Voeikov V.L. Targeted production of ROS by living cells

We met with Doctor of Biological Sciences, Professor of Moscow State University Vladimir Leonidovich Voeikov to talk about water, which remains a riddle of riddles for scientists even in the 21st century. True, the least was said about water.

- Vladimir Leonidovich, what kind of phenomenon is this - water?

First of all, it must be said that the word "water" usually means completely different phenomena. For example, there is fresh water, salt water, sea water, physicists are now carried away by computer simulations of water. Usually people characterize water by assuming that it is H 2 O plus something else. I am interested in water, which is related to life, since everything that we call life is water in the first place.

Water is a complex system, more precisely, a huge collection of systems that pass from one state to another. It is even better to say: not a system, but an organization. Because the system is something static, and the organization is dynamic, it develops. Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky meant by organization something that, on the one hand, is conservative, and, on the other hand, is changeable. Moreover, these changes do not occur randomly, but purposefully.

The manifestations of water are diverse. For example, there are cases when water burned the radar: the radar beam, reflected from the cloud and returning, burned the receiving device. Consequently, an incomparably large amount of energy returned from the cloud! Modern science cannot explain this. A cloud is particles of water. In liquid water, there is always some part that forms coherent domains, that is, regions in which water molecules oscillate coherently and behave like a laser body. The radar beam, hitting the cloud, makes the water in it non-equilibrium, and this excess energy is either given back by the cloud to the radar and burns it, or dissipates.

- And why did nature create such non-equilibrium water?

The question "why?" goes beyond science.

- It turns out that we know very little about water?

One more example. We know that mountain rivers are always cold: even if it is hot in the valley through which the river flows, the water still remains cold. For what? This is usually explained by the fact that there are glaciers in the mountains, there are springs along the way, and in general it moves. But there may be another explanation. What do we mean by "cold", "warm", "hot"? temperature. And where does the temperature that we measure with a thermometer come from? The molecules of the medium move, collide with each other, and energy is released, which is what we measure with a thermometer. Now let's see how fast the molecules move in one direction and what the thermometer will show if we try to measure the temperature of the flow. Molecules begin to move at similar speeds and “suck out” energy from the environment. It turns out that the temperature of the mountain stream is extremely high, and at the same time it is icy! Paradox! Temperature - and temperature ... A fast river cools down, although it must heat up due to friction ... That is, the water is cold, because the molecules stop knocking against each other! And the temperature of the directional flow is another. This explains the misunderstanding of the processes occurring in water. Water is inherently non-equilibrium, therefore, it can naturally produce work. But in order for everything that is not in equilibrium to be able to produce work, conditions must be created. And an organization can create conditions.

- There are ideal forms, such as Platonic solids. How is water organized?

The ideal bodies that Plato spoke of are unattainable in nature. These are abstract constructions, ideas. If such bodies are considered in nature, then they will begin to interact, knock against each other and cease to be ideal.

- But they seek to restore their forms?

They strive to strive, but when something strives to restore its form, this is already a dynamic phenomenon. And this is not Plato, but Aristotle. Aristotle has this desire and has a causa finalis - the ultimate goal, which has been thrown out of modern science.

It all started with the fact that scientists began to describe real phenomena and reduced everything to the study of cause-and-effect relationships. And now a science is called normal, in which a paradigm has been established, based on the idea that there is a causal relationship and there is no desire.

- But not everyone thinks so, perhaps there are other approaches?

Life is impossible without striving, and it is quite difficult to deny the existence of life, because wherever you look, you observe life itself in one way or another. True, I immediately want to dry the flower, make a stuffed animal out of a gopher ... And, of course, the most wonderful of all sciences is paleontology, because I put the skeleton in the museum, covered it with varnish, and it stands and will not collapse. And biology should deal with life and the most remarkable phenomenon of life - development. Development from simple to complex, from incoherent to connected, from monotonous to diverse. And all this happens spontaneously.

- And the goal?

And the purpose of life is to save life. The goal is to add life. Because the more life, the harder it is to destroy. In 1935, Erwin Bauer published Theoretical Biology, in which he formulated three basic principles of life. Bauer's first principle sounds like this: all living and only living systems are never in equilibrium. And they use all their excess energy in order not to slip into balance.

- What then is the role of science, scientist?

I'll tell you what the purpose of science is. Academician Berg, a Russian geographer, geologist, zoologist, introduced the term "nomogenesis" (that is, development according to laws) in opposition to Darwinism. According to Darwin, there was no development, since the word "development" means unfolding according to a plan, unfolding. The same with evolution, which, in fact, is purposeful development.

The scientist tells how the world works and how a person works. The study of the world interests us, by and large, from an egoistic point of view: we want to understand our place in this world. Since a living person studies the world, he has a question about the purpose of existence. As soon as the question of the purpose of existence disappears, that's all ...

- What all"?

Life ends. Indifference, man does not care. Goals are different, and they stimulate life. As soon as a person loses his purpose in life, he ceases to exist. Darwin never used the word "evolution". He was interested in the origin of diversity. Diversity is not the equivalent of evolution. You can build different buildings from the same bricks, but this will not be evolution ...

- It seems to me that today this is not the most popular point of view.

I agree. Why is this approach unpopular? Science does not raise questions of morality and ethics. What is morality and morality in the laws of gravity, the laws of gravitation? But the correct occupation of science and the elucidation of the laws of the universe surprisingly leads to the substantiation of the deep questions of morality and morality. Why do morality exist? What is the meaning of morality and ethics? What about life support? Morality and morality are necessary for our life to be preserved.

- It turns out that Nature, God - say whatever you want - is laid down so that a moral law lives in the soul of a person?

Quite right. Another thing is that it is not science that directly deals with morality and morality, but, for example, religion. But the universe can be viewed from different points of view: it can be from the point of view of the Creator, or it can be from the point of view of creation. Mikhail Vasilyevich Lomonosov spoke about this.

- Can religious knowledge be useful to scientists?

Is it possible to study astronomy or other sciences from the Bible?.. Let me give you an example. On the third day of Creation, God created the luminaries: large and small. For what? In order to separate the day from the night, so that there would be signs. When did he create flora? On the second day. Without the sun? Is it complete nonsense? But no ... About 30 years ago, the so-called black smokers were discovered at the bottom of the ocean - entire ecosystems that have never seen any sun in their lives, and there are animals with a circulatory system. And what, the Sun gave rise to these energy systems?.. Then we must assume that the Earth also warmed up due to the Sun. Only here geographers and geologists will already object. Because the Earth is warm not because the Sun warmed it. It is written in the textbooks that all the energy from the Sun is photosynthesis, glucose, CO 2 and H 2 O + the sun and so on, remember, I guess. But let's go down to the bottom of the ocean: there is no photosynthesis there, but there are animals, and they did not descend from land to a five-kilometer depth.

- Who gives them energy for life?

Water! The synthesis of CO 2 and H 2 O occurs only when there is an activation energy. And in water, which is initially non-equilibrium, this energy exists, regardless of whether there is a sun or not. And, by the way, what preceded the flora? About the first day of Creation it is written: "And the Spirit of God hovered over the waters." The translation, as I recently learned, is incorrect: "The Spirit of God moved with the waters." “Worn” does not mean “tossed about”, in its origin this word is related to the word “hen”. The Spirit of God energy-information organized water, that's what it can mean. It turns out that water is conceived as the basis of the universe.

- You want to say that all modern scientific discoveries were once known to someone?

A scientist discovers laws, but does not invent, does not invent patterns. Language is very difficult to deceive. There is a word "invention", this is when you have gained from something. And there is the word "discovery" - I open a book and make a discovery for myself.

Once this happened to me. I came across a book by the Academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the founder of modern embryology, Karl Bern, “Reflections while Observing the Development of a Chicken”, written in 1834. The book was published in 1924, with uncut pages. I brought it to the department of embryology and showed it to my colleagues - I made a discovery, discovered a thing unknown to them.

- What is this book about?

About the very final goal to which everything aspires. Bern studied the development of the chick embryo at different stages. And I discovered a paradox: the eggs are exactly the same, but the embryos are different. Where is the norm? If one embryo is the norm, then all the rest are freaks? But what is interesting - then all the chickens hatch the same. It turns out that everyone goes their own way towards a single goal, and this has nothing to do with genetics. It is quite clear that they are initially in different conditions: one egg is on the edge of the clutch, the other is inside ... They cannot be in the same conditions, this is the law of diversity. But then everything “pulls together” towards a single goal. In this case, we cannot say that the development of chick #77 is correct and chick #78 is not. In fact, science often unifies everything.

- This is one of the problems of education ...

It is difficult to avoid this: it is impossible to assign a teacher to each student. But you need to understand that sometimes we have to simplify, unify, and we do this not for the benefit of a particular person, but contrary to his individuality and in order to have time to cover as much as possible.

- Let's get back to the mysteries of water.

Another interesting experiment. We take dry soil, fill it with water and put it in front of a photomultiplier - the device captures a flash of light. This means that if water falls on parched earth, besides the fact that the soil is moistened, light is also emitted in it! You cannot see it with your eyes, but all seeds, all microorganisms receive an impulse to respiration, to further development. Again, we came to the same conclusion: water and the earth's firmament, when interacting, give the energy of shaping.

- Blimey!

Another interesting observation. It is known that carbon exists in two crystalline modifications - graphite and diamond. Graphite is a more non-equilibrium state of carbon than diamond.

In order for a diamond to appear in nature, the impact of colossal pressures is necessary, and in our body carbon has a diamond structure. Initially, carbon appears in the CO 2 compound, which does not have a diamond configuration, however, when combined with water, CO 2 and H 2 O form glucose, in which the carbon is already “diamond”. And no high pressure! This means that in a living system (living organisms are up to 90% water), carbon from “non-diamond” turns into “diamond”, and this happens only due to the organization of water!

- Therefore, the diamond structure of carbon is needed for something in a living system?

Certainly! This is high energy! But water does not need monstrous energy costs to create high pressure and temperature for such transformations, it does this at the expense of organization. The most surprising thing is that Vernadsky thought about this fact at the beginning of the 20th century. I sometimes come to the conclusion that a lot has already been done for the knowledge of water, but not everything has been explained. We need to learn how to explain.

- But there are concrete facts, experimental data, and there are a great many interpretations (sometimes polar) of these data. Where does science end and speculation begin? For example, can Masaru Emoto's experiments be trusted?

I am personally acquainted with Masaru Emoto, familiar with his experiments and books. To a large extent, he is a popularizer and a little dreamer. I see the enormous historical role of Masaru Emoto in that he drew the attention of hundreds of millions of people to water. But his experiments do not meet scientific criteria. I was sent a scientific article with the participation of Masaru Emoto for review, and I must admit that the experiment was not set up correctly. For example, the question arises: what is the statistics of crystal formation after listening to this or that music? The statistics in the article are remarkable: the experiments are almost impossible to repeat. At least repeat the way he puts them. Moreover, does the nature of the resulting crystals depend on the photographer (experimenter)? Yes, it depends: some do not succeed, while others do great. But this is some other science. And in order to objectively judge the work of Emoto, we must create a different methodology, a different language and other means of evaluation. Then it will be judged differently.

- So, we must wait for the emergence of a new science?

In fact, we already have such a science, it is ... biology. It is very different from physics. No matter how many times Galileo throws a stone from the Leaning Tower of Pisa, the probability spread of the results will be small. But if not a stone is thrown from this very tower, but a crow, then no matter how many times you throw it, where it will fly is always a big question. Ten thousand crows must be thrown to find out where they are, generally speaking, heading. This is completely different. Here we must consider an incomparably greater number of introduced factors than is usually considered in science.

- It turns out that Emoto's experiments are somewhat similar to your example with crows?

But this does not mean at all that such experiments should not be carried out. It only says that today we need to build a new science. But, building it, you need to know the old one. Let me give you an example that shows that science is never absolutely false or absolutely true. Once upon a time there was a model of a flat earth. Today you can laugh at such ideas of ancient scientists. But excuse me, but what model do we use when we mark out our summer cottage? Copernican? No, we need a flat earth model! Nothing else is needed to solve this problem, we are simply engaged in land management. But when it comes to launching a satellite into low Earth orbit, this is a different matter. But the Copernican system is also imperfect. Does it explain the structure of the universe? Not! To clarify this issue, we need to build a new science, but we also need the old science - so that there is something to start from.

- So, scientists will never remain without tricky questions and unsolvable problems.

Certainly! Here's how to explain why birds fly over Everest, at an altitude of 11,000 meters? And from the point of view of physiology, and from the point of view of bioenergy, this is impossible! What are they breathing in? But they fly, and they need something there! And here it is required, I would say, to subdue pride, to admit that we - ah! - there's a lot we don't know yet. But as soon as it comes to water, everything that we already know about it can mislead us, at least today. We think too much about water today. Water is our progenitor, the matrix of life, on the other hand, the global flood is also water, but it washed everything off the face of the earth. And because of our ignorance or a distorted idea of ​​water, we can inadvertently do harm by engaging in all sorts of conspiracies, slander, and so on. If we consider that water is the progenitor of life and life itself, then this life must be treated with great respect. If any life is treated with disrespect, the consequences will not be difficult to guess. So we admit that we still don't know much, much.

Questions were asked by Elena Belega, Candidate of Physical and Mathematical Sciences.

Vladimir Leonidovich Voeikov (b. 1946), a biophysicist with chemical thinking, unexpectedly came to the conclusion that Oparin's approach contains much more value than was thought in the last half century. Of course, we are not talking about the “principle of the Heffalump” (p. 7-2*), but about the fact that, as it turns out, many reactions of biopoiesis could indeed take place in the “primary broth”. First of all, these could be the reactions of polycondensation (polymerization with the expenditure of energy and the release of water), the source of energy for which is the mechanical movement of water. When it moves through ultrafine pores, it dissociates, and hydroxyls form hydrogen peroxide in unexpectedly large (over 1%) concentrations; it serves as an oxidizing agent. Part of the peroxide decomposes into O2 and H2.
For these reactions to be irreversible, a runoff of products is required. During polycondensation, it is achieved by changing the environmental conditions; and when peroxide decomposes, O2 and H2 go into the atmosphere, where O2 remains at the bottom and serves as the main oxidizing agent (Voeikov V.L. Reactive oxygen species, water, photon, and life // Rivista di Biology / Biology Forum 94, 2001).
Polycondensation is one of the forms of primary self-organization, the possible mechanisms of which Voeikov considered in his doctoral dissertation (Biofaq Moscow State University, 2003).
However, the problems of biopoiesis as a whole, of course, are not solved by this: we still need to understand how and why polymers can be assembled into what is needed for life. Leningrad physiologists D.N. Nasonov (a student of Ukhtomsky) and A.S. Troshin (a student of Nasonov), and soon Gilbert Ling (arrived in the USA from China), developed the concept of a cell in the middle of the 20th century, largely about
contrary to conventional wisdom. The main thing for us in it is that the cell is not a solution held by its shell, but a jelly-like structure (gel), the activity of which determines the work of the cell.
At present, this theory6^ is very advanced and provides insight into many questions of cytology. The basis of the operation of all cellular mechanisms (transport of ions across the cell boundary, cell division, chromosome segregation, etc.) is recognized as a local phase transition.
If we admit that the cell cavity is not a solution, but a gel, then the whole problematic of biopoiesis changes: instead of idle thoughts about how the first set with the qualities necessary for this model of biopoiesis could have formed from the molecules of the “broth”, a rather real task is posed - to understand how the gel complex necessary for the birth of life was arranged.
It should not be thought of as a cell and it is better to call it an eobiont (this term was suggested in 1953 by N. Piri).
The first difficulty of biopoiesis, which disappears in the concept of a gel: the required concentrations of substances and their ions are set not by the shell of the eobiont, but by its very structure. No "pumps" are needed to start life.
The second difficulty - how the first proteins and nucleic acids formed into the necessary helical structures - disappears when the fact is clarified that the spirals are set by the quasi-crystalline structure of water.
The main thing is that water shows the very activity on which all living things are based. It manifests itself in two completely different forms at once: firstly, the structure of water determines the spatial structure of macromolecules and organizes their interaction, and secondly, water serves as a source and carrier of reactive oxygen species (ROS) - this is the general designation for particles containing oxygen with unpaired electron (hydroxyl, hydrogen peroxide, ozone, C2, etc.).
The quenching of ROS, achieved by pairing two unpaired electrons when two free radicals are combined, is, according to Voeikov, the main and historically the first source of life energy (ATP appeared later - see paragraphs 7-7 **). ROS appear all the time and immediately disappear - either they are used in the metabolic reaction, or, if there is no such need at the moment in this place, they are simply extinguished; moreover, there are special mechanisms for quenching in the cells of all organisms.
This process of the birth and death of ROS reminds me of fluctuations in the quantum vacuum (Voeikov agreed with this analogy).
61 This is how the American physical chemist Gerald Pollack calls his construction (Pollack G.H. Cells, gels and engines of life; a new, unified approach to cell function. Seattle (Washington), 2001; a Russian edition under the editorship of V.L. Voeikov is being prepared). In fact, we are talking about one aspect of the future theory: an abstract cell is considered; cell diversity (eg, ways of dividing) is ignored, and it is not clear how to include it in this concept. The role of the membrane and the early evolution of the cell are oversimplified.

