https://charleseisenstein-org.translate.goog/podcasts/new-and-ancient-story-podcast/dr-zach-bush-life-is-a-community-e49/?_x_tr_sl=en&_x_tr_tl=pl&_x_tr_hl=pl&_x_tr_pto=sc
In this podcast I talk with Zach Bush, MD, a doctor with a background in endocrinology who "went holistic" and turned toward gut/brain health, the microbiome, and soil science. Our conversation covered a lot of ground: evolution, the importance of biological diversity for personal, social, and ecological health, the inventive fecundity of life, the role of viruses in sharing genetic information, and more. I expect this conversation will help expand people's horizons in trying to understand health and sickness in the Covid era.
About Zach: zachbushmd.com
Interview with Del Bigtree: The Highwire
Access a transcript of the podcast episode here or read below. Many thanks to Rachel Wakefield for her work on this transcription.
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
viruses, genetic information, genomics, bacteria, information, happening, biology, fungi, started, proteins, process, update, body, microbiome, science, system, contagion, create, stressors, cell
SPEAKERS
Charles Eisenstein, Zach Bush
Charles Eisenstein
Hello and welcome to a new and ancient story. This is a podcast, a series of conversations, interviews, and occasionally speeches dedicated to the transformation of self and society. The basic idea is that we are moving from a story of separation to a new story - new for the dominant culture, at least - of interbeing. What that means will become apparent as you listen to the series. We explore things like technology, spirituality, agriculture, healing, economics, politics, ecology, relationships, education, I mean, pretty much everything that is undergoing a transition today, as our old story nears collapse. If you want to engage these ideas more deeply, you can come to our website, charleseisenstein.net. Yeah, all right. Great. Yeah, so like just a meta note. A little thing that was going on in the back of my mind is that I know you've been on a lot of these podcasts. I'm on a lot of them too. And I and some of my audience would like to go beyond the basic information. And there's also probably a large segment of my audience that doesn't know very much about, you know, terrain theory, or microbiome or soil ecology or anything like that. So people are generally better at filling in the blanks than we give them credit for. So I don't think we have to do too much basic stuff, but you know, it might be sometimes good to kind of footnote it a little bit. Yeah.
Zach Bush
Especially around the viruses. There's so much confusion right now around virus that I think that it's worthwhile to do a little bit of a dive on that if that's the direction of the conversation.
Yeah.
But yeah, I think I'm very comfortable with it. I feel like every conversation brings new space for new information to come forward even within the basic stuff, so I couldn't be more excited, Charles, to be in this conversation with you. Honestly, I've been looking forward to meeting you for years, you are just - honestly, I'll just get emotional if I really try to put it into words, so I won't go much further there. But I'm just so grateful. I'm so powerfully grateful for what you have done for all of us in opening up a real pathway to renew the science of philosophy in our generation. It is so devoid and so much what's going on in our generation and I just couldn't be more excited that a great mind like yours has devoted itself to to the philosophy of the future here. So thank you for your devotion. And the truth that you're channeling in for us is so, so powerful.
Wow, thank you. That's really special to hear that coming from you. Zach is an MD who seems to have gone a little renegade here in defying certain aspects of the official narratives. I think I had some idea of you before, but I really only became aware of you as the COVID-19 crisis got going and I saw you on a couple podcasts. So I'm like okay, this guy is drawing from the same spring that I am, touching on so many things that I've been devoted to for about 15 years, that were crazy land 15 years ago. If I joked to somebody that I was a neo-Lamarckian, if they even knew what that was, they would roll their eyes, you know. It was better if they didn't know what it was. For those of you who do not know what that is, that's somebody who believes that acquired characteristics can be inherited through the DNA. So like, that used to be anathema to science. When I tried to goad a scientist at some conference a couple years ago by saying I was a neo-Lamarckian, and he's like, oh, everybody's a neo-Lamarckian today. Like I have this weird - still - level of buy-in to the established ways of conferring legitimacy on somebody, where if somebody who has, you know, a PhD or an MD actually agrees with me on something I'm like, see? But then I'm like, hold on a minute, just by even doing that am I validating that system of legitimacy? So maybe I'll start by asking you: what happened to you? I mean -
