Rethinking Plant Physiology and Absorption of Nutrients From the Soil

Hi friends, I'm John Kemp, hosting this podcast. I am passionate about developing regenerative agriculture systems that improve soil health, produce crops that are completely resistant to diseases and insects, and produce fruit of such an exceptional quality that we can have a legitimate conversation about growing food as medicine. I've discovered that there are many people with incredible knowledge and information about soil and plant systems and how to develop regenerative agriculture systems. However, much of this knowledge and this information is scattered. It's found all over the place, some of it has been published in peer reviewed publications, but there are many incredible stories and a lot of knowledge that has not been published and that hasn't been shared with many people. I started advancing EcoAgriculture in 2006 to bring this knowledge together in a more coherent fashion and incorporate it into products and growing systems that growers can easily put into practice. It's my personal mission to have these regenerative agricultural systems become adopted globally and become the mainstream, the status quo against which all other growing systems are compared. To help achieve this goal, I want to share the knowledge that we have learned in the last decade and make it available to everyone while we have developed products at AEA that embody the principles of regenerative agriculture systems and make them easier for growers to apply this knowledge and these principles can be applied anywhere and when they are applied properly, they will always increase farm profitability and resilience to climate stress. If you have any questions, suggestions, comments or ideas, topics that you would like for me to discuss, Please connect on LinkedIn or on Twitter where my username is visionbuilder7 or you can also email me at john kempf.com I would very much like to hear from you and to hear your feedback. Be sure to subscribe to this podcast and thank you very much for listening. Enjoy the show.

On this episode I had the privilege of interviewing Dr. Jerry Pollack, who is a leading researcher in the area of water structure and water ordering. Or as he refers to it, a much better term is easy water, which stands for exclusion zone water. Jerry's research work has won some exceptional accolades and has been considered by some people to be the groundbreaking research in biology that is going to become some of the most important research for the 21st century. Jerry's research in how water functions in plants and in cells has tremendous implications for how we understand plant nutrition, nutrient absorption, nutrient flow within plants, and very importantly, how we understand the absorption of nutrients and compounds by plant root systems and by plant leaves. In this discussion, Jerry and I talked about how the exclusion zone effect, the easy effect of water explains how water can quickly move up to the tops of very tall trees. We talk about how this function of structured water can allow large red blood cells to move through capillaries that are only half the size of the red blood cell. And very importantly, I think one of the key pieces for me was thinking about how biology in the soil can actually increase the soil's water holding capacity directly by developing an environment that can hold more of this exclusion zone water directly around biological substances and biological substrates. Even before we begin building large amounts of organic matter. This is something that we've actually observed in the field where we may apply a biological inoculant and get an almost immediate response in water holding capacity and drought resilience, even though there hasn't yet been time to build large amounts of soil organic matter. And lastly, I would strongly recommend for any citizen scientist, farmer, agronomist, who wants to understand how to manage plants and livestock and human health better. You really need to get to Jerry's books. His two books, Cells, Gels and the Engines of Life, is one. The second is titled the Fourth Phase of Water, and they are on the very, very short list. Both of those books are on the very, very short list of books that I reread regularly just because they strike at the very foundations of what we think we understand about biology and will fundamentally shift and reshape our understanding of biolo the near future. I hope you please enjoy and please send us your comments. Thank you.

Hi, friends. Welcome. And thank you for listening to the Regenerative Agriculture podcast today. I'm excited to have Jerry Pollack with me from Washington State University. Jerry has done some very groundbreaking research in water. And his research work has been described as perhaps having been the most innovative breakthrough in science in the 21st century. And I think certainly for agriculture, it has the potential to be that, because his research in water, plants and animal bodies, in our own bodies, are all primarily composed of water. And the understanding that he has developed really changes the way that we need to think about cellular metabolism. So, Jerry, we're very excited to have you and looking forward to hearing your thoughts.