The main oxidizable biochemistry substrate is highly structured water, the oxidation product is weakly structured water, and the energy source is ROS quenching. The act of structuring water is an act of energy accumulation, the act of its destructurization releases energy for a biochemical reaction. It can be said that it was the inclusion of this process in the reactions of the geochemical cycle, which led to the complication of substances, that marked the transition of chemical activity into biochemical one. For more details, see: [Voeikov, 2005]. If we recall that the oxidation of substrates for the purpose of metabolism is called respiration, then Voeikov’s thesis

“Life is the breath of water” is quite acceptable. Of course, this is not a definition of life, but an indication of the first and main bioenergetic process, as well as the main direction in the search for a solution to the mystery of the birth of life.
To begin with, a coacervate is a tiny portion of an aqueous gel, but the gel can also fill a large structure (for example, a puddle). If we add that ROS abound above water, in water, and in gel, then, as we shall see, the problem of the initial stages of biopoiesis is greatly simplified.

Bratus B.S.:We are present at the next meeting of the general psychological seminar, but it is unusual, because this is a joint seminar with institutions [ joint with the seminar of the Institute of Synergistic Anthropology under the guidance of S.S. Khoruzhy and O.I. Genisaretsky and the Laboratory of Neurophysiological Foundations of the Psyche of the Institute of Psychology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, headed by Yu.I. Alexandrov], which are headed by two remarkable scientists. This is Professor Sergei Sergeevich Khoruzhy - philosopher, mathematician, theologian, and Professor Yuri Iosifovich Alexandrov - psychologist, psychophysiologist, thinker. Today we have an important task: for the first time in the seminar we turn to global biological problems in the broadest sense of the word - to biology as a doctrine of life. And our speaker is Vladimir Leonidovich Voeikov, a wonderful professor at the Faculty of Biology at Moscow University. I am pleased to give him the floor.

Voeikov V.L.:Thank you very much, Boris Sergeevich. Before I start, I want to congratulate all the ladies here on March 8th, who look beautiful, and I hope that today I will not upset them too much. And I also want to express my surprise and gratitude to the men present here, who broke away from preparing for the holiday and decided to listen to me. This is the first note.

The second remark that I would like to make is a complaint - a complaint against Boris Sergeevich [Bratus]. The fact is that the name "Biology of Being" was not invented by me. Boris Sergeevich called me a month and a half ago and said that I had to speak at a seminar on the topic: "The Biology of Being." At first I was dumbfounded, because, by and large, I don’t consider myself a philosopher, although I philosophize a little, like all other normal people, but philosophical concepts are somehow far from me. But when I thought about this topic and about those not very narrow biological problems that I deal with, it seemed to me that you can say something on this topic if you first look in dictionaries what is meant by the word "being", what it enters. I had a general idea, and therefore I decided that I needed to write an essay on the topic given by Boris Sergeevich.

I started from a well-defined concept of “being”, of course, many of those present will not agree with it and will give some definition of their own, but I chose one that is closer to me as a naturalist, as a natural scientist: “Being is a reality that exists objectively regardless of the consciousness, will and emotions of a person. And the attributes of being (named in the source that I used), according to materialistic philosophy, are time, space, energy, information and matter. I am a biologist, and the first question that arose for me was: where is the actual subject of my interest? Does this item belong to the attributes of being? Or does it arise in some way from the totality of all entities? In other words, is life an attribute of being? Or is life something that going on? And indeed, as you know since high school, the issue of the problem is constantly being discussed in the most active way. origin of life. This means that initially there is no life as such, but it somehow going on. But I think the question is wrong.

I personally believe that life is, perhaps, even the very first attribute of being. Life as a concept is in the same row as time, space, energy, information and matter. It's in this row. Life as an entity. But, we can speak about all these entities only by how they manifest themselves, that is, how life is “given to us in sensations,” as philosophers say, by how we feel it. And we, biologists, study this life according to its manifestations, only studying what in the broadest sense of the word can be called "living systems": from the cell to the biosphere. There are people with an even broader philosophical view, who say that the cosmos is "alive" and so on, but this is no longer the subject of a biologist's research.

If you are arguing about going on whether life or life given from the very beginning, like all the other attributes of being, then this is already a matter of worldview. That is, it is impossible to prove or disprove it. One can argue about whether energy is an attribute of being or whether it came from something else. Or is space an attribute of being, or did it come from something? You can argue on this topic, philosophize for a long time, but, one way or another, any scientific research is based on some prerequisites.

Now, my basic premise, at least the one on which I base my study of life in all its manifestations, is that not life happened, a living systems occur that we are studying. What are living systems? These are certain entities that are, as we say, in " alive". If you look at what is living state”, then we will also not find a clear definition in the biological literature, even at a fairly high level. But the living state, as a rule, is determined by its manifestations. These are reproduction, metabolism, reactivity, etc. It is possible to enumerate all the manifestations of the “living state” and further study them independently of each other, which is what the Faculty of Biology of Moscow State University is doing, which today already has 30 departments, and each department has 3-5 laboratories. And each is engaged in its specific "manifestation", up to the "molecular" - a single molecule. Recently, I also had to think about the question: is the “living state” an active or a passive state? You say that this is a strange question, because the living is active, and the dead, when it dies, becomes passive. This would seem to be self-evident. But from the logic of the materialistic worldview it follows (as I will now show) that living systems are passive objects, and we, biologists, do not study active, but study passive systems. At the same time, I am convinced that living systems (and I will try to prove this today) are active, interacting, purposefully developing entities according to objective laws. That is, by and large, they are subjects, not objects. Why is this opposition important to me: are living systems active or are they passive?

Let's look at the difference between a living system and inert matter. In order for something to show some kind of activity, for example, motor activity, energy is needed for this. The sources of free energy, that is, energy that can turn into some kind of work (the simplest form of work is movement), for machines and non-living systems lie outside their structures. Non-living systems are passive transformers of free energy into work. On the diagram [ on the screen] on the left is a model - one of those models on which the non-equilibrium thermodynamics of the Nobel laureate Prigogine is built. These are the Benard cells.

Rice. one. Benard cells

A frying pan is taken, a thin layer of water is poured on it and heat is supplied from below, a certain heat gradient is created. The energy passes through this frying pan along the external gradient, and structures of this kind begin to form from the water. There is what is called self-organization. These structures are not fixed, they move, they somehow behave, they have some kind of behavior, but as soon as the heat source is turned off, again we see just a thin layer of water. In other words, this self-organization that we observe - as well as in many other cases of self-organization processes in nature - it is carried out due to an external source of free energy, which turns into certain forms of work.

Now let's look at what biology textbooks teach us, starting from high school. Here is the picture on the right. It can be found not only on the Internet, but also in any biology textbooks. On it, we see how the biosphere exists.

Fig.2. Energy transformations in the biosphere

It exists due to the constant influx of solar energy. The sun shines on the earth, there is a flow of this energy. This energy is free energy. It is taken up by photosynthetic plants. Plants, having absorbed this energy, transform it into chemical work for the production of organic compounds. Part of the energy dissipates, they turn it into heat. Consumers - animals feed on these organic compounds, which ensures their activity. They turn some of this energy back into heat. Then their waste consumes a wide variety of microorganisms, turning organic matter that animals do not need back into inorganic matter, and thus this cycle is spinning. In other words, the biospheric cycle drive belt, as depicted in any textbook, is external. This external flow of energy rotates all life, all ecology on earth. Without a constant influx of solar energy, biological systems, according to this concept, will quickly die.

But life, as we know very well, is omnipresent. Recently, they began to study more and more that life that is extremely active and complex - that is, these are not some kind of anaerobic microorganisms, but the most active animals - but which live where there is neither light nor oxygen, but the ambient temperature environment lies in the range from 2 to 4 degrees Celsius. Such animals live at the bottom of the ocean, up to the Mariana Trench. There are large living organisms, which, by the way, are more active, and even larger in size, than their closest relatives living on the surface. There is no sun there, and yet life flourishes. It is quite possible that it originated there (many scientists now believe so). And no sunlight is needed for this life to exist. These animals did not fall from above to the bottom of the ocean, but exist there during the entire period of which we know anything. So where do they get their energy from? Where is the energy from? I'm getting ahead of myself, but I'll explain. They live in liquid water, and water is liquid because there is a small amount of heat, just enough to keep the water liquid instead of ice. It's already energy. And these living organisms transform a small energy into an extremely intense one, with the help of which they carry out their entire life activity, no less complex than the life activity of the biota that we see here, on the surface, with our own eyes.

I must say, the idea that such an active life exists at the bottom of the oceans appeared 25-30 years ago. And that is why it has not yet reached textbooks, and not at all because biologists have overlooked it. They simply didn't know or even suspected it. Now numerous underwater expeditions are increasingly studying this amazing life that is there. You can give a lot of other examples of active life without an external engine - without such an external energy gradient that turns the entire system. And this existence of life where there is no external motor for it, in particular, testifies that life is indeed a fundamental concept. And for the realization of the principle of life, a very narrow, very limited range of conditions is needed.

I could talk for a long time on this topic, but Boris Sergeevich [ bratus] nevertheless invited me to speak at the Faculty of Psychology, and not at the Faculty of Biology or Physics or Chemistry, where I also have to speak. To psychology, I have such an attitude. Boris Sergeevich and I wrote a book in which I considered a question connected, however, not with psychology, but with the relationship between science and religion. And I began to think how it is possible to talk about the biology of being, that is, about “a reality that exists objectively, regardless of the consciousness, will and emotions of a person” - so that it would be interesting to everyone, so that it would affect, at least, the emotions of the people present here . And today it affects what everyone is talking about: the so-called "global crisis". And so, starting from the basic laws of biology, I would like to show that this global crisis is one of the manifestations of the fundamental laws in psychology. Actually, the main part of my speech will be devoted to this.

But in order to talk about what the laws of biology are and whether there are such laws at all, of course, you need to find something that was done before us. And almost everything was done before us. Let me remind you of Vernadsky's statement: "If you find something new and interesting, be sure to look for predecessors." If you do not find predecessors, then the question arises, did you invent this new and interesting? Does it exist in reality? The predecessors knew everything, and we only need to translate this into modern language and add it to our other knowledge. So, is the concept of “life” fundamental, what are living systems like? Or are living systems, according to a biology textbook, just a special case of physics and chemistry? There is physics and chemistry, and there are special cases, for example, there is geophysics, there is biology. This is about one series of concepts. So, there was such a great scientist XX century Erwin Simonovich Bauer. One could devote a whole lecture and more than one to a story about him and what he did, but there is no time for this. And so I'm just here to outline the main points that we need for the next discussion.

In 1935, the publishing house of the All-Union Institute of Experimental Medicine in Leningrad published a book by Erwin Bauer called Theoretical Biology. In it, he formulated the fundamental principles or axioms that laid the foundation for the general theory of living matter. He created a theoretical biology based on an axiomatic principle. He put forward three postulates, three axioms, three principles, as he called them, from which all manifestations of life activity could already follow, which he showed. And like any other theoretical science based on axiomatic principles, it is an independent science, and not a section of some other sciences. For example, modern and not very modern physics and chemistry are based on the laws of motion of inanimate matter.

What are Bauer's axioms? We will need them. I can't go into too much depth here, but I'll just give you a general idea. The first and main axiom, the first and main postulate, that is, a position that can be rejected if something contradicts it, but it does not follow (at the axiomatic level) from something previous - this is the principle of stable disequilibrium: “All and only living systems are never in equilibrium and are constantly doing work at the expense of their own free energy against the equilibrium required by the laws of physics and chemistry under existing external conditions” (E.S. Bauer. Theoretical biology. M-L., 1935. P.43). Here I am standing in front of you, and this is clearly a non-equilibrium situation. Obviously, lying on the sofa with your nose to the wall would be more balanced. And in order to hold on, so as not to fall, I have to continuously do some kind of work, that is, work against balance. Such a simple example. The definition of what a living system is comes down to a simple thesis: living systems are constantly working to stay alive. If they stop this activity, then they cease to be alive. That's actually all that concerns the essence of living systems. Another thing, due to what they carry out this work? Where do they get energy to constantly remain in a non-equilibrium state? These are questions that require serious consideration.

Here are pictures on the left and right of the screen, which all clearly show. You don't have to be a biologist, a physicist, or a chemist to understand that we have a living organism on the left, and a former living organism on the right. Now it is bone matter in itself.

So, in order to constantly do your work against balance and be a source of free energy all the time, you need to draw this free energy from somewhere, get it from somewhere, and, moreover, you can’t stop there. In order for living systems to continue to exist continuously in time, their growth and development are required. From the first the principle of stable disequilibrium, growth and development does not follow directly. This principle speaks about the current state of each living system. But if she only fights against the balance, then sooner or later her strength will run out, and she will become inanimate. There are many such systems, but they are no longer of interest, they are non-living systems. In order for life to be preserved in the form of living systems and, moreover, for life to develop in the form of living systems, a continuous and constant increase in their free energy is required to carry out external work.

What is meant by "outside work"? This is the work of extracting matter and energy from the environment and turning them into their non-equilibrium state. If you think about it, no one throws dumplings in our mouths. It is only in Gogol that such a situation is described. In order to extract something from the environment, it is necessary to work hard, to carry out external work. If external work is carried out without an additional bonus, then again, the living system will turn into a non-living system. Therefore, the mere fact of the existence of living systems, at least in that region of the cosmos, which is quite well known to us, requires the realization the principle of increasing external work, the principle of growth and development. In fact, this is the principle of evolution, and it determines the vector of movement of living systems at all levels of their existence. These are the two principles that we need. We must either accept them or reject them: what, they say, is not - if the living system does not carry out growth and development, it still remains alive; if it stopped working against balance, it will still remain alive. Someone can express such a point of view, well - free will. I proceed from the fact that without these principles there is no living organization.

This means that these are the basic biological laws, I give a course of lectures on this topic. Like Sergei Sergeevich [ Horuzhy] tried last time to set out a course of lectures in 15 minutes, anticipating the main material, so I have to follow approximately the same path. And now I am moving from the idea of ​​the fundamental biological laws laid down by Erwin Bauer to the main question: does the global crisis that all of today's humanity has entered have any biological prerequisites? Does this global crisis have anything to do with the laws of life that manifest themselves in living systems? I think no one doubts that man and humanity as such is also a "living system". At least, this is a system that meets both the first and second Bauer's principles: that is, it is non-equilibrium and constantly does work against equilibrium; and this is a system (both man and humanity) that grows and develops - this cannot be denied.

We have now entered a state that everyone calls a "global crisis". Well, talking about the global crisis basically boils down to discussing financial, economic, social problems that will arise sooner or later. So I pulled a picture from the Internet that clearly shows what is happening - not just with cars (factories are closing or not closing), but with something without which it is generally difficult for us to exist, that is, with food. Oil prices… sorry, misspoke, rice prices. Oil prices, I think, should be of little interest to us, but rice and grain should be of much greater interest. And what happened to world prices for rice and grain can be seen from this graph [ on the screen]. From 2000 to 2006, prices hover somewhere within the stationary level, and suddenly, since 2008, they have skyrocketed 5-6 times. And this, of course, is a manifestation of the most serious global crisis affecting what a person lives on. I just gave one of the examples to remind you of what is meant today by a global crisis in world literature.

Where did the global crisis come from? Where did he come from? Today you can read a lot of accusations against those fifths, tenths, specific individuals and individual states that allegedly provoked the global crisis. In fact, the global crisis was clearly predicted as early as 1960. Then in the journal "Science" was published an article by Heinz von Foerster, one of the founders of second-order cybernetics, under such a screaming title "Judgment Day: Friday, November 13, 2026 after the birth of Christ" ( Foerster, H. von, P. Mora, and L. Amiot. 1960. Doomsday: Friday, November 13, A.D. 2026. At this date human population will approach infinity if it grows as it has grown in the last two millennia. Science 132: 1291–1295). In this article, Heinz von Foerster analyzed the growth curve of mankind on earth and came to the conclusion that this curve does not grow according to an exponential law, as everyone thought, based on the a priori theory of Malthus (that reproduction - that of a person, that bacteria - goes to geometric progression), but according to a law called "hyperbolic". What does "hyperbolic law" mean? And this means that if something increases according to the hyperbolic law, then at some point in time it something will become infinite in number. And Foerster calculated this moment in time when humanity should become infinite in number, it turned out: Friday, November 13, 2026. It turns out that humanity will die not from hunger, since this moment comes very quickly, but from a crush. This is, of course, someone's joke.

What is the "hyperbolic law" in relation to the size of mankind? Here are data on the number of people on earth, and we are talking about humanity as an integral system, excluding migration, an increase in numbers in one place, a decrease in another, and so on.

Rice. 3. Correlation between empirical estimates of world population dynamics (in millions of people, 1000 - 1970) and the curve generated by the H. von Förster equation

The dots show how the increase in the number of people from the birth of Christ until the year 2000 is going on. And, pay attention, this is the same - that is, hyperbolic - curve that tends to infinity. Moreover, the critical point is very close to us - in 2026. There is not long to wait. But this is absurd! Absurd, if only because it cannot be, because it can never be. A mathematical function can go into a singularity, but physically, no process ever ends with infinity. Something must change drastically - this is called "the system goes into sharpening mode" - in order for the physical system, perhaps having changed, but to remain. But the same applies to the living system, which is humanity: this living system must change very much. Von Förster writes that near a critical value, the system as a whole becomes extremely unstable, and the presence of a singularity is an alarm signal that the structure of the system will be broken. This hyperbolic law is especially clearly visible if you draw a graph in reciprocal values. On the vertical axis, mark the reciprocal of the number of people, and on the horizontal axis, years. And then the number of people grows and grows, and the reciprocal falls and falls. Accordingly, in the year 2025-2026 the number of people should become infinite, [ and the reciprocal will tend to "0"].