[Laughs] Yeah, that's never been asked quite that way and I appreciate that because that's definitely - what happened is a bunch of stuff happened to me. You know, it was a long process. I was 17 years in academia and kind of Western medicine paradigm and drug-focused. I was doing chemotherapy research and I was practicing endocrinology, so a lot of diabetes and heart disease and chronic kidney disease and hormonal disorders, thyroid cancer, you know, all this stuff that's just like epidemic in our environment. So I thought I was really doing my purpose there at University of Colorado, then the University of Virginia. And I really felt on purpose, felt very excited to be caring for patients and doing all of that. And when I got into basic science and chemotherapy research, it was very exciting to be glimpsing things on microscopes that had never been witnessed before. And there is a real drug-like quality to that existence, where you're like, in this constant feedback of like, yes, you are right on the cutting edge, right on the cutting edge. You just saw something nobody's ever seen before and you push further and you can see more. So that is the rabbit hole that has a drug-like quality to it for a researcher and ultimately that's the problem that we actually have in our modern science in some ways: that our scientists are given the opportunity to kind of go down this addictive drug-like pathway of new information, new information, the heady kind of experience of "I must be smarter than everybody else". And then of course, our funding is channeled towards that. So if you have some new protein that you're following down the rabbit hole, and you're one of five people in the world that are studying that, you're going to get funding. And so there's this warp towards this kind of new information desire, this new information race. And after 17 years of that I was sitting by a bedside of a patient one evening. I had just gotten funding for my first clinical trial with this new compound that has some chemotherapeutic action. I was super excited, you know, as a scientist - I'm now taking what I learned in the laboratory, and I'm about to apply it to humans for the first time. And in that journey, this woman is delivered these little blue pills that the nurse has to like, glove up and do all these like, biohazard things just because it's a general clinical research center and there's protocols. And so this nurse coming in looking like she's handling some sort of biohazard, puts these pills in this woman's bare hand and says, you can swallow those now. And the woman looks at the nurse and is like, so why am I safe holding this in my hand? And why am I safe swallowing this if you have to go through all of that to protect yourself from even holding these things? And, you know, watching that happen, it was frustrating for me because I was like, this is actually very safe. This is just protocol. But somewhere down in the core of this woman, she knew she wasn't supposed to swallow these pills, and over the next 45 minutes, I really worked to deconstruct her worldview, and reconstruct my worldview in her mind and overcome not just her fear, but really her intuitive knowledge that this wasn't helpful to her, and I convinced her to swallow these pills. You know, these pills were safe, it was chemotherapy that I had developed, actually was quite safe, it was a vitamin A compound and all that. But I think at that moment, I really failed as a physician because I broke that woman's spirit and I broke her trust in her own intuitive thing. And so I give that example of like, how can we come to do the most patriarchal, most broken pathway of honoring this human body that we're supposed to be taking care of, through this addictive effort to be the first one to have a clinical trial, to be the first one to discover something? So that pathway, you know, started to really reveal itself in 2008 to 2010, which happened to be during this massive recession that was hitting medicine and the department of medicine, and my department of endocrinology was collapsing due to lack of funding, and the whole research center got defunded through the NIH and all this. And so there was a freefall happening in medicine at the same time my psychological and philosophical freefall was happening. And so that whole point bumped me out of the common paradigm into a rural practice that I decided to start. I wanted to start a nutrition center in a food desert and see if I could find a pathway to reversing chronic disease in the most impoverished county in Virginia. Because if I could find something that would work there, I felt like it was something that was scalable to the country and maybe help, you know, stem the tide of this collapse of our entire healthcare system. That was so obvious then, and [laughs].
Yes. Yeah, it sounds like that was maybe just one landmark moment in a larger journey. I mean, already, you were studying some agent that was not strictly a pharmaceutical agent, right? It was a vitamin?
And this thing about the addictive quality you were talking about, of being first. And how that impulse then receives the boost of funding, of prestige and so on. But then there's also the light side of the force, which is the exploration of the wonders of the universe, which is maybe what science at its best is, which then gets hijacked by the financial and other institutional mechanisms that run things today. And - because most scientists that I talk to I can detect, underneath, that impulse, and I wonder: how have you translated that impulse into your work today? What is bringing you into that state of wonder at apprehending the magnificence of biology, of the world, of the body?
