Читать книгу Songs of Being - Nader Rahimi - Страница 10

Aristotle, my great, great teacher, who pondered his whole life about life.

We are all made of earth, air, fire, water, and a little bit “aether” that is all, he announced.

In later years, René Descartes, my other great teacher proclaimed,

We are all but mechanical machines, nothing else.

Decades later, my new teachers, Schleiden and Schwann whose work I am grateful for, said,

All lives are made of cells as all matters are from atoms.

Centuries passed.

My new teacher, a man named Charles Darwin, who traveled to a faraway land to learn about life said,

All lives come from a common descent.

In this jungle of life, the fittest survive.

Life is a “blind watchmaker” and the only thing that is, one of his fans quietly whispered.

Decades and centuries went by.

My newest teacher, a man whose name was Francis Crick, declared with charm:

Life is made of four letters; A, T, C and G, they form a “double helix” that is all.

“Double helix” is the greatest secret of life, he later secretly voiced to his son.

After centuries of schooling, we now know,

All livings are made of cells.

Cells are made of genes, which we named deoxyribonucleic acid, and called it DNA for short.

DNA turns into ribonucleic acid, and it passes on the secrets of life, which is nicknamed messenger RNA.

In the hidden command center of cells,

RNA translates the great secrets of life into 20 amino acid codes with a great care.

The cell code-breakers know them as proteins.

RNA is the mother of all the proteins that we know.

Life is all about proteins who are also the workhorse of all living things.

That is all about life for now, the teacher said.

So what?