My cells are not allowed to follow their dreams

I support personal freedom right up until one of my cells starts taking it seriously.

Imagine a liver cell announcing that it is done living for others. It wants to grow, reproduce, ignore negative feedback and stop letting the body’s expectations define it. It has bought a ring light.

Several items on its vision board resemble established hallmarks of cancer: keeping division going, escaping the signals that restrain growth, and evading cell death. Hanahan and Weinberg’s landmark review describes these capabilities without once recommending a leadership retreat.^[1]

The cell’s expanding lineage can be doing rather well while the person containing it is doing catastrophically badly. Same growth curve. Different performance review.

Meanwhile, normal tissues use apoptosis: a regulated process in which cells dismantle themselves. Kerr, Wyllie and Currie described it in their classic 1972 paper as part of how animal cell populations are maintained. Staying alive, at my scale, includes organised dying at another.^[2]

I am a workplace where some employees are expected to become digestible parcels. The annual wellbeing survey must be fucking spectacular.

This makes “individual” a less comfortable word. Queller and Strassmann propose that an organism is defined by extensive cooperation and very little conflict among its parts. On that view, being one thing is an evolutionary achievement: the parts have become organised into a functioning whole.^[3]

So perhaps I am something that keeps happening successfully between cells. A coordinated activity with a passport. Asking which cell is the real me would be like stopping an orchestra and demanding to inspect the symphony’s elbow.

None of this makes cells little people. They have no career plans; the cooperation and conflict here are evolutionary descriptions. Nor does my continued existence prove that obedience is morally good. Humans can suffer, deliberate and object. A pancreas is a terrible constitutional adviser.

But it does make “more life” an oddly incomplete ambition. More of which life? For how long? At whose expense? My liver cell and I may give very different answers, despite technically attending the meeting in the same trousers.