So it's a good question. Yeah. I think that the process that began from that moment was realizing that there hadn't been a single case of cancer in human history that had been caused by a lack of chemotherapy. And so when you start to back yourself out of the rabbit hole and ask these root cause, root solution kind of questions and start to pursue answers in those directions, you realize that you are so far down the stream of pathology towards cancer or heart disease or whatever you're studying, that you've failed to remember that there's a complex process that's been in play for decades before the physiology that you're studying occurs. And so that is really the fallacy of Western medicine as we've become a disease-centric disease management system. The wonder happens down at this collapse of physiology rather than the wonder of a newborn baby. And how does that baby at, you know, days old know how to survive in the context of this massive ecosystem of bacteria and fungi and viruses that are teeming across its body long before it can make an immune system as we would see it? And so, we directed now as a science group, I think, and as a team, our attention way upstream now to ask how does physiology happen as it's best instead of how does physiology function as it's collapsing? You know, instead of trying to find stopgaps for disease, how do we actually start to provide support to the fundamentals of biology? Under the most ideal circumstances, how do you support actual healing to happen? And the word healing is actually really poorly used and really not used in western medicine. One of my last lectures I gave at the university before leaving in 2010 had the word healing in it, and nobody came to the lecture. And I was used to, you know, a couple hundred people coming to these lectures around my cancer research and everything else, but by throwing the word healing in there, it sounded New Agey, or granola or, you know, fill in the blank. It didn't sound scientific to these colleagues because we've never worked that word into our education. There's a lot of appall over the fact that we don't use the word nutrition much in our medical science or education. We get maybe two or three months of medical education around nutrition and it's very dogmatic and old school, you know, food pyramid and BS. But I think it's much more devastating that we're never taught about healing. We literally are, I think, blinded to the reality that bodies heal. There's not a single course called Physiology of Healing or something like that, and yet, if a two-year-old trips and falls and skins their knee, somehow there's the intelligence within that body to regrow different layers of tissue back to its original form. The skin knows exactly where to grow to and knows how to, you know, cover that thing with not so much as a scar. As we age, then the wound repair gets a little more disorganized, and we end up with scar tissue and all this stuff rather than normal physiologic tissue. But nonetheless, there's never a course in your entire medical school training that will teach you any of those processes. How does a scar form? How does skin heal? How does a liver heal after injury? And yet, we see all of this evidence that it's happening at every age, and so it's treated as if it's a non sequitur or nonentity. In fact, of course, it's the only reason we're here. If we weren't healing at an extraordinary rate, we would die very much in the first week of life.
I think that there are deeper ideological reasons why healing is a bit of a taboo word. Because as you know, the word means to come to wholeness. Etymologically, the word "heal", and the word "whole" are from the same root. So, to invoke a process of coming back into wholeness first requires that you believe that there is such a thing as wholeness. You don't talk about the wholeness of a machine, really. And if it breaks down, you don't expect it to heal. You don't expect it to get better by itself. Well, actually, I kind of do sometimes. I'm like, maybe if I, you know, don't drive my car for a couple days and let it rest, the oil will stop leaking. But generally speaking, we don't expect machines to heal. And the more that we live as a society in amongst machines, physical, literal machines, as well as machine processes that have been stamped onto society through industry, the more we expect the world to be like a machine, and in medicine that is translated into the paradigm of the doctor fixing the patient. But to recognize that life knows how to heal, that there's an innate tendency toward wholeness that is present already in the body - that kind of recasts medicine into terms of how do we support that process? Why, if that process isn't happening, why? What's missing? And it also requires us to think about what is being made whole, in this process of healing? What is a self? And if we understand, this gets to a lot of your other work that I've heard you talking about, around the idea that our selves are a collective, are a set of almost infinitely huge set of relationships that are not just the expression of your nuclear DNA, as kind of old school biology named the self as the phenotype, the expression of the DNA, but it includes a host of other beings that live within our bodies. And most people are familiar with this at this point. People know that we have, whatever, 10 times more bacterial cells than human cells in our bodies, and that these are an essential part of the self. And so this is a step in expanding our idea of wholeness, like what needs to be made whole? And then we could extend that to external relationships as well. Like, is it actually possible to be whole when you are not in ongoing relationship with other humans and the rest of life, as happens when we are locked down and quarantined, which is a whole other topic, which we can get into as well. I wonder: a lot of people are familiar with the importance of the gut microbiome and stuff. But I'd like to maybe get into the topic of viruses and the genetic plenum, as you might call it, and what role does the interchange of genetic information play in health? And we could even go into evolution as well. Do you have -
