The Hidden Science of How Exercise & Food Impact Your DNA

Apr 29

Written By Nathan Schechter, ACSM CPT, CYT, PN1-NC

“Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.”
- Voltaire

“Living systems, we are. Not frozen in time, but flowing, changing, becoming.“
- paraphrased wisdom from a galaxy far, far away

Video

Audio

I wanted to start us off by talking a little bit about models and ways of looking at things because I think it's a little tricky. Here you have models of complex systems and as you shared with me - so many events are happening in a living system - and trying to map that.

I think you said to me once that you could go mad trying just to map what goes on in one cell. And yet models kind of aid our thinking, right?

They help us solve problems, but it's also easy to fall in love with a model or misapply a model or misunderstand a model.

And when we get this opportunity to talk with folks and get a more nuanced sense of things, it does help us to get an increased likelihood of success.

It helps us understand the world around us better. And, also, I think, gives us a better sense of the excitement of learning - that there's a lot that's unknown and there's a lot out there to discover.

Audio Podcast

QUOTES

Dr. Daniel Guerra: Everything biochemically in you, if you wanna get down to that, is unique just to you. And we will never know what it is because we can't measure all of that. 'cause it's constantly changing.

Nathan Schechter: And so it sounds like you're talking about the love, the love of the learning, that you actually incorporate the learning, almost like you digest food, that you take it in, you assimilate it, you are trying to understand it. And in, in that process, it sort of becomes a little bit of a part of you that then informs your increased mastery of your field. Am I getting that?

Dr. Daniel Guerra: And life becomes beautiful. Life becomes more beautiful.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: 45 years ago. I remembered it because the professors I had were like, amazing. And they were as amazed by the phenomena as they were teaching it.

Nathan Schechter: It was one of the things that I really picked up in talking to you is this love of original thinking versus just simple pattern recognition that that's a useful skill, but that original thinking really is a different skill.

And I'm just curious, you know, with everything you've studied over the years, was there a moment that like, completely changed how you think about biochemistry or, or how you think about life? You know, can you pick one maybe as an example?

Dr. Daniel Guerra: Yeah. I would say when I first started getting into the epigenetics literature … Epi just means above. It means the sequence of events that usually involves some kind of covalent modification of certain nucleotides in the DNA or RNA. Covalent modification means adding something.

Nathan Schechter: I also hear you saying in a lot of things that you say that if we think about genetics in a very simple way, like this causes blue eyes, this causes this, then it's a simple tic-tac toe game that anybody can play. And it's very simplistic.

But if we look at the greater epigenetic complexity, which has been described by people like Waddington and others, which is much more, like anything could possibly happen, like when you drop a marble and it bounces all the way down and you don't know where it's gonna go, now you have a much more vast, complex - and all these ways that you've tried to describe today - possibilities of events that might happen that are so sophisticated and so vast - that it almost becomes hard to say this causes this in a simplistic way or that causes that.

And when you're confronted with that, what really takes the day is a better ability to think with original thought in a way that really begins to accrue mastery. Because then you have a better shot when you throw the dart of coming close to the bullseye, at least because you're not just repeating some simple pattern, which doesn't match up to the complexity of living systems and how they actually unfold.

Am I hearing that right?

Dr. Daniel Guerra: That's exactly right.

“Membranes are so complex and they're not just barriers. What they are is a communication network.” - Dr. Daniel Guerra

Nathan Schechter: But you were saying well membranes have a sequence (like DNA), but we don't even understand the sequence. Can you explain?

Dr. Daniel Guerra: When you say that about membranes, people, people go - their eyes just explode. Other biochemists do …

Dr. Daniel Guerra: These are events. Even the, just the DNA molecule is an event that has to be read, right? It's not just sitting there like all of a sudden it spills out messenger RNA. It's being read by RNA polymerase 2 and transcription factors and proteins that unwind the DNA

Dr. Daniel Guerra: It's not like, well, you must be then a well-trained older biochemist to get this. No. What you need is a person that knows this, who can effectively give that to other people, that knowledge base,

Nathan Schechter: There's something called frequency modulation, which again, for folks who may not know, if you just think of an FM radio, there's a wave coming through the air to your radio antenna and somebody's imprinted information on that wave.

Most people can understand that.

If you say your cell phone, it's a different kind of wave. It's a microwave or whatever kind of wave, but again, there's information traveling on the wave.

Most people go, “okay, I get that.”

That's not too hard for folks. Right?

And then if you say to them, well, now think inside your body.

And inside your body there's a communication system that's just like that. There's waves that are traveling with information, but now we're talking electrochemical waves.

And depending on the frequency of those waves, they're sending certain signals.

Now somebody might not go from that to understanding everything about how the entire system works, but it's one piece that somebody might grab onto and go, “Huh, that's a really interesting idea.”

And now they're starting down that larger path.

Nathan Schechter: It sounds like you're talking a bit about the ease of belief, that some people just want it to be easy, so you can latch onto a simple model, and then if you latch onto a simple model, you just say, well, that's how it is.

Even if that's not really how it is, or it's misapplied, it's just easier than doing the work to understand something more, and that you run into that a lot

Dr. Daniel Guerra: and it's sad because people really do want the knowledge.

Nathan Schechter: Do you think that this is one of the ways that it happens, that if people have more of a day-to-day relationship, they see somebody, they, you know, they come in, they empty the garbage, they stop and chat for 15 minutes, they're there next week, that slowly the information starts to come out because it's happening sort of informally over a period of time.

And that that's a another way for people to learn besides just sitting down in a lecture. I mean, both are useful, but that, perhaps, if people are often stumbling against feeling - either overwhelmed by information or it's too much, or they don't wanna take it in -that when they're talking to somebody they can get these little, so for example - you just gave the idea of a threshold,

“Hey, you're taking a supplement? Does the chemical that you're putting into the body rise to a threshold?”

That's an idea that somebody could walk away with in 15 minutes.

And also they could relate it back to what you were talking about earlier, which is.

”Oh, you mean the things that I eat, they cause these substrates, that cause certain thresholds, which then trigger things in genetics?”

“Oh. I'm starting to understand this idea about how thresholds have to be achieved inside cells. Inside the body. Whether it's a medication, whether it's a normal metabolic process”

and so they've learned a little something from you, even though they might not have the depth of somebody who's been at it this intensity for 40 years.

Do you think that's a possible way for people to begin?

Dr. Daniel Guerra: And you imagine all the time. You can put right now in your mind while I'm talking and you're listening to me, what the color of your dashboard is in your car, right? You can. It's not there, is it? All imagination means that you can conjure something in your mind that's not there. Doesn't mean never is there, doesn't mean it's purely fiction.

And so you have to imagine all the time 'cause imagination is populated by ideas and those ideas - imagination is a faculty of reason.

Nathan Schechter: You said to me, imagination is a faculty of reason. What do you mean by that?

Dr. Daniel Guerra: Your reasoning skills require a constant ability to take in information as it's coming.

And when you're doing that, when the actual signal transduction to cascade works, because of the wave particles hitting receptors that are moving through your eyes and your other four senses, that phenomena is being translated in your mind immediately. But it has no meaning until, and this is something we have no biochemical correlate for, but it's what reasoning does.

I can explain what reasoning does, but I can't tell you there's any biochemical correlate to it.

Short Summary for Non-Scientists

Even from a hard-core scientific perspective, there is an awe-inspiring moment when you realize just how unbelievably intricate and coordinated the machinery of life is. There's an almost incomprehensible precision and beauty to how cells work.
No matter how much you break it down, there's something about how life works that’s beyond full understanding — because we are always becoming, not just being.
Life isn't just DNA — it's how the environment talks to DNA right now, every second.
There is a level of continuous adaptation that shows we’re not static beings — we're processes, unfolding molecular events that are always changing and reacting, down to the lipid membrane level. We are living processes (“events”), not fixed things.
Membranes (like those around cells and organelles) are not just passive walls. They're dynamic, self-organizing systems (and have their own sequences - like DNA).
Membranes are constantly rebuilding and adjusting themselves, using a vast array of lipids and proteins.
This process happens at incredible speed, with extremely high accuracy, even while handling enormous molecular complexity — hundreds of different lipid species, signaling molecules, and structural components, all changing in response to conditions.
As we age or experience disease, the regulation of this membrane dynamics can start to falter, which contributes to breakdowns in cell function.
Thoughts on teaching and learning.
Thoughts on the lack of biochemical correlates to how humans perceive through senses.
Insights on cancer and approaches to understanding it and treating it.
Thoughts on Alzheimer’s disease.
Guidelines for a healthy life.

Transcript

Dr. Daniel Guerra: The vitality of living systems. And it took me really a long time as a biochem professor and as a research scientist, all this time to really start to comprehend complexity. It does, the word itself doesn't even really come close to what it is.

Nathan Schechter: It sounds like you're talking about the magnitude of the job.

Nathan Schechter: I mean, if we're gonna put it into very simple terms that a geneticist might look at coding, they might be interested in what particular region produces what particular protein. But what you're saying is: “Yeah, but that happens through chemistry - chemistry inside a living …

Dr. Daniel Guerra: It’s all biochemistry. Those nucleotides have to be synthesized and end up in a sequence.

Nathan Schechter: Right. And that chemistry is so complex and has to be on such a massive scale and timed so perfectly and have such great fidelity that when you look at it, it's almost awesome to behold, like looking at the Grand Canyon because you have this …

Dr. Daniel Guerra: It's like a living systems are really a miracle.

Nathan Schechter: Welcome to the Mind Body Literacy Podcast and videocast. I'm your host, Nathan Schechter. A lot of the best sharing and learning happens in conversations, often ones that are informal and private. But what if you could be a fly on the wall and listen in?