Okay, thank you, John. But let me just make one correction. Not Washington State University, which is in Pullman in eastern Washington and is famous for agriculture. I'm at the University of Washington, which is equally, maybe even more famous, which is located in Seattle. And so there are so many universities with the name Washington that it's really confusing. There's another one called Washington University, not University of Washington, which is in St. Louis, and then there's George Washington University, which is somewhere in D.C. and then even within the state of Washington, there's Western Washington University and Eastern Washington University and Central Washington University and probably myriad more throughout the country. So, anyway, I'm at the University of Washington in Seattle, and I wish they changed their name to make it easier for people, especially Europeans. You know, they have no idea. The presumption is that there's only one university with the name Washington, but it's not true at all. I guess his name is so revered that people consider it a distinction to name their university after him. Anyway, thanks for inviting me. Happy to be on and happy to share what we know about water and other aspects of life.

There are a couple of important pieces here. You've written two books which I reread quite frequently, Cells, Gels and the Engines of Life and the Fourth Phase of Water. And I guess perhaps as a kickoff, you discovered and described this fourth phase of water as being the exclusion zone and describe how that impacts living systems and in plant cell biology. Can you just give us an overview of exclusion zone water and how that might function in plants and living organisms?

How many hours do you have? Okay, synopsis. Okay, the quick synopsis, and stop me if, if I'm going astray. So we've all grown up to learn that water has three phases. A solid, ice, a liquid, and vapor. And I learned that, you learned that, we all learned that. On the other hand, many years ago, a suggestion was made by a famous physical chemist more than 100 years ago that, you know, with these three phases of water, it's really hard to interpret the known behaviors of water. You try to do it with the understanding there are only three phases and you simply can't do it. It creates a kind of anomaly, anomalous behavior. If you total the number of anomalous behaviors, anomalous meaning doesn't fit the theory. As of today, there's a famous website that details it. The number is something like between 60 and 70 of them. So for a chemist looking at these, the number is so large that you think something has to be wrong with our understanding of water because there can't be so many anomalies or translated in common English, there can't be so many features of water that don't fit the theory. So it must mean that there's something wrong with the theory. So more than 100 years ago, a suggestion was made that there must be another phase of water beyond those three, a phase somewhere in between the Liquid and solid. And this idea has been around, kicked around for some time, especially by a few well known people. One of them is a guy named Gilbert Ling who's by now, he's 99 years old right now. And he's, he's written I think seven books or six books on the subject. And most of what he's written points to evidence that there is another. He doesn't call it a phase of water, but he calls it structured water. That is where the molecules are not bouncing around randomly and pointed in every which way, but they're ordered. They're like dipoles, you know, little plus and minus at either end and all these dipoles are lined up with one another. And he's argued that for many years the water inside the cell is exactly like that, is ordered. And also another one is Albert St. George and I'm not sure if you're familiar with that name, but he passed about 20 years, 25 years ago and he's considered to be the father of modern biochemistry. And he knew through his years, having been in various fields including water, he knew that the organization or the order of water is really important in biology. In fact, famous quote of his is life is water dancing to the tune of solids. So he knew that water was centrally involved in everything to do with living systems. And so that when we started, and I'll just, that was preface to answering your question, what is this fourth phase or easy water and what it is? It's exactly the kinds of things that these people were thinking about. But we found clear experimental evidence for it. It's a phase of water that is indeed in between a solid and a liquid. If you think of, to appreciate the consistency, if you think of raw egg white, this is the consistency of this kind of water. It's kind of gel like, like a loose gel. And in fact it's the main component of water inside of gels, a side point. So it's an ordered phase where the molecules are lined up. A bit different from what Gilbert Ling had put forth about dipoles organizing themselves. It has a different structure. I can tell you about it later if you want. And it has, unlike ordinary