The Biology of Belief

Posted on November 14, 2005

David Ian Miller of The San Francisco Chronicle talks to Bruce Lipton, cell biologist and author of The Biology of Belief, who says that our genes don't control our lives, but rather that our beliefs, not our DNA, that control our biology. Lipton's ideas are in line with those espoused in the popular documentary about the interrelationship between God and physics called What the Bleep Do We Know. Lipton was a professor at the University of Wisconsin Medical School and the Stanford School of Medicine. A former atheist, Lipton's discoveries about the way cells function convinced him that God does exist.

"One of the first papers I wrote at the University of Wisconsin, in 1977, was on stem cells. I realized that if I changed the environment that these cells were in, I could turn the cells into bone, and if I changed the environment a bit more, they would form fat cells. I began to see that the character and behavior of the cells reflected their environment, not their DNA."
"Later on, while doing work on blood vessel cells at Stanford, I discovered that these cells have two primary shapes. The form that they eventually take can be mediated by the central nervous system by signals that come from the brain."
*****
"The implication is that this basic idea we have that we are controlled by our genes is false. It's an idea that turns us into victims. I'm saying we are the creators of our situation. The genes are merely the blueprints. We are the contractors, and we can adjust those blueprints. And we can even rewrite them."
*****
"I watch Jon Stewart, because I need to laugh. Otherwise, life gets too serious. Besides that, I don't watch any news."

Aha! So all those reports about people just getting their news from The Daily Show are true. Lipton's book is The Biology of Belief (Elite Books, 2005).