I love it. I knew this was gonna be one of my favorite conversations of the year when you invited me, so - I'm so in love with this concept of wholeness being the underpinnings or the structure function of healing, and therefore, because - what you just laid out is so important for all of us as an audience to mull over, is where have we made the mistakes in our lives of thinking that we're machinelike, rather than these quantum beings that are capable of so much? And I mean, I feel conviction on a lot of levels just listening to that, because it starts to get into some of my stuckness as a person, like, why do I, you know, relate to my kids or my wife or, my coworkers in the same way day in and day out? Or what is it that I am dumbing down there to a machinelike quality, and where am I failing to be an adaptive creative force in their lives? And where am I being machinelike is a very important, deep thing there. So, as we start to then move to this virome concept, it's actually in line with that, that we believe for, you know, millennia really, but really strongly in the last hundred years or so that the genetic information that we were handed from Mom and Dad predicts who we are. And so we have this very Newtonian, very mechanistic belief that Mom contributes half our DNA, Dad contributes half the DNA, that there's a sperm-ovum event, and you get this whole 46 chromosomes and the whole thing goes into this cell production. And then we're born and then we deteriorate from there on. So the aging process starts at birth, and we just get less and less functional as time goes on. But, in fact, it's not at all that, and the last 20 years has really revealed a whole new world of plasticity in a place that we once thought was very concrete, and that is the genome, but also the end products of that genetic information, like the brain. We used to think the brain was this, you know, machine that was slowly losing connections throughout the course of its life and dysfunctioning as our computers do. And it's just as plastic in the end as the genes that would have predicted its original form. And the plasticity happens on many levels. My background is in endocrinology and you know, certainly there's an explosion now of information about how hormones and our environmental influences of pheromones and other hormones are floating around us and everything else, as well as the hormones that we come in contact within the home or other situations, like you've heard that women will align their periods if they are roommates for long enough and stuff like this. Like the endocrine system will adapt to its environment, to change the behavior of the organism that it's governing. In the same way and at a much deeper level, the genomics are extraordinarily plastic now, and this is really performed at the global level through viruses. The viruses have been miscategorized I believe, by medicine and by the general public and most obviously, recently by the media as part of the microbiome, that there's these living germs that attack us and all this. The word micro and the word biome - the microbiome is the description of small living organisms. And so the virus being a nonliving organism and a nonliving, you know, a sheath of genetic information already doesn't fit into this. And so if you go into Wikipedia or whatever right now and look up virus, it says it's part of the microbiome because it's so small. And so that's not a rational categorization. Just because it fits the first word so well, we're going to go ahead and push it into this category. And so the danger that's in this miscategorization is that we assume it has features similar to bacteria, fungi, archaea, protozoa, all these microorganisms that are in the microbiome. And in fact, it's impossible that it has any similar traits because in fact, it's an information stream coming out of biology as a whole targeted specifically at other parts of biology to update the genetics. And what we see in the virome, which is a description of this global genetic information that's coursing out of biology - the virome is the machinery of adaptation, and it's the language of adaptation within life. And without the virome we would never have had the first bacteria or the first human cell. We've been built literally by the compilation and insertion of genetic information by these viruses into life forms around the planet for billions of years. The first viruses can be found in the fossil record some three and a half billion years ago. And so that's fascinating to me that this genetic information has been really the building block by which we now have life. And yet we've demonized it. And in demonizing the building blocks of life, and perhaps more to the point, demonizing the creative force, the adaptive force of biology - what have we done? What have we so missed? And where are we going as a species if we remain in this demonized behavior and belief system towards this fundamental building block of life? And I think the last pandemic has really shown what happens.
So right now I'm in a little bit of a dilemma. On the one hand, there's like a lot of basic information here that you're presenting that is super important for people to navigate our current public health situation (choosing my words very carefully here). And then I also, on the other hand, really want to geek out and talk about how perhaps bacteria preceded viruses and create viruses and how they transfer genes horizontally and accelerate evolution by millions of times what it would be if it were only random mutation and natural selection operating. And so there's two different directions I want to go but maybe I'll start with the first one. Yeah, the demonization of viruses is kind of inevitable when we have a broader context of seeing the world through an us-versus-them lens, through a competitive lens.
That's right.