Von Foerster published this article in 1960, and it caused a huge surge of interest in this topic in 1961-62. They began to accuse him of not respecting comrade Malthus, that all these figures were drawn from nowhere, although he took 24 independent sources to draw this number, and clearly showed that these sources are independent. But, one way or another, the whole thing was forgotten until the beginning of the 90s, until the well-known remarkable physicist Sergei Petrovich Kapitsa paid attention to it. His attention was drawn to the work of von Foerster, and he began to explore the problem of human growth in more depth. Kapitsa also drew the same curve. It is given in his book published in 1999 (S.P. Kapitsa. How many people lived, live and will live on earth. Essays on the theory of human growth. M., 1999), although a number of his articles were published earlier. This is the same curve as Förster's, only with a certain kind of kinks.

Rice. 4. 1 - world population, 2 - aggravated regime, 3 - demographic transition, 4 - population stabilization, 5 - ancient world, 6 - middle ages, 7 - modern and 8 - recent history, the arrow indicates the period of the plague - "Black Death" , circle - present time, double-sided arrow - scatter of estimates of the world population during R.Kh. Population limit N oo=12-13 billion

(Source: S.P. Kapitsa. How many people lived, lives and will live on earth. Essays on the theory of human growth. M., 1999.)

It's not just a "smooth" curve. What is she talking about? There was a plague pandemic in Europe, when more than a third or almost half of the population died out. And the numbers decreased, and then she took it and returned to the same curve. If we take the 20th century, then according to the demographic estimates of Kapitsa, about 300-400 million people died in and around the two world wars - this is another bend, and nevertheless, the curve has again returned to the trajectory along which it moved before. And now, according to Sergey Petrovich Kapitsa, 2025–2026 is the very year when the denominator of this simple equation turns to zero, and then the human population should become infinite, but this is meaningless, and therefore some event must occur. It's called demographic transition- this is the period in which we now live, and for several decades, not noticing it very well.

What's happened demographic transition? This is braking. This is the transition of a function from one law to another. The law of hyperbolic growth has ceased to operate. And, according to Kapitsa, this happened in 1964. This year, the relative population growth reached a maximum, and then began to decrease. And on the border of the last decade of the twentieth century and the first decade XI century and the absolute population growth also began to decrease. In the 1990s, 874 million people were born on earth, and in the 2000s, 874 million people will also be born. That is, the population will also grow, but the rate of its growth will be completely different from what it was not only for the last two thousand years, but, according to updated data, in general since the emergence of mankind. At that time, growth rates were generally very slow. Actually, this fact was noticed, because the curve turned into aggravated mode. And now they are paying attention.

This means that the demographic transition is a slowdown in absolute population growth, which then begins to develop into a phenomenon called depopulation. I think we who live in Russia have heard a lot about depopulation, because it is constantly reported that every year the population of the Russian Federation decreases by 700,000, by 1,000,000 people, etc. - what a nightmare! Generally speaking, there is nothing good in this, since in Russia such an intense depopulation occurs for a reason related to the short life expectancy of people. But in fact, depopulation is not only our feature. It's just that we pay a lot of attention to ourselves, but we don't see what our neighbors are doing in terms of depopulation. To show this, I will give some graphs.

Fig.5. The total population growth of the CIS countries,
1950-2050, 2008 average recalculation, % per annum
Source: Demoscope.ru website http://demoscope.ru/weekly/2009/0381/barom05.php

This is the population since 1950 of the union republics of the former Soviet Union. And here, the blue curve is the population of the Russian Federation. The bend here occurred in 1992, it began to decrease. Here, if I am not mistaken, is Kazakhstan, and here is Georgia. True, there was a war there, there was a very sharp decline, but then the curve rose, and then it again began and continues to decline. In all republics, regardless of their size, economic potential, regardless of anything, their depopulation is going on. Today, the number continues to grow only in three former republics - in Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan.

Replica: It is also growing in Kazakhstan.

Voeikov V.L.: No, there is also depopulation. I took the data from the site Demoskop.ru, this is the latest data that is given.

Replica: There was a depopulation when the Russians left, and according to new data, the population is growing there.

Voeikov V.L.: Maybe, but let's not really argue about this, because we are talking about depopulation as a explicit manifestation of the phenomenon of inhibition of growth, that is, this is the next step, the next manifestation. So, if we take the European continent or the USA, then depopulation has not yet been observed there for one simple reason. Although there the rate of reproduction of people is significantly lower than what is required for simple reproduction (for example, in Spain it is lower than in our country: we have 1.1 there, we have 1.3 children per family), but due to the very long life expectancy there is some kind of stasis. And the ratio of growth and mortality of the population just depends on the ratio of life expectancy and the rate of reproduction. And now the main role is played by life expectancy. Sooner or later, the average life expectancy will reach its limit, and then depopulation will begin everywhere.

These are demographic problems, and they follow from the law of human growth. Sergei Petrovich Kapitsa formulated the demographic imperative. Why does humanity grow according to such a law? According to his demographic imperative, the leading variable of the demographic law is the number of people. And why does it grow according to the hyperbolic law? Because people interact informationally with each other, and this interaction leads to a different, and not to geometric or exponential growth. Only weakly connected systems grow exponentially, the “explosion” usually proceeds exponentially, the reproduction of bacteria in a dilute medium proceeds exponentially, in geometric progression. But people, in the view of Sergei Petrovich Kapitsa, interact with each other, and due to this information exchange, their number grows not exponentially, but depending on the square of the number of people. There were two people, and the number increases by 4 times. There were four people, their number increased 16 times, it became 16, the number increased 16 2 times, and so on.

But not all researchers involved in this demographic problem agreed with Kapitsa that information is the spring of population dynamics and stabilization. If you follow this law, then humanity was constantly growing even when there were a million people on earth, and 10 million, and 100 million people, but then the question arises, what kind of information transfer channel, interaction channel? The bottom line is that we are talking about a holistic developing system. And in such a system, each part of it must know about the state of the whole and behave in accordance with the state of the whole. So she should be informed about it. But how? It's not very clear. And relatively recently, a young employee of the Institute of Applied Mathematics. Keldysh Andrey Viktorovich Podlazov put forward a more rational explanation for both the geometric growth in numbers and the demographic transition, that is, the deceleration of this growth. Podlazov formulated "technological imperative". What is it connected with? The growth of the human population becomes hyperbolic due to the fact that the life expectancy of people increases. Statistically, if life expectancy increases even by a small amount, then there is a significant increase in population. And it increases due to what Podlazov called "life-saving technologies." He writes: “The quadratic dependence of the population growth rate on its size is due to the fact that those who would die if there were no effective mutual assistance between its members remain alive.” saving an average of at least one person per generation" ( Podlazov A.V. Theoretical demography as the basis of mathematical history. M., 2000). This means that the more life-saving technologies develop, the more non-linear, the more acute the increase in the number of people on earth.

The first life-saving technology was the mastery of fire. It was the first or at least one of the first such technologies. When man mastered fire, fewer people died for various reasons. They began to live longer, and they have more time to invent new life-saving technologies. So one thing clings to the other. These technologies can appear in different places independently of each other and spread through the population because they are life-saving. According to Podlazov: "The limit of the growth of the human population, as well as the development of life-saving technologies, is determined solely by the ratio of the characteristic biological times of a person and the size of the population of his ancestors." In other words, what should cause this change? And due to the fact that it is not possible to ensure the average life expectancy of people above 84 years, at least for today. 84 years is in Japan, but they are unlikely to provide more there. But even if they reach both 90 and 100 years, it will still reach some limit sooner or later. Humanity will grow to infinity only if people begin to live statistically indefinitely. But this is the same absurdity as the infinite number of people.

All these technologies and in general all life activity (in fact, I started with this) requires energy. In order for the number of people to increase in this way, it is necessary (and for the existence of life-saving technologies too) the presence of a sufficient amount of energy.

And so, in 1991, John Holdren's work "Population and the Energy Problem" appeared. John Holdren - American energy and environmental scientist, Obama [ President of the U.S.A] has now appointed him as his adviser. So, John Holdren in this work discovered another very interesting law. It is difficult to derive this law directly from something in advance. Holdren discovered the following. It turns out that the amount of energy that humanity owns and can use to carry out this or that work (that is, free energy) - it grew from 1850 to 1990. And it grew like this: the amount of this energy increased in proportion to the square of the number of people. Namely: proportionally not to the number of people, but to the square of the number of people. In other words, if we compare 1850 and 1990, the population has grown 4.3 times, and the amount of energy that mankind has mastered has grown 17 times. That is, the amount of energy per person (it is clear that the amount of energy consumed is distributed unevenly over the earth, but we are considering purely statistical data) has increased in proportion to the square of the number of people. And, by the way, if this law is respected, then the demographic transition and further depopulation will accordingly affect the amount of energy that humanity owns. By the way, where does all this noise and uproar about energy come from in our time? Not because there is not enough of it, but because per capita growth has become slower than before, and we have felt this - not even a deficit, but, as it were, an approaching deficit.

Where does all this energy come from? And it is taken from the fact that a person develops. That in 1700 there was no oil, gas? Were. Did people use them? Almost never used. What happened in 1850? This is the middle of the industrial revolution, when people first invented heat engines, then electricity appeared, then they began to use oil, gas, atomic energy and so on. Where does all this come from? All this is. But a person turns bound energy, which is more than enough, into free energy for himself. He does it all himself. And this absolutely contradicts the postulates of Darwin's theory of evolution. I do not mean neo-Darwinism, which is not a theory at all, but the Darwinian theory of evolution, according to which humanity reproduces exponentially, according to Malthus, in conditions of scarcity of resources. In fact, the curves I have cited show that there is no shortage of resources in principle. When necessary, we begin to find these very resources, extract energy and turn them into what we need to continue our life.

It's still an introduction. So far, there is no biology here. There is a demographic here that physicists have taken up. By the way, many demographers strongly pecked at these physicists for the fact that they "got into the wrong sleigh." But in fact, these physicists did wonderful things, although, as a biologist, not all of their statements are close to me, let's say. For example, Iosif Samuilovich Shklovsky in his famous and wonderful book “The Universe. A life. Mind" back in 1980 remembered Holdren's work and published all this data. He firmly believed in the Malthusian laws and wrote that the current life hyperbolic law of the increase in the population of the entire globe is due not so much to biological as to social factors. It has nothing to do with biology. Kapitsa writes: "... due to the peculiarities of the development of man and mankind, his special path, one should not transfer the examples of the rest of the animal world and biocenoses to the case of a person whose development is subject to completely different physical, biological and social laws." ( P.S. Kapitsa. Cit. op. p.24) Podlazov also approaches the fundamental difference between animals and humans: “Animals can only use those schemes of collective behavior that are genetically embedded in them, at the level of instincts, while people are able to develop new ways of joint actions as their numbers grow” ( Podlazov A.V. Cit. op.). Etc.

Generally speaking, I believe that the universe is one, and nothing that was before disappears today, but more and more floors are simply built on. You just need to see how the features of a person appeared from what preceded him. And again I return to the Bauer principle - the principle of increasing external work, growth and development, the principle of evolution. Humanity, and each person individually (otherwise he would not have developed), corresponds to this principle. And this principle determines the vector of movement of living systems at all levels of their existence. So far, we have been talking about humanity, about people, about the geometric progression of their growth and development, which is characteristic of them due to social and other reasons. But look, here is the growth curve of animal energy, if it is superimposed on the time of the first fixation of these animals in the fossil record.

Fig.6. The change energy metabolism of living organisms in the course of biological evolution and at the initial stage of human civilization:
1 - coelenterates, 2 - crustaceans, 3 - mollusks, 4 - fish, 5 - amphibians,
6 - insects, 7 - reptiles, 8 - mammals, 9 - non-passerine birds,
10 - passerine birds, 11 - primitive man, 12 - a man using fire.

Such work was carried out by Alexander Ilyich Zotin, a remarkable biodemographer, bioenergy, unfortunately, he died some time ago. See what happens. If we look at the Phanerozoic period, we get the following growth curve of energy progress. That is, if we look at the change in energy characteristics that are characteristic of representatives of a particular class of living organisms, we will see that growth clearly follows a hyperbolic law. This means that energy progress follows the hyperbolic law. But where is there, in the evolutionary process, human sociology? By the way, this evolutionary process follows a special law - it is nomogenesis or orthogenesis, but not the Darwinian theory of evolution. It's just real physical data.

Recently, the joint work of the paleontologist A.V. Markov and the historian, sociologist A.V. Korotaev “The dynamics of the diversity of Phanerozoic marine animals corresponds to the hyperbolic growth model” ( Journal of General Biology. 2007. No. 1. S. 1-12). And last year an article was published that speaks not only about sea animals, but also about land animals. What grows hyperbolically here? Generic diversity is growing, genera are growing. Genera are made up of species. Generally speaking, "genus", as many biologists believe, is some kind of fiction, a product of biological systematics. The genus cannot be held in the hands and the view too. You can only hold representatives of certain species in your hands. But it turns out that both the genera, which consist of species, and the species formed by individuals, that is, material substances, also increase in their number exactly according to the hyperbolic law, and this is within 600 million years. Of course, there are some fluctuations here. But, by the way, fluctuations are also visible on the human growth curve, but this does not mean that the basic law is not respected, it just has fluctuations.

Another example is completely "from another opera." In the previous article, we talked about the evolutionary process according to the hyberpobolic law of growth, which lasts for hundreds of millions of years. Korotaev and Markov find an explanation for this, and in particular, it is very similar to the explanation of this law for humanity, namely: the life expectancy of younger births significantly exceeds the life expectancy of earlier births, and in connection with this, a hyperbolic dependence is obtained. I rummaged through the literature, and it turned out that so far, unfortunately, biologists, blinded by the geometric progression of growth according to Malthus, everywhere and everywhere carry out fitting their dependencies, as a rule, to exponents. But it turned out that there are scientists who find hyperbolas in fairly short-term processes, such as in this [ above]. If, God forbid, a person has an oncological disease and was treated with chemotherapy or radiotherapy, then with such treatment, his entire immune system is knocked out at the same time. This system needs to be restored. And they restore the immune system by planting a person with his own (or a close relative) stem cells or cells of a close relative, which stimulate his bone marrow and multiply themselves. Thus, the immune system is created almost from scratch, cell growth begins anew. What is the law of growth of these white cells planted in a person? Here is a 2002 paper on the subject. After these cells were transplanted, there was no growth at all for 7 days. Then comes the burst of growth. This is in double logarithmic coordinates the exact correspondence of the hyperbolic curve. Here, growth happens in the system, and it happens in this way. By this example, I want to say that the hyperbolic law of growth is not the prerogative of man alone. It is connected with some deeper biological reasons for the existence of this form of growth.

Why have biologists begun to pay attention to this fact recently? Because there is a well-known example of growth and development - embryonic. We all know very well that embryonic growth and development must follow some kind of law, otherwise there will simply be no procreation. And it turned out that the embryo grows and develops not according to a hyperbolic, although also according to a non-linear law. And it's not an exponent, but another function. It's called a "power function". If it is put in reciprocal logarithmic coordinates, then, as in the case of the hyperbolic law, it will be a straight line. But unlike the hyperbola, which goes to infinity when approaching the limit point, here, on the graph of the growth of the mass of the embryo, the power function goes to infinity only in infinite time. But we know that it never goes to infinity, because at some point in time a person is born.

The fact that the law of embryonic growth corresponds to a power function was discovered back in 1927 by our compatriot, the great evolutionist Ivan Ivanovich Schmalhausen. But the power function also requires its own explanation. Why does an embryo grow according to a power function? And this happens, in particular, also because when the embryo grows, the growth of biomass is carried out not only in time, but also in space: the size of the embryo increases. But the embryo is not a homogeneous system, it consists of organs, tissues, cells, and so on. And how do they grow? It turns out that with the growth of an embryo according to a power law, all its parts - organs, tissues and cells - grow in proportion to the logarithms of each other's sizes and the logarithm of the mass of the entire system, that is, they grow harmoniously. They also grow according to a similar power law. What does it mean? This means that each individual organ grows in this way and as long as other organs grow, which it knows about, and as long as the whole organism grows, which it knows about. Everything matches each other. And, in particular, this was shown by Schmalhausen in 1927: here it was about how the mass of each part changes depending on how the masses of other parts change. Even Julian S. Huxley, using such an exotic biological example as a fiddler crab, in which one claw is always incomparably larger than the other, showed that the growth of the mass of this claw depends on the growth of the body weight of the crab according to a power law, that is, it is disproportionate growth. This so-called allometric, but not isometric the law of growth, that is, not everything grows in a linear relationship with each other.

Question:Do all logarithms correlate linearly?

