Tuesday, July 21, 2015

Biophysics Week 1 (Week 10). Life and Living Systems

I know I'm a "living system" because...
I know I’m a ‘living system’ because... I am mass and angles and vectors and flesh. I breathe, pump, circulate, ambulate, sweat, think, consume, excrete. I move of my own volition. I am cells and organelles. I am tissue and organs and systems. I am constantly killing and regenerating myself. I grow. I evolve. I atrophy. I age. I refine. I am complex, and it’s kinda miraculous that all of these elements (me!) work together as they do. I can be awed.

Comments on one of the discussions... 
I was thinking about why Larry chose each of these articles for a class on biophysics, “Life and Living Systems”. They represent lots of thought-provoking topics at the interface of physics and biology. I found the one titled “Conscious or Not?” to be particularly interesting and, in a weird way, hopeful. A huge stressor in situations when a person is in a coma is that family and loved ones (and doctors) don’t really know what is going on with them. It seems that having a sense of how conscious someone is would be incredibly helpful and reassuring when faced with difficult decisions and even just a daily caretaking approach and how one might interact with the person, even if they can't respond. But perhaps there are situations in which it would make decisions even more difficult - what to do when there is an indication that someone is conscious but there is no hope of any degree of recovery? 

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