And one of the expressions of that basic worldview is the exclusive germ theory of disease, which says there are these pathogens out there, they don't care about you. Some of them are harmless because they're, you know, operating on some other animal or some other plant, but some of them are basically these parasites or these predators. And you have to protect yourself from them. Because basically, life is a vast war of each against all. That's how biology, the study of biology has conceived it for quite a long time. And that way of seeing it resonates with the economic circumstances that we've lived in, in modern society, where we have a money system that also sets us up in a war of each against all. And our religion and our psychology have also been conditioned by this worldview, which actually goes back thousands of years, to the origins of domestication and technology that made the world into an object and that conceived progress as a matter of coming to greater and greater dominance over these competitors and these indifferent forces of nature. So progress became a matter of harnessing them or insulating ourselves from them or extirpating them, destroying them. And so in that basic psychic field, the germ theory of disease - it's quite natural to think that, and it causes us to resist other ways of seeing it, like bioterrain theory, which says, okay, and I heard you saying this on Del Bigtree's podcast, which I kind of want everybody to watch that first, just to get some of this background information. And I'm curious also, like, is there anything that you said in that podcast about COVID that you've changed your mind on? But anyway, maybe we can return to that. Okay, so this predisposition to see the world as full of enemies. If you accept that, then you're probably going to accept the response, our public response, our government response with the broad participation of society, to COVID-19. When we see life as a community, and as relationship, and we see viruses as one of the ways that these relationships are maintained, that genetic information is shared, then we ask new questions, like, assuming that we see COVID in terms of a virus we ask, okay, well, what is this? What communication is trying to happen here?
And maybe we can talk about exosomes, too. Do you want to fill people in on that?
Yeah. I think you kind of started a cool spot there looking back at you know, bacteria versus viruses at the beginning of life in some ways, and there's a division in science right now as to which came first, you know, the chicken or the egg here, but it is fascinating that these archaea, which are the ancient bacteria that preceded what we consider the more modern or more technologically advanced form of bacterial life, but the archaea had a different mechanism for differentiation and proliferation. And you nailed one of the main mechanisms that was abundant in this was this horizontal gene transfer phenomenon where any tiny little organism that abutted another one could pass its genetic information to and fro. And this still very much happens in bacteria in a hospital, for example. When you give an antibiotic and that hits, you know, one and a half quadrillion bacteria within your body, there's going to be a significant portion of those bacteria that have developed enough genomic alternatives and alternate pathways for adaptation that they're not going to die under the pressures of the antibiotic, so that they get narrowed down into this kind of drug resistant population. They can then pass that sideways to all the other bacteria in the environment so that the next time you see that drug, it's a lot less likely there's gonna be a knockdown of the population.
I want people to hear this. This is not that they just - Zach is not saying that they're just passing the antibiotic resistance to the next generation. They're actually passing it to their friends. Like, the bacteria meet up, and sometimes they even conjugate, they even like, open a channel in their lipid membranes, and actually, like exchange genetic - it's like they're having sex. They're like exchanging genetic information.
Yeah, yeah. And it's interesting. I mean, we've so long considered genetic swapping as a sexual event. And that's one of the things that's limiting our worldview right now around genomics. But we need to start to realize that the sexual transmission of information goes way beyond the genetics of the cell. We're now realizing in cloning experiments, for example, that you can't actually clone an animal, unless you also clone the mitochondria inside of those animals, inside of the cell you're trying to clone. And the mitochondria are these little bacteria guys. Mitochondria is an ancient archaea that's been absorbed by a methane-producing bacteria. And this happened, you know, billions of years ago and it became a very important part of the infrastructure of multicellular life is that these organisms could live inside of eukaryotic cells and produce energy through this, you know, fermentation or ultimately oxidative phosphorylation or oxygen-rich energy production. And in that, you know, archaea, within that is this little strip of DNA, this little ancient piece of genomics. And it has extraordinary variability, such that if you look in a single human cell, you will have somewhere between two hundred and two thousand mitochondria living inside that cell. And if you look across the genomics of that mitochondrial population within a single cell, there's massive variation. And so we're starting to realize that the massive variations of genomics within the mitochondria are constantly swapping information with the nuclear DNA that was received by Mom and Dad human, that nuclear DNA is being changed and transformed by the mitochondrial DNA that's responding to its environment second to second. And so we're starting to realize that even the phenotype of a single cell or therefore a whole human body is not determined by Mom and Dad's DNA very well. That's a rough template, and then it's the environmental influence on the mitochondria, which are the microbiome. And then as soon as the child is born, the vast amount of genomic information that's available within the bacteria and the fungi of the gut or the skin, or now we realize that there's fungi and bacteria in every single organ system in a healthy state. So the brain has bacteria and fungi, and the liver, the kidneys. And so without all this genomic input, we don't actually look like who we are today. And so we're super plastic in that way. And so, in the same way that these archaea were horizontally gene transferring information to their buddies so that they could immediately adopt this antiboiotic resistance, the same thing happens in weeds in a field when we spray herbicides and pesticides on large scale farms. There's always a couple weeds that will have a genetic resistance to that. And they can horizontally gene transfer to the other plants such that even in the same field during the same season, without reproduction happening, you'll see increased resistance happen across the strains, and so -
That's incredible. I just love that. And they're doing that with viruses then? That's the main - among plants and animals, would you consider that the main avenue of horizontal gene transfer?