Voeikov V.L.:The logarithms correlate linearly, quite right. This is the law of embryonic growth. There is a lot of work on it, and there are a lot of interesting things there, but this is not hyperbolic growth. Although there is one weak point in embryology. Before this report, I had to talk to embryologists. I asked when the allometric growth of the embryo begins? The fact is that when an egg is fertilized in animals, the egg does not grow at first, it is crushed. Cleavage into 2, 4, 8, 16 or more eggs occurs, and there is no increase in mass, or at least it is claimed that it does not occur. Thus, allometric growth, which is observed in the embryos of various animals, is preceded by a certain lag phase when cell growth does not occur. But from what moment then does the countdown of the growth of the embryo begin? Embryologists begin to measure the mass of this very embryo somewhere from two grams. Those who are smarter start measuring from one and a half grams. But what was the mass of the egg? And it was 0.005 milligrams, that is, 5 micrograms. Thus, according to some data, the power-law growth in a human embryo can begin to be measured only 40 days after fertilization, and according to others, after 60 days, that is, when this mass becomes two grams. What happens during these 30-60 days when this mass increases from 2-5 micrograms to two million micrograms? Moreover, at the beginning there is no growth at all. Isn't this stage, which precedes the growth of the embryo according to the allometric or harmonic law, hyperbolic growth? There is a very high probability that this process also follows the hyperbolic law - that is, the process preceding the growth and development of the embryo, which is already quite well known.

Here [ on-screen chart] in double logarithmic coordinates, two stages are shown. The numbers say: here - 5 micrograms, on the 7th day - 100 micrograms, the 10th day is marked - this is just a kind of reference point; on day 12 - 380 micrograms, and on day 28 - already two million micrograms. There is such a rapid increase in this mass, which is very similar to the hyperbolic law. In humans, this period is longer, about a third longer than in a horse or a monkey. That is, I showed that the hyperbolic law is not something unique for humanity, as physicists claim (it’s excusable for them, they don’t know biology, especially one that needs to be rummaged through, since this is not in textbooks).

But still, a person is something special among the whole living world, a special living system. How is it different from other living systems? There is another biological law - the law of the dependence of the number of animal species on the mass of individual representatives of each species.

Rice. 7. The number of animal species depending on their mass

(Source: S.P. Kapitsa. How many people lived, lives and will live on earth. Essays on the theory of human growth. M., 1999. S.)

Here, for example, a small animal - mice, a certain species. How many mice are representatives of this species on the globe? Their number on the globe is somewhere around 10 9, that is, about a billion individuals. If we look at some animals closer to us in size - for example, a bear, a horse, and so on, then the number of representatives of these animal species will be significantly less. What, for example, is the number of chimpanzee individuals? Or gorillas? Or macaques? This will be a value of the order of 100,000 pieces of a given species (not monkeys in general, but belonging to a specific species with a corresponding specific mass). The number of a person already today exceeds by five orders of magnitude the value that he should have had as a representative of the corresponding biological species. This is a feature of a person, only he flies out of this, again hyperbolic, dependence. (Man and, of course, domestic animals, which simply cannot exist by themselves; they, in general, are man's tools, he created them).

How else is a person different from all other living systems? We return to Bauer, to his theoretical biology, which is based on a special energy. This is the energy of the living system's own internal activity. From Bauer's theory (the theory of increasing external work that ensures evolutionary growth and development) it follows that in the course of evolution, if you climb the evolutionary ladder higher and higher, then the energy of biological species increases. How can this energy be measured? Bauer introduced such a parameter, which he called the "Rubner constant". Max Rubner is a German physiologist who, at the end XIX - At the beginning of the 20th century, he first took up the problems of biological energy in animals. By the way, he also deduced the allometric law that the amount of energy that an animal consumes, divided by a unit of mass and multiplied by its lifetime, is more or less a constant value for animals. For example, for mammals, this will be one value. If you go down to a lower level, go to the marsupials, then this will be a lower value, but nevertheless approximately the same for all representatives of the marsupials. And only a person is knocked out of this ratio.

Bauer correctly calculated this Rubner constant. What is she like? This is the life expectancy of a representative of this species in years, multiplied by the intensity of oxygen consumption (in fact, respiration is the main source of energy) per unit mass. That is, how much energy a given living being transforms during its lifetime. And it turned out that in primates the Rubner constant is 2200, and in homo sapiens - 3700. In pinnipeds - 1800, in proboscis - 1100. That is, in animals this constant grows according to one law, and a person also turned out to be out of this dependence. He is energetically different. Moreover, this constant for a person is greatly underestimated, since by life expectancy here one must mean the period biologically meaningful life, that is, the period required to leave viable offspring. A person does not need to live 100 years for this, an average of 25 years is enough. You can’t take less, because then the offspring will not be viable. And a monkey needs to live much less in order to leave viable offspring. And if we now look at the constant from this point of view, then it will differ in humans by an order of magnitude compared to all other mammals. This is the physiological difference between a person and animals according to the Rubner constant, that is, according to the measurement of his energy - the energy of an individual. This is one difference that Rubner discovered back in the 1920s, and in 1935Bauer confirmed it.

There is another indicator that in humans is very different from animals. Due to what, in the end, is a person so energetic compared to all animals? Due to a certain organ that all animals have, but in humans it is very different. How is it different? The ratio of the rate of oxygen consumption by the human brain to the rate of oxygen consumption by the body, together with the brain, is 2.3 times greater than in primates, and in dolphins and everyone else. This is the reduced value, everything is reduced to the mass. What does it mean - increased human energy? In general, why do we need energy from a biological point of view? It is needed in order to accumulate so much energy during a biologically meaningful life that it would be possible to leave viable offspring, which will again accumulate the same amount of energy to leave viable offspring, and so on. And the man has an excess. As a result, a person has O more free energy than is needed for its survival as a biological species.

Where did this excess come from? This is another question. This is the problem of the origin of man. Man originated when he had this very excess. And he can begin to spend this excess not only on leaving viable offspring, but additionally on all sorts of other purposes. And in particular, another goal that a person can fulfill is to compose and invent life-saving technologies. The first such technology is the mastery of energy, which cannot be mastered by any other species living on earth. This is the energy of fire. If we calculate the Rubner constant, taking into account this human energy, then it will already grow not by an order of magnitude, but by orders of magnitude compared to all other species. This will increase his lifespan and allow him to master everything. O big and b O more energy.

Returning to the dependence curve of the growth of human free energy (depending on the number of people), I would like to draw another picture here. Free energy increases as the square of the number of people, so there is more and more energy for each person. And in 1990, there was 4.2 times more energy per capita on earth than in 1850. That is, that free energy that can be used to continue, to transform the world for itself. This means that it was 4.2 times more (compared to 1850) in 1990. However, note that, starting from 1970, this curve begins to bend.

What is the amount of energy per unit mass? This is, generally speaking, potential. There is a concept that means not just the amount of energy. Energy can be different. It can be very "smeared", or it can be "concentrated". This is the potential. For example, if 100 amps is multiplied by 1 volt, then it will be 100 watts; and if you multiply 100 volts by 1 ampere, there will also be 100 watts. But "100 volts * 1 ampere" and "1 volt * 100 amperes" are completely different energy quality. Quality energy is concentrated energy. And so, in the course of his growth and development, man not only mastered the amount of energy that can be measured in watts, but he also mastered more and more expensive energy, more and more valuable energy. He started with the energy of fire, which, from a physical point of view, is much more valuable than just the energy of ordinary heat. And he came to nuclear energy. And, God forbid, it gets to thermonuclear. In principle, we do not really need it, but these are completely different energy potentials. With the help of high-potential energy, you can get heat, and light, and anything you like. And with the help of a central heating battery, it is impossible to illuminate the room, although it will be warm enough. So, among other things, there was also a transformation of energy.

So, we see what happened at the moment of the appearance of mankind on earth. I leave out the question of origin, of how this very moment came to be. I don't know it, and I don't know who knows it. And those who argue on this topic, what is free - will, from my point of view. But we know that at the moment of the origin of man, a phase transition took place. And what does this phase transition look like from an energetic point of view?

Here [ fig.6] this energy potential possessed by this or that living system. That's 100 million years before the origin of man. The energy potential in the process of evolution grew. But it reached a person, and a phase transition took place, a new way of mastering this very energy arose. Where are we now? And we are now in the place where the potential seems to have reached its maximum. That is, the previous stage of human development was associated with the fact that the energy potential grew and grew. For what? Back to Bauer again. According to the principle of stable disequilibrium: "All and only living systems are never in equilibrium and constantly perform work due to their own free energy against the equilibrium required by the laws of physics and chemistry under existing external conditions" (E.S. Bauer. Cited Op. P.43) Free energy can be of different quality. Free energy can be with a low potential, or it can be with a high potential. The higher the potential, the more reliably and efficiently it will be spent on the implementation of external work to extract bound energy from the environment and convert it into one's own energy. Hence, according to Bauer, the growth and development of living systems is provided by the initial supply of their free energy. Here is such a function: the stock of free energy is equal to the product of live mass and its potential. What is the biomass of humanity? Of course, the crowd is creepy, everywhere and everywhere. But if each person is given one square meter, then all mankind will fit in one quarter of the Moscow region. About 80 square kilometers are required in order to fit all of humanity living on earth. It is very easy to calculate: we are now, respectively, 5 billion. If we compare the biomass of humanity with the biomass of all the rest of the biota that is on earth, it is practically nothing. But the potential is gigantic. This is the gigantic potential of this nothing is a condition for further growth and development. Using this potential, you can begin to grow according to the power law, according to which the embryo develops.

And here I express hope. My hope lies in the fact that the previous stage of the growth and development of mankind can be conditionally called preimplantation stage - as in embryology, the stage before the growth and development of the embryo began according to a power-law harmonic law. At this time, by the way, the egg increases and increases its potential. I will not go into details, due to which this happens, but in a nutshell I can say. This is due to the fact that the egg cell that is crushed and grows in this way breathes mainly due to burning. There are two processes of breathing: one of them is smoldering or mitochondrial respiration; there is a similar process burning - direct reduction of oxygen. I will not go into these details. During the early stages of development, the egg is lit figuratively speaking. We can formulate this strictly chemically, but we will not go into details. By the way, the same leukocytes that are planted in a person with a ruined immune system and which then begin to grow according to the hyperbolic law - they provide their respiration, that is, their energy, again due to burning, unlike most other cells that do this optionally. That is, if we look at the examples of hyperbolic growth that I spoke about, then there we will see approximately the same thing that we see in the history of mankind. A man became a man when he mastered "burning" and began using this method to extract resources from the external environment. But, when the embryo reaches the blastocyst stage and the formed rudiments of tissues appear in it, it ceases to be so strong. burn and begins to use its potential for further allometric growth.

I believe that we are now at the stage when humanity has finished growing hyperbolically, has accumulated an absolutely gigantic potential and must move on to development according to a different law. That is, the growth of mankind will not stop, it will simply go according to a different law - according to the harmonic law. Both growth is impossible without interaction, without interconnections, without mutual assistance, without cooperativity. Speaking in physical terms, all living systems are not just cooperative, they coherent. And the degree of their coherence, that is, the mutual consistency of all the processes that take place in them, increases in the course of their growth and development. Therefore, I am very optimistic about the stage at which we are now. But, by and large, nothing can be predicted. The main trend is this: there should be a transition to a completely different harmonic world. But man is a complex being. Psychologists and psychiatrists know this much better than I do. And here it depends on his personal freedom of choice, freedom of will, how quickly and effectively he will move to the next stage of growth and development. And she, too, will not be the last, if we start from embryogenesis. Because embryogenesis ends with birth. After birth comes infancy. After infancy, adolescence follows. And so on and so forth. But before that we, I think, will not live. May God help us to survive this period of implantation. Thanks a lot.

DISCUSSION OF THE REPORT

Bratus B.S.:Dear colleagues, we have half an hour for questions. Let's do this: first ask all the questions. Vladimir Leonidovich will remember them, and then answer them. Who would like to be the first to ask a question?

Vostryakov A.P.:I am a member of the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology. By education - biologist, anatomist. As I understand it, you said that there is no free energy at the bottom of the ocean?

Voeikov V.L.:No, the energy is there. It's just low quality.

Vostryakov A.P.:There is a "black smoker", as you know. There is a large flow of heat, there are chemical processes that release energy.

Voeikov V.L.:I will answer briefly. Near the "smokers" there are really very concentrated and very diverse biospheres. Here I agree with you. But these same animals exist not only there, but much more scattered. This is the first. Second, smokers give water temperatures around 300-400 degrees Celsius. Living organisms exist there at such a distance from smokers that the temperature corresponds to the same 2-4 degrees. As for the chemistry that exists there, microorganisms really use this chemistry very actively. They provide organic matter that animals feed on. The problem here is different. There is no oxygen there.

Vostryakov A.P.:What about water breakdown?

Voeikov V.L.:Quite right. But the decomposition of water occurs at such a low rate that deep-sea fish, which have pure oxygen in their swim bladder (which few people know about), can only decompose it inside themselves. And for this, again, high potentials are required. But we are already going into details. The point was something else. Our basic ecological paradigm is that without the sun to shine and provide photosynthesis and all that, there is no life. And why then fly to Mars, to Europe and look for liquid water there? The sun is really bad there. That is, it is a contradiction with our textbooks.

Ovchinnikova T.N.(psychologist) : You argued as if in two logics. On the one hand, there is the self-developing, organic system that you spoke about. On the other hand, we take measurements and describe the process statistically. I'm curious to know what position you personally stand on? Do you use the logic of organic systems when you talk about living things? Or are you still the logic of mechanical systems when you measure all this?

Voeikov V.L.:Perhaps I didn't quite understand the question. But, of course, I use the logic of organic systems, because I am a biologist. And the objects that I study are living systems. But lately I have been studying the most fundamental, as it seems to me, living system - water. The question is often asked: is there "living water"? Remember jellyfish. There is a jellyfish, which consists of water, by weight by 99.9%. This water (it is almost distilled) is much cleaner than the water in which the jellyfish themselves live. Naturally, this is not pure water. It has organics, but in the aggregate it is 0.1%. All functions are carried out by the water, which is organized in a special way by this organic matter. And the function is energy, dynamics, and so on. So, I start from the fact that water produces the organic matter that organizes it. And organizes the organic matter that it produces, and so on. This is the process of self-organization - it, by the way, can be observed experimentally. And, moreover, for example, Wilhelm Reich, well known as a most interesting psychologist, but who made a colossal contribution to biology and was almost thrown out of life for this, - so he allegedly observed the spontaneous generation of life. But there can be no spontaneous generation of life, because the initial grain of life is water - not the one that is in a glass, but which is organized in a special way.

Orlova V.V.(PhD in Philosophy) : You spoke about the biological and energy parameters of the global crisis. Tell me, what is the role in the global crisis of processes that belong not to the biological, but to the cultural component?

Voeikov V.L.:In fact, it is not very easy for me to answer this question, since a phase transition is a serious event in the life of any system. Freezing, thawing, boiling water and so on are very serious processes that occur. And these are also phase transitions. Naturally, phase transitions at the level of a person, human consciousness will manifest themselves in a variety of ways. It all depends on the cultural context and so on. But the fact that now the whole society is in a much more excited state than it was in the calmer period of its existence according to the law is clear. Why? Because people will also have to move, along with the entire system, to another state - in this case, a worldview. Which one exactly? This is not my profession, here I can only argue as a layman: what a person should become in order to fit into the new law of growth and development. And my thesis was that this transition is inevitable, that it follows the objective laws of being, and we have been given the opportunity to unravel these laws. And how to continue to behave in accordance with these laws? This is where we have free will. We can go across all laws. Nobody forbids. But not for long.

Kavtaradze D.N.:Since the words about inevitability sound unusually appealing, the question is: is your vision amenable to experimental verification at the model level? Because we know about the work of the Club of Rome, etc. To what extent are your ideas amenable to experimental modeling and anticipation of developments?

Voeikov V.L.:Well, at the level of a unique experimental model called "humanity", I would not experiment. Yes, it's impossible, I'm kidding. Naturally, the question is about the model. The model is always smaller than what we are modeling. The transition from hyperbolic growth to power-law growth is also a phase transition. There are few such transitions - not because they themselves are few, but because there are very few situations where they began to be studied. The same leukocytes that are implanted in a person - I gave this example. First, they grow in hyperbole, and then they pass into another state. Some stage of power-law growth is possible there, you can really see it, but then, if they take root and everything went well, the standard oscillatory regime begins, which we are well aware of for already developed systems.

Question:Did I understand correctly that you describe physical, biological, social phenomena in the same categories?

Voeikov V.L.:I would put it this way: I'm not qualified enough to describe them in the same categories. But a qualified mathematician who knows physics, chemistry and biology will be able to describe all this in the same categories, because the hyperbolic law is characteristic of very different kinds of systems. The power law is characteristic of the most diverse kinds of systems. Wave laws are characteristic of the most diverse kinds of systems. That is, these are some fundamental laws. For example, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle refers, by the way, not only to the microcosm, but also to the macrocosm as well. These are the most fundamental concepts, but I am not qualified enough to operate on them. I need to have some kind of material base, living or quasi- a living system that you can hold in your hands.

Schukin Dmitry (graduate student of Moscow State Technical University named after Bauman) : I have a question about a graph showing the growth of energy in global history. There energy was measured by all living things? Kind or what?

