“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Sunday, September 25, 2011

You ARE What You Eat

Plant RNA circulates in your body from the food that you eat and alters your DNA expression. In particular, the RNA Professor Zhang and his team studied inhibits your liver from recognizing “bad” cholesterol (LDL).

This is not news to anyone who has been thinking about the extended phenotype—the way DNA and RNA do not stop at the edge of your skin. A spider's web, for instance, is an expression of spider DNA. It turns out that some of our body's behavior might be an expression of plant genomes.

1 comment:

zareen said...

In other news, it turns out Plato was right all along.