The hand that signed the paper felled a city;
Five sovereign fingers taxed the breath,
Doubled the globe of dead and halved a country;
These five kings did a king to death.
Dylan Thomas, “The hand that signed the paper,” 1936
Of course, you would never use poison, would you? Affirm it to me: put your hand up if you wouldn’t use poison, wiggle your fingers for emphasis . . .
Liar. The very fact that you have fingers to wiggle betrays you. I claimed at the start of this book that we are creatures of poison, but poison is in our recent past, as well as in our distant past, and our fingers prove it, the very fingers that make us human. They were shaped by poison, a very special poison, applied cell by cell to a slab of flesh, a mere flipper, separating the slab into five strips that became the fingers of the hand, and the thumb. Apoptosis not only protects us from cancers, but it also shapes us, as in the formation of fingers.
The operations of apoptosis are exquisitely precise, and one of the 2002 Nobel Prizes went to Sydney Brenner, Robert Horvitz, and John Sulston for their discoveries concerning “genetic regulation of organ development and programmed cell death,” which is the Nobel committee’s preferred name for apoptosis. Most of this work orbited around the discovery that a worm, barely a millimeter long, is formed from 1,090 cells, but that Caenor-habditis elegans destroys 131 of those, to form an organism with exactly 959 cells.
The same principle applies to all living things: the careful use of poison, apoptosis, shapes us as we develop, and keeps us alive, yet only 30 years ago, we knew nothing of this. Poison, it seems, has not yet finished surprising us.