Voeikov V.L.:We look at energy by its manifestations. The Rubner constant was measured, what is it? This is the amount of energy that is converted from bound energy - the energy of food - into free energy. So, if this constant, if this reduced value ...

Shchukin Dmitry:One for a representative...

Voeikov V.L.:Right. But then we can multiply it by all.

Shchukin Dmitry:On the schedule - on the representative?

Voeikov V.L.:Yes, on the graph - for a representative of this species.

Shchukin Dmitry:Then does it not turn out that the energy of the anthropoid ape is much greater than that of a huge dinosaur?

Voeikov V.L.:Quite right. We still divide by a unit of live weight. The value is given to the unit of live weight.

Question:I would like to ask a question as a social psychologist. Is it possible to interpret your idea, expressed in this report, as the transition of life from one type of determination, which can be called "causality", to another type of determination, determined no longer by the laws of mass, but by the laws of interaction? This is the type of determination that Jung once described as the phenomenon of synchronicity, when events occur simultaneously. In other words, some events occur simultaneously, but their similarity is determined not by time, not by a causal connection, but by a common meaning that connects these events with each other. In this sense, there is a qualitative change in determination.

Voeikov V.L.:In general, this is very close to what I really wanted to say, that there is a change of determination going on here. As far as causality or synchronicity is concerned, it is very close to what the small number of biophysicists who deal with this problem say so far. This problem is related to the coherence of living systems. That is, living systems behave like interconnected oscillators within themselves. And when it comes to resonating systems, systems that are in continuous resonance, then it is impossible to say who is the first and who is the second - in general, this is one system. But this is such a different approach to explaining biological mechanisms that it breaks through with great difficulty. Today we are terribly chemicalized. Our biology is based on chemical representation. These wave, resonant, oscillatory representations and everything else with great difficulty make their way. But it is impossible to do without them. And this system is integral, precisely because it sways as a whole, and so many octaves are involved here!

Question:How do you explain that the Rubner constant was higher in pinnipeds than in primates? First primates, then pinnipeds, and then humans? This breaks your logic.

Voeikov V.L.:It doesn't break the logic. Both those, and others, and the third - mammals. For Rubner's constant, I gave three completely different representatives of mammals. And they have a certain kind of scatter in measurements. Maybe I just took not very good examples from Bauer, but there are differences between them. Rubner's claim is that all mammals are in the same group for this constant. And, of course, there is a certain scatter between them. But it is not very regular. Man falls out of this group of mammals, although he is also a mammal. Its constant is orders of magnitude greater, up to 10 times. That is, physiologically, he is no longer an animal.

Question:You take on different levels of energy organization. And in a biological sense, how do you feel about warm-bloodedness in mammals and birds? How does this relate to the process of development in this sense?

Voeikov V.L.:I want to refer you to the book by Alexander Ilyich Zotin, where just all this bioenergetics, thermodynamics, warm-bloodedness, and so on are very carefully analyzed on gigantic material. And there you will find the answer to your question. Conceptually, I do not quite agree with Zotin, but as far as purely empirical, technical issues are concerned, everything is very well written there. This is the best book in world literature and it is available on the Internet.

Aleksandrov Yu.I.(neurophysiologist) : Thank you, Vladimir Leonidovich, for a very interesting report. I have a question about the connection between the first part and all the rest of the material in your report. I mean that in the beginning you talked about activity and passivity and complained that this has not yet made it into biology textbooks yet. I must say that all this has been contained in the textbooks of psychology and psychophysiology for decades, as a more or less banal thing. It is unlikely that you understand only coherence by activity. After all, this is the synchronization of processes; it exists even in quantum theory for distant particles. So I would like to know what do you mean by active versus passive? You then use this opposition. If possible, at least briefly answer. My question is related to the interpretation of hyperbolic curves. Because you say that they are inherent not only to living systems, but to other systems too. Then it means that this curve is not a characteristic of activity?

Voeikov V.L.:Regarding the first question, I will try to formulate the following difference between passivity and activity. If we take the early models of Prigogine, then the system moves away from equilibrium, and self-organization takes place in it, provided that it is in a gradient external to it. Here is Benard's cell, where it was shown. There are more complex systems where there are more complex processes of organization. In other words, the system is in an energy gradient that serves as the drive belt and is external to the system. I define such a system as passive. And according to the logic of a biology textbook, the entire biosphere is passive, well, and then one turns the other like gears. As for activity, the gradient is created by the living system itself. That is, there is a potential difference between it and the environment. And she does work on the environment. Take photosynthesis as an example. It would seem that the light falls, so it turns this whole car. But for photosynthesis to begin, the seed must germinate (and there is no photosynthesis there). It must synthesize its chloroplasts, because if you smear chlorophyll on the fence with a thin layer, then there will be no photosynthesis, of course. And it has to keep these chloroplasts in an excited state. And its potential must be higher than the potential of those photons that fall on this sheet. That's what activity is. That is, I do work, and the leaf does work on the environment in order to extract energy from it and raise it to its potential.

Bratus B.S.:Thanks a lot. We turn to the discussion of the report, please speak no more than 3-5 minutes. And at the end we will summarize. Who wants to speak first? No one? Then - the second? You are welcome.

Performance (Nicholas...?) : Very interesting message. But since our seminar is methodological, it is interesting for me to methodologically understand what we have heard. And it seems to me that there is one tendency here: to explain complex phenomena with the help of relatively simple natural scientific foundations. And in this sense, in any phenomenon, especially if it is multilevel, we can find a level that will be present in this phenomenon, but it is not exhausted by it. Therefore, I still have a problem in understanding being, although, of course, the very idea of ​​​​finding a universal universal principle, of course, fascinates.

Bratus B.S.:Thank you. Who else would like to speak? You are welcome.

Tchaikovsky Yu.V. (IIET RAS): In the wonderful report that we listened to, there is one thing that I would like to clarify, since for Vladimir Leonidovich [ Voeikova] it is too simple, and he considers it obvious. When he said that in the textbook only the sun is considered active, but in fact any living system is active, he missed something without which it is simply impossible to understand it the first time, namely: energy. Energy comes to a living system only from two places: from the sun and from the bowels of the earth. It's been said. Now, activity is not energy. Activity cannot work without energy. But activity is the very thing that distinguishes, for example, a thinking person from an imbecile who can only digest food. Activity is the basic property of any matter. Moreover, the more complex the system, the more complex the form of activity. The simplest known form of activity is gravity. Particles are attracted to each other and create something new. A star appears from a grain of dust - a qualitative novelty appears due to the fact that they are attracted. Activity in this case is the gravitational field. From my point of view, each activity can be associated with a field. Who knows, who doesn't, I can't explain it now.

The great thing about what was not said today, although it was meant, is that as the earth and life develop on it, more and more new forms of activity appear. Vladimir Leonidovich put fire first. This is simply because he lives in a cold country. And man originated, as is commonly believed, from East Africa, where very little depended on fire. True, a person very quickly in the Paleolithic came to the Arctic, where fire, indeed, was the main thing. But if you ask what made a man a man, then, of course, the fire recedes for me to some very distant place. And above all, it is that a person began to take care of each other. Man is the only animal that cannot reproduce unaided. He needs childbirth. And this is just as important a feature of humanity as the burial of the dead. And the question is, what made the forefathers care about each other? This is a new type of activity. Today we have been told as an apocalyptic conclusion that we have ended the past mode of existence and are beginning a new one. This, from my point of view, is evidence that the former type of activity (as we know it: occupied the entire planet, and the rest have nowhere to live) - this mode of activity, indeed, led humanity to a dead end. Moreover, interestingly, this happened simultaneously both in terms of the circumstances of the global crisis, which we were told about today, and in terms of those that can be read in the newspaper, where they write about the economic crisis. These are two manifestations of the same process, and indeed, humanity, in all likelihood, will not be able to resist in this status. Let me remind you of one single example that I have in my memory. This happened once before, when the Roman Empire collapsed. Indeed, the former infrastructure fell apart within 2-3 centuries. And after that, the so-called "dark ages" came, when the number of mankind in one generation fell by 7 times, according to paleodemographers. That's the worst thing. Yes, Vladimir Leonidovich, a new humanity, apparently, will arise, but before that we will all die.

Replica: Well, yes, this is the opinion of an optimist and a pessimist!

Bratus B.S.: Dmitry Nikolaevich Kavtaradze. I will allow him to be introduced here, since he was recently elected a professor at Moscow State University in the Faculty of Public Administration, on which we congratulate him.

Kavtaradze D.N.:Dear colleagues, first of all, I must say why we are all here today. Vladimir Leonidovich Voeikov] gave us a delicate understanding that when they talk about the global crisis and other Armageddons, in fact, this audience is discussing the problem of changing the picture of the worldview. And it begins, as always, with heresy, and Moscow University is opposite for this... well... The point is that we see the world differently, and also thanks to the attempts that the speaker made today. I learned a lot from the report today.

I recall the work of Vernadsky, where he wrote that we live in the physical picture of the world. And the subway, and timetables, and even the cloakroom attendant downstairs work according to these very hours. And then Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky wrote that in the physical picture of the world there is no place for the living. And there is the old picture of the world - naturalistic, which Vladimir Leonidovich presented to us today, but at the same time boldly began to borrow elements of the physical picture. I think this is the most remarkable event of the evening. There is a new union of pictures of the world. They are going, apparently, somehow anew. And so there were anxious questions from colleagues: “Where is the person?”; Is it possible to integrate it up to N to some extent?" etc.

Replica: A person is impossible, but humanity is possible ...

Kavtaradze D.N.:Well, yes, but humanity can. Therefore, it seems to me that the change in the picture of the world is a much more global event than the global crisis that is now being talked about. Thank you very much.

Krichevets A.N.(Professor of Psychology) : I would like to point out one of the last proposals of Vladimir Leonidovich [Voyeikov] that humanity should switch to growth according to a new law. I would like to ask Vladimir Leonidovich what does the word “should” mean in this context? I don't need an answer at all. The ontology of the report is a bit strange. I think it's really a biological ontology. Biology now (and, probably, for a long time) is going through, in my opinion, a certain period of perestroika, in which it does not really understand how to use words. I hope that Vladimir Leonidovich will not be offended at all by my words. "Living systems - subjects" was written on one of the pictures that we were shown. Who are "subjects"? How do we use the word "subject"? How can I offer the audience the word "subject" without talking about history, where it had a different meaning than it does now (for example, in Kant)? Now it is a common language word. And it points not to anything, but to a certain point, which in our communication is responsible for its being. Here I propose such a formula of "subject". But then what does living - subject? This means - as Vladimir Leonidovich just said - that "leaf tries". It is not chlorophyll that processes something, but Leaf is trying. What does it mean? Do you remember that Pavlov forbade his laboratory assistants and assistants to say: “the dog wants” or “the dog tries”? And now we see that already leaf can try. I agree that there is some effort behind this. I can quote here Piaget, who definitely characterized life in this way in one of his last great works. Of course, not under Sergei Sergeevich [ Khoruzhem] to make this risky speech, but, nevertheless, what there tries? Does it subject of effort the leaf itself? Whole tree? Biocenosis? Or something else? Definitely, we can only feel some kind of effort in him and join with our souls in this effort. And here is what I would rather ask Sergei Sergeyevich to say here: is it right to use the word “subject” in relation to you and me in exactly the sense that I am talking about? We we try, but, it seems to me, Sergey Sergeevich will better explain that we are trying not by ourselves, but by the Lord God, by external energy, which can also be subdivided according to qualities or levels.

In relation to psychology, I tried (there is my article on this topic in Questions of Philosophy for the past year) to build some centaur categorical approaches in psychology, where this subjectivity is combined with a deterministic description. I tried to describe and systematize them. It seems to me that this is the right direction of work for biology as well. In fact, we are presented here with empirical regularities. Vladimir Leonidovich also said that he would like mathematicians to come up with some kind of mathematical ontology for hyperbolic laws. True, right? And then it will sound like a thing similar to natural science, and not just an empirical pattern. But even if we see an ontology, how can these approaches be combined correctly, or at least reasonably and usefully? But imagine if Vladimir Leonidovich had summed all this up under the kind of ontology that Yury Viktorovich Tchaikovsky has now frightened us with: after a hyperbolic regularity, strong shooting begins, the system naturally moves to a new level of relations, and then everything is fine again. How would I react to this? Maybe it will be good, but I don't want to shoot. I do not want this transition to be carried out with the help of such operations. Therefore, when Vladimir Leonidovich says that humanity must move on, I consider this word “should” to be the key here. This must cannot be understood in the following way: empirical laws have been observed, mathematicians have brought ontology under hyperbolic regularities, and must- because these patterns flow into one another and everything will be fine with us. I feel like this is about something else." must". Even if this crisis, after a two-year recession, again turns into a stage of sustainable growth, then I still see behind this that the duty here is addressed literally to each of us and to the human community, and to the authorities, etc.

In conclusion, I want to say that, in my opinion, it is important not only for psychologists, but also for biologists to work on the question of who is the subject, what is the distribution of responsibility and what is the purpose of scientific descriptions, which are addressed, among other things, to certain subjects, for which the word must quite confidently interpreted in the ordinary sense.

Father Andrei Lorgus: I am a priest, a psychologist and an anthropologist - only in a different sense.

Bratus B.S.:Graduate of the psychological faculty of Moscow State University.

Father Andrei Lorgus: Yes. It seems to me that those two principles that were expressed by Bauer have a certain human dimension, which was not discussed today. I understand why: he didn't belong here. Man, as a living system, can choose whether to fight against balance or maintain balance. Live or die. A person has such a choice. And the vast majority of people use this choice. They give up life or choose life. And the further humanity lives, the more and more people accumulate who do not want to live. They choose the principle of balance. The human form of life has freedom against both of these principles. And the principle of sustainable disequilibrium a person may not comply with if he chooses to do so. If he refuses to get his own bread, refuses to accumulate potential, then the question arises about the life of an individual and the life of mankind. Is it possible to raise the question that mankind refuses to live on as a whole? Or, if humanity as a whole is a system that has neither the possibility, nor the duty, nor freedom, if it is only a biological system, then humanity as a whole does not have such an opportunity. It will live according to these principles. But a person may not live. Then the main expectation is what will a person choose at the turn of these epochs? Thank you.

Bratus B.S.:Thank you. We are coming to the final part of our workshop. We will listen to some attitude towards the report of the chairs of our seminar. Let's start with Yuri Iosifovich Alexandrov, please.

Aleksandrov Yu.I.: Dear colleagues, I would like to once again thank Vladimir Leonidovich [Voyeikov]. I will say a few thoughts on the report, but first, in order not to forget, I would like to say about the speech of my colleague Yu.V. Tchaikovsky, who is the largest specialist in the field of the theory of evolution. He said a strange thing, that man differs from animals in that mutual assistance has appeared in the human environment. I'm sure you remember very well Kropotkin's work from about the 1920s on mutual aid in animals. And now there are reviews about mutual assistance for everyone, starting with elephants, about helping the disabled, and in general, whatever you want. So don't jump to such hasty conclusions.

Now, as to the actual topic of the report. I want to say a little differently about activity. In general, I have not received such pleasure for a long time, hearing my favorite word “activity”, which, in accordance with the paradigm to which I belong, has been defended for at least half a century, if not more, probably already closer to 70 years. If in psychology the theory of activity is a completely obvious and accepted thing, and this theory, in fact, is the theory of activity, then in the physiological and biological environment this science or neuroscience - and colleague Krichivets is absolutely right here - is currently experiencing a clear shift towards a holistic and active approach. And it's very nice to see. Today's report is another proof of that. Nevertheless, activity can be considered from different angles, including the way it was considered in the report. But in the systemic paradigm to which I belong, activity is understood as an anticipatory reflection. One of the main properties of activity is anticipation, that is, the construction of subjective models of the future, and not a reaction to a stimulus. By the way, an important thing. Vladimir Leonidovich said that it follows from the logic of materialism that living systems are passive. But as far as I understand, this follows not from the logic of materialism, but from the logic of the “stimulus-response” paradigm, in which the body responds to the impact of the environment. And, by the way, our classicist Vladimir Mikhailovich Bekhterev quite clearly noticed that reactivity exists both in living objects and in bodies of dead nature, thereby equalizing them. That is, indeed, in this system of representations it is a passive object. But absolutely not every materialistic ideology presupposes passivity. I attribute the idea that develops, say, in the theory of functional systems, in systemic psychophysiology, in particular, developed by Nikolai Alexandrovich Bershtein, to materialistic ideology. Here is the time paradox. How was it resolved? Teleological determination was known - determination by the future. This determination came into conflict with causal connections. How can the future determine the present? One way to solve this problem was to bring the future into the present by building a model. This construction of a model is, it seems to me, the main property of activity and the main property of the living as such, represented at all levels of its organization. And I completely agree that this property is presented differently at different levels, since the way of reflection changes in evolution. And if we talk about a person, then I would approach those phenomena that the speaker spoke about from the other side, which does not at all exclude what was said in the report. I would say that activity in a person is the anticipation of appropriate results, ahead of the reflection of the environment, since the result in culture is part of a cooperative, social result. That is, it is not an individual result, but part of a social result. Thus, in society there is, if you like, a joint foresight. And the development of society, the development of culture is the improvement of social foresight and the properties of this foresight. The process of such improvement is based on the activity of the individual, which also exists at the social level. There is a powerful improvement by adapting to what is foreseen at the social level. What is generally better activity than reactivity? The fact that she does not respond to a “poke from behind” when it is too late, but adapts to the changes that she foresees. Whether it adapts worse or better is another question.

