revolutionary discovery. I had a canine companion in whom I confided my metaphysical concerns, my partner in the quest for truth. One fine day, I tried to show him a tiny red spider (in fact a tiny garden acarina), without managing to attract his attention. I concluded that the acarina was too tiny for my dog to see and suddenly, I found myself identifying with my dog. It thus came into my mind that the fairies and angels were perhaps just that little bit too miniscule for us to be able to perceive them.

As quickly as I could, I presented my theory to my father. I was particularly serene, not only in view of a proof of the existence of fairies, but also of the proof that my father could not be sure of their non-existence. I played devil’s advocate not because I wanted to contradict my father at any price, but rather to show that my cousins and uncle were perhaps not entirely in the wrong.

“Even if you searched everywhere on Earth for angels and didn’t find any, that proves nothing” I said. “Perhaps angels and fairies are simply too small for us to see them?” I explained to him the experience with my dog. My father, who had an answer to hand for everything, enlightened me that the search had included the direction of the tiny as well. He spoke to me of the microscope and – and in fact it was this that surprised me the most - he explained that the effective discovery of a multitude of tiny animals invisible to the naked eye had thereby been made. He then took a piece of paper and drew a sketch of an amoeba. I fell headlong in love with this tiny and adorable creature, multiform and so easy to draw.

And so to the fundamental question of the moment: how long might an amoeba expect to live?

Considering my belief that the smaller an animal was, the less time it could live, I hardly had any illusions. It must be that my tiny amoeba could not possibly live very long at all.

On this question of the lifetime of an amoeba, my father, with infinite wisdom, contented himself to explain that having eaten their fill of even tinier (!) creatures during a day, rather than merely dying like any ordinary beast such as a butterfly, it divided itself instead into two. Instead of dying and disappearing, an amoeba would divide itself and give birth to two amoebas. This was practically the reverse of death itself.

“So they’re immortal, then?”

This time, my father made no response.

I requested, of my elder brother and sister notably, that they bring back from school as many documents as they could find on amoebas, which they very kindly did. I thus started to write (more exactly, to scribble in just about every sense) a book: The Invisible World. My idea was that if invisible worlds existed – and the existence of the amoeba proved the existence of such worlds – one could no longer enjoy any form of certainty over whatever the case might be. In the final analysis, my uncle may well have been right on the subject of angels. The amoeba was surely a tangible piece of evidence that at least certain animals could be immortal. I killed time by annoying my parents with the demand for a microscope of my own. When the microscope inevitably arrived, I looked for amoebas. I discovered euglenas and especially paramecia, and when they divided themselves into two, I divided into two also. The question now was to know whether the paramecium had survived its division.

What exactly was going on?

I arrived at my first public seminar on amoebas. Even though I may be driven by self-imposed questions, I have always had an immense enthusiasm for giving oral exposés, even delivering classes and seminars on subjects at a considerable distance from those that preoccupy me directly. Thus, I had already given several verbal exposés, notably on minerals, but, in 1963, at the age of 8, people were urging me to deliver a seminar on microbes.

Entitled Amoeba, Euglena and Paramecium, I have managed to rediscover my succinct resumé in an old notebook:

My friends, let me tell you, in this room, we are not 24 in number, but several million².

 

[Footnote 2: I already liked paradoxical propositions; true but slightly astonishing statements, so to speak. “We” to my mind, evidently designated the students of the class with the teacher and the microbes in the class. The “million” would have had to be a much higher number in reality, if one had wanted to be more exact.]

 

Does the elephant see the tiny red spider? Could living beings exist who are so tiny that to us they would be invisible? Could there be an invisible world and a tunnel through which to explore it? As incredible as this may sound: yes. The microscope is the tunnel and the microbes are the discovery. Amoeba, euglena, paramecia, vorticellae, stentor, bacteria, ovum and spermatozoa, the protozoa among us! Nutrition, digestion, excretion, diverse sensibilities (the euglena’s eye), and …. reproduction.

