Some Principles of Human Design for a Post-COVID World

When Linnaeus named us Homo sapiens, he recognized that we are a type of animal. The conversation beyond the pandemic may run from this core fact, but it cannot hide. Birds fly, turtles crawl, and insects breed prodigiously. Each has a fundamental nature that facilitates certain behaviors and impedes others.

If we are to find our way to a new order that better meets our own deep needs, and also the planet’s, we need to grasp what is fundamental to our biological nature. To get from here to a better place unavoidably requires that we speculate—project beyond what is known. But we should try to launch from solid ground. So here are points offered from a professional biologist as beacons to steer by.

Consider our basic biochemistry. The enzymatic machinery that replicates our DNA, reads our genes into proteins, and governs our cellular energy metabolism was inherited from microbes and their descendant, “eukaryotic” cells, which are larger, better structured, and better energized. These fundamental aspects of our animal nature were optimized—perfected to the point of un-improvability—by half a billion years ago.

Of course, with changing conditions, evolution added new genes and modified others. But the core of our stunningly intricate intracellular machinery has long been “settled law.” We study cellular processes in “model” organisms, such as the nematode worm and the fruit fly, because our cellular processes are deeply similar, having been inherited from the same common ancestor.

So what? Well, much of our biomedical enterprise—physicians, medical schools, hospitals, federal and private biomedical research institutes, plus Big Pharma—focuses on trying to understand this molecular machinery in order to control it. Newly discovered genes, proteins, and “signaling” molecules are often reported as potentially “druggable” targets for control of some disorder or condition. This vast enterprise, engaging many of our best and brightest scientists, has achieved innumerable, immense successes. This was my career for half a century.

But now we should reflect that 70 years of basic and clinical research directed at cellular machinery has not solved the major causes of death in today’s modern society. These include hypertension, obesity, type 2 diabetes, coronary heart disease, suicide, and addictions to drugs, alcohol, and tobacco. Moreover, these causes are coupled: obesity contributes to hypertension and type 2 diabetes; smoking contributes to heart disease; and so on.

Together these causes are four-fold greater than the next important cause of death, cancer. But, if we move to the “addictions” column and include the 50% of all primary liver cancers that are caused by alcoholism and the 90% of lung cancers that are caused by smoking, then the sum exceeds the remaining cancers by nearly five-fold.

Molecular treatment has been ineffective for these leading causes of death because they arise from chronic stress and despair—caused by societal dysfunctions. Failures of human interaction trigger cascades of diverse pathologies that ultimately filter down to disrupt the cellular machinery. But since there’s nothing wrong with the cellular machinery, except as it is abused, efforts to “fix” it with a panoply of drugs are doomed.

Give one drug, and both brain and body compensate. Add a second one, and they compensate further. Eventually, some control may be achieved; however, each drug has multiple (“side”) effects—mostly predictable. Those require additional drugs, and the result is a basically sick person stabilized precariously by “polypharmacy.” Such medically unstable individuals are the most vulnerable to COVID-19. Meanwhile, this direction for the bio-medical enterprise grows ever more expensive: US health care now consumes nearly 20% of the GDP, whereas in 1960 it was 5%.

What needs to change?
After COVID, such wasteful misdirection of bio-medical R&D will be unaffordable. Ditto for Big Pharma’s commercial products derived from this enterprise. Furthermore, stress and despair will be rising and will remain high for perhaps decades. The consequent mortalities will also rise and persist until we manage to relieve ourselves from chronic strain.

Here is bio-medicine’s perfect storm: rising deaths from societal dysfunctions that cannot be cured by polypharmacy will overwhelm a vast bio-medical complex based on a quasi-religious faith in druggable molecular targets and in search of profits.

The bio-medical complex will continue to expand molecular therapies for socially caused conditions. Consequently lots more people will die prematurely, having lived in poor health for years before they succumb. Furthermore, attempts to fund this “health” behemoth will create a crisis of budgetary resources on a scale formerly occupied by the “defense” behemoth.

Based on these fundamental considerations, we should steer hard toward massively reducing stress and despair by meeting the deepest needs of our species. If we were to manage this, and also resume physical exercise, then we’d transition from a chronically ill population to a healthy one and roughly 90% of the current medical costs would be unnecessary.