Disease is a Breakdown of Conversation in Our Bodies

Our bodies, created in the image of the Triune God, have much to teach us about the virtues of conversation. The human body is a wondrous symphony of diverse parts: 206 bones and over 600 muscles, controlled by more than a billion neurons and energized by 60,000 miles of veins and arteries in the circulatory system, enough to circle the globe twice. These intricate parts work together in a harmonious conversation, mobilizing our body and striving for its health. Our bodies constantly adapt to instabilities among their members.

When I trip over a curb, for instance, my body tries to adjust itself and regain my balance. If that doesn’t work, it will in an instant adjust its members to break my fall and cause as little damage as possible. When my body is thrown into instability by an infection, the lymphatic system works around the clock to fight the infection and restore the body’s stability. Instabilities like these are not merely exceptional cases; to walk, for example, is to fall and repeatedly catch oneself.

Similarly, our bodies are constantly fighting toxins that enter through the air we breathe or the food we eat, and the overwhelming majority of these skirmishes go unnoticed by us. In order for systems and body parts to work together successfully in these ways, the body maintains a complex, constant conversation among its parts as information and needs circulate and are refined and adjusted as a result of this ongoing conversation.

We exist in our flesh as a many-layered conversation that is not simply idle banter but that moves us toward stability, health, and action. At the most basic level, the human body is a conversation among proteins that are absorbed by our cells or transferred from one cell to another.

The emerging science of proteomics studies the dynamics of this conversation, but it is still developing the tools necessary to listen effectively to the conversation and track the changes and movements of the proteins within it.

Researchers like Danny Hillis, a computer scientist who has developed some of the rudimentary tools of proteomics, are hopeful that by better understanding the conversation unfolding at the protein level, we can better describe how diseases like cancer operate.

Cancer is a breakdown, Hillis notes, “at the level of this conversation that’s going on between the cells, that somehow the cells are deciding to divide when they shouldn’t, not telling each other to die, or telling each other to make blood vessels when they shouldn’t, or telling each other lies.” Indeed, it seems that the health of our bodies is intimately tied to the ability of their members to effectively converse together.