water, which is neutral, this has a negative charge, usually a negative charge. And it's built by energy. You need some kind of energy to build order. And this is ordered and the energy actually comes from light, particularly infrared light. And infrared light is all around us. If you were to turn off the lights in the room and pull down the shade so that it's completely dark. And even when dark Adapted, you can't see anything. If you were to take out an infrared camera and create an image of all this, you get a beautiful image because everything is emitting infrared energies. And it's used as a night light, especially for military purposes. So this energy is all around us, it's free, free for the taking. So you might, you might call it free energy. So this free energy, which is all around us, builds this kind of water. And questions where does it build when? What happens is, we found that when water meets a surface, particularly surfaces that are hydrophilic. And that means water loving, means if the surface were like a desk or something, dropped droplet of water on it, the water would spread out as opposed to hydrophobic or water fearing, in which case the water beads up, it shirts away from the surface because it doesn't like it, it fears it. So usually not everyone, but most hydrophilic surfaces, when water meets these surfaces, the water, it transitions from ordinary H2O to this kind of fourth phase water. And the reason we call it fourth phase, because it's just different from ordinary liquid water and certainly different from solid water. Although the structure is somewhat similar to ice, not the same, but bears some, some resemblance. And so when the water meets such a surface, what happens is that the water layer is starting with the first layer right next to the surface, undergoes transition from ordinary water to, to fourth phase water. And it's not just this single molecular layer that wouldn't be so interesting. But it turns out many, many, many molecular layers build in that way. We found up to millions of molecular layers can build from such surfaces, all powered by the energy from light and especially infrared light, which is more powerful to build this kind of structure than other wavelengths of light. So, and because it's an ordered phase, because the molecules inside of this phase are not bouncing around randomly, they're well organized and ordered. It's, in a sense, it's like, it's like a crystal, it's a liquid crystal. If you can imagine a crystal of say, ice, which is solid crystal, what happens is as the ice builds, it excludes all kinds of materials and particles from the ice. Otherwise you wouldn't get a pure crystal of ice, you'd get ice containing some junk or garbage or whatever. So crystals, as the crystals build, in order to gain the purity that they show, they have to push out everything else. They exclude other materials, exactly the same as when the fourth phase builds, it pushes out substances. And that's why we call it exclusion zone, because it excludes. There's another reason for Calling it exclusion zone because exclusion zone ez. And it's easy to remember. The only problem is it works in the US but when you go to Europe it's ez. So it's not quite as. Not quite as cool, but it works anyway. So it's kind of got a couple of or more, even more than those names. Ez water, what I tend to call it fourth phase water. Some people still refer to structured water, although that really is not an appropriate term because everything has structure. Ordered water is another. They're all essentially the same terms. So is that an okay preliminary descriptor of what we're talking about?

That was an outstanding preliminary descriptor.

Oh my goodness. It wasn't so good.

And by the way, I would just very, very highly recommend to all of our listeners, this is a topic that is so important, it has so many implications for understanding plants. We're having this conversation. I wanted to introduce you to some of Jerry's work. But you really need to read the book. And so Jerry can give us some ideas, some inspiration and some ideas. But I would strongly recommend that you read Cells Gels, the Engines of Life and the Fourth Phase of Water, two books that are outstanding.

So Jerry, the follow up that I.

Have to that initial overview is Understanding Easy Water. And there are a lot of implications for biological systems and to our understanding of how cells work, how nutrients are transported. And there are two pieces in plant nutrition and agronomy that many. There isn't a good explanation for that. I know many farmers and many agronomists struggle to understand. The first is how are nutrients transported and also water. How is water transported inside a plant? And secondly related to that is how are nutrients absorbed by root systems and then transported to the plant?

We know there is plenty of evidence.

To suggest that the current models for how this is thought to work. The evidence doesn't all fit the model and so we know the model is not quite correct. How might our understanding of easy water be able to shift our thinking?

