______________________________________________________________________________ | File Name : BODYCHAO.ASC | Online Date : 05/18/95 | | Contributed by : Jerry Decker | Dir Category : BIOLOGY | | From : KeelyNet BBS | DataLine : (214) 324-3501 | | A FREE Alternative Sciences BBS sponsored by Vanguard Sciences | | KeelyNet * PO BOX 870716 * Mesquite, Texas * USA * 75187 | | Voice/FAX : (214) 324-8741 InterNet - keelynet@ix.netcom.com | | WWW sites - http://www.eskimo.com/~billb & http://www.protree.com | |----------------------------------------------------------------------------| This article deals with an advanced approach to organ malfunction and what could be a potential cause of disease. The use of 'phase space' to represent complex dimensional fields in a simplified manner also has correlations to the study of over/unity devices, where a self-sustaining wave can be intentionally triggered and maintained. We invite your comments on the subject. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Yearly Subscriptions vary from $15 to about $20 per year, write Science Digest, PO BOX 10090, Des Moines, Iowa, 50347-0090. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Science Digest - September 1995 (page 20) Chaotic Body Rhythms A biologist uses topology to link unrelated phenomena Purdue biologist Arthur Winfree believes an underlying mathematical model that describes two seemingly unrelated phenomena - the internal biological clock, which determines sleep-wake cycles, and an obscure chemical process called the Belousov-Zhabotinshky reaction - also describes a third: fibrillation, the uncontrolled, erratic fluttering of the heart that is a major cause of sudden cardiac death. If he is right, fibrillation can result from such relatively mild, usually harmless stimuli as the premature firing of a few nerves. Should it happen at JUST THE WRONG MOMENT of the heartbeat cycle, it TRIGGERS a rotating, three dimensional wave of electric potential that moves through coronary tissue. This self-sustaining wave irrevocably overrides the heart's normal, rhythmic beating; even someone with a healthy heart is susceptible. In fact, this could explain sudden heart failure in disease-free people. Winfree is careful to emphasize that his ideas are unproven; yet they earned him a grant from the MacArthur Foundation last November. He is currently on leave from Purdue, working at the University of California, San Diego, and at the La Jolla Veterans Administration Hospital. "I'm trying," he explains, "to learn some cardiology." The theory Winfree is pursuing rests on a branch of mathematics known as TOPOLOGY, the study of the PROPERTIES OF GEOMETRIC SHAPES - and, by analogy, of systems that can be represented by geometric shapes. "My original work on the problem had to do with biological clocks," he says. Biologists had long believed that over the long term an organism would alternate sleeping and waking at regular intervals. A disturbing stimulus, such as a change in the pattern of light and darkness, might ADVANCE or RETARD THE CYCLE without CHANGING its FUNDAMENTAL RHYTHM. In fact, this is just what happened in experiments. "I thought that might not be the whole story, though," recalls Winfree. "The cycle is governed by the INTERACTION of many chemical compounds at many locations in the body. With topology, you can treat all those concentrations as a space of many dimensions, called a PHASE SPACE. You needn't define its structure in DETAIL to examine its PROPERTIES." Winfree treated the sleep-wake cycle as a one-dimensional slice of this many- dimensional phase space. He then described a two-dimensional slice, analogous in structure to a soap film stretched on a circular metal wire. He defined the wire as the ordinary rhythm - movement around the circle represents passage through the cycle over time. The soap film is a set of POSSIBLE disruptions. In the case of a disruption, represented by a point on the film, the normal rhythm resumes from some PREDICTABLE SPOT along the metal rim, just as a point on a soap film rushes to a PARTICULAR spot on the rim when the film breaks. "Nearly every spot on the film can be assigned a corresponding point on the rim," says Winfree. "But according to the topological theorem of NONRETRACTION, this can be true only if there is at least one point on the surface that does NOT have such a correspondence. A soap bubble cannot retract onto the rim unless you break it at some point." By analogy, Winfree predicted, there should be a point in the sleep-wake cycle where an applied stimulus would not RESTART the cycle but would result in an ARRHYTHMIC pattern. "Eric Patterson, a graduate student in biology, tried it on mosquitoes," he says, "and found we could PRODUCE a state in which the insects slept, then woke and buzzed around for a while, then dropped off again, in no DISCERNIBLE pattern." Winfree wondered whether it might be possible to treat other rhythmic biochemical systems the same way. "Since the mathematical model is abstract," explains Winfree, "there seemed to be no reason it couldn't apply to such things as rhythmic chemical reactions, the cycle of cell reproduction, the menstrual cycle or even fibrillation." The jury is still out on menstruation; the analogy just doesn't work when it comes to cell reproduction. In the Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction, though, a TRIGGERING BEAM of ultraviolet light interrupts the orderly interaction of a mixture of chemicals, sending a ROTATING WAVE FRONT of activity through them. "We can't say for sure, but the evidence is very good that the same sort of thing goes on in the heart," Winfree concludes. "The contraction of millions of heart cells, based on combinations of electrical and chemical stimuli, make up the phase space. And a mild stimulus occurring AT THE PROPER TIME should disrupt the pattern ENTIRELY." Does the mathematical model have a basis in reality? Two pieces of evidence suggest it does. The first is that electrodes placed on the surface of laboratory animals' hearts have detected what APPEAR to be the ROTATING SPIRAL WAVES of electricity that Winfree predicts. The second comes from the work of George Ralph Mines, a physiologist who did heart research at the University of Montreal in the early years of this century. Mines suspected that fibrillation could be caused by mild stimuli to the heart, though he had no theory to explain it. He may have been proved right. One day, in 1917, he was found alone in his lab, dying of heart failure. Attached to his chest were the wires of a machine he had been using to deliver weak shocks to lab animals. Michael D. Lemonick ------------------------------------------------------------------------------