The power of one

As children, many of us are told that we are one in a million. That we are unique. That there is nobody like us in the entire world. And we accept all of that to be true. In the world of cancer, though, one in a million is a monstrous proportion; one in ten trillion is the cancerous equivalent of the human one in a million.

As Johnson progresses through countless expeditions in which he attempts to find early origins of different types of cancer, he continually flashes back to the present, during which his wife Nancy is recovering from a metastasized cancer of her own. Throughout all of these flashbacks, Johnson repeatedly discusses the power of one cell in the body, in addition to the complexity of the cancer as a whole. For instance, he stated “Random events—triggered by a cosmic ray, a carcinogenic chemical, or just plain dumb luck---must have altered the DNA inside one of Nancy’s cells, causing it to lose touch” (Johnson 38) and “Inside my body, 10 trillion cells (these tiny Maxwell's demons) are battling the same inevitable slump toward entropy. It is eerie to think that inside each one—invisible to the eye—so much is happening” (Johnson 204). Johnson could not have used a more perfect word to describe the apparent paradox: eerie.

The fact that humans are at the mercy of even one cell in a trillion is utterly ironic when the extent of our evolution as a species is considered. We are a species that has evolved tremendously over the years, growing in sophistication, in size, in mental capacity, and in countless other ways other the years. And yet, there are countless diseases that continue to plague us, and we have still not evolved to be out of our own way; one carcinogen is capable of mutating one cell in our body, which, under the right circumstances, is capable of causing a debilitating disease that can kill us. This point is one that is clearly close to Johnson’s heart, and one that both he and I cannot fully believe.

As it pertains to our question of research (regarding how public figures and education have impacted societal attitudes towards the sciences), this fact provides an indirect but not insignificant point. That is, the idea that one individual is unique and capable of doing anything, which is so often embedded in American culture and often times is accepted as “truth” when that is not necessarily the case, is very much true in complex organisms studied in the sciences, as each cell has a very complex set of processes and a set of characteristics that make it unique from others, yet also capable of derailing an entire organism. These parallels are difficult to ignore; both the sciences and American culture are reflective of the power of the individual, which perhaps explains some of why science is emphasized so much in American education. The book sheds light on one half of this comparison, giving the reader a peek into how societal attitudes and sciences can be so interrelated.