Cell Language Theory, The: Connecting Mind And Matter

Cell Language 191

“6x9” b2861 The Cell Language Theory: Connecting Mind and Matter

soldiers in Egypt in 1799. It may well turn out that the breaking of the code

of the human genome (i.e., the DNA text) will follow a similar path fol-

lowed by the decoding of the Rosetta Stone by Jean-Francois Champollion

(1870–1832) in 1822, about 2000 years after the Stone was inscribed on in

three different scripts in 196 BC — in Egyptian hieroglyphs which were an

unknown language and in demotic glyphs and Greek which were known

languages. The key to decoding the unknown language in terms of the

known ones was provided by the accidental acquisition by Champollion of

a piece of evidence (i.e., the cartouche carrying the name of Pharaoh

Ramsey written in Coptic) which strongly suggested to Champollion that

Egyptian hieroglyphs might be “phonograms” and not “ideograms” as had

long been assumed by Egyptologists since the times of Greeks and Romans.

This thought must have been like a Copernican revolution, turning the

whole research orientation in Egyptology upside down.

A Copernican revolution similar to the one experienced by

Egyptologists in the 18th century may be needed in order for the biolo-

gists of the 21st century to decode the human genome:

The DNA text may be “ideograms” for the human brain and “phonograms”

for the living cell. (4.20)

This latter point seems to be supported by the following theoretical

and empirical evidences:

(i) According to biocybernetics, a general molecular theory of biology

(see Chapter 6), all biopolymers, including DNA, carry not only

information, but also mechanical energy (e.g., DNA supercoils; see

Section 3.4.2), in the form of sequence-specific conformational

strains called conformons [65]. The concept of conformons proposed

in 1972 was directly supported almost two decades later by the work

of C. Benham who showed that conformons, or equivalently what he

called “SIDD’s” (stress-induced duplex destabilizations), can indeed

accumulate in sequence-specific loci within under-twisted circular

DNA duplexes [226, 255] (see Figure 3.44).

(ii) The cell language theory [19, 21] suggests that (a) cells use a mole-

cule-dependent “microscopic” language very similar (i.e., isomor-

phic) in principle to sound- and visual signal-based “macroscopic”

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