Autophagy
Food Chain Radio Show #1192
Michael Olson, Author & Urban Farming Agriculturalist
Autophagy: Our Self-Eating Self!
Guest: Dr. Richard Vierstra, Professor of Biology, Washington University of St. Louis
A while back, I had the opportunity to go on a walk with a Shipibo shaman in the Peruvian Amazon…
Michael Olson Food Chain Radio – Autophagy: Our Self-Eating Self! How does our body renew itself by eating itself?
At one point along the trail, the shaman stopped to pass around a jug of jungle juice, from which we each had a pull, or two, or three. The interpreter said it would change the way we saw things, and it did.
When the shaman stopped again to describe the medicinal properties of the Uno de Gato plant, my gaze fixed on a leaf that had fallen to the ground. By fixed, I mean my site zoomed right down to that leaf and focused the myriad of tiny creatures that were consuming it.
From the voracity of their feasting, I realized that neither weakness, nor death, last very long in the Amazon. Life is simply too competitive to allow for weakness, and too hungry to allow nutrients to be locked up by the dead, so both weakness and death are quickly recycled back into life.
It has been known, for some time, that a process like the one I observed in the Amazon, goes on in the human body. The process is called, “autophagy,” which is Greek for “self eating.” Crudely translated, autophagy means our body renews itself, by eating itself.
What is now known, thanks to the Nobel Prize-winning research of Yoshinori Ohsumi of Japan, is how autophagy works. Ohsumi’s discovery is quickly opening a brave new world of medical possibilities, and the big venture capital money is pouring in.
But, for the most, those possibilities lie in the future. Today we pause to ask…
Leave a comment below: How does our body heal itself, by eating itself?
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