Body [The Internal Internet]
Some 2,500 years ago Chaung Tzu wrote " All that have faces , form, voices , colours - all these are mere things . How could one thing and another be far removed from each other. And how could any of them be capable of leading you to what preceded them ?. They are forms and colours - nothing more. But that which creates things has no form and rests where there is no change. If a man can get hold of this and exhaust it fully , then how can things stand in his way. He may rest within the bounds that know no excess , hide within the borders that know no source , may wander where the ten thousand things have their beginning , nourish his breath , unite his virtue and thereby COMMUNICATE with that which creates all things" [23].
Two thousand five hundred years BI [Before Internet ] a philosopher understood the natural Internet that connects all things in the world wide web of Nature. Understood that it may be that the virus and bacteria [ which contain genetic material - as do all our cells ] - are as much a form of communication as an "illness" . That in trying to wipe out a virus we may be stabbing ourselves in the back - because the virus is part of Nature - as we are. Life is a dynamic , its only constant is change. Mutation is an ongoing process whose vector is time. To interfere in a process that we do not understand is to invite trouble. We have got that trouble in the form of viral mutations that nourish themselves on Vancomycin. A recent article in the Lancet drew attention to Enterococcus Faecium that mutated in 7 days into a form that relied on Vancomycin as its food. MRSA and forms of TB resist all the drugs we throw at them. TB has been detected in the bones of dinosaurs and it might have occurred to us that an organism that predates the human race has a high survival drive. Vaccines are frozen in time , they do not mutate. Yet out here in the real world the dynamic of relentless mutation is a constant and ongoing fact of life. The 'Flu virus is known to mutate in a matter of days , or at most, weeks yet it takes 7/9 months to make up a vaccine. Any dangerous pandemic will almost certainly not be covered by the vaccine that is then current.
Scarlet Fever was a danger in the 1930's but vanished without a trace - and without theuse of a vaccine , for none was ever developed. There is talk of its reappearance now , some 60 years later. Where has it been and what cycle of mutations has it passed through?. To pretend that the picture of Life is not chaotic is absurd. But chaos merely means that we do not understand what we see. To produce 'order' by putting on blinkers , restricting our view to that which we CAN understand will lead us into serious error . Only in the synthesis of material and non material views will a way ahead be found.