Nathan Schechter: The Mind Body Literacy VP-cast highlights different people with different perspectives.It's particularly aimed at sharing insights between professional silos of knowledge that work with the mind and the body. So, for example, massage therapists can hear how psychoanalysts think, and neurologists can hear how their ideas might be used by dancers or yogis because the mind and the body are too complex for any one person or group of people to understand it alone.

Narrator: The information and content provided by Mind Body Literacy and in the Mind Body Literacy Podcast and video cast is general information and it's intended for educational purposes only individual situations vary, and this content is not intended as nor should it be used as a substitute for professional medical or psychological advice, diagnosis, or treatment.

Narrator: No guarantee or warranties are given with respect to the accuracy, applicability, fitness, or completeness of the content.

Nathan Schechter: With over 40 years of experience in biochemistry, Dr. Daniel Guerra has worked at the intersection of research, teaching and consulting, making science accessible to diverse audiences.

Nathan Schechter: Dr. Guerra acts as a bridge between scientific research and real world application, ensuring that the right people receive the appropriate level of information. His work covers a wide range of topics, providing in-depth analysis of published evidence-based, peer-reviewed research, literature and clinical studies in areas including:

Biochemistry, genetics, biomedicine, pharmacology, microbiology, complimentary and alternative medicines, nutrition and diets, and physical exercise for the promotion of a healthy population.

Nathan Schechter: His research and consulting have helped shape medical treatments, guide research initiatives, and inform healthcare decisions. In his consulting work, Dr. Guerra analyzes scientific literature at various levels for different audiences for academic and private industry clients.

Nathan Schechter: He focuses on research development and securing funding. For doctors and healthcare providers, he breaks down complex research on pharmaceuticals, supplements, and medical treatments, explaining how they interact with the body based on factors like genetics, age, and health conditions. And for patients, he provides consultations and clear summaries of the latest evidence on their medical concerns.

Nathan Schechter: For institutions, he conducts deep reviews of biomedical research, including cancer studies and clinical trials. And finally, for students, he offers guidance on cutting edge research in biochemistry and medicine, helping them understand both animal and human studies. He also prepares professional students for exams like the MCAT and medical boards.

Nathan Schechter: Dr. Guerra has also taught a wide range of biochemistry, molecular biology, and medical science courses at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. Some of the courses he has taught include:

graduate biochemistry, lipid biochemistry, graduate research methods, biochemistry, genomics and molecular biology of exercise, physiology and nutrition.

Nathan Schechter: You can learn more about Dr. Guerra’s work on his podcast available on Apple podcasts. It's called Authentic Biochemistry.

Please join me in welcoming Dr. Daniel Guerra.

Nathan Schechter: So welcome everybody to the Mind Body Literacy Podcast, and my guest today is Dr. Daniel Guerra. He has over 40 years of experience in the field of biochemistry.

Nathan Schechter: Dan, thank you so much for being here. I really appreciate it because you do bring such a depth and breadth of knowledge in so many ways. You've published over, I think it is 40 papers. You have your PhD in biochemistry, and you also do many interesting things. You're the host of your own podcast: the Authentic Biochemistry Podcast.

Nathan Schechter:You break down for many different kinds of folks at many different levels peer reviewed research in the field of biochemistry and genetics. You're also somebody who's very interested in finding the truth of how things really work and, and sharing that with folks.

Nathan Schechter: So it's really a pleasure to have you on the show. And I wanted to start us off just by talking a little bit about models and ways of looking at things because I think it's a little tricky because here you have models of complex systems and as you shared with me - so many events are happening in a living system - and trying to map that.

Nathan Schechter: I think you said to me once that you could go mad trying just to map what goes on in one cell. And yet models kind of aid our thinking, right? They help us solve problems, but it's also easy to kind of fall in love with a model or misapply a model or misunderstand a model. And when we can get this opportunity to talk with folks and get a more nuanced sense of things it does help us to get an increased likelihood of success.

Nathan Schechter: It helps us understand the world around us better. And it also, I think, gives us a better sense of the excitement of learning - that there's a lot that's unknown and there's a lot out there to discover. And one of the key places that that happened for me when we were first speaking was you just said something in the midst of our talking and I want to share what it was and then ask you about it.

Nathan Schechter: But also break it down a little for those of our folks who aren't maybe scientists or folks in the healthcare fields. But you just said to me, just in passing, you said, you know, there's a synchronization between metabolism and gene expression. And you said it was - it's on the level of modifying DNA and nucleotides.

Nathan Schechter: And I just started thinking about that because in my journey and path I had come along this way where first I was looking at things from the perspective of exercise and nutrition. And then as I went deeper into it, it was - okay, now I understood about metabolic pathways- but I hadn't made in my mind - even though you begin to learn that exercise changes mitochondria and vascularization, and it does all these things - I hadn't really stopped to think about that bridge and that connection to genetics, you know?

Nathan Schechter: Right. And then when you said that to me, I was like, oh yeah, it's not happening by magic. Right. And you said it's transcription translation, and so you really completed in my mind. You know, almost like, you know, I had gone and thought of having a trip. I had bought the plane ticket, you know, but I had forgotten to board the plane, you know?

Nathan Schechter: Right. And so, like, the process wasn't finished. And so when you said that it really filled something in for me, and so that's why I wanna start there. And for folks maybe who are starting at a very beginning level just to say, you know, metabolism, which is this process of breaking down molecules in food, the major groupings of food that we often talk about, which are lipids or fats.

Nathan Schechter: We often refer to them as, or refer to them as proteins, carbohydrates, and then how we derive energy from these. And the way in which this gets studied, and then how that connects to - what I even have learned in talking with you and then going back and looking at things - that my understanding of genetics is very outdated.

Nathan Schechter: You know, that these models of genetics is a code that produces x is very simplified as a model. But you started to share with me and you said, look, it is that there is the synchronization - that that is something where the DNA is getting modified, the nucleotides are getting modified, that this is happening quickly - it's happening in real time - , and that your metabolism is influencing what's happening in the genetics.

Nathan Schechter: Can you talk a little bit about that and maybe about these things like covalent modification and molar concentration and frequency modulation - share with the audience what that's about, how that works and what that looks like.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: Sure. Well, when you think about the living system, particularly a eukaryotic cell, that is already complex because there are individual organelles, subcellular, and each one of those organelles are gonna have membrane around them, which means immediately you understand that whatever's occurring in that organelle is unique to it.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: But you also understand that those organelles, none of them are working in isolation. In fact, for the cell to function, they have to be - not, occasionally, not randomly, certainly not randomly, and not even intermittently - in communication. What's going on inside the lumen of the endoplasmic reticulum or the peroxisome, or the golgi, or the mitochondrion, or the nucleus all have to be communicating for that cell to function.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: It's not simply that something has to change in the cell, and then the mitochondria is going to, let's say, increase ATP synthesis because there is a need for more bioenergetics because the cell simply, the simplest mode you can think about is ready to divide, right? So the cell could go through cell cycle, and that means two things have to happen front and center.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: You have to replicate the genome and you have to replicate the membrane. All the membrane, that means de novo, fatty acid synthesis, de novo cholesterologenesis. So the two major types of lipids, Prenol lipids,and Acyl lipids those are two major pathways. And for you to be able to coordinate that with the nucleus, you meaning the cell, the cell, to be able to coordinate just at the biochemical level means that all of those systems have to be poised at their correct molecular and equilibrium dynamics.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: And by that I mean all of the intermediates in the pathway and all the potential enzymatic reactions, which can run into first the maybe hundreds, then thousands, then tens of thousands of things have to happen. All, not just like immediately, but in a particular sequence that is both spatial and temporal.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: So a lot of people think of the physicists coming up with space time now. You know, it was the ancient Greeks that really understood space time and it's just, we've been derivitizing that all the rest of our generations. So in a living system you have functioning temporal events, and those temporal events are following a very, very, very specific set of time intervals.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: And okay, one in particular, when a protein is synthesized, first of all you have to have nascent transcription. So that means proteins from the cytoplasm, and maybe from one of those organelles I mentioned a few minutes ago, acting as proteins, have to translocate to the nucleus. Now that in itself is a temporal and spatial event, so it has to move, and those proteins aren't just like swimming in an aqueous solution.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: You know, the nucleus isn't just okay, everything is just water. Everything's water soluble. So you have to think down to that leve. In fact, transcription factors, which are polypeptides, they themselves also are mobilized with carbohydrate and with lipid. So it's not just a protein coming into the nucleus, binding to the DNA - at a very specific location we call a promoter and enhancer region.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: Those are called the CIS acting elements. Those are DNA, right? Your protein is working in what we call trans. So you have a protein binding to DNA. Yes, the protein recognizes that DNA, that huge macromolecular structure as substrate, that simply put - but how does it find it?

Dr. Daniel Guerra: And how does it know where in this humongous genome does it find the promoter? Just to cause the expression of, specifically, 'cause we're talking about a cell cycle, acetyl-CoA carboxylase (ACC), that is the first enzyme that has to be expressed, first transcript made. Then the transcript has to be spliced correctly, and there are splice variants.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: Then that messenger, RNA, has to be five prime capped and three prime polyadenylated. So that that mRNA now has the correct signature in a sequence. It's not simply a molecule. All these things we're talking about are events. This is real time happening where there are transformations of molecules.

Nathan Schechter: I want to ask you a question about temporal, but before I do, I just want to translate some of what you said into layperson terms.