Okay, those are broad and provocative and interesting questions. Let me talk about transport first. And if I run off track, remind me that we also need to address the issue of absorption by plants. So transport. So the question always arises, you know, how does the water get transported? And I guess the question is most interesting when you, when you think of 100 meter tall redwood trees, how does a column of water get transported from the roots all the way up to the leaves on top? And this been a conundrum. In fact, just sitting on my desk right now is A picture of Martin Canney. I don't know if you know the name, but Martin. He passed a couple of years ago, and I was sent this memorial thing and it's been sitting on my desk. And he was quite a handsome guy when he was in his school days when I saw it. But when I got to know him, he was getting aged and had a lot of problems. And I. I think he passed. Probably he was in his 90s and he was highly influential. And he's the one who had a famous Scientific American article, I think it was called how does the Water get to the Top of Tall Trees? Or something like that. And in his. In this review article, he indicated how difficult the problem was to solve. Nobody really could understand because a column like that is so high that the amount of energy it would take to raise something, if you've got a head of water on top of you that's 300ft tall, there's a lot of weight. And it's hard to imagine getting water to move up against such a heavy load. And at that time, he was not clear on what he thought. But eventually, after many discussions, I think he was kind of aligned with our thinking. And he wrote actually a nice little capsule at the back of my fourth Phase book, which is still there. He said something about. He thought that by reading this book he would learn how physics and chemistry apply to water. But he said he learned that through water. He learned more about how physics and chemistry work. I was really pleased with that comment. Anyway, the question is, how is water transported? And so we think we. We understand this because we discovered something that was completely unexpected. We found that if we took a tube, a tube that could, for example, resemble xylem tube, if we put the tube made of hydrophilic material, a thin tube maybe 500 micrometers in diameter, and put it inside a bath of water. This was actually noticed by a young student working in our laboratory who came running in. I was sitting in my office in the chair where I'm sitting right now, and I was. I had a guest. I can't remember who it was, but we were in the middle of chatting or something, and this undergraduate student walks in and he's very excited about. About what he found. And he was excited enough to interrupt our conversation. Of course, I was happy to hear what he had to say. He said, you know, I put this tube in the water, and the water contained a lot of particles. So you can. There was any water movement, you could easily track it by looking in microscope and watching how those Particles behave. So he said, I put the tube in the water, and I noticed that the water was flowing through the tube like water flows through a straw. And it doesn't stop. It just keeps going. And he thought it was pretty important. He was supposed to be doing something else. But like most of the students, they don't listen to me, and they find more interesting stuff than what they were assigned to do. And I actually encourage that sort of thing because some important discoveries have come. Anyway, he said, the water just keeps flowing through and it just keeps going and it doesn't stop. And he thought this was important, and I thought it was extremely important, because usually if you got a tube and you want to drive water through the tube, it's sort of like a blood vessel, you know, and you. You want to drive blood through the vessel. You need the heart to do the pumping, although we think there's more to it now. But. But at any rate, you need to. You need to develop a pressure or a pressure difference between one end and the other end. And that pressure gradient drives the flow. And here there's no pressure gradient because the tube is sitting horizontally oriented in the chamber of water. So there's no pressure difference between one end and the other end, yet the fluid keeps flowing through. And you need energy to push fluid through. You can't get something for nothing. And so I'm thinking, as he comes in and delivers this news, I'm thinking that if he's right about this, then it's so important because it demonstrates what we. We had known up to that point, that the energy comes from the light that's absorbed in the water, especially the infrared light. And so I thought if. If his observation is real and we checked it to check for artifacts or errors or stuff, it was correct. If it's correct, it demonstrates the importance of this kind of energy that's being absorbed from the environment. Of course, when you think about plants, the environment out there is pretty important. So we knew, we found out, and we did many experiments afterwards, that it's the energy from outside, particularly the infrared energy, that gets converted into a different kind of energy. Actually, it's a charge gradient, but we don't need to go into that at the moment. It's in the fourth phase book. But this is what drives flow through the tube. So now we have something completely different and understanding about the driving of flow through a tube. And we can apply that, for example, to what happens in plants and trees, because again, we have these thin tubes. In this case, they run vertically and. And we Know that the energy from outside can be used to basically push the water through this kind of environment. And Martin Canney, by the way, did an experiment, and it appears in my book, he took some asylum and he put some particles inside. And what he saw was an exclusion zone at the edges of the xylem. In other words, this fourth phase water exists as an annulus just inside the xylem tube. And this is exactly what we