Man Takes Up Internal Farming 136
RockDoctor writes "'A Massachusetts man who was rushed to hospital with a collapsed lung came home with an unusual diagnosis: a pea plant was growing in his lung.' Just that summary should tell you enough to work out most of the rest of the details, but it does raise a number of questions unaddressed by the article: How did the pea roots deal with the patient's immune system? What would have happened if the situation had continued un-treated? I bet the guy has a career awaiting him in PR for a pea-growing company."
good thing it wasn't a watermelon seed (Score:3, Interesting)
I assume that if it went untreated it would have just died and either been absorbed or caused a nasty infection.
Re:good thing it wasn't a watermelon seed (Score:5, Interesting)
Photosynthesis serves the function of producing sugar from sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide by transfering an electron through several enzymatic structures. It is conceivable that (in order of likelihood), a) the half-inch long seedling was still being fully fed from the fruit, b) simple diffusion of sugar from the blood stream was able to supply the plant with enough sugar to sustain itself, c) free radicals were able to diffuse into the seedling's tissue, donating an electron to the photosynthetic chain.
"Scientists Grow Plants without Sunlight or Water": http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=scientists-grow-plants-wi [scientificamerican.com]
How about internal hookworm farming? Serious! (Score:5, Interesting)
I was watching one of the weird science documentaries my wife loves and saw one that beats this story by a bit. Jasper Lawrence [jasper-lawrence.com] had severe asthma and allergies and heard an old wives tale that hookworms could force the body's immune system to "cure" the allergies...so he went to Africa, stamped around in feces and got a nice case of hookworm. It worked. [wikipedia.org]
Now, he has set up a business [autoimmunetherapies.com] selling hookworms he harvests from his own feces.
Re:good thing it wasn't a watermelon seed (Score:3, Interesting)
"Scientists Grow Plants without Sunlight or Water" -- I'm wondering how this might be applied to limited-resource gardening, such as aboard spacecraft (wouldn't be energy-efficient, but might be nutrient-efficient). No doubt some are already wondering how to apply it to the pot plants in mom's basement, too. ;)
Not to mention... "If I grow pot in my lung, I won't have to smoke it!"
Re:Pine tree lung (Score:3, Interesting)
How did this toxic pollen evolve?
Of course humans have intentions - brains operate differently than bark. It's of course true that the basis for our brains is simple electro-chemical/quantum interactions, but from that base are built ever more complex structures, some of which generate intentions.
To say a brain has no intentions is to say that a city has no neighborhoods because houses are made of wood, stone and metal, which have no neighborhoods. This is a division [nizkor.org] error.
Re:Pine tree lung (Score:3, Interesting)
How does anything evolve? What's your point?
Traits occurring through random mutation that are useful for a species to reproduce tend to be picked up, and traits that expend resources that offer no benefit tend to be lost.
The idea that thousands of plant species could have convergently picked up a complex set of traits (poison pollen, communications systems) that were never useful before but required resources to maintain - asymptotically approaches zero.
Synergism of neurons can create inordinately complex results, but that does not create a qualitative upheaval in which "intention" is born. Free will cannot exist without cause-and-effect. If we truly had free will, our actions would have no correlation to our environment at all ... but they do.
Yes, I'm familiar with the Free Will arguments. That Will is predictable, given perfect knowledge of all the inputs and states (including quantum uncertainty) is true, but that knowledge is unattainable, so 'free will' is used to describe an abstraction of the human experience. The same could be said of any of the other human mental states - anger, love, happiness, sadness, calmness, inspiration, depression. That one can explain the hormones or neurotransmitters involved in creating those states does not make the words less useful for describing the human condition.
This isn't superstition, though, it's pragmatism. Sitting around in a nihilistic funk winds up not being a useful exercise. Using these abstractions lets us talk about humanity. Describing the mechanics lets us talk about a human being. Simply describing the anatomy and physiology is insufficient to describe the emergent behavioral features.