Nathan Schechter: It sounds like you're talking about a very complex coordination that, you know, if we all go back to high school cell biology and we look at a cell and inside the cell is an aqueous solution - the cytoplasm - and inside of that are the individual organelles, which each have their jobs - that the organelles have membranes, the cell itself has a membrane, and that these are not totally separate things.

Nathan Schechter: They are coordinating with each other in a very complex way. And then when we're talking about processes inside - again, just to go back for folks to basic high school - inside the cell you have the DNA, strands of DNA, the two twisted helixes and they're spread out like spaghetti inside the cell.

Nathan Schechter: And when the cell decides it wants to, you gave the very simplest example of divide - we have these processes of transcription where the two strands kind of separate a little bit because certain enzymes come along, sort of like if you think of running your hand along a bead of a beaded necklace.

Nathan Schechter: And as it does that it builds up a messenger, RNA. So a separate strand?

Dr. Daniel Guerra: No, no. When the genome, when the genome replicates …

Nathan Schechter: Yeah.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: That's a totally different process than transcription. Transcription is simply making a messenger RNA. Particular molecular species that when it leaves the nucleus.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: Then will be translated on polyribosomes in the cytoplasm. Ribosomes in the endoplasmic reticulum.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: And the molecule itself, the RNA has a chemical signature and that that chemical signature directs it towards the poly ribosomes and the cytoplasm or the ribosomes and endoplasmic reticulum.

Nathan Schechter: Right, it travels out into the cell

Dr. Daniel Guerra: So replication though is a totally different thing that DNA does. So, DNA replicates it, recombines, it repairs, and it becomes transcribed. Four different molecular -, all of them, all of them have to be coordinated for cell cycle. So new transcripts have to be made, but at the same time, the entire genome has to be replicated.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: That means that the DNA has to be replicated - every single nucleotide - and with huge, precise, pristine fidelity.

Nathan Schechter: Right. So you're talking about massive things that are millions.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: daughter cell has to have the same genome, right? You can't just, like the cell, just can't make a mistake here or there. Any mistake.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: That genome is faulty and that cell will not survive.

Nathan Schechter: Right. So you're talking millions of base pairs that have to be flawlessly recreated in a sequence.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: Yeah. The fidelity, we talk about DNA, fidelity. Yeah. And mutation. People know about mutations. Sometimes mutations can be, have no effect because most of the DNA does not code for polypeptide.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: That's only like five, that maybe less than 10% of all the DNA will actually result in a messenger. RNA, most of the DNA is what we call intervening sequences, introns. It's only the exons that get expressed. And so when we first discovered that, and I had professors who taught me were the people who discovered that sort of stuff, right?

Dr. Daniel Guerra: So I was really lucky to have them as my mentors. 'cause it wasn't that long ago. We didn't know anything like this. I mean, Watson and Crick in the late fifties, just figuring out the structure of one type of DNA. Now we know all this, what I call floor detail. So people, when they study it, you can't simplify it.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: That's what I don't do in authentic biochemistry. That’s why it's called authentic. If you want to learn what biochemistry is, which is the foundation of living systems, and what's more important to us than that. It's not a bias. You ask a geneticist, what's the foundation of living systems?

Dr. Daniel Guerra: It's biochemical processes because everything that geneticists do is a biochemical derivation, right? They look at the DNA and they say, okay, here's the particular coding region for a protein. That's like the dumbest thing to think about. It's the simplest thing to have is a code for something. But how does that all get arranged simultaneously - and at the same time - abruptly stop?

Dr. Daniel Guerra: When I say abruptly, how about at the level of a microsecond all the way up the millisecond in seconds? So if you have a stuff, for example, if you're replicating a genome, there are proteins that bind to the DNA, that control. They're called cell cycle checkpoint proteins, and some of them, when they have a minor mutation, those are the worst oncogenes.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: For example, P53. When you hear a term like that, the P stands for protein and the number after it has to do with its size and kilodaltons . Okay? P53 is a protein is 53 kilodaltons. See, but that doesn't say anything about the protein. That's all geneticists wanna know is if this protein has a mutation, what is it doing?

Dr. Daniel Guerra: It's allowing the cell cycle to proceed, make a division. And what happens when you get rapid cell division with a mutation that's called cancer, right? See, so we have checkpoints during cell cycle when at a microsecond level, if something is wrong with the, the way the DNA is being replicated, it's stopped by these proteins.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: Those proteins actually destroy the protein transcription factor binding to that DNA and stop it from happening. It's no, this cell will not replicate because replicating it, if it continues to replicate, it can not only just kill the tissue, it can kill the organism. See, so the vitality of living systems, and it took me really a long time as a biochem professor and as a research scientist all this time to really start to comprehend complexity.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: It doesn't, the word itself doesn't even really come close to what it is.

Nathan Schechter: It sounds like you're talking about the magnitude, the magnitude of the job. I mean, if we're gonna put it into very simple terms that, that a geneticist might look at coding, they might be interested in what particular region produces what particular protein.

Nathan Schechter: But what you're saying is Yeah, but that happens through chemistry. You know, chemistry inside a living.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: Well, it's all biochemistry. Yeah. Those nucleotides, you had to be synthesized and end up in a sequence. Right.

Nathan Schechter: And that, that chemistry is so complex and has to be on such a massive scale and timed so perfectly and have such great fidelity that when you look at it, it's almost awesome to behold by looking at the Grand Canyon because you have this,

Dr. Daniel Guerra: it's like a living systems are really a miracle in that we cannot create life.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: We can't except by procreating. What does that mean? Life begets life. You cannot take something that isn't living and turn it into life. Right. There is not no way to do that. Okay.

Nathan Schechter: I wanna ask you another question because I know you've talked to me a little bit about membrane even

Dr. Daniel Guerra: goes back to where does life come from?

Dr. Daniel Guerra: You see, I remember, um, Crick had this hypothesis called Panspermia, you know, Crick who was part of the original Watson and Crick group. He moved to California, left Britain, and he worked in - he built some original, the first biotech labs down in southern California, LA Jolla. And he worked on a lot of stuff after DNA, right after the structure of DNA.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: And people would ask him these questions and he would answer them saying, well, we don't really know where life comes from. So maybe there was some living matter on a meteor. It landed, and that's where life comes from. So even way back then, people realized that we don't really have any kind of theory of where life comes from.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: It's not just like all of a sudden the earth cooled and we had these gases and we had all these compounds that turned into amino acids. It's like rubbish. Okay. You don't get life like that. You get a soup of a bunch of organic compounds. And not only that, somehow life, you have a membrane. That's why as a lipid biochemist, I know people think I'm biased

Dr. Daniel Guerra: they don't like it.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: Other biochemists don't like lipid biochemistry usually because we tend to take center stage when we start discussing this. 'cause you don't have life unless you have a membrane. Okay, how do you get these membranes? And you say, well, it didn't, it just circles around and now it's us and them right inside out.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: Like no membranes are so complex and they're not just barriers. What they are is a communication network. All those organelles we're talking about with all those different membranes that endomembrane. I wrote a, a review article on the endomembrane system a couple years ago if you wanna get a copy of it, and, and I was the first one to come up with an idea that the endomembrane system, I mean, I'm sure I wasn't the first to come up with the idea.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: First one that published a paper on it. Because the endomembrane system is actually the communication network of life because the membranes aren't just sitting there allowing channels to be formed. The membranes are segregating and storing everything. From gene expression at the level of DNA, going to RNA from the RNA splicing to the RNA translocation to the cytoplasm, to the ribosomes, which is ribosomal, RNA and transfer RNA and messenger, RNA and 40 or 50 different proteins and lipids interacting within making one protein.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: But that's happening at the level of 20 or 30,000. Different types of proteins are being made at the right molar percent, the right stoichiometric ratios. The mathematics of that is beyond calculus, and I know calculus. There's no mathematics that, how does that work? Like it's already doing that. So we are stumbling in as people, you know?

Dr. Daniel Guerra: Yeah. You get a PhD in biochemistry in my late twenties and I go, oh, well, we know all this stuff. This was the beginning of gene expression changes. So I was one of the first people in, in a lab, we were involved in the synthesis of a synthetic gene. So, and this was in U.S.D.A. lab in Peoria, Illinois. The lipid biochemist, we were all lipid biochemists.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: We synthesized, 'cause it was a small protein, so that means the gene is small, just how many nucleotides for a cell carrier protein. And we expressed the synthetic gene in E. coli and it functioned in E. coli. And that, you know, didn't get much press time because it was in plants and nobody knew what a cell carrier protein was.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: But we were able to tear apart lipid metabolism that way. And I was, it was like in the mid eighties, right? And we thought, wow, we know so much. I didn't even start to become a professor then. I didn't start to become a professor until 1991. And when you have to teach, right, this is something I always explain to scientists, young ones, they are in my lab or young ones that I'm training, that I’m consulting with.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: People say, well, I don't wanna teach. I don't wanna do that, Dr. Guerra, I want to, I want to be a researcher all the time. You know what you're missing out by not teaching you, you're missing out on understanding really, whatever it is you think you're doing. Because then you really, when you teach, and maybe you've taught before, I'm sure people listening to this have taught.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: You have to know that you can't just simply go up there and chalkboard like we used to use a chalkboard, now it's a, you know, PowerPoint presentation. You can't just go blah, blah, blah, because you know, you know what you don't know because you’re always true to yourself, no matter how much ego a person has.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: And so what you do when you become a professor, if you are a good one, and there are a lot that aren't just like any field, right? They should stay in research. They should just write grants. What you have to do is actually fundamentally humble yourself down and say, okay, I have to learn what this means.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: I have to learn what anomeric structures of carbohydrates are. Why do I want to know this? I remember learning it in graduate school. I have to teach this, which means I have to own it.