Question: How long can an amoeba live? One day or forever? If it lives two days it lives every day… forever. (Public secondary school Robert Catteau, in the presence of Prof. Verschaeve)

 

I would become more and more obsessed by this question of the immortality of the amoeba. For the following two full years, I would pass half my free time on walks gathering every possible kind of water (sewerage, liquid manure, pond water, estuarine, puddles of every sort) and the other half observing these waters under the microscope. As usual, I always identified completely with the microorganisms I was observing and attempted to somehow sense whatever was going on at the moment of their division. I scaffolded an unimaginable number of theories illustrating the immortal character of unicellular creatures without arriving at a stage of conviction over any of them. The consistent effort to go from fairies to amoebas had been kick-started by my fear of believing in non-existent things and I did not at any price want to believe that amoebas were immortal if they in fact were not.

Yet, certitude had come through: IF an amoeba lives two days THEN it lives every day³

 

[Footnote 3: In fact the common amoeba divides on average every 50 hours approximately, but for the sake of simplicity I will continue to speak as though its divisions occur every 24 hours.]

 

It remained to demonstrate that for an amoeba to be immortal, it only needed to survive one division.

An example of a theory heading in this direction was what I called “The Principle of the Inspector”:

 

NO CORPSE means NO MURDER

 

According to the inspector, when the amoeba divides, it leaves behind no corpse, so no “body” dies in the act of dividing, therefore an amoeba survives its division. But this reasoning is invalid. When a hydra eats an amoeba, it gets digested and neither is any corpse left behind. The difficulty lies in believing that it survives the process of digestion. The “Principle of the Inspector” collapsed.

My basic theory or argument in favour of the immortality of the amoeba or paramecium had been directly linked to the experiment of swapping places with a concrete paramecium and keenly observing it through a microscope. Evidently I had come up against a problem of scale. It seems that I go from one to two but how is this possible? Which is the original paramecium between the two new ones? Both or only one of them? Which one?

In particular, if I become one of the two paramecia, how could I convince the other, given that it could just as easily make the claim of being me?

Completely gobsmacked by this, given over to a sort of semi-ecstatic vertigo I realised something just as extraordinary and incommunicable.

My feeling had been that the amoeba survived its division (and thus every division, meaning that it was immortal) but as it had become two, each of the two resulting amoebas were unable to convince the other that it had survived, where “it” referred to the original amoeba. From whence arose the incommunicability.

If an amoeba could not bring any of its copies to accept its survival or its immortality, how much more difficult might it be to convince a human being?

How difficult might it be for me to convince another human of the immortality of an amoeba even if immortality were an accepted notion? The more I reflected on this, the more it seemed to me that this immortality, if immortality it was, must be condemned to remain forever secret. This explained to my satisfaction the prudent silence of my father.

A spectacular confirmation would arrive when I was given The Marvels of Life, the very fine book by Ames & Wyler with a preface by Jean Rostand and superb illustrations by Charles Harper – it was also the first book I ever took to bed and slept with!

This book contained an entire chapter consecrated to the amoeba. Distraught by the toll of new information it contained, I initially believed that it would not get down to the question of the immortality of protozoa, but one day, I fell upon the photo of a paramecium for which the legend was “Is the paramecium immortal?” I quickly felt relieved because I could see that one could at least pose this question. Soon thereafter I felt astonished: “here, finally is a book that addresses an enormous number of questions and is content to pose the question”. This astonishment was given legs by the confirmation that the immortality of the paramecium, if immortality exists, could be no more than a necessary interrogation: a wager on uncommunicable success.

Ames and Wyler were just as prudent as my dad. I wondered if I was going to succeed at being just as prudent as them. What rotten luck all the same: I discover a fundamental truth and it seems forbidden to communicate it. I would have to wait until 1971 to get out of this impasse and to weigh up the communicable as per the uncommunicable parts of the amoeba’s secret.

