Why It Matters

A Matter Of Scale The Scale Of The Problem Contents Part One: The Scale Of The Problem Chapter 1: One Ten Millionth Of A Metre 4 Chapter 2: One Millionth Of A Metre 19 Chapter 3: One Thousandth Of A Metre 31 Chapter 4: One Hundredth Of A Metre 44 Chapter 5: One Metre 55 Chapter 6: One Hundred Metres 70 Chapter 7: Beneath And Beyond 82 Part Two: Why It Matters Chapter 8: What Are We? 89 Chapter 9: Who Are We? 102 Chapter 10: Why Does It Matter? 115 Part Three: Making The Connection Chapter 11: Why Connect? 135 Chapter 12: How To Connect 148 Chapter 13: Why Can’t We Connect? 157 Part Four: How To Survive Chapter 14: Getting Angry 188 Chapter 15: You Are The System 197 Chapter 16: Making The Change 210 Chapter 17: Being Ourselves 253 Notes and References 264 2 Part One The Scale Of The Problem “Oh, the world is so big, and we are so small, The world is so big, are we here at all?” (Big Dipper, Songs From The Blue House) “The only constant I am sure of, Is this accelerating rate of change.” (Peter Gabriel, Downside-Up) A Matter Of Scale The Scale Of The Problem Chapter 1 One Ten Millionth Of A Metre Breathe in, and your body starts a battle. Countless microorganisms hitch a lift on every stream of air being pulled into your lungs, seeking out a place where they can embed themselves and multiply. Once inside every potential form of nutrition is fair game: blood cells, fat cells, skin, bone marrow, lymphatic fluid – all hosts for the army of invaders that just want to find a way of increasing their numbers. You are alive because your body has evolved ways of fighting them off. No medicine can match the efficiency of your own army of defenders across such a vast range of attackers, without killing off its host as well. HIV, the virus responsible for AIDS, is a beautiful thing to look at; rather like a three dimensional cog with rounded buds spread across its spherical surface. In cross- section the central Capsid, which contains the genetic material responsible for allowing HIV to fight off all but the most sophisticated drugs, is coffin-shaped. So beautiful, so appropriate, but so terrible that it is able to cut through an entire country in just a few years, leaving a scarred, distressed and dying landscape of human beings in its wake. In South Africa, nineteen percent of the population of 44 million are infected with HIV.1 In Lesotho, twenty-three percent of the two million inhabitants have HIV. In Botswana, twenty-four percent of the population of just under two million – that’s nearly a quarter of every person in this tiny country; adults, children, even new born babies – have a virus that will eventually kill most of them.2 Over a million of these tiny viral entities could fit, side by side, on this full stop. We may have evolved defences against the oldest and most common viruses, but human evolution is a slow process; we have no natural defences against HIV. Here is another statistic. The World Health Organisation estimate that Dengue Fever, caused by four types of closely related virus, is a risk for around two-fifths of the world’s population.3 Without treatment, Dengue Fever is deadly in twenty percent of cases, and there are around fifty million cases of the disease every year. Dengue Fever is spread by mosquitoes, as is Yellow Fever, which kills 30,000 people a year. 4 A Matter Of Scale The Scale Of The Problem Japanese Encephalitis is also spread by mosquitoes, but develops in pigs and birds before being passed to humans by the same species of mosquito that infected these other animals. This kills around 15,000 people a year and leaves another 25,000 permanently paralysed. Figure 1: HIV viruses and (inset) cross-section showing the central coffin-shaped capsid (Source: © Boehringer-Ingelheim / Wikimedia Commons) Influenza is not spread by mosquitoes: it is spread by birds, humans and many other mammals including domestic dogs and cats – in fact any warm-blooded animal can potentially harbour and pass on influenza in its many forms. The worry, quite rightly expressed by epidemiologists and other health professionals about the potential for a catastrophic influenza pandemic (global infection), is not based on some abstract idea that bears no resemblance to reality; it is a genuine fear that echoes fiction in so many ways. Compare this quotation: By midnight the barriers were set up, and by dawn the next morning, the morning of the twenty-fifth, several people had been shot at the barriers, most just wounded, but three or four killed. Almost all of them were people coming north, streaming out of Boston, stricken with fear, panic-stupid. They were dealt with. But by that evening, most of the men manning the barricades were sick themselves, glowing bright with fever, constantly propping their shotguns between their feet so they could blow their noses. Some…simply fell down 5 A Matter Of Scale The Scale Of The Problem unconscious