I’m reading, “ the Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” by Rebecca Skloot. A fascinating non-fiction that reads like a novel. Anyway, I don’t believe in divine providence, at least, not the way Evangelicals of the Christian or Muslim faith do. I might be closer to Henrietta’s family – they still believe in Voo Doo, even though they are Christian. The point is, my idea of ‘divine intervention’ is not the master plan of some bearded guy in the sky, although, I did picture God as a Gandalf character when I was little, probably due to the Moses thing instead of the Jesus thing, and we never said that Moses was God, only one of his representatives. Anyway, My idea is more like…science and math. In other words, however the universe was created, there are these patterns, like Bedford’s Law, and Fibonacci, the Golden Mean / spiral, etc. Everything, of course, except for pi, or maybe it does have a pattern and we haven’t found it yet. The point is, there are ‘laws’ that the universe follows, and so…
In the case of HeLa, Henrietta’s cells, they were cancerous cells. That’s why they divide so readily. Cancer, first of all, is not a thing. They are cells that go crazy. Out of control. Chaotic. It’s not like a virus or bacteria, that is an entity. Cancer is a process that uses our own cells against us so they can eat. Sorta like, an orgiastic feast.
I learned about Blastocysts when my gramma got pancreatic cancer; I was 18. They exist in everyone, in every mammal, because in the beginning stages of life, their purpose is to eat. If activated later in life by carcinogenic forces, they come out to party. Not really, because they have no agenda, no intention. We imbue them with intention, of course, as we do everything else in order to make sense of our world. They, however, ironically, are benign, which is a word we use to say that a tumor is not growing out of control. What I mean to say is that the blastocysts are benign emotionally. They are objective and have no intention.
I believe that this irony was gifted to us when Gey, the scientist, discovered that Henrietta Lack’s tumor cells (malignant) would grow without stopping in a cultured medium. Ironically, it is cancerous cells, in other words, normal human cells that went haywire in a human body, that have allowed scientists all over the world, for more than 60 years, to find cures for things like polio and invent medications that assist in many diseases. Scientists searched for decades for human cells that would grow like this, and it was cancerous cells that finally gave us the opportunity to make these discoveries. So, is cancer bad or good? Well, I guess that depends what you are using it for.
Much like the killing of people. Is it good or bad to kill? (I have an entire essay written on this somewhere). We kill in self-defense – in war, to protect ourselves and our loved ones, and even, to punish people. The ‘pro-life’ people, a contradiction in terms in my opinion, say that we ‘kill’ babies in utero. And on and on. We ‘kill’ someone to put them out of their misery, such as euthanasia. So, is there a ‘divine’ judgment about killing? The very religious Jews say that you should not even kill in self-defense. Which means that the Israelis are not very religious because they send everyone in the country to the army. I continue to agree with Neal Donald Walsh in his book series, “Conversations with God” because he speaks about the concept of good and evil and what is the difference? Do they really exist or are they simply a perspective? Such as…the cancerous HeLa cells.