And the last thing I wanted to say. A colleague speaking here used a term that I think almost all psychologists have in their head, which is culture. So, the figures that the speaker spoke about are, from my point of view, one of the ways to reflect culture. Building an ascending series of numbers is a specific way of describing some kind of cultural change. What cultural changes? To understand this, one has to look at cultural specificity. From the graphs that were shown here, this cultural specificity follows. If we take these graphs for different cultures, then we will get different curves. And then it will be possible to see how these figures, the steepness of the graphs correspond to cultural changes in certain societies. And I think it's a very interesting comparison. Thanks a lot.

Bratus B.S.:Thanks, Yuri Iosifovich. Sergei Sergeevich Khoruzhy, please.

Khoruzhy S.S.:Friends, I must say that our anthropological seminar has its own strategy connected with today's meeting. I will modestly take credit for the fact that I very actively tried to act as an interested person, an interested authority, pestering Boris Sergeevich with this. And he had in mind the real urgent conceptual need to start a conversation of this kind within the framework of our long-standing seminar on anthropology, broadly understood for several years. One of the major tasks of such a modern broad understanding of anthropology in the new situation, of course, is to build an anthropology-biology interface, or interface "AB", as we sometimes refer to it in internal discussion. And so, this interface also should be built. And I really hoped that our meeting today would be such a first step in this direction. The report was distinguished by perfect clarity, and I am extremely grateful to Vladimir Leonidovich [ Voeikov] for the fact that a certain kind, a certain type of scientific position was presented in its purity. What is this purity? Of course, this is a classic reductionist methodology. This is a very good place to start. This is a beginning from far away, the path from below - from the hierarchical levels of large natural science systems. What can be said at this level about this much-desired AB interface, we heard today. I think that I absolutely should not reproach our speaker with the fact that in this purity of the reductionist position there was not and even the position of the next level, the next generation has not even begun to take shape. And what is this position? This is a position that at least takes the trouble to reflect on its own methodological boundaries. The reflection of methodological boundaries has not yet begun. Very correctly, pure reductionism does not do this, it considers itself to be limitless. However, further, in the next stages, as I hope, our cooperation should inevitably ask the question, within what phenomenal area Are the regularities we heard decisive? Certain boundaries of this kind certainly exist. You need to identify them. We were told about universal laws. But they are, of course, universal from now to now. On one end - natural science, perhaps these boundaries were marked. But the other end of the conversation has not yet begun. What relation to the life of mankind will have all the universal laws that we were presented today, if a person implements the program that he has already begun to implement today, namely, the program of transhumanism? And in accordance with this program, it transforms itself into software ( software )? Will such software be implemented according to the universal law, or according to the hyperbolic, or according to some other? The answer is simple: all this universality will be irrelevant. So, at the next stage, it is useful for us to ask exactly this question: where is everything heard relevant, and where does it reveal its insufficiency? Where are the boundaries at which biological discourse reveals its insufficiency, and anthropological discourse should come into its own? And in the future, we are talking not only about anthropological discourse. There is a fairly well-known book of the twentieth century - "Being and Time" by Heidegger. It begins with the fact that Heidegger says: there are three ways to talk about a person (he puts everything in one clip) - anthropology, psychology, biology. But this is a poor conversation, - says Martin Heidegger, - this is not even the beginning of the conversation. These are some pieces of a conversation torn from somewhere, but a real conversation is built in a completely different way. Heidegger tells us that while we have not yet reached not only Being, but we have not yet reached man, his authentic human specificity, anthropology has not yet begun. And I really hope that such tasks of our cooperation are yet to come. I am sure that in this kind of our communication there is a very great potential for advancing towards a person. And there, if God wills, maybe even to Genesis.

Bratus B.S.:Dear colleagues, I will try to be brief. And first I will express my emotional attitude to the report. It's a long forgotten feeling of enjoying science. Unlike our psychological conversations about personality, etc., which require gesture, there is tread. You can agree with it, or you can disagree, but there is a pace, there are data, figures, one follows from the other, one is built from the other. There is a certain support, there is what is called scientific eye. This is being forgotten more and more. Now, says colleague Kavtaradze, it's mostly about opinions. There are a lot of opinions, they, as a rule, are not supported by anything. And now this "porridge" is now called public opinion, including scientific. We forgot that science is a disciplinary way of knowing the world and nothing else really. As mathematicians say: there is a useful prejudice that mathematics is useful. To paraphrase this statement, we can say that we are even too firmly established in our prejudice that science is useful. Science is, first of all, a way of knowing, behind which is that very mysterious d O false, which Anatoly Nikolaevich [Krichevets] spoke about. Science must study. And who said that she should study? And why is she studying? Why is she studying with such tenacity? Why is she paying for this perseverance? And sometimes a very tough price. What lies behind it d O false?

It seems to me that, digressing in this direction, one can then return to what was said here. Here, I would like to say that this is what is recorded in culture, - Yuri Iosifovich spoke about this [ Alexandrov], - or that it is a public foresight. But look: in fact, humanity is not following culture. It sort of pulls this culture in spite of this culture. What is the current, relatively speaking, superficial, but the dominant culture of the modern world? She is monstrous. You don't even need to go into criticism. So what allows us to think that we will somehow pull it out? And if we talk about public foresight ... (I apologize for these slightly simplified examples.) Now it's March, and I remember very well that March when Stalin died. Many years have passed since he died, and the public foresight is that he is a very popular person, creative manager and so on. So what does social foresight have to do with whether we survive or not? Do you understand? What does it have to do with Christian civilization in general, with the Christian position? Which? What lies on the scales, what will outweigh? Public vision? Or maybe culture?

Ultimately, it seems to me that culture is just a set of signs. And here Sergey Sergeevich [ Horuzhy] - a person who has reached high levels in the field of natural sciences (physical, mathematical), - rightly speaks of a certain reduction. Here is Yuri Iosifovich [ Alexandrov] asked me (after Sergei Sergeevich's speech) that reduction is bad or not bad? And this is just a statement. But then the question arises, for the sake of which we today for the first time held such a meeting of representatives of different fields of knowledge - philosophers, psychologists, biologists. This is a question about cross-level content. How to avoid reduction? Or how to find its limits? Where does the reduction say that it is a reduction? The moment we call a judgment a reduction, we overcome it. We say, for example, that there is a universal law. What does universal law mean? This means that this law continues beyond some limits. But it will be modified. Rather, it will not so much be modified as it will be expressed in a different language. It seems to me that this work by Vladimir Leonidovich [ Voeikova] is unique and very important in the sense that Vladimir Leonidovich is a representative of theoretical biology. But there are many biologists, and few people who come to those laws that can be understood as universal. Here we are already entering the language in which those universal laws that Sergei Sergeevich spoke about will be formulated.

In this regard, there is a very clear and understandable definition given by Metropolitan Anthony, who says that science is "the knowledge of the Creator through the knowledge of his creations." Modern science, at best, studies creations, forgetting that if there is a creation, then it has a Creator. Since there is createdness, there is also the Creator. And in this case (in a certain scientific sense) the exit to the Creator is the exit, in fact, to the idea, to the understanding of this idea, to its non-randomness. And so it seems to me that these kinds of, these kinds of considerations are extremely important for any audience, because they knock on the main doors. Another thing is whether they will be opened and how they will be opened. Outside of this knock, everything falls apart, everything becomes a reduction that is not aware of itself as a reduction. Once again: as soon as we realize that we are reducing something, we have overcome the reduction. We seem to set our own limit, but we mean something that is beyond this limit. There is scientific knowledge and there are scientific ignorance. And scientific ignorance is extraordinarily important and valuable. There is no scientist outside of scientific ignorance, because the scientist who develops scientific knowledge is obviously limited. It must imply something that goes beyond the boundaries of this knowledge.

And, probably, I will express the general opinion and admiration for the work of Vladimir Leonidovich. I have known him for a long time, we actually worked together on the first monograph on Christian psychology, where Vladimir Leonidovich wrote a brilliant article on the relationship between science and religion. And I hope that this growth of activity and knowledge of Vladimir Leonidovich not only has not reached its climax, but in general it is never-ending and pleases us all, and will continue to please.

In conclusion, I would like to say that thanks to the work of Alexander Evgenievich Kremlev, we have prepared CDs with the performance of Sergey Sergeyevich [ Khoruzhy]. In this regard, you can contact us at the department. Our next seminar will be in about a month. It will be devoted to the psychology of villainy [ speaker - S.N.Enikolopov]. This will be an experimental workshop. I thank all those present and distinguished guests.

Voeikov V.L.:Many thanks. Despite the fact that it is already 8.43 pm, nevertheless the hall is full. And I would like to hope that I managed to arouse some reactions that will further make you think about this topic. I myself, when preparing for this report, learned a lot of things that I did not know. And what's more, as Boris Sergeevich said, I also learned how much I still don't know.

And about foresight. From studies of the process of evolution, according to L.S. Berg, it is quite well known that in the course of evolution there are predecessors that are absolutely unnecessary at this stage, which then, after some millions of years, will turn out to be necessary. Moreover, at shorter time intervals, the phenomenon of foresight is also observed. For example, in some birds, egg laying will depend on what summer and autumn will be like. All these data are available. This foresight is a property of the living world. Another thing is that we, at least some of us, have developed these properties to the properties of the prophets. And here, at this level, there may be common ground. On the one hand, I, to be honest, Sergey Sergeevich, am a little upset that there is a certain border between us. These boundaries exist and remain in science today. But when we cross them, then they will inevitably blur. The boundaries between physics and chemistry, between chemistry and biology, between biology and psychology, between psychology and anthropology - they remain. But it is important to realize that these boundaries exist, and you need to look at how you can cross them, find coherence, cooperativity, interconnectedness, mutual merging, and at the same time preserve individuality. As long as we are very individual. But it's time to start thinking about increasing interaction. And I am very pleased with tonight, because it seems to me that this is another step towards stimulating interaction, at least within our Moscow University. Although he universe, but so far divided into a heap compacts. And the boundaries between these compactments needs to be blurred. Thank you everybody.

Workshop “Superweak impacts on physicochemical and biological systems. Connection with solar and geomagnetic activity”. May 6-8, 2002, Crimean Astrophysical Observatory of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine

V.L. Voeikov

Transcript of the lecture

The role of dynamic processes in water in the implementation of the effects of weak and superweak impacts on biological systems

I am very happy to be in this wonderful place. Everything is so beautiful here, everything is so unusual, everything is so exciting, but the only drawback is that open water sources are quite far away.

My report will be devoted to the importance, the role that water plays in our life, in the life of each individual person, in the life of all living beings. And everyone knows that without water, "nowhere and no here." But it just so happened that if we talk about the role and importance of water in biological research, then, perhaps, until the very last time, the sayings of Albert Szent-Györgyi and about the fact that biology has forgotten about water or never knew about it, and if we translate the second part of his phrase "biology has not yet discovered water", then they were very true until very recently.

Figure 1. Water - the reaction medium of life processes or the substance that generates them?

As you can see in Fig. 1 (left side), we are 70%, more than 2/3, composed of water. The most important parts of the human body, the body of any other animal, plant, in general, all living beings is water. And so, indeed, biochemists know very little about water, just like a fish that swims in water, apparently, knows very little about its environment. Let's look at what a very serious, advanced biochemistry, which has studied a lot of subtleties and details, is doing today. As an illustration, I will give an extremely simplified picture (Fig. 2), which, probably, many students of biology, biochemistry, biophysics have seen and learned by heart about the most diverse interactions, regulatory interactions that take place in the cell. Receptors perceive molecular signals from the external environment in the form of various kinds of hormones, then a variety of regulatory factors and mechanisms are activated, up to the point that gene expression in cells begins to change, and it reacts in one way or another to external influences.

Figure 2. Modern ideas about the molecular mechanisms of regulation of cellular activity.

But from this picture, which really illustrates the ideas of today's biochemistry, one might get the impression that everything numerous interactions and carefully studied structural components of a living cell live as if in a vacuum. What is the medium for all these interactions? In any textbook of biochemistry, in any textbook of chemistry, it seems to be implied that, of course, this is a liquid medium, of course, that all these molecules do not hover independently of each other, although it is assumed that they only diffuse in an aqueous medium. And only very recently it has been taken into account that all these interactions of molecules with each other are really carried out not just in some airless space, and not just in some abstract water - among the innumerable molecules of Al, there are two O, but that the molecules of water and itself in itself, water, as a finely structured substance, plays a crucial role in what happens in a living cell, and in what happens in any organism, and water, quite possibly, is the main receptor, the main "listener" of what happens in the external environment. environment.

Over the past 10 - 15 years, more and more data began to appear that water in water is in fact not at all a kind of gas with individual H 2 0 particles weakly bound to each other, which, for vanishingly short time intervals, are with each other. On the other hand, they stick together by hydrogen bonds, forming the so-called flashing clusters (right side of Fig. 1), and then fall apart again. Until recently, the lifetime of such structures in water was considered extremely short and, therefore, it was naturally not assumed that water could play any structural, important organizing role. Now more and more physical and chemical data have begun to appear, which indicate that in water, in liquid water, there are quite a lot of the most diverse stable structures that can be called clusters.

In general, recently a whole branch of chemistry has appeared - cluster chemistry. Cluster chemistry appeared not only in connection with water, not even so much in connection with water, but it began to become quite important. And now, since we are talking about clusters, I would like to show you one example of clusters, now, perhaps, the most carefully studied, the so-called carbon clusters, which are called fullerenes, or another form of this carbon cluster is nanotubes.

What exactly are clusters? And when it comes to water, then what was learned in chemistry about the chemistry of fullerenes, more precisely, the chemical physics of fullerenes, apparently, can be related to water. It was well known to everyone until the mid-80s that carbon can exist in two main modifications: graphite - such flat carbon panels and diamond with a tetrahedral carbon structure. And in the mid-80s, it was discovered that under certain conditions, when carbon is turned into steam, and then this steam cools quickly, some structures appear that are called fullerenes or tank balls, such balls named after the American architect, Buckmeister Fuller , who built houses long before the discovery of fullerenes, similar to later discovered fullerenes. It turned out that fullerene is a molecule consisting of several tens of carbon atoms connected to each other by their bonds, as shown in Fig.3.

Rice. 3 Fullerene and nanotube – bulk polymers of carbon

Here are the yellow ones here - carbon atoms, white and red sticks - these are valence bonds between them. The best-known fullerene has 60 carbon atoms, but very stable balls can be built from other sets of carbon atoms. Fullerenes and nanotubes are examples of clusters, and a cluster itself means such a closed, voluminous architectural molecule, which is not similar to the planar molecules known to us. This kind of clusters have absolutely amazing properties in terms of their chemical activity, more precisely, their catalytic activity, because chemically this molecule has an extremely low activity, but at the same time it can catalyze a lot of various reactions. This molecule is apparently capable of acting as an energy transformer. In particular, it can act as a transformer of low-frequency radio waves into high-frequency oscillations, up to oscillations that are capable of causing electronic excitations. Another form of such a cluster is a nanotube, which is now being actively pursued by engineers who are trying to create new generations of computers, since it has superconducting properties under certain conditions, and so on.

Why did I settle on these two molecules? Firstly, they are very stable, they can be isolated, they can be carefully studied, studied, and they are now being studied a lot. Secondly, these molecules, these clusters, reflecting completely new properties of chemical, physical matter, are such that even some consider them to be new states of matter. I spoke very briefly about these fullerenes, about these nanotubes, only in connection with the fact that quite a lot of models of water have begun to appear recently, which are extremely similar in their organization to these same fullerenes and nanotubes.

Rice. 4 Possible structure of water clusters

Now in the literature on quantum chemistry, many different forms of water clusters are given, starting with clusters that include 5 water molecules, 6 water molecules, and so on. This is from the work of the English physical chemist Martin Chaplin (Fig. 4). He calculated what kind of clusters are most likely to exist in water and suggested that there could be a whole hierarchy of rather stable structures of this kind. Blocking with each other, they can reach enormous sizes, including 280 water molecules. What is the peculiarity of such clusters? How do they differ from generally accepted, standard ideas about water molecules? Figure 1 on the right shows water molecules in their "standard" form. The red circle is an oxygen atom. Two black ones are two hydrogen atoms, yellow sticks are covalent bonds between them, and blue ones are hydrogen bonds that connect the hydrogen atom of one molecule to the oxygen atom of another. Here is one water molecule, another water molecule. A cluster is a three-dimensional structure in which each water molecule can be connected with other molecules either by one hydrogen bond, or two hydrogen bonds, or three hydrogen bonds, and a kind of cooperative formation arises, similar to those that we see in Fig. 4. Cooperative in the sense that if one molecule of water is pulled out of this structure, it will not disintegrate, there are still enough bonds in it, despite the fact that hydrogen bonds are rather weak. But when there are many of these weak bonds, they support each other, and if due to thermal movement one water molecule can jump out, and the cluster remains, and the probability that some water molecule will take this place before the cluster falls apart is much higher than the probability that the entire corresponding cluster will fall apart. And the more molecules are combined into such structures, the more stable these clusters are. When such giant molecules appear, already polymolecules of water, in fact polymers, water polymers, they have high stability and completely different chemical physicochemical properties than a single water molecule.

