#917 Body Condo

There used to be this notion that the human body was kind of like a house. It was occupied by the brain and various other organs but they were all connected with the unique DNA of their family. A lovely American nuclear family metaphor.
Well it turns out the body is more like an apartment house, or maybe a group of condos. Everyone co-exists under the same architecture. To some extent we have to pay attention to the CCRs and Head of the Condo association or the Apartment manager. But we’re not all members of the same family.
That’s evident when you look in our gut. All sorts of species swim around down there. Most of them bacterial to be sure, but lots of our body processes take part on that cellular level. So, down in the laundry room it’s hard to tell the workers and condo residents from the guys who came in off the street to use the coin-op.
E-coli, fungus and yeast thrive in the warm moistness of our body condo. Even mitochondria, those little workhorses that do so much inside every cell, have distinct DNA lineages from the rest of the cell. Kind of like loyal family retainers or perhaps domestic pets.
Fetch my slippers, Mitochondria.
A recent transplant success lends credence to the theory we are sometimes a whole dwelling and sometimes a sum of our apartments.
Usually when you get a transplanted organ you have to take a whole array of immunosuppressive drugs or your body will send all its killer T-cells after the invading tissue. But in a recent transplant, the recipient also got a bone marrow transplant from the same donor. And the immune response was avoided.
So by having new bone marrow, new T-cells were made and added to the condo body’s security force. These T-cells could speak the same language as the new immigrant kidney in apartment 2-P. They could also speak the same language as the rest of the residents, and everybody just found a way to get along for the common good.
Peace and harmony and micro-cellular condo parties.
Tell the Super we need more beer fermented by the brothers of the yeast in our gut.
America, ya gotta love it.