Yeah, I mean, the viruses - the word viruses needs to be a little bit loosely held there, just in the sense that you mentioned the word exosome earlier, and exosomes are, you know, an external transfer of genetic information over short to long distances. They are packaged in a little envelope of phospholipids, this little safe package of genetic information to be sent out into the air and then transferred. And so if we consider that word virus very loosely, just to mean the exchange of genetic information through space and time, then yes, it's all done virally. And I would say some of it's done by exosomes, some of it's done by more of a classical virus kind of thing. The differences between those two seem to be, again, starting to blur, but historically, meaning five years ago - like, all of the science is so new now - but five, ten years ago I would have said, well, a virus has all of these very intentional surface proteins that target it to a specific tissue in the recipient. And so I'll make a virus. It's important for us to remember every coronavirus ever in history that infected the human being was made by a human being. We make these things, and we make them intelligently designed to hit the recipient at a very specific receptor. And so we'll cover the viral package of information with a smart bomb kind of approach of saying okay, we're gonna move this thing to right in the right location. And the word bomb is very erroneous there; I should use like, smart delivery system or something because again, the bomb word harkens in someone who's going to damage something but in fact, it's an intelligent update. So picture this more like your IT personnel coming into your computer and saying okay, I need to traffic this new piece of code to the hard drive, or this needs to update the screensaver or whatever it is. And so they put a piece of data on each end of the code that will target it to the right place within your computer. In the same way, when I put out viruses I'm going to target that specifically to, in the case of Coronavirus, ACE2 receptors inside the lung and vascular system of the recipient, because I'm trying to update my own genomics to handle new toxins in my environment, things like cyanide or air pollution or herbicides and pesticides and food. So I'm adapting to this toxic environment that I'm breathing every day and I need a genetic update to make a more resilient lung surface or vascular tree behind that lung to adapt to this new toxic environment as we start to approach some sort of massive extinction threat. And so the biology is always updating, always is. An exosome historically has been thought to be less smart-targeted. It's just a packet of information that can combine to the surface of any cellular material and be absorbed. And so it's more of a general, here's some new genetic information I'm sending out as much to tell you what's going on in my body as anything else. And so I think that many of us in the science realm of genomics right now think that much of the genomic information that we exude in the form of exosomes is not to go and update other people's genomics, as much as it is to tell them I'm under this kind of stress, you might want to prepare your body for this stressor. And so instead of integrating the DNA from an exosome, which can be the large genes of RNA and DNA, but it's more common that it's actually microRNA. MicroRNA don't ever go to make a protein, microRNA are actually modifiers. They're corepressors and coactivators of other genes that we're expressing right now. And so by exuding microRNA, if I'm sitting in a room with you, within a few minutes, you're starting to get updated as to what are the stressors I've been under over the last 24 hours, and what genes have I activated, and maybe it's not the stressors, maybe I've had a really wonderful creative 24 hours and I wrote a piece of music yesterday and I was playing guitar by the pool and I was relaxed and blah, blah, blah. I'm going to turn on a different set of genes, which are going to express these microRNA that are exuding in these packets of information out of my breath, out of my sweat, etc. And so I'm putting out this cloud of information to tell you as somebody in my proximity, what my last 24 hours has looked like. And it's not surprising that we start to see patterns of diseases in families that make it look like it's genetic. Type two diabetes, for example. If your mom and dad had type two diabetes, the likelihood of you having it is high. And yet, the risk factors around type two diabetes are far more environmental than they are genomic. And so this is how we can start to get familial traits or familial patterns of disease, when in fact, they're not genetic. They're environmental. But through our environmental exposure, we express a microRNA exosomal experience and then everybody adapts to our stress around us in a similar fashion. So that's the overall kind of, you know, terrain, and viruses really are intended to be large RNA, DNA strands that will get integrated into specific tissues to do new information, adaptation in real time, whereas the microRNA are more of a short term modification of behavior that partners genome but not necessarily insertion into their genome.
Uh-huh. So I'm just curious. So the viruses have all these surface proteins that allow them to be taken up by certain receptors. Whereas the exosomes, I've seen the pictures, they're just basically a smooth membrane.
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m.mlotkowski