The Case of the Body Snatchers

Did the title catch your attention?  Of course, it did. The genre of "body snatcher" movies was fodder to a number of Hollywood movie productions from low budget adaptations of one or two popular science fiction novels that go back to the '50s to one or two that actually had named stars with starring roles in them, including Nicole Kidman in one and David Sutherland, etc. in others.

However, the fascination with body snatchers were not just limited to the genre of science fiction but from fantasy platforms including those that were a mix of horror and ultra religious themes that would include "The Exorcist" from a best seller written by William Peter Blatty.

Sorry to disappoint some of you but this will not be about that kind of body snatchers.  It is about the "real thing".  Body snatchers are not only all around us, they are in us.  Hyperbole aside, they made us. 

Whatever  the reader's belief system dictates, whether it is from pure naturalism or faith in the  power of a Creator, this musing is about the wonders of the unseen that makes life possible and the survival of  all living organisms in this planet. It could also be our ultimate protection. H.G. Wells' "War of the Worlds" drove home that point (spoiler alert for those who are not familiar with the book or movie) towards the end.  The exoplanetary invaders were in the process of extinguishing all of humanity with their superior technological weapons and invincible spacecraft only to succumb to the tiniest, invisible inhabitants of the earth - microbes. The invaders were felled by germs!! The space aliens did not have immunity to bacteria and viruses. One by one, each of them perished from infection.

Fictional accounts and runaway imaginations of many sci-fi authors aside, the idea of body snatchers in our midst - in our innards and all over our entire bodies - that protect and insure our survival is very real. Read below a direct quote from a scientific paper:

"Microbes occupy all of our body surfaces, including the skin, gut, and mucous membranes. In fact, our bodies contain at least 10 times more bacterial cells than human ones, blurring the line between where microbes end and humans begin. Microbes in the human gastrointestinal tract alone comprise at least 10 trillion organisms, representing more than 1,000 species, which are thought to prevent the gut from being colonized by disease-causing organisms. Among their other beneficial roles, microbes synthesize vitamins, break down food into absorbable nutrients, and stimulate our immune systems".

"There is a close connection between microbes and humans. Experts believe about half of all human DNA originated from viruses that infected and embedded their nucleic acid in our ancestors’ egg and sperm cells".

The above two paragraphs explain completely but concisely the compelling dependence of macro organisms to the smallest microbes that are in us and all around the environment in which we live.  The truth of the matter is that microbes preceded us by many millions of years.  Other estimates claim that single celled organisms may date back to as early as 2 billion years ago before we became us.  Those dates don't matter very much because even plant life was here long before the first vertebrate animals and early mammals and hominids that came much later.

Time in this case was on the side of allowing myriad opportunities for organisms, especially those that developed into the more complex ones which would include us, so that today we benefit from how our bodies were able to adapt and actually utilize many microbial agents into helping our physiology to defend against the more harmful of these invading organisms. Today we use vaccines that work because the introduction of weakened microorganisms help train our antibodies into recognizing and eliminating the bad infectious actors. The accidental, albeit serendipitous discovery by Alexander Fleming in 1928 of penicillin - the golden wonder of antibiotics - came about when mold that is ordinarily harmful to us, became a bacterial nemesis that we rely on to this day.  It saved millions of lives and averted all kinds of infections when it was needed the most - during and immediately after WWII.

However, these wonders give problems to those rare individuals who are either allergic to certain microbial medications, such as penicillin or toxins produced by other microbes. I am one of those. Many, many years ago while a freshman in college I had tonsillitis  that warranted antibiotics.  As an out patient, I stopped by the university hospital on my way to ROTC that afternoon.  It was awkward having to get the shot on my behind and taking down the bottom of my uniform.  Immediately, although unbeknownst to me, embarrassment that a female nurse had to give me the shot, witnessed by a  female student nurse, was the least of my problems that early afternoon.  I made it to the lobby on my way to ROTC class and that was the last I remembered until three days later.  I was in a coma from severe reaction to penicillin.  It was anaphylactic shock, a sudden drop in blood pressure made me collapse on the lobby floor. 

That was very rare but indeed microbes can cause us harm.  But for every microbe that can hurt us there are many in our system, inside our bodies, permanent residents in our gut, that are beneficial.  And often we and the micro-colonists benefit mutually from living together.

From the moment of our conception, all throughout the nine months or so of our existence in the womb, microbes of innumerable varieties were already in us.  Our early immune systems were provided for us by our mothers.

"From the moment we are born, microbes begin to colonize our bodies. Each of us has a unique set of microbial communities, which are believed to play an important role in digestion and in protection from disease".

"And though some microbes make us sick and even kill us, in the long run they have a shared interest in our survival. For these tiny invaders, a dead host is a dead end".

In other words our bodies are composed of teeming colonies.  The colonizers are microbes that not only preceded our coming into being but have in fact played a role in our ultimate survival and development. Perhaps these microbes, as we speak, are shaping the future of humanity and other species.  There is no doubt they were there to influence our historical past.

It seems then that the microbe's preeminent status in the bio-world is due to the fact that they were here first and their superior ability to adapt gives them the most advantage.  While humans produce a new generation every twenty to twenty five years, bacteria create a generation every twenty or thirty minutes. That is a critical trait that bacteria sooner or later develop immunity when antibiotics are misused by us.  Packets or colonies of bacteria that survived when the prescribed dosage of antibiotics are not completely taken by the patient will develop immunity to that particular medication. 

Viruses are, of course, impervious to antibiotics because technically they are not "live" organisms. "Viruses are simply packets of nucleic acid, either DNA or RNA, surrounded by a protein shell.." They merely hijack our own cells to make exact copies of themselves. Our cells die in the process while the virus clone will go on to do the same thing over and over again with other cells.  Why then do viruses kill the very host that propagated them? Viruses outside can lay dormant and may survive for periods of time, long enough for a nearby host to come in contact with them.  What a clever if not  a sinister method of adaptation.  That is what makes COVID 19 a really bad snatcher of life for the most vulnerable among us.

A vaccine, however, is like a platoon of special forces, the Green Berets in our bodies that go out to train the native cells to recognize potential invaders and annihilate them with anti-body assassins and booby traps.  The much lauded and oftentimes more effective natural immunity stems from having survived an assault by the virus that left a great number of our antibodies prepared and able to recognize the invaders and preemptively "killing" them before taking a foothold in and among our cells. It's a violent world in there. 

The long and short stories of it all is that tiny microbes outnumber all the living cells in our body by a  huge margin. Of course, that is in number only because where size is concerned, our cells are way far larger and heavier.  There may  be an equal number of bacteria as there are cells in our body but the microbes only weigh less than half a pound in a typical 150 pound man.

In the total analysis, microbes of bacteria and viruses may outnumber the cells in our body but they can never outnumber the trillions and trillions of neurons and the number of synapses the neurons are capable of connecting in the human brain. It is the intelligence of the host organism that makes it possible for humans to not only understand the complexity of the invisible colonists but the ability to find ways to keep the balance undisturbed and find means to alleviate the situation when one side is about to upset the entire apple cart.

We must accept that we are forever hitched to the symbiosis between our body and the body snatchers. Our existence and survival depend on the balance that demands total equilibrium between us and them - the real body snatchers.  The real heroes are our system of antibodies that obviously have retentive, cellular photographic memories of the invaders that once encountered are never forgotten throughout our lifetime.

Y'all Be safe, be well, stay healthy and be always grateful.