Nathan Schechter: Right. It sounds like you're talking about a depth of understanding that comes from needing to teach. That's a deeper level than if one is just learning passively.

Nathan Schechter: And I remember when you were talking about membranes, you said to me that actually they have a sequence, you know, that we don't even fully understand that. We know at least DNA, you've mentioned Watson and Crick, so we know there is, and others who've worked on that. But that, that there is a sequence to DNA.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: But protein too. Protein as well.

Nathan Schechter: But you were saying well membranes have a sequence, but we don't even understand yet what the sequence. Can you explain?

Dr. Daniel Guerra: When you say that about membranes, people, people go - their eyes just explode. Other biochemists do, like, I think I told you my son, my oldest son is also a PhD biochemist, and he says, what do you mean by sequence?

Dr. Daniel Guerra: You know, when he was younger, you know, now he knows what his father meant. Just like you have a sequence in DNA and RNA, that means you have, if you wanna think of it this way, a beginning and an end in the middle, right? That's how it is. Five prime and three prime and DNA amino terminus , carboxyl terminus, polypeptide.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: And everyone that knows - everyone who's a protein chemist or a nucleic acid chemist knows each nucleotide matters in the DNA and RNA and each amino acid matters in sequence. It's not the composition, it's the sequence that causes the DNA to be then the replicon for the genome, right? It's all about the sequence, so that, again, drives away all that nonsense of substance ontology.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: These are events. Even the, just the DNA molecule is an event that has to be read, right? It's not just sitting there like all of a sudden it spills out messenger RNA. It's being read by RNA polymerase 2 and transcription factors and proteins that unwind the DNA gyrases and topoisomerases. Very specifically right there, right now for this particular sequence of events, and not just that, other parts of the genome are doing the same thing with pure fidelity.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: It's so pure that when it goes wrong, the cell kills itself. That's called apoptosis.

Nathan Schechter: I heard somebody talk about the way that people learn genetics are used to

Dr. Daniel Guerra: way beyond, and what I tell people too is it's not like, well, you must be then a well-trained older biochemist to get this. No. What you need is a person that knows this, who can effectively give that to other people, that knowledge base, and that's what we've been doing as human beings since pres Socratic times, right before we even were doing writing, we were sitting down and, and, you know, outside and having conversations with people.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: You know, the Socratic dialogues, it's the same thing. If you can get a person's attention, that's the first thing. If you're a really good communicator, that's something you learn. Some people aren't, they're gifted inside their mind, but they cannot communicate. That's something you have to learn. If you can't do it well, you should stay out of it.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: But the most important thing of it, the most important is for the student to work, to study, to really want to know this. And that requires them, as we were talking about before we started this interview, they have to be motivated and, and no matter how good of a professor you are to motivate something has to come from the other person.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: So it's always an I relationship, even when there's 500 people in the classroom. And so for me to be able to translate what I know requires, I have an audience that's interested in it and I don't feel ever like I am lording it over them because I'm teaching them. I'm glad to teach them because once you learn something, whatever it is, like learning how to play the piano.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: When I was a youngster, I learned how to play the piano. I haven't played it in years. Learning that. Think about how that makes you feel. You can sit in front of a keyboard, you can walk anybody's house and you can play Mozart. I mean, my God, everybody is entertained by that, and it's not because of you, it's because you have a talent so that you're not doing it to make yourself something. You're doing it to give to others.

Nathan Schechter: It sounds like you're talking about how both relationship is a bridge by which information transfers, but also that one begins to see the world differently when one, you know, has a conversation or a relationship where one is exposed to ideas maybe that are a bit of a different model than one was seeing or used to or knew before.

Nathan Schechter: And that if those two things come together, the relationship, the communication, the, the exchange of ideas and the motivation to be open to new ideas, that then new skills and abilities and, and possibilities emerge. Am I hearing that right?

Dr. Daniel Guerra: Yes, exactly. And also keep in mind, the more you learn and think about, yourself, each of - whoever's listening to this podcast, the more you learn because you're honest with yourself, right?

Dr. Daniel Guerra: You can't lie to yourself. I mean, unless you are delusional, unless you have such a psychotic break from reality. You and I've learned this, I mentioned it to you, I think before I, I worked with neuroscientists and neuropsychiatrist who have some of the people that went into prisons to specifically interview people that are in there because they are mass murderers or something like that, right?

Dr. Daniel Guerra: And every one of them, if, and this has been published, many people have published this stuff. It's in the regular book form where you can read it. Every one of these people, these really nasty people that are in prisons, what they say to the interviewer as they say, oh, well I would never lie to myself. I learned how to lie to others so I can control them and you know, whatever it is they're criminals about. But no, you don't lie to yourself. So even people who are twisted in that way, I. We all want to tell ourselves truth. If you believe something, that's the truth. You want to believe. You don't wanna believe a lie.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: And so what this does is communication that you get to have with people who are learning in the subject, really learning in the subject is this, it's a transfer, but it's also a, an association between who has the knowledge and who is gaining the knowledge. And eventually a equilibrium is generated so that the person that's learning, they're not gonna have the entire knowledge base that this one person or another may have to give them.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: 'cause it'll take a long time to get that. But what they'll get are the means by which to have that transcendental event.

Nathan Schechter: Yeah, maybe I can give an example of exactly what you're talking about, which is, I think you're saying that if you have curiosity, if you have some inner integrity of perception that you want to know more, that you're willing to, you know, be critical in your thinking and, and evaluate things, uh, that if you have the curiosity that you may not go from A to Z you know, in an hour or 20 minutes or in a 15 minute conversation, but the path then is, is open to you.

Nathan Schechter: And, you know, if I was gonna put that into terms of what we're talking about here, I, I think that is, you know, part of what you know happened in my own thinking was that as I, you know, began to understand like, okay, wait a minute, there are I. There's something called frequency modulation, which again, for folks who may not know, but like if you just think of an FM radio, you know that there's a wave coming, you know, through the air to your radio antenna and somebody's imprinted information on that wave.

Nathan Schechter: Most people can understand that. If you say your cell phone, it's a different kind of wave. You know, it's a microwave or it's a, you know, whatever kind of wave. But again, there's information traveling on the wave. Most people go, okay, I get that. That's not too hard for folks. Right? And then if you say to them, well, now think inside your body.

Nathan Schechter: And inside your body there's a communication system that's just like that. There's waves that are traveling with information, but now we're talking electrochemical waves. And depending on the frequency of those waves, they're sending certain signals. Now somebody might not go from that to understanding everything about, you know.

Nathan Schechter: How the entire system works, but it's one piece that somebody might grab onto and go, huh, that's a really interesting idea. And now they're starting down that larger path. Would that be an example of sort of what you're saying here?

Dr. Daniel Guerra: Yeah.

Nathan Schechter: Yeah.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: The only, the only thing I would change about everything you said is, that is absolutely eloquent.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: The only thing I would change is I'm, I'm kind of into terms. Right. Okay. Curious. For example, the word curious. Yeah. Plato hated that word. Okay. And basically, basically, I do too. You know why, why curious is bad. But when someone's curious about something, it means that they have enough interest that they want to get enough information about it, that they think at the level of just apprehending it.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: Mm-hmm. Like grabbing it. But you don't want to do that. You want to obtain it. Right. That's what knowledge is. So many, many people, and I've had them in my classroom, I'm really, I really want to know something about biochemistry because my dad died of Alzheimer's disease, things like that. You get it all the time.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: They come in in your office and they say, that's why I'm in your class, and they, you know, they're not even majors in in the science. I said, sure, you're welcome in. And they might not have the pre-reqs and sometimes they'd have to take the pre-reqs for let 'em in the class, that kind of thing. But whatever, curiosity isn't what we're talking about here.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: You have to humble yourself to say, I really want to have knowledge of this because just having curiosity, which you end up with is an opinion,

Nathan Schechter: right? Not a passing dalliance, not a passing interest, but a, a a a de desire for a mastery of a, of a modality is what you're really talking about.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: My thinking about all the people that are successful, and I don't mean monetarily necessarily 'cause I'm certainly, to me that's not anything I'm successful at.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: Nothing wrong with it. Think about people who are successful, what every one of them will tell you, you know, all the people I've ever met, really big names in, in my field in science in biochemistry, and even people in metaphysics that I've talked to, what they'll tell you is the same thing I just said.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: How did you get to be this person, this knowledgeable? I work on it all the time for sure. But right now, today, when we're finished with this, I'm gonna be working on a lecture. I'm gonna tape tonight and I'm going to be learning things, doing that, right. So it doesn't mean that everyone can gain the same knowledge as everyone else does, right?