Question (inaudible)

Answer: Just calculate the characteristic size between the hydrogen atoms and the oxygen atom - 1 angstrom. The length of the hydrogen bond is about 1.3 angstroms. As for this giant cluster (see Fig. 4), its diameter is on the order of several nanometers. This is the size of a nanoparticle in a nanostructure

Question (inaudible)

Answer: Look, you can see it quite clearly here: inside this particle, actually inside this octahedron, this dodecahedron and this giant icosahedron, there are cavities into which, generally speaking, individual ions, individual gas atoms, etc., can "fit". These clusters, uniting with each other, also create such a shell structure. In general, clusters form structures that are basically shells, and inside them, as a rule, cavities. And here, in particular, such data were obtained regarding clusters, for example, there is a cluster of iron, and so a cluster consisting of 10 iron atoms is able to bind hydrogen 1000 times more actively than a cluster consisting of 17 iron atoms, where iron is hidden inside . Generally speaking, cluster chemistry is just beginning to develop. And when we talk about hydrogen bonds, it is assumed that the hydrogen bond is a weak electrostatic interaction: delta plus and delta minus. Delta plus on the hydrogen atom and delta minus on the oxygen atom. But it has recently been shown that at least 10% of hydrogen bonds are covalent bonds, and a covalent bond is electrons already bonded to each other. In fact, this very cluster is an electron cloud, which is organized in one way or another around the corresponding nuclei. Therefore, a structure of this kind has very special physical and chemical properties.

There is one more circumstance. The data of quantum-chemical calculations of superpure water are often cited; absolutely pure water, absolutely free of impurities, but one must understand that real water never happens to be such water. It always contains some kind of impurities, it is necessarily in some kind of vessel, it does not exist by itself. Water, as you know, is the best solvent, i.e. if it is placed in a vessel, it will somehow receive something from the vessel. Thus, when it comes to what can actually happen in water, a number of circumstances must be taken into account: where did this water come from, how was it obtained. Whether it turned out as a result of melting, or as a result of condensation, what is the temperature of this water, what gases are dissolved in this water, etc. and all this will influence in a certain way the composition of the respective clusters. I want to emphasize here again - what is shown in this figure is one of the illustrations of how water clusters can be fundamentally arranged. If we take Zenin clusters, if we take Chaplin or Bulonkov clusters, then all of them will give different pictures in accordance with different calculations. And one of the researchers of water, water, thank God, has been studied for a long time, said that today there are several dozen theories of the structure of water. This does not mean that they are all wrong. All of them, perhaps, are correct theories, they simply show what a variety of this absolutely incredible fluid, of which we, in general, are composed.

And now, speaking about the presence of such clusters in water, I would also like to draw attention to the fact that I am still talking about the structure of water, which is somehow related to crystallography. Chaplin considered (see Fig. 4) that the same cluster, consisting of 280 water molecules, can be in two different kinds of conformations. The conformation, as it were, swollen and the conformation compressed, the number of particles in these conformations is the same. The density of this cluster will be lower, it will occupy a smaller volume with the same number of atoms in it, than the density of this cluster. The change in the properties of water, according to Chaplin, may be related to how much, what percentage of compressed and what percentage of swollen clusters will be in a particular water. The energy of jumping from one state to another is not very high, but there is some kind of energy barrier, it must be overcome, and certain effects on water can lead to the fact that this energy barrier can be overcome. When it comes to that, I repeat once again that water consists not just of water molecules that “rush around” at an enormous speed, diffuse at an enormous speed relative to each other, colliding and flying apart in different directions, but water can be like this “micro ice flakes” (this, of course, is not ice, which has a certain extent, these are really closed structures of a certain kind, they can have sizes), then at least there is a way to understand a number of phenomena that are completely unbelievable from the standard point of view, which associated with the properties of water. These phenomena have been known for a long time.

For example, on the basis of these phenomena associated with the properties of water, there is a whole medical direction, which at one time dominated, then went into the shadows called homeopathy, a host of other phenomena associated with other properties of water. But our academic science during those very 200 years, during which homeopathy exists, “swept under the rug”, because, based on standard, generally accepted ideas about the structure of water, more precisely, about the absence of any structure in water, they can be explained it is forbidden. It is impossible to imagine that certain events, certain phenomena can take place in this ordinary water, which are described by such words as “memory”, “perception of information”, “imprinting”. This kind of words, terminology was almost completely rejected by academic science. And finally, the emergence of new ideas about the structure of water makes it possible to explain a number of phenomena, or, at least, to find a path along which one must move in order to explain a number of phenomena, which I will try to describe here.

The next part of my post will be about all sorts of amazing phenomenology, you know, like in Wonders and Adventures. Since the first report, the report of Lev Vladimirovich Belousov, was devoted to works related to the name of Alexander Gavrilovich Gurvich, I would like to tell you about one more study, which until recently remained unnoticed because the discovery he made seems completely incredible. Gurvich, studying ultra-weak radiation, studying the interaction of biological objects with each other due to low-intensity, ultra-weak, ultraviolet radiation, began to descend somewhat lower in terms of complexity, began to try to investigate how radiation can affect any chemical reactions occurring in water. What kind of reactions can develop in water that is irradiated with a very weak light flux? In particular, back in the late 1930s, then these works continued after the war, he discovered an absolutely amazing phenomenon, which he called the multiplication of amino acids or the multiplication of enzymes in aqueous solutions.

All those who graduated from high school know that any biosynthetic processes occur with the participation of incredibly complex machines - ribosomes, a lot of enzymes are required in order to create something new. But in the experiments of Gurvich, and then in the later experiments of Anna Alexandrovna Gurvich, absolutely amazing things were discovered (Fig. 5). They took an amino acid called tyrosine (this is a complex aromatic amino acid) and placed it in an aqueous solution of an amino acid called glycine (the simplest amino acid), and a vanishingly small amount of tyrosine was placed there, i.e. made an extremely high dilution, at which tyrazine cannot be determined by conventional chemical, chemical-analytical methods. Then, such an aqueous solution of tyrosine was irradiated for a short time with mitogenetic radiation, a very weak source of ultraviolet light. Some time later, the number of tyrosine molecules in this solution will increase significantly, i.e. multiplication of complex molecules occurs due to the decay of simple molecules. What is happening?

The process is not fully understood, but it can be assumed, although from the point of view of a “classical” biochemist, what I will say is a monstrous heresy: under the action of light, it is better if it is ultraviolet, the tyrosine molecule goes into an electronically excited state rich in electronic energy. Then a certain stage occurs, it is not entirely clear what it is associated with, which leads to the fact that glycine molecules decompose into fragments: NH 2, CH 2, CO, COOH. The glycine molecule broke up into fragments, which are called radicals, free radicals, then we will talk about them. And the most surprising thing is that from these radicals molecules begin to assemble in the likeness of tyrosine, a much larger number of them than the initial number of tyrosine molecules.

In order to assemble one tyrosine molecule from glycine molecules, 8 glycine molecules must be destroyed. There are enough CH 2 residues here to build this one chain, but only one NH 2 fragment is needed - here it sits here (Fig. 5) and only one COOH fragment - here it sits here and one more OH fragment is needed, which needs to be planted here . Those. for some reason, the glycine molecule under the action of an excited tyrosine molecule breaks up into fragments and then, for some reason, not just a tyrosine molecule is assembled from these fragments. But there are extra fragments that cannot be attached anywhere. Pieces appear that can combine, giving simple molecules like hydroxylamine - there is NH 2 OH, I will not delve into chemistry, and in Gurvich's experiments it was shown that not only the number of tyrosine molecules actually increases, but such fragments appear in this system . A complete mystery. In addition, if we take not tyrosine, but some other aromatic molecule capable of being excited by light, then this particular molecule will multiply. Let's say, this is how nucleic bases will multiply if you shine a light on them in this system. Apparently, this kind of experiment cannot be explained without the participation of water. I stopped at this, as one of the miracles from the standard point of view.

The following miracles were investigated by the famous, unfortunately we can say that the infamous French biochemist Jacques Benviniste. He is scandalously known through no fault of his own; around his name, the pillars of Western academic science made a scandal, so to speak. Jacques Benviniste - a classic highly qualified French immunologist in the mid-80s was engaged in purely immunological experiments. He studied the effect on blood cells, which are called basophils, of protein substances that act specifically on these cells and cause their specific response, which is called degranulation. These substances are called anti-IgE, in general, it does not even matter. It is important that these proteins bind to cells and cause some kind of biological reaction in them. The standard idea of ​​how a protein molecule will act on a cell is that it binds to a specific receptor on the cell surface, one of the chains of events shown in Fig. 2, which leads to the corresponding physiological response of the cells. The higher the concentration of such proteins, the higher the rate of these reactions. The lower the concentration of these molecules, the fewer cells will react. But for some reason, as always by accident, the Benviniste lab went down below the concentration that could have caused any effect at all. However, they got the effect. Then they began to study this effect more carefully. They took solutions of protein molecules (anti-IgE) and diluted them 10 times, 20 times, 70 times with distilled water, i.e. the breeding rates were absolutely colossal. Here, with this kind of dilution, at concentrations of 10 - 30, i.e. below the magic number of Avogadro (10 -23), meaning that this is one molecule per liter of water, if here is minus 30 degrees, this means one molecule per 10 7 liters of water, such a dilution can be imagined, meaning that in the test tube where there should be cells, in fact there is nothing, even if we take the 20th dilution, 10 to the 20th power. And the degranulation of basophils occurs, as shown in Fig. 6.

Rice. 6. Degranulation of basophils in response to the addition of sequential decimal dilutions of anti-IgE antiserum (according to J. Benveniste).

This drawing is made up of many points, and it is clear that when we go farther and farther along these dilutions, the effect either appears or disappears when, as they say, there are no longer any traces of the original molecules, or rather, there are traces of those molecules in these solutions. But there are absolutely no molecules. For this discovery, which was published in the journal Nature, Belvinist was defamed for 15 years. And only now they began to cautiously recognize him, he was previously excommunicated from science in the leading biological and medical institutions in France, where he worked and was even nominated for the Nobel Prize before he was terribly unlucky that he made this discovery. There is still a lot to be said about this, about how he moved further with this story, but the report is not only dedicated to him - this is another illustration of what absolutely incredible phenomena, from the point of view of standard theories, can be observed in the study of water systems.

Now I would like to talk about some of our "pseudo-scientific" experiences, since we occasionally study the influence of people who are called psychics on various kinds of biological and water systems. My approach here is, I would say, cold. If there is an effect, even if I cannot understand its cause, if I can state this effect, if it is reproduced, if I understand or have the opportunity to understand what is happening in the system on which some action was performed, I by and large, at the first stage, it doesn’t matter what caused this effect. The effect may be caused by heating or cooling, the addition of a chemical, or some other factor affecting this system. This other factor could be a person who claims to have healing abilities and claims to affect the health of other people. If he claims that he can affect the health of other people, then, apparently, he can also affect biological or physico-chemical objects. The challenge is to test its impact. We work quite a lot with blood, and in fig. Figure 7 shows a diagram of one of the two types of experiments that served as test systems for testing such people. This is a well-known reaction of erythrocyte sedimentation, since for sure each of you has ever donated blood for analysis. Blood is drawn into a pipette, which is placed vertically, and the blood gradually begins to settle. We have created a device that allows us to follow the position of the boundary of the settling red blood with a good time resolution. Everyone who donated blood for analysis knows that the normal rate of blood sedimentation is somewhere up to 10 mm / hour, if it rises to 30–40 mm / hour, then this is already bad. We register the kinetic curve, follow the graph of blood sedimentation: we look at how it sits: monotonously, evenly, or sedimentation occurs with accelerations and decelerations.

Rice. 7. The principle of measuring the dynamics of erythrocyte sedimentation. Above - a diagram of the settling of red blood in a vertically installed pipette. Bottom - change in time of the position of the boundary (curve with crosses) and the rate of its subsidence in each given period of time (curve with circles).

The idea is very simple, with the help of a special electronic device, which will not be discussed here, every 10, 15, or 30 seconds the position of this border is recorded. At one point in time, the border was here; in a given period of time, it moved here. We divide this distance by time and, accordingly, we get the sinking speed for this period of time, then we slowed down, the speed became less, and here we get a graph (Fig. 7), which is a graph of the speed of movement of this boundary in time. Here we see that it settled quickly at first, and then began to settle more slowly. The other graph is just a graph of the position of this boundary at one time or another from the beginning of the experiment. This method is very sensitive in the sense that it allows you to see very well, gives reproducible results and allows you to see very subtle changes in the blood, because they all kind of integrate, any changes in the blood that happen one way or another will be reflected in one way or another. on the erythrocyte sedimentation rate. The request to the appropriate psychic or healer was the following: to act on the blood or to act on the physiological solution, which we then added to the blood, after which it was compared with the erythrocyte sedimentation rate in the control sample, which was not affected by him. Here it is taken from the same donor at the same time, in the same conditions, but outside of his influence, for him it was also a control, and for him it was a prototype or an effect of saline, with which we diluted the blood.

Interest in reactive oxygen species (ROS) and reactions involving them, as well as in antioxidants that block these reactions, has recently been growing rapidly, since ROS are associated with the development of a wide range of chronic diseases in humans. But within the framework of traditional concepts of biochemistry, it does not find a convincing explanation for the need for regular consumption of ROS with air (superoxide radical), water (hydrogen peroxide), food (Meillard reaction products) to increase the adaptive capabilities of the body, resistance to stress, and maintain high vital activity. The reasons for the high therapeutic efficacy of such strong oxidants as ozone and hydrogen peroxide with almost no side effects remain unclear. At the same time, almost no attention is paid to the unique feature of reactions involving ROS, i.e., their extremely high energy yield. It can be assumed that the absolute necessity of ROS for life and their beneficial therapeutic effect can be explained by the formation of electronically excited states during their reactions - triggers for all subsequent bioenergetic processes. The oscillatory mode of such reactions can cause the rhythmic flow of biochemical processes of a higher level. The pathogenetic effects of ROS can then be explained by dysregulation of both the processes of their generation and elimination.

Paradoxes of oxygen respiration.

The dynamics of the growth of scientific literature devoted to reactive oxygen species (ROS), free radicals, oxidative processes with their participation, speaks of the rapidly growing interest of biologists and physicians in them. Most publications on problems associated with reactive oxygen species emphasize their destructive effect on membranes, nucleic acids and proteins.

Since research on the role that ROS can play in biochemistry and physiology is dominated by a toxicological and pathophysiological bias, the number of publications on antioxidants is growing even faster than the total number of articles on ROS. If in the 25 years before 1990 the number of articles on antioxidants reviewed in Medline was less than 4500, then only in 1999 and 2000 it exceeded 6000.

At the same time, a huge array of data remains outside the field of view of most researchers, indicating the absolute need for ROS for vital processes. So, with a reduced content of superoxide radicals in the atmosphere, animals and humans become ill, and if they are absent for a long time, they die. The production of ROS normally takes 10-15%, and in special circumstances - up to 30% of the oxygen consumed by the body. It becomes clear that a certain “background” of ROS is necessary for the implementation of the action of bioregulatory molecules on cells, and ROS themselves can imitate the action of many of them. Oxytherapy is increasingly being used - the treatment of a wide range of diseases by artificial air ionization of air, the treatment of blood with such extremely active forms of oxygen as ozone and hydrogen peroxide.

Thus, numerous empirical data are in conflict with the scheme that has developed in classical biochemistry, in which ROS are seen only as overactive chemical particles that can disrupt the orderly course of normal biochemical processes. At the same time, the main feature of reactions involving ROS, i.e., their extremely high energy yield, sufficient to generate electronically excited states, is not taken into account. But thanks to this particular feature, they can form a kind of bioenergy flows necessary to start, maintain, and streamline various biochemical and physiological processes. We assume that reactions involving ROS play a fundamental (from the word "foundation") role in the organization of the most complex network of bio-physico-chemical processes, which together correspond to the concept of "living organism". To substantiate this assumption, it is necessary to dwell at least briefly on the unique properties of oxygen and its active forms.

Special properties of the oxygen molecule and its transformation products.

Oxygen is absolutely necessary for all organisms, and especially for human life. Just a few minutes without oxygen leads to permanent brain damage. The human brain, which makes up only 2% of the mass of its body, consumes about 20% of the oxygen received by the body. It is believed that almost all O2 is consumed during oxidative phosphorylation in mitochondria, but their content in the nervous tissue is no more, if not less, than in other energy-dependent tissues. Therefore, there must be another way of utilizing O2, and the brain must consume it more actively along this way than other tissues. An alternative to oxidative phosphorylation, the way of using O2 for energy production is its one-electron reduction. The properties of the O2 molecule, in principle, make it possible to obtain energy in this way as well.

Oxygen is unique among the molecules important for life. It contains 2 unpaired electrons in valence orbitals (M, where is an electron with a certain spin value), i.e. O2 is triplet in its ground state. Such particles have much more energy than molecules in the unexcited singlet state [M], when all their electrons are paired. O2 can become singlet only after receiving a considerable portion of energy. Thus, both the triplet and singlet states of oxygen are excited, energy-rich states. The excess energy of O2 (180 kcal / mol) is released when it is reduced to 2 water molecules, having received 4 electrons with hydrogen atoms, completely balancing the electron shells of both O atoms.