and were later driven back to the jackleg infirmary that had been set up over the town hall, and there they died.4 With this one: The Boston Globe reported that in the twenty-four hours preceding 7:00 am of September 23, 66 men, all of them probably in the peak years of physical prowess, had died. The statistics boggled Welch’s mind: the sight of the lines of sick men shuffling through the cold, penetrating rain to the hospital gave him no encouragement about the immediate future. He needed no stethoscope to conclude that the problem for many of them was lung failure. He could see that at a dozen paces: some of them, stumbling along, the blankets over their shoulders soaking up the fine drizzle, were turning blue and even purple.5 It would take a brave person to tell which the fictional report is: it is actually the first one, from Stephen King’s doomsday epic, The Stand. The second quotation is from an American study of the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic, which took twenty-five million lives globally, or 1.5 percent of the world’s population. The general public only seem to have recently grasped the deadly potential of the seemingly innocuous flu virus. A healthy person can catch one of the more benign and common strains of flu and spend a few days in bed albeit with considerable discomfort, before making a full recovery. Astonishingly, up to a billion people worldwide may be infected every year6 with influenza, of which half a million will die. Such is the population of the Earth (6.6 billion and counting) that half a million people is a global “hiccup” – a mere 0.008 percent of humanity; yet the Indian Ocean tsunami, which took 300,000 lives in December 2004, is still remembered as a world-changing event. Less than one percent of the annual global toll from influenza died in the World Trade Center attacks of September 11, 2001. Nineteen hijackers in four aircraft making a coordinated attack on the military and financial centres of the USA are tangible targets on which we can pile our collective wrath. Unknowably vast numbers of sub-microscopic virii do not a tangible target make. 6 A Matter Of Scale The Scale Of The Problem What Is A Virus? With an irony that speaks volumes about the direction we are heading as a species, the simplest description for a virus comes from the world of computers. Such is the extent that we have substituted our ancient love of nature for the modern love of technology, that we often have problems seeing the real world without a technological analogy to help us along the way. So, for the uninitiated in technology, a computer virus is a small, simple piece of computer code (a program) that attaches itself to a larger piece of code in order to duplicate itself and spread. At the time of writing, there were about 74,000 computer viruses in the “wild”7 (now there’s a bizarre use of the term “wild”, if ever there was one). For the uninitiated in biology, a natural virus is an organism that has no means of reproducing other than by using another organism as a host; generally that organism is a cell within a larger organism, such as a person, plant or fungus. Viruses reproduce by convincing a cell, by use of its protein coating, that it is a desirable object to welcome into the cell’s interior. Once inside, the virus loses its protective coating, revealing the genetic code, which is then copied by the cell’s nucleus, just as though the cell is copying its own genetic material. The cell then ejects the newly replicated viral material through its walls and, voila! Replication is complete. This is clever stuff, especially considering that a virus may not, in fact, be a living thing. Obviously something that is less than a micron (a millionth of a metre) across couldn’t be considered an animal even by the most imaginative biologist; but whether something that is not even capable of reproducing on its own or with another virus, let alone being able to move, excrete or grow, should be considered “living” is another matter. Scientists cannot agree with each other on this, largely because the definition of “life” is unclear: is it the ability to be self aware – in which case things could get very complicated due to the limited ways in which this can be tested (try holding a mirror in front of a sightless creature to understand the problem); is it the ability to grow, move, excrete, respire, reproduce and all those good things; or is it simply “the ability to move a genetic blueprint into future generations, thereby regenerating your likeness”?8 We do know that there are probably more different viruses than all (other) types of life, and that there are certainly more individual viruses than all (other) individual life forms put together; so, if viruses are living then they are most certainly the most successful life forms that there has ever been.

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