found in our experiments. We used a hydrophilic tube made of various materials and always right next to the surface, the material surface of the tube just inside is our EZ water or exclusion zone. And so the same thing Martin showed exists in xylem with plants. So therefore, this reinforces the idea that, that what my students saw in the laboratory may be operative inside the trees. And the energy is now coming from outside. And without going into detail about the mechanism, it has to do with charges that develop inside the tube and charge gradient. So if you have, for example, a lot of protons, the protons, with the protons, first of all, attach the water molecules, form hydronium ions. Those hydronium ions repel one another. And so if there are fewer hydronium ions up high and more down below, the hydronium ions, which is basically protonated, water will move upward. And so we're pretty confident that this mechanism is the mechanism that applies in the xylem of plants. And it's detailed. I mean, without a couple of diagrams, it's not so complicated. But it's hard without diagrams to explain the details of the mechanism. But it's in the fourth phase book and side point, by the way, is that we think that this occurs also in the cardiovascular system of you and me. So let me tell you, there's a side issue from the issue of agriculture and plants, but it's really important. So I began my career studying or simulating, you might say, the cardiovascular system pressure and flow. And I built a model. I was really excited about this model. And I thought we had pretty much solved every problem nicely, every problem there was to solve, because we could explain the pressures and flows at different points in the cardiovascular system. And everything, everything occurred as a consequence of the pumping of the heart. And so for many years I was kind of proud of that. Although it made no impact, I began to understand why usually when people build models, their models are filled with assumptions. And if you're not sure about whether these assumptions are accurate or true or not, then it lends a kind of doubt. But any rate, I thought I really understood the cardiovascular system until I went one of my trips to Russia, to Moscow University, where my good friend Vladimir Velikov introduced me to his neighbor, the guy in the next laboratory. And this guy was studying cardiovascular system. And he tells me through translation, in the cardiovascular system, there's a very big problem. Oh, really? Tell me about it. He said, well, the big problem is that capillaries are so small, though. You start with the arteries and arterioles down to very thin capillaries, and then the venules and the veins and back to the heart and it circulates. But when you get to those tiny capillaries, there's a problem because in healthy young adults, the diameter of the capillary is three or four micrometers. And you compare three or four with the red blood cell that needs to squeeze through, and it's six or seven micrometers. So it looks like a plumbing problem. It looks like you have to force those red blood cells somehow to get through these narrow conduits. And, you know, it looks like a screw up of mother Nature. How is it possible this is not a plumbing system that you would think that mother Nature would dev. That's the way it is. And of course, there are reasons for it, obviously, but one of the things is that in order to squeeze those red blood cells through, they have to bend, they have to be kind of squeezed and pushed through. So this Russian guy calculates the amount of resistance that would be encountered in squeezing these red blood cells and pushing them through, and he comes to the conclusion that the resistance is so high that if the heart were fully responsible for driving blood through those capillaries, the heart would need to develop an extraordinarily high pressure, something like a million times the pressure that it actually develops. You might call that high blood pressure. But we're talking about six orders of magnitude. So this is a problem. He says, it can't be. There must be something else besides the heart that's doing this, because it just can't be. It's just too, too far off. And well, that had big influence. The first thing I, he has a few, had a few ideas about mechanisms. I had my own ideas and I knew about our work where if you put a tube in a chamber of water, flow goes through the tube like through a straw. So I'm thinking, wow, the same phenomenon could be at play in blood vessels. And we tested it. And my student has just been working on his writing his PhD dissertation on this, and we found indeed that that was the case. We found that, first of all, like others have found if you stop the heart, the flow doesn't cease. This is the first thing that is shocking. Many people don't know about this, but there are a handful of studies over the years that have shown that if you stop the heart in any of a number of ways, you don't stop the flow. It goes down quite a lot, but it keeps going. And so, you know, the question is, well, how is it possible that it can keep going? There must, must be something that is at work in addition to the heart. And I think what's at work is the mechanism that I've been talking about where you can get flow propelled by the energy, electromagnetic energy, I guess you call it infrared light energy. And you know, inside our body there's lots of infrared because the metabolic energy is heat, and heat is where you get infrared energy. So it's like a sauna. Going into the sauna, you get lots of infrared energy and that energy is absorbed by the body. So anyway, we found that if you add infrared energy that this flow through the capillaries, that's retained even when the heart is not beating, it amplifies enormously. So we're confident that the phenomenon that I mentioned to you, where you get flow in a tube, that it applies not only in our cardiovascular system, but also in the vessels of plants and trees. So that was a long answer to your. I guess it was your second question about flow.

