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Harry Potter, the National Institutes of Health, and the Purpose of Life November 20, 2005 The Reverend Roger Fritts Cedar Lane Unitarian Universalist Church Bethesda, Maryland Friday night by 6:00 p.m. the Silver Spring movie theater had sold out all eight shows of the new Harry Potter movie. Apparently Silver Spring was not the only sold out theater. Early reports say it was the third-biggest Friday in movie box office history, just trailing Spider-Man and an earlier Harry Potter movie. In a quick search I found these headlines:
• Rome: Fans Pack Theaters for New Potter Film. • Beijing: Harry Potter Mania Grips Cinemas. • Bangalore: Going Potty over Potter. I did get in to see the movie last night in Wheaton. I should explain to those of you who have not seen the movies or read the fictional books that Harry Potter is a young boy. When Harry was a baby, someone killed his parents. He lives a miserable life as an unwanted member of a dysfunctional extended family. Then he learns that he is a wizard. He goes to a boarding school specializing in witchcraft and wizardry. There he learns that he is a very special, very powerful boy, who is fated to save the world by defeating the evil wizard who killed his parents. The books have simple moral lessons such as:
• Beware of pompous people. • Stay true to your nerdy or unpopular friends. • And love and friendship are stronger than evil. Personally I enjoy the books because I find them relaxing. Some books excite me. Some inform me, some make me angry, and some bore me. However, The Harry Potter books fall into the category of books that help me escape from the struggles of life and let me slow down. I gain temporary peace of mind by reading the Harry Potter series. Last August on vacation I was relaxing, reading a Harry Potter book during one part of the day and reading a serious book about the future of medicine later the same day. The similarities struck me. Both the Potter book and the medical book contained descriptions of mixing stuff together to make people healthy or more powerful. For example, the fictional Harry Potter makes something called “Polyjuice” a bubbling thick dark mud mixture that tastes like over cooked cabbage. When you add the hair of another person to the polyjuice and drink it down, hair and all, for an hour your body changes into the form of the person whose hair you drank. In the new movie fictional Harry Potter chews gillyweed, which feels unpleasantly slimy and rubbery. He grows gills just below the ears, allowing him to swim underwater without needing to come up for air, the gills send oxygen to Potter’s blood. Also the gillyweed causes the boy’s hands and feet to become webbed. The books are full of such made-up potions. I read about an imaginary sleeping potion so powerful it is known as the living death. I read about an imaginary stone taken from the stomach of a goat that will save you from most poisons. I read about an imaginary potion made with dried nettles and crushed snake fangs that cures warts. Then I turned and read a non fiction book called Fantastic Voyages by Ray Kurzweil (the inventor of the digital piano, text scanners and voice recognition software). It describes future advances in health care that sound almost as fantastic as the imaginary potions in the Harry Potter books. Take for example the issue of tumor biopsies. A team at the University of California at Irvine is using a National Institutes of Health grant to develop a microscopic vessel that surgeons would remotely pilot through the esophagus, stomach, small intestine, and colon, to find tiny tumors and preform immediate biopsies. Ultimately, it can destroy the tumors it finds. Or consider Nanotechnology. Nanotechnology is technology built on the atomic level: building machines one atom at a time. In nano medicine tiny robots will replace our white blood cells. They will download software from the Internet to destroy specific infections hundreds of times faster than antibiotics. They will be effective against all bacterial, viral, and fungal infections with no limitations or drug resistance. Scientists are also inventing a non fiction form of Harry Potter’s fictional gillyweed. Researchers say our red blood cells perform the oxygenating function very inefficiently, and researchers are redesigning them for optimal performance. With an ounce or two of new nano red blood cells circulating along with our normal blood, we can go hours without oxygen. Although the prototypes are still in the future, scientists have worked the physical and chemical requirements out in detail. These nano robots can also help us with our digestion. Tiny robots in our stomach and intestines can augment our biological digestive system by adding nutrients to the bloodstream and removing unwanted substances such as toxins and excess nutrients. This technology will effectively eliminate excess weight as a problem by destroying unneeded calories. We can expect to see technology of this type around 2020, and a refined system that can replace our children and grand children’s digestive system is about twenty-five years away. Meanwhile as we approach Thanksgiving I found it comforting to read that a weight reduction nasal spray is in the works. The spray, now in phase 1 trials, is based on the hormone our stomachs normally release when it is full. The drug triggers a feeling of fullness before we have actually filled our stomachs. Nutritionists know that increased consumption of omega-3 fatty acids is critical to our health. Presently the best and easiest way to get these omega-3,s is by eating fish. But a novel biotech solution is in the works. One gene from the roundworm can convert omega-6 fatty acids into omega-3 fatty acids. Most land-based animals, including humans, lack this ability. Genetic engineers have spliced this gene into laboratory mice, which now convert the omega-6's in their diet into omega-3's. Since consumers are not likely to find mice a desirable food, scientists are working to apply this new tech knowledge to more traditional animals so our milk and meat may provide healthy omega-3 fatty acids rather than saturated fat. Cloning technologies offer a possible solution for world hunger by creating meat and other protein sources without animals by cloning animal muscle tissue. This would allow growing beef steak or chicken breast in a factory without animals. So in the future no animals will suffer in the production of a turkey dinner. As you can see, reading about the future of medicine is almost like reading a Harry Potter book. In 2005 we are a long way from the first harvest festival of the English settlers in what we now call Plymouth, Massachusetts. No complete record of the food exists for the 1621 celebration, although we do know that deer meat was a primary food on the menu. In England venison was rarely part of the common people’s food experience. Deer were found only in the parks and forests of the landed gentry. Venison was not commercially available, by law you could not buy or sell it. It is likely that few, if any, of the colonists