Despite the large excess of energy, O2 reacts with difficulty with the substances it oxidizes. Almost all electron donors available to it are singlet molecules, and a direct triplet-singlet reaction with the formation of products in the singlet state is impossible. If O2 in one way or another acquires an additional electron, then it can easily get the next ones. On the path of one-electron reduction of O2, intermediate compounds are formed, called ROS, due to their high chemical activity. Having received the first electron, O2 turns into the superoxide anion radical O2-. The addition of a second electron (along with two protons) turns the latter into hydrogen peroxide, H2O2. Peroxide, not being a radical, but an unstable molecule, can easily get a third electron, turning into an extremely active hydroxyl radical, HO, which easily takes away a hydrogen atom from any organic molecule, turning into water.

Free radicals differ from ordinary molecules not only in their high chemical activity, but also in that they generate chain reactions. Having “taken away” an available electron from a nearby molecule, the radical turns into a molecule, and the electron donor turns into a radical that can continue the chain further (Figure 1). Indeed, when free-radical reactions develop in solutions of bioorganic compounds, a few initial free radicals can cause damage to a huge number of biomolecules. That is why ROS are traditionally considered in the biochemical literature as extremely dangerous particles, and their appearance in the environment of the body explains many diseases and even sees them as the main cause of aging.

Targeted production of ROS by living cells.

All organisms are equipped with a variety of mechanisms for the targeted generation of ROS. The enzyme NADPH oxidase has long been known to actively produce “toxic” superoxide, behind which the entire gamma of ROS is generated. But until very recently, it was considered a specific property of phagocytic cells of the immune system, explaining the need for ROS production in critical circumstances of protection against pathogenic microorganisms and viruses. It is now clear that this enzyme is ubiquitous. It and similar enzymes are found in the cells of all three layers of the aorta, in fibroblasts, synocytes, chondrocytes, plant cells, yeast, in kidney cells, neurons and astrocytes of the cerebral cortex O2- produce other ubiquitous enzymes: NO-synthase, cytochrome P- 450, gamma-glutamyl transpeptidase, and the list continues to grow. It has recently been found that all antibodies are capable of producing H2O2; they are also ROS generators. According to some estimates, even at rest, 10-15% of all oxygen consumed by animals undergoes one-electron reduction, and under stress, when the activity of superoxide-generating enzymes increases sharply, the intensity of oxygen reduction increases by another 20%. Thus, ROS should play a very important role in normal physiology.

Bioregulatory role of ROS.

It turns out that ROS are directly involved in the formation of various physiological responses of cells to a particular molecular bioregulator. What exactly the reaction of the cell will be - whether it will enter the mitotic cycle, whether it will go towards differentiation or dedifferentiation, or whether the genes that trigger the process of apoptosis are activated in it, depends both on the specific bioregulator of a molecular nature that acts on specific cell receptors, and on the "context ”, in which this bioregulator operates: the prehistory of the cell and the background level of ROS. The latter depends on the ratio of rates and methods of production and elimination of these active particles.

The production of ROS by cells is influenced by the same factors that regulate the physiological activity of cells, in particular, hormones and cytokines. Different cells that make up a tissue react differently to a physiological stimulus, but individual reactions add up to the reaction of the tissue as a whole. So, factors affecting the activity of NADPH-oxidase of chondrocytes, osteoblasts stimulate the restructuring of cartilage and bone tissues. The activity of NADPH-oxidase in fibroblasts increases with their mechanical stimulation, and the rate of production of oxidants by the vascular wall is affected by the intensity and nature of the blood flow through them. When they suppress the production of ROS, the development of a multicellular organism is disrupted.

ROS themselves can mimic the action of many hormones and neurotransmitters. So, H2O2 in low concentrations mimics the action of insulin on fat cells, and insulin stimulates the activity of NADPH oxidase in them. Insulin antagonists, epinephrine and its analogs, inhibit NADPH oxidase of fat cells, and H2O2 inhibits the action of glucagon and adrenaline. It is essential that the generation of O2 and other ROS by cells precedes other events in the intracellular information chain.

Although there are many sources of ROS production in the body, their regular intake from the outside is necessary for the normal functioning of humans and animals. Even A.L. Chizhevsky showed that negatively charged air ions are necessary for normal life. It has now been established that Chizhevsky air ions are hydrated O2- radicals. And although their concentration in clean air is negligible (hundreds of pieces per cm3), but in their absence, experimental animals die within a few days with symptoms of suffocation. At the same time, air enrichment with superoxide up to 104 particles/cm3 normalizes blood pressure and its rheology, facilitates tissue oxygenation, and enhances the body's overall resistance to stress factors. . Other ROS, such as ozone (O3), H2O2, were used as early as the first third of the 20th century to treat a variety of chronic diseases, from multiple sclerosis to neurological pathologies and cancer. . Currently, they are rarely used in general medicine due to their alleged toxicity. Nevertheless, in recent years, especially in our country, ozone therapy is becoming more and more popular, and the use of intravenous infusions of diluted H2O2 solutions is also beginning.

Thus, it becomes clear that ROS are universal regulatory agents, factors that have a beneficial effect on vital processes from the cellular level to the level of the whole organism. But if ROS, unlike molecular bioregulators, do not have chemical specificity, how can they provide fine regulation of cellular functions?

Free radical reactions are sources of light impulses.

The only way to interrupt the dangerous radical chain reactions in which all new bioorganic molecules are involved is the recombination of two free radicals with the formation of a stable molecular product. But in a system where the concentration of radicals is very low and the concentration of organic molecules is high, the probability of two radicals meeting is negligible. It is remarkable that oxygen, which generates free radicals, is almost the only agent that can eliminate them. Being a bi-radical, it ensures the reproduction of mono-radicals, increasing the likelihood of their meeting. If the radical R interacts with O2, the peroxyl radical ROO is formed. It can snatch a hydrogen atom from a suitable donor, converting it into a radical, while itself becoming a peroxide. The O-O bond in peroxides is relatively weak, and under certain circumstances it can break, giving rise to 2 new radicals, RO and HO. This event is called delayed (relative to the main chain reaction) branching of chains. New radicals can recombine with others and break the chains they lead (Figure 2).

And here it is necessary to emphasize the unique feature of radical recombination reactions: the energy quanta released during such events are comparable to the energy of photons of visible and even UV light. Back in 1938, A.G. Gurvich showed that in the presence of oxygen dissolved in water in a system where chain free-radical processes occur with the participation of simple biomolecules, photons in the UV region of the spectrum can be emitted, which can stimulate mitoses in cell populations (therefore, such radiation was called mitogenetic). When studying ROS-initiated autoxidation processes in aqueous solutions of glycine or glycine and reducing sugars (glucose, fructose, ribose), we observed super-weak emission from them in the blue-green region of the spectrum and confirmed Gurvich's ideas about the branched-chain nature of these reactions.

A.G. Gurvich was the first to discover that plants, yeasts, microorganisms, as well as some organs and tissues of animals serve as sources of mitogenetic radiation in a "calm" state, and this radiation is strictly oxygen-dependent. Of all animal tissues, only blood and nervous tissue possessed such radiation. Using modern photon detection technology, we fully confirmed Gurvich's statement about the ability of fresh, undiluted human blood to be a source of photon emission even in a calm state, which indicates continuous generation of ROS in the blood and recombination of radicals. With artificial excitation of immune reactions in the blood, the intensity of the radiation of whole blood increases sharply. It has recently been shown that the intensity of radiation from the brain of a rat is so high that it can be detected by highly sensitive equipment even on a whole animal.

As noted above, a significant part of O2 in the body of humans and animals is reduced by a one-electron mechanism. But at the same time, the current concentrations of ROS in cells and the extracellular matrix are very low due to the high activity of enzymatic and non-enzymatic mechanisms for their elimination, known collectively as "antioxidant protection". Some elements of this protection operate at a very high speed. Thus, the speed of superoxide dismutase (SOD) and catalase exceeds 106 revolutions/sec. SOD catalyzes the dismutation (recombination) reaction of two superoxide radicals with the formation of H2O2 and oxygen, while catalase decomposes H2O2 to oxygen and water. Usually, attention is paid only to the detoxifying effect of these enzymes and low molecular weight antioxidants - ascorbate, tocopherol, glutathione, etc. But what is the point of intensive generation of ROS, for example, by NADPH oxidase, if its products are immediately eliminated by SOD and catalase?

In biochemistry, the energy of these reactions is usually not considered, while the energy yield of one act of superoxide dimsutation is about 1 eV, and that of H2O2 decomposition is 2 eV, which is equivalent to a quantum of yellow-red light. In general, with the complete one-electron reduction of one O2 molecule, 8 eV is released (for comparison, we point out that the energy of a UV photon with lambda = 250 nm is 5 eV). At maximum enzyme activity, energy is released at a megahertz frequency, which makes it difficult to quickly dissipate it in the form of heat. Useless dissipation of this valuable energy is also unlikely because its generation takes place in an organized cellular and extracellular environment. It has been experimentally established that it can be radiatively and nonradiatively transferred to macromolecules and supramolecular ensembles, and used as an activation energy or to modulate enzymatic activity.

Radical recombination, both in delayed branch chain reactions (Fig. 2) and mediated by enzymatic and non-enzymatic antioxidants, not only provides high-density energy to drive and maintain more specialized biochemical processes. They can support their rhythmic flow, since self-organization occurs in processes involving ROS, which manifests itself in the rhythmic release of photons.

Oscillatory modes of reactions involving ROS.

The possibility of self-organization in redox model reactions, expressed in the appearance of oscillations of the redox potential or color, was shown long ago using the Belousov-Zhabotinsky reactions as an example. The development of an oscillatory regime during catalysis of the oxidation of NADH with oxygen by peroxidase is known. However, until recently, the role of electronically excited states in the occurrence of these oscillations was not taken into account. It is known that in aqueous solutions of carbonyl compounds (for example, glucose, ribose, methylglyoxal) and amino acids, oxygen is reduced, free radicals appear, and their reactions are accompanied by photon emission. Recently, we have shown that in such systems, under conditions close to physiological, an oscillatory radiation regime occurs, which indicates the self-organization of the process in time and space. It is significant that such processes, known as the Meilard reaction, continuously occur in cells and non-cellular space. Figure 3 shows that these oscillations do not decay for a long time and can have a complex shape, i.e. are pronounced non-linear oscillations.

The influence of classical antioxidants, for example, ascorbate, on the nature of these oscillations is interesting (Figure 4). It was found that under conditions when pronounced radiation oscillations do not occur in the system, ascorbate at a negligible concentration (1 μM) contributes to their appearance and, up to a concentration of 100 μM, sharply increases the overall radiation intensity and oscillation amplitude. Those. it behaves like a typical pro-oxidant. Only at a concentration of 1 mM, ascorbate acts as an antioxidant, significantly lengthening the lag phase of the process. But when it is partially consumed, the radiation intensity increases to maximum values. Such phenomena are characteristic of chain processes with degenerate branches

Oscillatory processes involving ROS also occur at the level of whole cells and tissues. Thus, in individual granulocytes, where ROS are generated by NADPH oxidases, the entire set of these enzymes is "turned on" strictly for 20 seconds, and in the next 20 seconds the cell performs other functions. Interestingly, in cells from septic blood, this rhythm is significantly disturbed. We found that oscillatory modes of photon emission are characteristic not only for individual cells, but also for suspensions of neutrophils (Figure 5A) and even for undiluted whole blood, to which lucigenin is added, an indicator of the generation of superoxide radical in it (Figure 5B). It is essential that the observed fluctuations are of a complex, multilevel nature. The oscillation periods range from tens of minutes to their fractions (inset in Fig. 5A).

The significance of the oscillatory nature of both regulatory and executive biochemical and physiological processes is only beginning to be realized. More recently, it has been proven that intracellular signaling, carried out by one of the most important bioregulators, calcium, is due not just to a change in its concentration in the cytoplasm. Information lies in the frequency of oscillations of its intracellular concentration. These discoveries require a revision of ideas about the mechanisms of biological regulation. Until now, when studying the reaction of a cell to a bioregulator, only its dose (signal amplitude) was taken into account, it becomes clear that the main information lies in the oscillatory nature of the change in parameters, in amplitude, frequency and phase modulations of oscillatory processes.

Of the many bioregulatory substances, ROS are the most suitable candidates for the role of triggers of oscillatory processes, because they are in constant motion, more precisely, they are continuously generated and die, but when they die, electronically excited states are born - impulses of electromagnetic energy. We assume that the mechanisms of the biological action of ROS are determined by the structure of the processes in which they participate. By the “structure of processes” we mean the frequency-amplitude characteristics and the degree of phase consistency of the processes of generation and relaxation of EVS accompanying reactions of ROS interaction with each other or with singlet molecules. The generated electromagnetic impulses can activate specific molecular acceptors, and the structure of EMU generation processes determines the rhythms of biochemical, and at a higher level, physiological processes. This, probably, explains the specificity of the action of ROS, these agents that are extremely nonspecific from a chemical point of view. Depending on the frequency of their birth and death, the structure of EMU generation processes should change, and, therefore, the spectrum of acceptors of this energy will also change, since different acceptors - low molecular weight bioregulators, proteins, nucleic acids can perceive only resonant frequencies.

Our assumption allows us to explain many disparate phenomena from a unified standpoint. Thus, the role of antioxidants seems to be much richer than in the framework of traditional ideas. Of course, they prevent nonspecific chemical reactions that damage biomacromolecules in the presence of excessive ROS production. But their main function is to organize and ensure the diversity of process structures involving ROS. The more instruments in such an "orchestra", the richer its sound. Perhaps that is why herbal therapy, vitamin therapy and other forms of naturopathy are so successful - after all, these "food supplements" contain a variety of antioxidants and coenzymes - generators and acceptors of EMU energy. Together they provide a full and harmonious set of rhythms of life.

It becomes clear why for normal life it is necessary to consume at least negligible amounts of ROS with air, water and food, despite the active generation of ROS in the body. The fact is that full-fledged processes involving ROS sooner or later die out, since their inhibitors, free radical traps, gradually accumulate in the course of them. The analogy here can be seen with a fire, which is extinguished even in the presence of fuel, if the products of incomplete combustion begin to take away more and more energy from the flame. The ROS entering the body act as "sparks" that rekindle the "flame" - the generation of ROS by the body itself, which allows you to burn out the products of incomplete combustion. Especially many of these products accumulate in a sick body, and therefore ozone therapy and hydrogen peroxide therapy are so effective.

Rhythms that occur during the exchange of ROS in the body, to one degree or another, depend on external pacemakers. The latter include, in particular, oscillations of external electromagnetic and magnetic fields, since reactions involving ROS are, in essence, unpaired electron transfer reactions occurring in an active medium. Such processes, as follows from modern concepts of the physics of nonlinear self-oscillatory systems, are very sensitive to very weak in intensity, but resonant influences. In particular, processes involving ROS can be the primary acceptors of abrupt changes in the intensity of the Earth's geomagnetic field, the so-called geomagnetic storms. To some extent, they can respond to low-intensity but ordered fields of modern electronic devices - computers, cell phones, etc., and if their rhythm of processes involving ROS is weakened and depleted, such external influences, with certain characteristics, increase the probability of uncoupling and chaotization of biochemical and physiological processes dependent on the generation of electronically excited states.

instead of a conclusion.

The above analysis of empirical data related to such a “hot” topic of reactive oxygen species and antioxidants led us to conclusions that, to a certain extent, contradict the currently dominant approaches to solving medical problems. We cannot rule out that some of the above assumptions and hypotheses will not be fully confirmed when they are experimentally verified. But, nevertheless, we are convinced that the main conclusion: processes involving ROS play a fundamental bio-energy-information role in the formation and implementation of life is true. Of course, like any other mechanism, the fine mechanism of processes involving ROS can be disturbed. In particular, one of the main dangers for its normal functioning may be the lack of oxygen in the environment where it flows. And it is then that those processes begin to develop that pose a real danger - the spread of chain radical reactions, in which many biologically important macromolecules are damaged. As a result, giant macromolecular chimeras arise, which include atherosclerotic and amyloid plaques, age spots (lipofuscin), other sclerotic structures, and many still poorly identified ballast, or rather, toxic substances. The body fights them by intensifying the production of ROS, but it is in ROS that they see the cause of the pathology and seek to eliminate them immediately. One can, however, hope that a deeper understanding of the diverse mechanisms of oxygen utilization by humans and animals will help to effectively deal with the causes, and not the consequences of diseases, which often reflect the body's own efforts in the struggle for life.

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According to the site: http://www.gastroportal.ru/php/content.php?id=1284

Lecture at the XVI school-seminar "Modern problems of physiology and pathology of digestion", Pushchino-on-Oka, May 14-17, 2001, published in Appendix No. 14 to the Russian Journal of Gastroenterology, Hepatology, Coloproctology "Materials of the XVI session of the Academic School-Seminar named after A .M. Ugolev "Modern problems of physiology and pathology of digestion", 2001, volume XI, No. 4, pp. 128-136