TCM & Cell Biology

When I see glimmers of TCM in popular science, my feeling is always - of course! Or: they're catching on!

Although my two closest friends in the Western scientific world (both former roommates of mine) have unfortunately seemed unsympathetic to my desire for dialogue between what they study and what I'm working on, I see connections most every day. A major difference I've found is a sense of rooted-ness that I'm finding in the purpose and value of my path, and its history, whereas they seem to dismiss/poo-poo this notion. While they strive to discover/conquer/eradicate, I want to understand, but I think even within popular science, (although there are obviously still some who agree with them) my two friends are about one hundred years behind the times.

A noble and exciting movement in laboratory-science seems to be coming from the social sciences my boyfriend studies: Systems Theory. Studying parts individually has merit only insofar as the connections and interactions between components come to be understood more fully. Cell biology (and the links we checked out this week) has been focused on the basic observations we can make of parts because, hey, this is exciting stuff, too.

We are constantly creating newer, better technology allowing us to confirm some of what we expect is in there, and causing us to retrace our steps and come up with new ways of describing things. There is room for this observation phase. Chinese Medicine has had thousands of years to study the body, in its parts and as a whole, and it's only through the study that the practice was developed. If cell biology has seemed to neglect the whole picture, perhaps it's because we've become caught up in our ever increasing capabilities of observation.

On the other hand, the field is so new and has changed and grown so quickly, that maybe it's unfair to shortchange the study as not-holistic-enough. Maybe a Systems Approach is what we need to integrate all of science in the West; natural, medical, social... and maybe that can happen before we get too lost, you know, not seeing the forest for the trees.

A few links that gave me hope:

Adrian Bird, of the Wellcome Trust Centre for Cell Biology says, "Isn't systems biology the only viable approach to biological systems?"

I wish more information on this seminar had been accessible. A bioengineering and chemistry professor gave a presentation on a systems-approach in cell biology, which would have lent itself pretty well to a comparison with TCM, I suspect.

Here, a paper published in Science Magazine states:
"One of the defining features of plants is a body plan based on the physical properties of cell walls. Structural analyses of the polysaccharide components, combined with high-resolution imaging, have provided the basis for much of the current understanding of cell walls. The application of genetic methods has begun to provide new insights into how walls are made, how they are controlled, and how they function. However, progress in integrating biophysical, developmental, and genetic information into a useful model will require a system-based approach."