Dr. Daniel Guerra: So you may be really good in chemistry, but not as good in biology,

Dr. Daniel Guerra: So you can become an excellent chemist, but you won't be a biologist and you also won't be a biochemist. You see? A biochemist. We're, we're the weird breed in all of it, all of all biological and chemical sciences. I think I told you this, but as a biochemist, the chemists have to take a course that I would offer.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: I only taught graduate biochemistry. I never taught undergraduate. I never understood that. 'cause baby biochemistry is like, what is that? It's like nursery school. It's not worth it. So I always told the dean when I first, whenever I got hired somewhere, I'm only gonna teach graduate biochemistry or medical or pharmaceutical, you know, the school's beyond having an undergraduate degree.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: And the reason for that is I'm not capable of doing that. I know my limitations yet. I say that, and I told you this before too, I think, uh, before we started recording, I would go into, I got four children. They're all adults now, but every one of them starting . The oldest is 38. The PhD biochemist like me, I would, I would talk to his teachers.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: I would say, Hey, do you want to have a, you know, moms and dads come in, say, what does mom and dad do for a living? Because I'd like to come in and I could teach what I do. I'm a biochemistry professor. By then I was already, uh, at the university teaching and they said, sure, you know, that sounds cool. And I can tell you, Nathan, every time I did that, those young kids, I would say starting at about third grade, not so much second, but at the third grade, they would ask me questions that sounded as educated as a 50-year-old attorney who would be listening to the same kind of lecture and I wouldn't dumb it down.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: And I would teach them things that were not simple like photosynthesis, which is not simple. Now we think that mammalian biochemistry is complex. I started as a plant biochemist and I'm so glad 'cause plants are autotropes. Plants have all these other pathways. Plus the pathways animals have - much more complex.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: So I would go into this third grade class and I teach 'em photosynthesis. The light reactions. So they have to learn a lot about wave particle duality. Right. And they have to learn about wavelength and amplitude and energy pulses. And then they have to learn all the biochemistry, we call the dark pathway, all the darks and the Calvin cycle.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: And these kids. Then I would give these kids a quiz, take home quiz, and you know, they would come back and they would work on it. Right? And I'd come back one more time in that semester, usually in the fall. and it was amazing how, how well they could answer those questions with, with no background. And you know, why?

Dr. Daniel Guerra: 'Cause they wanted to.

Nathan Schechter: And it sounds like you're talking about the love younger …

Dr. Daniel Guerra: They were, it wasn't about what is Joe going to say to me? What is, you know, somebody else gonna say to me, I want to know this because that's how a young mind is. And your, your mind can stay youthful. Right. Look at you. You're learning things all the time.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: You run this whole system that you're doing. My mind is youthful. I'm still like fascinated by things. I don't know. I love learning. Like I, I took Kirk Maxwell's original treatise right on the electromagnetic spectrum. And I, it's in English, right? Published in 1873, and I tore it apart. I took about two weeks reading it, looked at the calculus and everything.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: I, I learned so much reading that one treatise, right? And I'm thinking, I love the challenge now. I own that right now. I understand. And that's the basis, not just the physics, but a lot of what we know about biochemistry, right? Because it talked all about how electrical current can go through a medium, right?

Dr. Daniel Guerra: First time it was ever put together in that one treatise. So to me, you're always learning. It's like exciting to do that all the way to the day you die.

Nathan Schechter: And so it sounds like you're talking about the love, the love of the learning, that you actually incorporate the learning, almost like you digest food, that you take it in, you assimilate it, you are trying to understand it.

Nathan Schechter: And in, in that process, it sort of becomes a little bit of a part of you that then informs your increased mastery of your field. Am I getting that?

Dr. Daniel Guerra:And life becomes beautiful. Life becomes more beautiful. Right? You know, when I walk in the forest, if you're walking with me, if you want to hear it, I'm just gonna start talking about it.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: I explained to you how photosynthesis works at different levels in the canopy. Right. And that causes a red shifting of what? Different wavelengths of light, and then there's a photo morphogenic effect. That's why these leaves are curling now in the morning and not in the afternoon. I remember that from my plant biochemistry days when I was, you know, 50 years ago.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: 45 years ago. I remembered it because the professors I had were like, amazing. And they were as amazed by the phenomena as they were teaching it.

Nathan Schechter: It, it was one of the things that I really picked up in talking to you is this, this love of original thinking versus just simple pattern recognition that that's a useful skill, but that original thinking really is a different skill.

Nathan Schechter: And I'm just curious, you know, with everything you've studied over the years, was there a moment that like, completely changed how you think about biochemistry or, or how you think about life? You know, can you pick one maybe as an example?

Dr. Daniel Guerra: Yeah. I would say, I would say when I first started getting into the epigenetics literature, so epigenetics is a covalent modification of many macromolecules, but primarily what people are talking about. 'cause the word genetics is there. Epi just means above. It means the sequence of events that usually involves some kind of covalent modification of certain nucleotides in the DNA or RNA. Covalent modification means like adding something, right?

Dr. Daniel Guerra: A covalent bond. Something simple like acetate or a methyl group. And what that does, it doesn't change the genomic at all, although it can leave an imprint, we call it plastic, right? It leaves an imprint because there's something called the methylome and the acetylome, right? That can be erased, by the way, in the next generation or maintained.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: Maintenance methylation. Okay. At any rate, what that does - this is what changed my whole viewpoint tremendously - that's the communication from the environment that's always happening and the environment. By that I mean everything inside the living system and everything outside of it. Everything is happening now.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: Like right now when you're learning something, your central nervous system is changing the wiring of the associated synapses in such a way that you create a memory and you create that memory and you superimpose it. You increase its density, actually more arborization around those particular accents.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: Well, how does that happen so that you don't forget it because you want to remember it? You think about it, you sit down with a piece of paper and you write out - what was this about? You go to any lecture, it's the same with me, right? I go to a lecture in subatomic particle physics. I'm doing the same thing.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: I'm taking notes, I'm learning. So the point is, we don't give ourselves enough credit as human beings. We, there's so much, we don't have to turn into something that's magical. There's nothing magical about this, but there is something that's way beyond simple physicalist, understanding living systems absolutely blow off the top on a, from a physicalist perspective, there isn't any.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: Absolutely. Here are the principles of life. We can give you a thousand of them, but they're not principles. All they are observations

Nathan Schechter: would you say that after all your years in biochemistry,

Dr. Daniel Guerra: a readout that's exact every time. And you can even put in a change in the code. So it can allow it to be, itself, to be able to nuance around that code enough to be able to pick up something or lose something.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: But the living system doesn't just do that stuff that ___ or occasionally the cells in your body have the memory of everything they've been through at the biochemical level, and some of them you've been carrying like the neurons in your brain a really long time. That's why you have a memory of self. So the way you really get to understand living systems is you not just have to read science, you have to read fiction.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: You, and for me it was reading philosophy. Metaphysics in particular, but also a lot of epistemology. You know, we were all always people talking about all this metaphysics, right? People discard it. Now we'll say we don't really need metaphysics anymore. Now we have science. That word is ridiculous. Science simply means knowledge, right?

Dr. Daniel Guerra: Science is, you mean research science, right? And all, all that is, is a series of methods. But you have to expand your horizons too. You have to be able to, like recently I was reading The Idiot by Dostoyevsky, never read it before, one of his books. I read a lot of 'em. I never read that. It's like amazing to read the talent of a real novelist, right?

Dr. Daniel Guerra: An amazing, now there was writing over a hundred years ago and he was Russian, right? I don't, I don't know what his culture was, right? How do you get that and then assimilate that into who you are? You read it carefully, you look at the way the words are put together and it just blows me away. That's why books like that are amazing.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: That's why books like that used to be, you must read certain books. Like when I was in high school, we had to read some Plato, Socratic, we had to read The Republic and then we had to dissect it and we had to explain it. You know, that was, that was like junior year in high school. They don't do that anymore, you know?

Dr. Daniel Guerra: And, and Shakespeare, we did a lot of Shakespeare, right? I mean so much. And I remember, I don't wanna do this, I don't wanna do science. 'cause I always like science. So when you say what things have really turned me on just about three months ago, the Idiot by Dostoyevsky totally changed a lot of different, it tweaked me in a way that never had affected me before.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: And then I found out, and this is an aside, but in the book, the character talks about a character of someone he's explaining about that said, what is it like to live in a place like a prison, knowing you're gonna be executed and then go all the way up to you're in the firing squad and you are the next one to get killed.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: And then, no, by the way, we're not gonna kill you guys today. And then two weeks later, you're freed. It's in this book. Right? And you know what, that actually happened to Dostoyevsky, the Czarist regime was going to kill him, and the last minute he wasn't. And he was in line with the guys that he saw it killed.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: What kind of effect would that have on you and the way he set it in the book, putting into another character and just explaining it to other people on a train, it was like, that's what real knowledge is, you know, experience. So your experience is all through your life. Are going to modulate epigenetically how you learn and how you interact with others.

Nathan Schechter: And it sounds like you're making a parallel that you're saying like, you know, when you have DNA and enzymes are coming along, like somebody running their hand along a pearl necklace and saying, I'm gonna touch this part. I'm gonna touch this part, I'm gonna touch this part, and these are the parts that I'm gonna express.

Nathan Schechter: That that's, you know, the scientific biochemical way in which we talk about it. But you're saying life and ideas and experience can be looked at the same way. That, that you could, you, you could look at that in, in, in almost a similar metaphor, even though it's got nothing to do with chemicals or enzymes or polymerases or, you know, transcription factor.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: Well, it does, but it does. But it does.

Nathan Schechter: But you're saying the two, the two are sort of parallels to each other and that if one, and, and what I also hear you saying in, in a lot of things that you say is that be, if we think about genetics in a very simple way, like this causes blue eyes, this causes this, then it's a simple tic-tac toe game that anybody can play.

Nathan Schechter: And it's very simplistic. But if we look at the, the, the greater epigenetic complexity, which has been described by people like Waddington and others, which is like a much more, like anything could possibly happen, like when you drop a marble and it bounces all the way down and you don't know where it's gonna go, now you have a much vast, complex, and all these ways that you've tried to describe today, possibilities of events that might happen that are so sophisticated and so vast that it almost becomes hard.

Nathan Schechter: To say this causes this in a simplistic way or that causes that. And when you're confronted with that, what really takes the day is a better ability to think in a, with original thought in a way that really begins to accrue mastery. Because then you have a better shot when you throw the dart of coming close to the bullseye, at least because you're not just repeating some simple pattern, which doesn't match up to the complexity of living systems and how they actually unfold.