Jerry, I'd love to follow up on this. I know that you expressly mentioned that it's difficult to describe with the diagram. And so if this question isn't easy to answer, then we can come back to it in some other fashion. But we know within two to your blood example, we know that having the right electrolyte balance within blood is very important. Sodium, potassium, for example. And you mentioned the importance of having the appropriate proton pressure and proton gradients and within plants. And so I'm wondering, how does this awareness also transfer to our understanding of nutrient mobility within the vascular tissue of a plant? Are there important nutrient balances that we should be paying attention to in plant structure as well?

Well, there are, but I don't know them. And so I would hesitate to speculate, but I, I will say one thing, that when you, if you, if you want to transfer something through tissue or through a vessel, there is a way to do this. And I hesitate to come across as though I trying to sell my books, but in the first book, Sales Gels and the Engines of Life, this is described in detail. What it involves is, if you can imagine a tube Filled with easy water, with structured water. And that tube tends to exclude everything, almost everything. We can't say everything because we haven't studied everything. However, if there's a region along the tube that is not the ordered or easy water, but is ordinary water, the solutes or nutrients or whatever you like will tend to gather in that zone. There is a process that I described called zone melting, which pretty much does exactly this. So again, along the tube, inside the tube you've got structured water, but inside some region along that structured water, you have a zone that's not structured. And so all the, all of the nutrients would be there. Now if this non structured zone propagates along the inside of the tube, then the nutrients will move with it. And this is a way of transporting substances. And I think that this may operate inside the cell. See, if the cell, you think of the cell as containing only structured water, and I think there's fair evidence that most of the water inside the cell contains easy water, then all the nutrients would seem to get excluded and that won't work. And so you need to have regions inside the cell that are non structured, at least transiently non structured. And then you can move things from outside to inside or inside to outside. And I think this is the way nature does it. It kind of the word that comes to mind is like caterpillar or something, where you have something propagating along it. And this is one way that nature can move substances. And I think it occurs not only in plant cells, but also in animal cells. And I give some examples in that cells gels in the Engines of Life books, which I. Sorry, the book was published some years ago and a few things have changed. Mostly I think the book is as accurate as it was then. I think it's as accurate now with the exception of a few considerations that are slightly different based on what we found since then. But I think this is how nutrients can move from one place to another place. I hope that's clear. I'm. I'm not sure it is.

