tomorrow is our permanent address

Let me tell you about what a bee sting therapist and a believer in the one true Hallelujah diet have in common. No, it isn’t that they are both concerned about total complete well-being. No, it isn’t that they have both transcended the boundaries of Western medicine the way many bands seem to attempt to escape from being mainstream music, different, obscure, almost too far removed to be relatable, and proud of it. No, it isn’t that for some reason both have elected to live in Tagaytay. All three are true, but they aren’t important. All right, all three are true, all three are relevant, and if it weren’t for those three facts chances are we wouldn’t have gone all the way to Tagaytay in the first place, but let me tell you something that in all probability has never occurred to either of them- that they can both take a cue from Mushroomburger.

Mushroomburger isn’t concerned about total complete well-being. If it was obscure once, as businesses are apt to be when they start out, it didn’t delight in being so. It started out in Tagaytay as well, but that’s just an accident of proximity. It’s a restaurant whose defining dishes are centered around- guess what- mushroom burgers. That is, burger patties made of beef mixed with mushroom. It doesn’t promise to solve all your problems. It doesn’t require you to eat mushroom burgers day in and day out. It just set up shop one day and said, “Hey, this is new, our burgers are part mushroom, try it out.”

And I am willing to bet that, though none of them are what you’d call common knowledge, more people know about Mushroomburger than about bee sting therapy or the Hallelujah diet.

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The point of medicine is to ensure the well-being, physical, mental, and hopefully otherwise, of as many people as possible. Some fields concentrate on creating drugs to cure physical maladies, some choose to find the most effective way of killing whatever is causing the physical malady, some focus on coming up with ways to keep people from being affected by said physical maladies in the first place. To each their own, after all. There is no real divide between what traditional mainstream medicine intends to do and what alternative medicine intends to do, the same way there is no real divide between, say, surgery and community medicine. They both intend to ensure well-being. The foci differ, the methods differ, the short-term goals differ, but the end goal is the same.

The only catch is that the scientific method has been present in some parts of the world longer than it has been in others. Some medical practices have been under study for a longer time than others, have had better-researched scientific bases, have held up under both public and scientific scrutiny for centuries, have been ubiquitous for ages. These practices- most of them Western, simply because the Western world enjoys spreading ideas like the plague- have fallen under the label of mainstream medicine. The other, not-so-familiar practices go under alternative medicine. They may be more effective. They may not be effective at all, and most of their effects might just be in the mind. They may have adverse effects no one is aware of because they haven’t been under study for very long.

That's all.

1.    Differentiate Biogenesis from Spontaneous Generation.  What factors or conditions prevailed such that early scientists believed in spontaneous generation despite the experimentation that they were able to do? Suppose you lived in those times when the origin of life was still an issue. Propose an experiment that you can perform to prove biogenesis. Use the scientific method in proposing your experiment. (15 pts)

The process of biogenesis is nowadays universally accepted as the method by which organisms are created. The law of biogenesis states that all life forms originate from other life forms.

Early scientists believed that organisms emerged due to spontaneous generation- a process in which organisms could be created either from nonliving matter (abiogenesis) or from an entirely different type of organism (heterogenesis). This was probably because they didn’t have the technology we have today- autoclaves and microscopes come to mind- and had no way of confirming that no, there were indeed no microorganisms or eggs in the broth that could have been the source of whatever colony ended up growing there. They relied on observation, but they could only rely on the observations their own senses could make.

In order to propose an experiment to disprove spontaneous generation, one would first have to ensure that one could, indeed, create an environment which no microscopic eggs or organisms would be able to enter. One would have to fill a flask with a broth in which bacteria or fungi could survive, seal the flask well, and sterilize the sealed flask. (You can’t have an oxygen-less flask, because the proponents of spontaneous generation would say that life did not generate in the flask because of the lack of oxygen.) If you lived back in the nineteenth century, proper sterilization would be the most pressing problem.

This entire experimentation thing would be so much easier if it were actually specified what century we would be conducting this experiment in. If it were the eighteenth we’d have a microscope, and if it were the nineteenth we’d have Pasteur’s experiment with the goose-necked flask to base our own ideas on.