Nathan Schechter: Am I hearing that right?

Dr. Daniel Guerra: That's exactly right. And again, you then, you know, this is something that isn't very popular too, but very popular from like, say existential metaphysics. Um, the individual is the person that becomes knowledgeable, not the group. Okay. So you, you could say, yeah, well, as a group, we work together, you know, and the Manhattan Project, you know, take something horrible like that.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: Not really horrible and good science, but no, each of those individuals contributed something that was unique to them. So what really changed me, another thing when I was in graduate school, one of my advisors was actually, she helped us write our research papers. 'cause she was an English prof. She worked in our department.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: Like she was like part-time, an older woman - name was Martha. And when I first started writing, Martha would look at my writing. She said, oh, you write really well, but yeah, you're not expressive enough. I said, well this is scientific research isn't supposed to be very cold. She said, no. What you need to do is you need to put in the accent of who you are.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: Once I got that, I, I felt how to do it. And she would read and she'd say, yeah, keep doing that. That's how that really helped me see things from a point of view of an English literacy. You know, she had the right idea that whoever decided to put her in there with this was amazing. And she didn't talk to everybody.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: 'cause most of the other people didn't want to talk to her. I don't want, I don't want you to look at my stuff. Who are you? Right. Because it wasn't mandatory. You have to be open to those things. You know, if you get on a bus and somebody's sitting next to you, if you feel comfortable enough to have a conversation with them, do it.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: You may learn something amazing from that person, or you may just feel good that you had a human communication. Right. And you have to be careful, of course. But when you're in a setting where you have like, and that's what you're doing every day, going through a university or now interacting on in this kind of format.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: That's what we're here to do. We're here to learn from each other. And what, what you, what is required, the onus is on you. The onus, as much as you want to take in, is as much as you want to contribute. You see, and you have to humble yourself to do that. And if you really wanna learn biochemistry from somebody, you have to go in there and learn it and take the time to do it.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: And nowadays, with all of this, you know, press always talking about, what about vaccines? What about drugs for cancer? What about drugs for diabetes? And I get people always asking me questions like family and whatnot, right? People wanna know, well, my doctor said I should go on this particular pharmaceutical.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: And they ask me. And, and most of the time, the first conversation I have with them, they say, stop. I don't wanna hear anymore. Because they think that what I'm going to say is don't take the prescription. I say, look, I'm not a medical doctor. I'm not, I'm not one that writes prescriptions. I don't wanna do that.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: But I will tell you that anything you're talking about, any pharmaceutical, how about any, uh, supplement? Okay, supplements are big. You really have to consider. Why do you think you think you need to take this? What is it you think? What are they telling you it's going to do? Oh, it's going to boost your immune system.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: What does that mean? And then you know, the person's telling you, well, I don't really know. What does it mean? So well, the immune system is either, you know, hyper inflammatory, non-inflammatory, or hypo inflammatory. Which of those elements do you think it boosted by this particular, you know, organic acid in this, you know, extract.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: What are they saying? I can tell you I can look it up and I can tell you, and people ask me all the time whenever something comes on and I say, look, this particular thing they have, it's not gonna kill you. But the concentrations of what they say is the biologically active component in there isn't sufficient to act at the, at the level of a binding constant, a KD to ever affect the molecules in your body. (KD = Binding strength threshold means how tightly a molecule needs to stick to its target (like a protein) to actually do something.)

Dr. Daniel Guerra: So you would've to take in kilograms of this in one meal. Okay? And then you still don't know it's going to have that effect after digestion. Because what happens when you take anything into your body, it's modified.

Nathan Schechter: It sounds like you're talking, you're talking a bit about the ease of belief, that some people just want it to be easy, so you can latch onto a simple model, and then if you latch onto a simple model, you just say, well, that's how it is.

Nathan Schechter: Even if that's not really how it is, or it's misapplied, it's just easier than doing the work to understand something more, and that you run into that a lot,

Dr. Daniel Guerra: and it's sad because people really do want the knowledge. When, when I talk to anybody, you know, people, I, I think I told you people come in in my office at, you know, years ago, a guy would come in and dump your garbage out.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: Right? They would come by your office or in there late. I would've conversations with these people. It was amazing what they, what their histories were. Well, because.

Nathan Schechter: Do you think that this is one of the ways that it happens, that if people have more of a day-to-day relationship, they see somebody, they, you know, they come in, they empty the garbage, they stop and chat for 15 minutes, they're there next week, that slowly the information starts to come out because it's happening sort of informally over a period of time.

Nathan Schechter: And that that's a another way for people to learn besides just sitting down in a lecture. I mean, both are useful, but that perhaps if people are often stumbling against feeling either overwhelmed by information or it's too much, or they don't wanna take it in, that when they're talking to somebody that they can get these little - so for example, you just gave the idea of a threshold,

Nathan Schechter: Hey, you're taking a supplement? Does the chemical that you're putting into the body rise to a threshold? That's an idea that somebody could walk away with in 15 minutes. And also they could relate it back to what you were talking about earlier, which is. “Oh, you mean the things that I eat, they cause these substrates that cause certain thresholds, which then trigger things in genetics.”

Nathan Schechter: “Oh. I'm starting to understand this idea about how thresholds have to be achieved inside cells inside the body, whether it's a medication, whether it's a normal metabolic process.” and so they've learned a little something from you, even though they might not have the depth of somebody who's been at it at this intensity for 40 years.

Nathan Schechter: Do you think that's a possible way for people to begin?

Dr. Daniel Guerra: Yeah. Growth. You're building. What you're building. There is what there. The faculty of the understanding, faculty of the understanding, the rational faculty. Understanding is populated by concepts, and concepts are abstractions, such as the word threshold, right?

Dr. Daniel Guerra: Or density, something like that. And people can get that. But equally important are ideas. Now ideas are the instantiating real events. Concepts are abstractions. Like when you say tulips are beautiful, you can't say that and say that's actually that you've seen every tulip have you. No. So you just say, well, tulips are beautiful, but what you can say, this flower I'm holding is beautiful.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: And then I'm going to extrapolate and say they all are. But really they're not. All, some of them are very pretty. Some of them are dying. Some of them haven't bloomed correctly yet. Right? So you select, right? So you have to cultivate those other, the other faculty and the other faculty of the mind that really is neglected is the faculty of the imagination.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: And you imagine all the time you imagine you can put right now in your mind while I'm talking, you're listening to me, um, what the color of your dashboard is in your car, right? You can, it's not there, is it? All imagination means that you can conjure something in your mind that's not there. Doesn't mean never is there, doesn't mean it's purely fiction.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: Right. And so you have to imagine all the time 'cause imagination is populated by ideas and those ideas - imagination is a faculty of reason.

Nathan Schechter: You said to me, imagination is a faculty of reason. What do you mean by that?

Dr. Daniel Guerra: Your, your, your reasoning skills require a constant ability to take in information as it's coming.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: And when you're doing that, when the actual signal transduction to cascade works, because of the wave particles hitting receptors that are moving through your eyes and your other four senses, that phenomena is being translated in your mind immediately. But it has no meaning until, and this is something we have no biochemical correlate for, but it's what reasoning does.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: I can explain what reasoning does, but I can't tell you there's any biochemical correlate to it. What you do is you take something like, you observe something specific and you say, ah, that is a camel. Now I know 'cause I have concept camel. Ah, that's a grizzly bear. Ah, that's a human being. That pers, that's a woman.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: That woman has blue eyes. You see? So those concepts are in your mind. That's one faculty of reason. The understanding you have that in your mind. You build that up over time. The other faculty imagination is taking in raw sense data and having it be specific. That idea instantiates as it's moving through your senses and then you marry it, harmonize it to the other faculty, which is the faculty of understanding.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: And then what do you have experience? Okay, so it's a way to describe what you do naturally. Now what is your mind doing? Synapses are firing. Neurotransmitters are entering the inner synaptic space. Fingal lipids are trafficking, uh, you know, various kinds of neurotransmitters across that cleft and firing an electrochemical potential.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: That doesn't tell you what that was, does it? You never will see something like a pyramid because of those potentials firing. You can't ever take that electrochemical, all the data and you won't get something like a movie of a person seeing a sailboat going in front of them. Those are faculties of reason, and all we know is that that's what we do.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: That's what metaphysicians talk about. You see meta?

Nathan Schechter: That, that, that's something I've also taken is that, that, you know, as I've talked with you, that, that you come at it from these two sides. I mean, you can go very deeply into biochemistry and every specific biochemical interaction and how it unfolds and the timing of all that.

Nathan Schechter: But you also have a very deep interest in how we perceive, how we learn, how we understand things. And it sounds to me that, you know, one of the words that you mentioned that kind of maybe links the two together, I'm guessing is the word experience, that as one gains an experience. You know, I've come to think of it more now as I look at things, you know, rather than thinking it as, um, you know, an exact causality of A causes B rather a network of possibilities of vast possibilities.

Nathan Schechter: But with experience one might navigate better amidst them. So if one was a mountain guide. One might not be able to say: “Oh, you know, Mount Kilimanjaro is always the same every day. And I can predict exactly how the snows are gonna fall and when it's gonna be an avalanche, and what bear is gonna be where, when, and how the wind's gonna be blowing.”