It is noteworthy that up until this time, I had never asked what an amoeba was made of, or what I myself was made of. It seemed to me that the question did not truly depend on whatever things were made of. I did not imagine myself as made of something(s). The problem of immortality seemed to me to be more a question of biology, or of psychology, or of theology - not a question of physics. The matter did not rest there either in that I demanded to know how an amoeba managed to divide itself into two. Moreover, the argument in favour of the amoeba’s immortality on one hand and especially the incommunicability of this immortality by the amoeba on the other hand, depended crucially on the fact that after the division, the two resulting amoebas were rigorously identical, since only in this case did the two amoebas seem to contradict one another in claiming to have survived, one, each!

The reading of Ames & Wyler, accompanied by books of Jean Rostand passed to me by my father as well as some excellent manuals of Jean-Pierre Vanden Eeckhoudt – teacher at the Robert Catteau Public School – would drive me from astonishment to astonishment. There, I learnt the magic words that described the principal phases of cellular division: prophase, metaphase, anaphase, telophase; as well as their significance in chromosomal terms. I learnt especially that I am myself constituted from a colony of social amoebas! Our pluricellular organic quality posed me problems: how could I as a society of amoebas still identify with an individual amoeba? Unless an amoeba itself were in turn a colony of sub-microbes, and so on and so forth? I was thus led naturally to an interest in chemistry and to atomic physics.

On the subject of matter, I would pose myself a question that would prevent me from truly taking seriously the idea of the atom, to say nothing of the very notion of matter itself. Initially, I imagined atoms to be ultra-smooth and ultra-hard spheres; next I learnt that atoms were in fact constituted of electrons spinning around a nucleus of protons and neutrons that I imagined were in their turn, like ultra-smooth and ultra-hard spheres. It seemed that you could always divide matter and that research to find the ultimate particle was all in vain. At the same time however, if one were to find an ultimate particle, it seemed to me, what could it possibly be other than a smooth and ultra-hard sphere once again, and what could such a sphere be made of?

The very idea of matter seemed to me to be void of any explanatory capacity? To me, the notion of matter seemed to bring out more questions than it did answers and seemed to threaten perhaps, the unity of the amoeba.

It was in the volume by Joël de Rosnay that I learnt of the existence of DNA⁴, the gigantic molecule of deoxyribonucleic acid which is a long chain in the form of a double helix “like the inside of a certain castle of the Loire”, comprising the repetition of molecules taken from the group { Adenine, Thymine, Cytosine, Guanine} resulting in a very long “word” in the genre of AATGGCTATGGACCTCAG….and it was in this book that I would learn how this word, seen as a suite of triplets AAT GGC TAT GGA CCT CAG…. is translated into RNA, another nucleic acid, itself translated into a “word”: proteins, comprising tiny molecules, amino acids, chosen from the alphabet of 20 “amino acids”. I would learn how these proteins and their enzymes coped with the rest: from the synthesis of tiny molecules (amino acids, nucleotides, sugars), even right up to the constitution of the cell.

All the same, this gave oxygen to more questions. How did we know all this? What, indeed is a molecule?

In fact my “Joël de Rosnay” and the review Science & Life,  was a springboard for the book destined to become my basic bible for the following years (1968 and thereafter) : the French edition, edited by François Gros and prefaced by François Jacob of James D. Watson’s The Molecular Biology of the Gene. In this book, I would gain a glimpse of the incredible molecular dance that goes on, not only with the amoeba, but with an even tinier creature: the bacterium Escherichia Coli.

My “Watson” was so biblical that in my vocabulary, the very word “Watson” had become synonymous with THE Bible. In retrospect, my “Ames & Wyler” had been my first Watson, but at the age at which I read it, I believe that I did not pose questions in the genre of knowing who might have written a book.

(to be cont.)

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