Access
This article is part of Nature's premium content.
Published online 7 May 2008 | Nature | doi:10.1038/453150a
News Feature
Cell biology: The cellular hullabaloo
The inner life of a cell is noisy. Helen Pearson discovers how the resulting randomness makes life more challenging — and richer.
Sunney Xie's eight-year-old twins have a lot in common — starting with their genome. But they have different fingerprints, footprints and very different personalities.
To read this story in full you will need to login or make a payment (see right).
Comments
Reader comments are usually moderated after posting. If you find something offensive or inappropriate, you can speed this process by clicking 'Report this comment' (or, if that doesn't work for you, email redesign@nature.com). For more controversial topics, we reserve the right to moderate before comments are published.
Precise answers for the noising problems----------- When the actual event is not directly observed and thus its underlying mechanism is only wildly speculated, the occurrence of the event may appear random and its mechanism can be accounted by nothing but stochastic noise. However, I must declare that this universe contains no true random event and the stochastic nature of chance events will be replaced only with a deterministic understanding of precise mechanism when true knowledge on the event is obtained.///// If people wish to understand how cells live the way they live, they must overcome a fundamental mistake in cell biology: one mother cell divides into two daughter cells. This cell division deception is a major source for many of our random perceptions of otherwise precision life. We must realize that one mother cell reproduces one or more daughter cells and that reproduction is normally a precise event (see my article "In division we loss" (Pioneer 2: 27-31, 2007; [http://im1.biz/displayimage.php?album=59&pos=2]).////// If Sunney Xie wishes to know why his genetically identical twin daughters could be so different, I suggest he read two of my best publications. One is entitled "Linking DNA aging with cell aging and combining genetics with epigenetics" (Logical Biology 5:51-55, 2005; [http://im1.biz/displayimage.php?album=11&pos=11] ). The other is "A theoretical framework for understanding biotic aging from molecule to organism in multicellular life" (Logical Biology 5:109-116, 2005; [http://im1.biz/displayimage.php?album=12&pos=3]). ////// If Jan Vijg really wishes to resolve his outstanding puzzle on aging, he should not ignore what I told him in 2006 at the 3rd International Conference on Functional Genomics of Ageing which was organized by him. At that meeting I presented a poster "Towards a deep understanding of the fundamental and universal mechanism of biotic aging" [http://im1.biz/Aging2006FGA3.htm] which summarized my long-time research on aging (http://im1.biz/Aging.htm).///// I hope that I can provide more precise answers to many other "noise" questions. But this is a place only for brief comment. However, I can always be reached at SVL@logibio.com and my publications are almost all free at http://im1.biz. So please do not become "stuperfyingly unaware" of the existing precise knowledge on some so-called "noise" problems. /////// Shi V. Liu (a scientist at Eagle Institute of Molecular Medicine and a publisher at Truthfinding Cyberpress)
Sunney's work is definitely one of the best right now, and deserves such coverage. Unfortunately, this of Nature's coverage on the theoretical framework of noisy processes has not matched up. For those puzzles, for example, is there any connection to evolutionary dynamics of Darwin and Wallace in a broader perspective?
Darwin's Common Origin Mistake and Its Extension into Diversification by Random Mutations----------- Without knowing what cell life is and how heredity works Darwin assumed that all extent lives came from a common ancestral cell. He further speculated that variations in life forms originated from random mutations (which did not occur on DNA because it was not even known that DNA is the genetic material) and were fixed only by natural selection.//// However, as I stated 17 years ago, the common origin hypothesis is the most fundamental mistake in the Darwinian evolution theory (see http://im1.biz/displayimage.php?album=19&pos=4). The earliest forms of cellular lives could not come from just one single ancestral cell. Most likely, the diversity of life forms was already cast into some acellular forms as a continuum of evolution from abiotic material into bio-molecules. From there more diversifications happened in the formation of various cellular lives.//// The evolution of life may follow more precise physiochemical principles rather than just random events. Like the chemical periodical table which has captured those organic relationships between elements, a periodic table of life forms may reveal this more ordered relationship among life form than any random guesses.//// However, in order to usher in a NEW BIOLOGY (http://im1.biz/books/NewBiology.htm), we must first dismantle the invalid but still dominant "division"-based cell biology. We also must realize that ALL cells are mortal, including those fountain-of-youth stem cells. This is because, as the early formed cells in a multicellular life, stem cells contain the oldest DNA templates which are by no means the "immortal" strands.//// Wake up, experimentation-orientated biologists! If you do not have a correct theory to guide you and even despise logics, you may never see the order and links among the well organized living world. All you can still see is chaos, chaos and chaos. But who should be blamed for this: the precision natural world or your arrogant ignorance????/////// Shi V. Liu (a scientist at Eagle Institute of Molecular Medicine and a publisher at Truthfinding Cyberpress)