Nathan Schechter: Like nobody can predict that. Yeah. “But I've traveled over Mount Kilimanjaro 50 times and I know the layout and I've lived up there for six months and I've done this and I've done that. So I think if I'm gonna navigate my way up Mount Kilimanjaro, I can divine a path based on my experience. But I couldn't tell you. …”

Dr. Daniel Guerra: That's a good way to look at it. another, another word. Another word I would give you. And I've used, you said already, and you probably thought I was talking about something like, you know, new age or something. The word transcendental is the word that's incorrectly used. Transcendental means the means by which, the means by which it occurs.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: So a transcendental that's what those two faculties of reason are. They're transcendentals - the means by which I have. Reasoning is I have a faculty that can make abstractions and a faculty that can observe individual events and I can marry them in real time and know as I'm moving through life, what I call phenomenological reality.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: Now you have to think about it so you don't have to think about your mind doing that. It's doing that. Think about that. You know, think like next, next time you're just doing anything, try to put yourself in the, in the fact that you are I you are. Ideation is constantly happening. You're constantly seeing people crossing the street while you're driving.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: You know where the other cars are. You know you have all these things that are happening in real time, coming in your senses, and at the same time that's being married to your faculty of understanding and you precisely know how close you can get next to that car, how quickly you have to move past to make that pass on that two-lane highway.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: You're not going “Now I'm calculating this.” It is the means by which your mind operates. So one of the things I always tell students too is that wouldn't you want to keep that ability really pristine, healthy? Yeah. Because that's also what helps people to realize when someone's lying and when someone's trying to defraud them or hurt them.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: Right. Lie to them because it's not so much you live long enough, you notice it. That helps. But you're able to pick up on what are the abstracted equivalents of what you're picking up. And you don't have to give them a name. Your mind is doing it. But the more aware you are of what you're doing in your every life experience, because people have worked out, these are people who are philosophers.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: They have no idea how the brain works. That system I was explaining to you, that's in the critique of Pure Reason by Emmanuel Kant. It's metaphysics 101. But now when you read that, if you get that book and read it, and I suggest everybody sometime read that book, you're gonna hate it. 'cause he's not a very good author, doesn't write well, but when you study it and study it, you go, oh my God, this person's explaining something that I only just said, yeah, I thought about this.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: Right? He's explaining what must be occurring and his words. I use different words. He didn't use the words I used directly, but I got the ideas from him. Right.

Nathan Schechter: It sounds like you're talking about both. Not only science, but how we apprehend science and not only life, but how we apprehend life. That there's two pieces there, not just one.

Nathan Schechter: It's not just simple models or even complex and vast models, but it's also the way in which we use our human faculty too.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: and then it allows you to, it allows you to prune that. You might say, oh, that actually I've been carrying around this concept for a long time and it's BS because every, because now I'm trying to justify that concept, and when it doesn't, I just tell myself, oh, eventually that's what will happen. See, right?

Nathan Schechter: It's sort of a mental flexibility.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: justified true belief, justified true belief, JTB, that's knowledge, definition of it. So you have to justify those concepts, and if you continue to refute the null hypothesis, like in a, generating a, a research paper, generating a, a research endeavor, always consider your mind can do that about everything.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: And you're not sitting there saying, now I'm doing this. Right. You know, that's what you're doing because it's the means by which it's, again, it's like the concept of a lens. You look at the world through a lens and that lens are your five senses. So you realize that a dog has similar senses, but the dog isn't experiencing the world like you are.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: Neither is maybe your wife. See same senses, different mind, different mind. Because you are an individual mind. Everything biochemically in you if you wanna get down to that, is unique just to you. And we will never know what it is because we can't measure all of that. 'cause it's constantly changing.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: It's pretty amazing.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: So that, that gives you also the nuance to accept more about, you know, be more, be respectful of people. Even if you think, I don't really, I just like what this person's talking about, but respect, not just, well, they have these experiences, but the more you learn, that's how your mind works.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: The more you can learn complex things like how to take care of your health without being a nutritionist or a biochemist or physiologist.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: you don't just say, you know, I'm coining the word exo-objective. I throw it out there and say, well, that's what the experts say. BS. What do you mean? The experts say, what do you mean they're experts?

Dr. Daniel Guerra: Where is their knowledge based deriving this from? You can obtain that from anywhere.

Nathan Schechter: I want to thank you first of all for all of your, your time and also for all that I've learned speaking with you has been so helpful and so broadening of my own understanding. Before we finish, I was wondering if I could just fit in two last little.

Nathan Schechter: Well, they're not really little but two questions 'cause I'd like to capture them. I mean, one was something you said about age, that you know, age is really a failure of the regulatory systems beginning to decay that because the cells are no longer synchronized. Um, and you did mention about hyper inflammation or hypo inflammation.

Nathan Schechter: I was wondering if you could just talk, talk about that, you know, briefly about this concept that age isn't just wear and tear but rather it's a failure of regulation. And the second part of that question, if it is really a failure of biochemical regulation, do you think aging is something we’ll ever slow down or reverse?

Nathan Schechter: You know, so I'm curious what your thoughts are.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: First of all, no aging is, I sometimes I call it a chronic disease. You're aging from uh, embryogenesis to death. You know, you're not just aging 'cause you're 60 plus. Okay. So aging is an event that continues throughout life. All the living systems we talk about, for example, the control over lipid modification and turnover in the peroxisome.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: All the membrane lipids have to be taken out of the membrane, and then new ones have to be put in that membrane very specifically without the membrane ever noticing it. So it's not like manufacturing, well, we clear everything out and then we pull it back in. It's happening all the time. The processing of that requires, at the same time, the immune system is surveilling essentially every cellular mass.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: Looking for any minor perturbations, and that can be regulated by such things as chemokine trails. Chemokine trails are like a gradient coming from some cell that's being damaged, like imagine a cancer cell. Chemokines are, glycoproteins are being generated from that cell, and there's a trail. There's a lot of it at the source, very little, maybe at the lymph node, but enough that the lymph node that the TMB cells move to that gradient with the highest concentration.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: If they're natural killer cells, they arrive, they check out that cell a couple of different chemical ways and then they kill it. That's what NK cells do. They don't mess around. Not like a T-cell, typical classical T-cell, like a TH1 or TH2 or CD four, C eight positiveT cells or B cells. Okay?

Dr. Daniel Guerra: That regulation is so complex and interrelated into everything that's happening in every cell and every tissue that regulation starts to break down. The processing of all that information simultaneously slows down as you get older and older because there's so many different events that have to occur precisely that life is like a miracle.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: I told you it's like it's amazing we live this long with the vagaries of an oxygen environment. 'cause whenever you have molecular oxygen, you can make reactive oxygen. Reactive oxygen is what? It's a free radical. It has unpaired electrons. What is something with unpaired electrons? They go back to chemistry.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: It's looking to get another electron. So it pulls the electron right out of DNA. You take that nucleotide base you see? So you’re constantly being bombarded with reactive oxygen, and your body has all these systems to take care of it. Like vitamin C, like vitamin E. That's only, those are only a few things.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: You have glutathione and you have enzymes that break down reactive oxygen all the time. And you need reactive oxygen at the same time through life. 'cause reactive oxygen is how the, the lymphatic and the innate immune system kill cells that are damaged just produce a lot of reactive oxygen. The cell kills itself, right?

Dr. Daniel Guerra: So you have to do that. So all that regulation breaks down over time. There's no way that that isn't supposed to happen. Because what does happen the longer you live and we have this, you can see it every day. Why do we have so much neuropsychiatric disease like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, particularly Alzheimer's, that's neurodegeneration.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: So the body can stay very healthy. The body stays healthy so long, the most complex organ in your body, the CNS, they can't keep up with all the loss of the regulation, all the slow movement of all the lipids, they have to get into specific regions, subatomic nuclei be able to trigger certain subatomic nuclei in the hippocampus, so they exactly occur synchronously every time that starts slowing down.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: And what happens, what shows up at those sites is more and more the potential for damage, damage, damage, and then it damages it. So we live long enough now where we're increasing in the population diseases that we never had. And it's not because of nutrition, it's not because of the modern lifestyle being so stressful.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: We're living longer and longer. And no, not everybody gets Alzheimer's disease. There's a genetic and an epigenetic component to it. But can we predict that? No, it's not stochastic, it's pseudo. It's pseudo random, but it's not random.

Nathan Schechter: I want to ask you also about another issue, which was you talked a little bit about cancer and you talked about this is when you were talking about sort of the reasoning sort of, that you alluded to in one other part where we were talking about, well, why would you approach it?

Nathan Schechter: You know, and again, for folks who may not be at all familiar with these things, when people think about something very simple like how bacteria function, some bacteria like salt, some don't, some like oxygen, some don't. So when you think about how to defeat something, you often think about what process would we use to defeat something.

Nathan Schechter: But in answer, you talked about

Dr. Daniel Guerra: take away an essential nutrient

Nathan Schechter: Yeah. Right. Take away the nutrient. So you, you talked about with, with tumors, you know that they have a microenvironment, that there's sort of an adaptation process where they're, in real time biochemically, sort of trying to be flexible in terms of what they use to survive.