had eaten it before coming to New England. Wildfowl was also plentiful at the first harvest festival in Plymouth. We do not know what kinds of birds they ate but we can guess that the colonists ate duck and geese. Many wild turkeys lived in the forests of Plymouth in 1621. Turkeys were native to North America. The Spanish brought them from North America to Spain and from there traders took them to England. In England in the mid-1500s turkey became popular as a food eaten on Christmas day. The English colonists in Plymouth may have had turkey as part of their harvest celebration. Carbohydrates probably came as Indian corn. The colonists probably use the corn in traditional English ways, as porridge, pudding, or thickener in meat stews. Many English settlers considered vegetables a secondary and inferior food. The early autumn produce from the gardens at Plymouth probably included cabbage, carrots, cucumbers, chard, onions, parsley, radishes, spinach, and turnips. However, they probably did not eat the vegetables with the same degree of pleasure as the meat. Beer was the ordinary daily drink consumed by everyone despite age gender or class. They consumed it in quantities that are staggering to a modern person. For example a shipboard ration was a gallon a day per person. However, by the time of the harvest festival, the colonists may have run out of beer, and probably had not reached a point where they could brew and ferment their own. So it is likely that they drank water at their first harvest festival. But how does all this relate to Harry Potter, the National Institutes of Health, and the purpose of life? The word religion comes from a Latin word that means to bind together, to tie together. I like to define religion as any activity that tries to tie together all the different aspects of our lives into a meaningful whole. Making a connection between the medical work of the scientific community and the fictional stories of Harry Potter and our national holiday of Thanksgiving is what I try to do as a minister. How does it tie together? My own guess is that the force that created the universe, the force that made life possible, wants us to survive. Whatever caused the universe to come into being, caused it to come into being so life developed on this planet. Overtime that life became self-conscious, became aware of itself and aware of the universe around it. Call it the ground being, or the spirit of life, or the unity that underlies existence, or call it God. The name does not matter. That force wants us to survive. The fictional Harry Potter story and the story of the first English settlers in Massachusetts are all about survival, making stuff, harvesting stuff, mixing stuff together in different ways and eating it, so that we can stay alive. The work done at the National Institutes of Health and by all the other scientists in the world aimed at improving our survival as a species. I think this is one thing that the force that created the universe wants us to do. Being with loving families and friends helps us survive. Eating healthy foods 400 years ago at Plymouth and this Thursday on Thanksgiving is consistent with our purpose here on earth. Most of our activity as human beings revolves around trying to survive, and in the United States at Thanksgiving we give thanks and we celebrate that we have survived another year. But is that all? What do we do besides surviving? One answer is entertainment. Our only account of the 1621 harvest celebration says that after their meal, our English ancestors “exercised their arms,” This does not refer to 17th Century aerobics. It probably means that they engaged in some target practice with their flintlock muskets. Four hundred years later, after we have enjoyed a wonderful meal with family and friends, we also seek out our modern forms of amusement and entertainment. Some of us go to the movies. Some of us read a book. I think entertainment is about human survival because it is one way that we learn to survive. Scary books and movies give us imaginary of dangers. When our brain sees danger, it blocks out all extraneous stimuli and focuses tightly on the threat. Books and movies about courtship and mating teach us about these survival rituals. The new Harry Potter movies explore the awkward mating rituals of 14-year-olds going to their first dance. Both the action stories and the romance stories release hormones like adrenaline into our bodies that stimulate our brain. After the scary or the romantic part is over, hormones make us feel happy and at peace. Other forms of entertainment also help us practice survival. Sports exercises develop our physical survival skills. Card games exercise and develop our mental survival skills. Music helps us to survive by calming us. But is this all there is to life—survival, and learning to survive through entertainment? My own belief is that the force that created the universe, the ground being, or the spirit of life, or the unity that underlies existence, or God, wants us not only to survive but also to try our best to explore and understand the universe, to gain knowledge. This is why as life has evolved, brains have evolved. This is why the size of brains has increased dramatically. We are here to gain knowledge. The force that created the universe created it so life was born on this planet. This life grew a brain and that brain has gotten bigger and more intelligent. Our purpose is to learn, to explore, to understand. Some of you in this room are on the cutting edge of the growth of human knowledge. You work in places like NIH or NASA. Some of you work in the educational system or in libraries, or as parents, trying to preserve and pass on to our children what we have learned. Some of us play a role simply by paying our taxes to support this research into the nature of life and the universe. So it all ties together in my mind: Harry Potter, the National Institutes of Health, the Purpose of Life and even Thanksgiving. Our purpose on this earth is to survive and to gain knowledge. Harry Potter and NIH help us to survive. The people who work at NIH and other places like it, help us grow our understanding of life and the universe. Thanksgiving is a time to be grateful for our human survival and for the growth on human understanding. I give thanks that I am alive in such an exciting time. Of course, there are many terrible problems in the world and in this church we often try to do something about them. But there are also enormous advances in the growth of human knowledge, and I give thanks to be alive at this time in human history. This Thursday I invite you to share laughter with family and friends. Enjoy your meal and enjoy whatever entertainment fits your personal tastes. Give thanks for the harvest of food and the love and friendship of others. And in a quiet moment, may each of us give thanks not only that we have survived another year, but that we are lucky to be alive in such an exciting time as we explore the universe and life around us. Happy Thanksgiving! |
Cedar Lane Unitarian Universalist
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