Yes, I understand what you're trying to communicate and that actually your explanation and your answer leads back to the first question that I asked a little bit ago, which today the classical explanation for nutrient transport across cell membranes is the assumption that the cell membrane is impervious. And we have channels and pumps and transport systems that move nutrients back and forth, that we can only move individual ions across cell membranes. And yet, particularly in agriculture, there are some pretty clear cases where the evidence doesn't fit the theory. And the classical One that I refer to all the time is the absorption of systemic insecticides by plant roots, where we're applying systemic compounds that are absorbed in their entirety by the root system and then transported throughout the entire plant. You've proposed that there might be some alternate mechanisms for nutrient absorption by cells. Can you describe that for us?

Well, yeah, I think it starts with the fundamental assumptions that you mentioned that the membrane is impermeable and that pumps and channels are what governs pretty much the behavior of cells, what comes in, what goes out. And I think that concept is just dead wrong. And I know I'm, I'm in the minority. And let me explain. First of all, most cells, not all cells, have negative charge inside them, net negative charge. And if you stick an electrode inside the cell and measure the electrical potential difference between the inside and the outside, typically in animal cells it'll be minus 50 to minus 100 millivolts. And in plant cells it's higher, typically maybe 100 to 200 millivolts negative. But at any rate, the inside of the cell is negative. And this is reported by many people for many years. And I think there's no question about it. The only question is how does it occur? What's the reason for it? And somebody came up many years ago, got a Nobel Prize for suggesting a sodium pump. That is sodium, get, this pump lies in the membrane and sodium gets pumped out. And so if you're pumping out positive charges, a simplification of, of what, what fear is. But basically, if you pump out positive charge, then the cell remains negative instead of neutral and the pump keeps going and, and therefore the cell remains negative. So it's an active, dynamic kind of thing. A different explanation is that the easy water inside the cell is negatively charged. And this is the reason why the inside of the cell has negative charge. Now, I'm not the only one nor the first one to, to question the existence of pumps and channels. Gilbert Link, who I mentioned earlier, Gilbert came from China after World War II, and he was among three people chosen from all over China to come to the US Study. And there were three. And one of them, I think one passed, and one of them got a Nobel Prize in physics. And then there was Gilbert Ling, who many people suggested is deserving of at least one Nobel Prize and maybe more, but he's been passed over at least so far. And so Gilbert did some experiments to check this idea that the membrane contained pumps. And what he did was poison the cell in many different ways. I mean, it was, you might say, overkill. And so if you pull the plug, if you poison, metabolically poison the cell, you're basically pulling, pulling the plug on the pump and, and therefore the effect of pumping should disappear right away. But they didn't. He could measure the what, what been attributed to pumping, that is the electrical potential was maintained for many, many hours after that and, and finally disappeared. And he computed, and with the most generous of assumptions given to the other side, the cell needed 30 times the amount of energy that it could possibly conceivably muster just to achieve that. And so he said it doesn't work, the evidence doesn't fit. Well, nobody has challenged that since then. And Gilbert raised a number of other considerations which have gotten increasingly significant because the number of pumps that are now attributed to, suggested to lie in the membrane is something a student who's studying this told me was something like 2500 or something like this. And the number keeps increasing because, you know, in order to explain the separation of various ions or other substances, the trend is to suggest a pump. So everything's got their own pump and typically their own channel as well. And so Gilbert says there's not enough room in the membrane to accomplish, to accommodate all of these pumps, let alone enough energy to power them, because the sodium pump itself, even under the best of conditions, he computed, uses 30 or 40% of all the energy that the cell can muster. At that time the thought was there's only one pump and that's a sodium pump. So if you think of that pump is using 30, 40% of the cell's energy and by now we're talking about thousands of pumps. It just doesn't make sense. And so that for me, Gilbert's evidence suggests that there's no such thing as a pump doesn't exist in the membrane. As for the channels, there are other arguments and these are brought up in the cells gels and the engines of life book is if you think now there are more than a thousand, I believe, different channels for different substances, different, different ions and such. And there are