Nathan Schechter: And then the reasoning about how you target a specific thing to try to knock them out or whatever. Can you just say a little bit about that? 'cause I found out that was very interesting and eye opening as

Dr. Daniel Guerra: Well what happens with cancer is like your first have an oncogenic event and people who typically think it's a mutation.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: DNA mutation, DNA means a protein may not be made or worse. A protein is made, but it's not. The proteins supposed to be made it's the wrong sequence. So that protein then can generate what's known as a proteinopathy can start aggregating. This is how a beta proteins and for example, one of the components of Alzheimer's, you get a proteinopathy that causes then the induction of an immune response.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: Okay? So that processing of the tumor. The tumor starts off being a cell, like say a liver cell, hepatocyte, but then something happens to that cluster of hepatocytes and all of a sudden they're not hepatocytes anymore. They came from there and they have a lot of the same metabolism, but the metabolism has changed slightly.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: So they're not that anymore. They're a cancer cell. Not only that, the cancer cell then, because it's starting to generate a change in metabolism, like switching now to just glycolysis rather than fatty acid oxidation. And that means they can use glucose and make only a couple of ATP unless it runs through the TCA cycle, Electron Transport Chain, oxidative phosphorylation much less than you can get from beta oxidation and fatty acids for energetics.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: So you might think, why is a cancer using glucose then? Well, because glucose is water soluble, so it can get it without going through the effort of binding proteins and the slow motion of lipid movement as an energy source.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: So what has that tumor cell environment already done? It's changed the metabolism, not just of the tumor cells, but it's communicating with everything around that’s perfectly healthy, and it's not making them cancerous. It's making them deliver information that's different because that cell, which was right next to them in the tissue, which was hepatocyte, communicating perfectly well to make that tissue is now signaling the wrong signals.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: So those cells are not tumor cells yet, but their metabolome is completely wrong. So as this continues on, more and more cells start developing a phenotype, a biochemical phenotype. And what is measuring that all the time? The immune system. That's its job is surveil 24/7 embryogenesis to death. It's all it wants to do.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: And not only do that surveil arrest, detect, decide, kill. All those things, right? You have all these different immune cells. So what happens in a cancer and tumor microbiome? You don't just have tumor cells there. Now, they're not hepatocytes anymore. You also have immune cells in there, and you also have fibrocytes in there, and you may have endothelial cells in there.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: What happens now is all of those spells start signaling according to the tumor microenvironment. They start communicating, changing their metabolism, changing gene expression, all of which facilitates the growth of the tumor, not 'cause the tumor has a, it's not a master controller it’s because if the tumor's growing, that's what happens.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: See? See how that fits into what? The transcendental? It is the means by which it's doing that. So we go in, we design a drug. We're gonna target a specific sphingolipid, sphingosine-1-phosphate (S1P). 'cause every time we have this kind of tumor, multiple myeloma, this level of that particular lipid goes up.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: And we know what that lipid does. It causes what? Cell cycle. Ah, we got it figured out. We're gonna kill that. What happens when you do that? What about the pathway? sphingosine-1-phosphate (S1P)? It's a completely elaborated pathway. And you're destroying the production of that.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: Now you're gonna change the pathway in another direction Spatio temporally in healthy cells, and even in the tumor cells. And all that happens is as long as that cell keeps on dividing and dividing, it becomes a tumor. So the result is cancer, right? So it's the means by which it grows. So even when you add really sophisticated pharmaceuticals. Or even, you know, monoclonal antibodies to specific proteins or immunotherapy, eventually it breaks down.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: It breaks down Eventually those same things you put in there, even the immune cells are enhancing tumorgenesis. It's in the literature I'm not making, it's not, that's what the literature shows you. So, but the literature of people that are writing is really, talks about one specific thing.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: You know, we are interested in, you know, natural killer cells. We are interested in TH2 cells. And even if they're looking at all the cells and they're doing, you know, where they use algorithms and they look at entire pathways, they don't know what the pathways are doing as they're changing in real time. You see, because they're constantly changing.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: An individual metabolite that was a normal metabolite in say the Krebs cycle, The TCA cycle, now becomes, new term, an onco metabolite. So why is citric acid all of a sudden promoting cancer because it's being synthesized in the wrong subcellular compartment, or there's too much of it, or not enough of it, or it's altering the level of iso citrate.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: And now you find iso citrate dehydrogenase, isoform two that's in a cytoplasm that normally only carries out salvage pathways for amino acids to make, uh, fatty acids. That's one of the things that naturally occurs. A priori, it's always there already. Now all of a sudden that gets more robust 'cause more carbon's coming from the cytoplasm, all water soluble.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: And when that becomes more robust, that whole system becomes oncogenic. That's what I'm talking about.

Nathan Schechter:. So maybe I'll close by asking you this. If the world is so vast in so many different ways, from the ways that we perceive, to biochemistry itself, to the multiple systems and cells and ways in which one thing influences another thing.

Nathan Schechter: How do we then move forward in life? In a world where not everybody can be a biochemist with 40 years of experience. But yet we all have bodies. We all have lives, we all have health. We all go through states of wellness and disease. What is a, a way, do you think that, that we can begin to maybe not grasp too tightly to simple models and hold onto them with a death grip because we just are fearful and need something to believe in, but yet not be overwhelmed that it could take us 40 years and we'll be at the end of our lives before we could ever make a decision or know anything?

Nathan Schechter: What do you think is the, the middle ground for folks a a as they go through life? What have you found to be helpful in, in your own journey and, and what are your thoughts about that? Having seen other people, maybe even outside the fields of science?

Dr. Daniel Guerra: Um, the answer's very simple for me.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: Think about who you are as an individual and try to do good. And do better all the time. I'm serious. Do better not just say, I've done my best. Best. You can't do any better? You see, I get that actually from Kierkegaard. You see, you pick up things like this over time. So Kierkegaard, the, the, uh metaphysiciain writing 150 years ago, it was the first time I ever thought about that.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: That's why terms are so important when you think about your health. Okay? Which I don't, right? You know, they used to say the medical students, they think they got the disease they're studying. That could happen, right? You know, you see a movie and you think, oh gosh, that could happen. I get a home invasion.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: The mind works that way. Safety people are too hung up on safety, too. Hung up on security. Doesn't mean you want, don't wanna protect your family. Of course you do. But think more about the quality of your life as you live. Don't be so worried about how long you're going to live. Think about when you're living.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: Are you doing things that you feel you know are good? Good for yourself and most importantly, your beloved, your family, the people you care about. 'cause those are the people that are the closest to you. And when you do that, you're not so worried about things. And because of that, you're healthier. Because to do that means you're spending a lot of time with your mind and trying to say, Hey, I don't wanna act that way.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: I don't wanna make this person upset. I don't want to choose this particular route. Go into getting all this medical treatment if all I know is I'm gonna be sick for three more years. People start thinking about that using their reasoning skills. They'll live a healthier life and everyone knows this.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: You don't need any of this education. So we wanna know a lot. And we do wanna make,. I mean, I, I would be glad to help people's lives better, but you know, the kind of things I would tell' em don't drink alcohol. No alcohol. Alcohol is a toxin. You know, any amount of it. Okay. No matter what people think, it's not good for you, okay?

Dr. Daniel Guerra: That's one thing. Don't gain a lot of weight. Gaining a lot of weight makes you, it's aging in a much more rapid rate. Okay? Things like that. Those are simple things and everybody knows this and you don't need to, but, but they want, what people want is they wanna live their lives and do whatever they wanna do, and then they wanna say, you know, we used to say this in the sixties and seventies, you know, that, that the adults would say this, just take a pill.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: Now, how about forget about that. Forget eat natural food, eat normal food, exercise when you think you've exercised some. Double it, triple it. When you think you spent a lot of time working on a subject and your mind feels tired, listen to some Mozart or some Beethoven, some Schubert and a half an hour.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: Then had to go back and study for three hours. So I used to tell my students, and it works because you are controlling it. So again, think about when you're, if you're at a cliff and that cliff is the abyss, you say, I can't jump across that area. You think about, you know, movies you've seen where that is, how do you jump across that cliff - because you tell yourself you're going to - right?

Dr. Daniel Guerra: So you make it smaller and you run faster when you get across it. That's a metaphor for how you get through life. You know, you tell yourself this is a journey and, you know, in the end you're gonna die. So don't be afraid of it and don't hasten it. And don't hasten it in others, you know, because every human being is precious.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: Everyone, even people you don't care about. Right. And do what you can to do better. Right. And that means improve your knowledge base, start playing the piano, pick up a violin, you know, whatever it is. See? So don't ask me for advice 'cause that's my advice.

Nathan Schechter: I appreciate it.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: all the biochemistry and all the knowledge that you wanna, we wanna have people listen to, that's all important to me.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: Right. And so I love, I love teaching, I love when people learn it because then it's like, it's like what we used to say in the sixties. I'm turning you onto something, right? Life is more interesting to you when you walk out in the park or riding on the bus. 'cause you know more about what's going on and why worry about the fact that, yeah, it's gonna go wrong and one day your family will bury you.

Nathan Schechter: Yeah, I think, I think that's well said. That, that the other thing that you get is the interest and the wonder as you go through it, that anything can be

Dr. Daniel Guerra: always exciting, Nathan. It's always exciting.

Nathan Schechter: Yeah. You

Dr. Daniel Guerra: you still have worries, you know who doesn't, right?

Dr. Daniel Guerra: And you don't like pain and, you know, you're hoping that you're not, you're not carrying around a cancer that's, you know, indolent, smoldering. But if you are, well, you're gonna die. And if you die from cancer or you die from autoimmune disease or cardiovascular diseases, the three major ways you're gonna go, you know, I just don't think about it, you know?

Dr. Daniel Guerra: And, and I, and, and also the other thing I suggest is what makes people get more courage. Take chances, even when you're older, you know, take chances about, you know, experiences that you have. Why not? You know, and again, bottom line, the, uh, categorical imperative don't hurt other people. Treat them just as important as you are.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: Treat them as individuals. Right? Never as something that can do something for you. Why, why would you wanna do that? Right.

Nathan Schechter: Well thank you so very much. I really appreciate all you shared and it was a pleasure to have you. And I hope perhaps we will speak again. Thank you so much.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: I really appreciate it, Nathan.

Dr. Daniel Guerra: It was good talking to you. You're a good guy and, and good luck.

Nathan Schechter: Thank you.

Nathan Schechter, ACSM CPT, CYT, PN1-NC https://mindbodyliteracy.com