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As a Gen-X child, I am lucky to have watched the birth of genetics and also its golden period when there was a phase (similar to that experienced by classic physics during Newtonian era) that we had a feeling that we were on the verge of unveiling the ultimate secret of life.

When Watson and Crick discovered DNA, the code of life, it was a serendipitous shock as scientists felt that they now have a key to understand everything about life.

As genetics moved forward, it appeared as if each life-form was constructed using a set of instructions and nothing more, and the quest was all about reading that code.

As genetic expression was presumed to be based only on the code available in the DNA, it was felt that body construction and pathology it will lead to was completely and totally governed by the code with no real way of altering it. For example, if you have a gene with a specific error, say one more (third) copy of chromosome 21, you have no escape from developing Downs syndrome.

As genetics offered a very clear cause-and-effect relationship model, it made allopathy feel very happy with itself, because it strengthened the belief that doctors already had thanks to discovery of pathogens that cause diseases.

So, the early days of genetics was also the golden age of allopathy that was already empowered by antibiotics that killed pathogens and cured diseases and now knew that finding a way to correct genetic errors would cover the rest of the systemic malaises.

Unfortunately for us today, both these optimistic beliefs of allopathy have taken a severe beating, and allopathy is now on the verge of breakdown.

As evolution has started blunting the edge of antibiotics, allopathy is now desperately trying to find newer toxins to be a step ahead of the pathogens that are fast developing resistance, but it looks like a hopeless quest now.

While evolution is beating allopathy (on a front it had arguably won some great battles), on the genetic front, the situation is not looking too good thanks to a newly discovered concept called epigenetics.

In the early years of genetics, DNA looked like an instruction manual written in a linear way to build a life-form. Each protein had its code and each process had a fixed assembly line, so there was a clear one-to-one relationship and hence the comfort of predictable cause-and-effect logic that science thrives on was available.

Unfortunately, scientists soon realised that the book of life was not as simple or linear. It was actually a book that you have to keep flipping through because it had multiple options for a given decoding.

The science of epigenetics is based in this new understanding that DNA code is read by life depending on the given situation.

In simple terms, it is like a book where you read the instructions of what to do on the page 32 if a man coming at you is wearing a white shirt; but, if he is wearing a blue short, you need to read the instructions on page 245.

Similarly, the book of genes gets read depending on external circumstances, and hence genetics is now added with an epi, i.e. outside of to describe it more correctly.

So, epigenetics did what quantum physics did to classical physics. It destroyed the hope of having a deterministic view of a life-form, and what nCovid19 has done today is to tell that secret to the whole world.

While biology or genetics is not mainstream information that the masses are aware of, thanks to the coronavirus pandemic, the whole world saw how the great allopathy that claimed having the best cause-and-effect understanding of human body and its diseases actually failed completely in answering even the most simple questions.

It is about time allopathy recognises that the local cause-and-effect model it is pursing is not the only way to look at health and healthcare.

There are deeper and bigger systems at play in each illness and hence the brute-force cure of antibiotics or same-treatment-for-everyone cant be looked at as a future of healthcare.

We need a new allopathy that is ready to grow beyond the current idea of local cause-and-effect and widen its scope to understand the larger global systems that impact behaviour of the micro-systems it is focusing on.

If allopathy is not re-invented soon, it will cause far too many disruptions in larger systems (like what antibiotics have done to the web of life) and if they are agitated to cascade (as we can see with the HIV or coronavirus pandemics) into a problem, they have the power to send our species down the path of existence in a jiffy.

Allopathy may have cured a billion individuals in its golden age, but it is about to turn into a curse from a cure for human species at large. It needs to grow into becoming a holistic system that recognises the idea of optimisation in this chaotic interwoven universe instead of struggling to find cause-and-effect relationships in local systems.

DISCLAIMER : Views expressed above are the author's own.

Continue reading here:

Epigenetics and pandemics: How allopathy can turn into a curse from a cure - The Times of India Blog