big ones, smaller, smaller, smaller, down to two very small, even so called aquaporin channels for water. And if you imagine the lineup of all of these channels in the membrane, one for the biggest substance, the next biggest, the next biggest, so on in order. The logic is that each one will allow only one particular substance to flow through and exclude all the others. So imagine, let's take first the biggest substance, like a basketball, and imagine a channel that will let basketball through. So when the channel opens and lets the basketball through, that channel must Be able to exclude the softball, volleyball, golf ball, and all the others. Right. But they're all smaller. So how is it possible that that channel for the. For the basketball, when it opens, can exclude all the smaller ones? You think that all the smaller ones would sail right through. That applies not only to the channel for the biggest one, but the second biggest also has to exclude all of the smaller ones and so on and so forth. So logically, it becomes untenable because it's hard to think of a mechanism where a certain channel will certainly pass its basketball through. But how is it going to exclude all the smaller ones that can? It's kind of like having a dog door, you know, and the dog can get through, barely squeeze through to get in or out of your house, but cat can go through, too, and so can the mouse or whatever. It doesn't exclude all the others. So there's a logical inconsistency in the idea of channels. So both the idea of channels and pumps, there's something wrong with those concepts. So we go back to the issue of how does. How does the cell get its electrical potential? As I'm suggesting it, the water that's inside the cell, that's negatively charged, that accounts for this. And so the idea has been that the cell membrane is impermeable to everything, and the only way that things get in and out are through these channels. But if the channel doesn't exist, then what's going on? And I think the answer is that cell membrane is not impermeable and to substances. There's several pieces of evidence. The one, the one that I like is if you take a cell and you pass an electrical current, this is the technique called electroporation, where once you pass the electric current, the holes in the membrane are large enough that genomic material can pass through. So we're talking about really big molecules can pass through. And the evidence for that is if you take new genetic information and put it outside the cell, it gets incorporated and the cell expresses those genes. So it means the new genetic material must be getting from outside to inside the cell, and it must be getting from the outside to the inside through those holes that are blasted in the cell by the electrical pulse. Now, if that's true, and by the way, this can occur, once you pass the electrical current, you can put the genomic material outside a day later, and it still gets in. So it must mean that these giant holes in the membrane are there. They can last for a day or so. And then you ask the question, well, something's Wrong here, because if you have a big hole in the cell, how come all the ions will go out or in and kill the cell? But the cell doesn't die. So it must mean that the membrane is not impermeable to all of these substances. And the reason the cell hangs together even without a membrane that excludes everything is it's a gel. And, you know, if you handle a gel, the gel hangs together. It doesn't need a membrane. And by the way, gels also have similar negative electrical potentials, same as the cell, but they have no membrane. And so I would conclude by saying that the idea that the cell membrane is impermeable to all of this stuff is questionable. Another experiment to support that is if you take a cell like a muscle cell or a nerve cell, that's been done with both, and just slice it like you'd slice a sausage, the cell doesn't die, nor does it generate a new membrane. And so when you cut a slice, basically you're cutting through the membrane and you're exposing the inside of the cell to the outside of the cell. But the cell doesn't die, nor does it generate new membrane. So it must mean that the concept that you must have an impermeable membrane around the cell is not correct. It is very fundamental. And I think if one looks objectively at the evidence instead of merely accepting what textbooks like to say, you'd come to that same conclusion. So back to your substances that get absorbed. Substances can get absorbed by the cell because there is no impermeable barrier. I know this is a highly radical point of view, but I think if you look objectively at the evidence, you can understand that it might be valid. A fair answer to your question.

Jerry.

That's an incredible answer, and it's not a surprising answer given some of the evidence that I have seen out in the field.

And yet it still kind of blows my mind a little bit for what the implications are and what that might mean.

Well, yeah, you know, I'm sorry to indulge in. In philosophy too much, but in my long career, I've seen simplicity is the essence of science. And when a concept grows so complicated that it's really hard to understand and follow, and it's full of assumptions, it's like an upside down thing.