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Anesthesia works on plants too, and we don’t know why
- MichaelZuo 6y ago“ Right now, anesthesia science is like physics before Einstein. ” Not quite, the answer is due to quantum mechanical-electro-chemical dynamics. That we know, since cells are such constructs, including all derivative conglomerate entities. A better way to put it: “Right now, anesthesia science is like astronomy before the invention of space based telescopes.”
- omgwtfbyobbq 6y agoIt looks like one of the authors referenced in the 2018 paper already have a follow up paper. https://academic.oup.com/aob/article-abstract/125/1/173/5611149?redirectedFrom=fulltext https://academic.oup.com/aob/article-abstract/125/1/173/5611... https://www.botany.one/2020/01/anaesthetic-blocks-trap-closure-and-wounding-response-in-venus-flytraps/ https://www.botany.one/2020/01/anaesthetic-blocks-trap-closu...
- im3w1l 6y agoSo... what about botox and curare?
- netizen-9748 6y agoThe pharmacological dynamics of those compounds are different than general anesthetics, theoretically the effect on cells will be different as well depending on what receptor proteins the plant cells express.
- scarmig 6y ago> Fortunately, this work may go faster than anesthetic research in animals. There are fewer ethical issues surrounding plant research, so more studies can be done. Are there fewer ethical issues in plants than animals? Or might we just know less about plant sentience than we think we do?
- TaupeRanger 6y agoThe former. Suffering appears to require a nervous system. So in the absence of one we have no more reason to assume plant-suffering than bacteria-suffering, and we lay waste to countless billions of those without blinking.
- science4sail 6y ago> So in the absence of one we have no more reason to assume plant-suffering than bacteria-suffering, and we lay waste to countless billions of those without blinking. To play devil's advocate (panpsychist's advocate?), how do we know that we aren't causing immense bacterial suffering each day? Your argument mainly appears to be a pragmatic decision to assume that suffering doesn't exist unless it's obviously apparent to our monkey brains.
- TaupeRanger 6y agoYes, the ethical decision of mowing your grass or taking antibiotics to treat infection is pragmatic in some sense.
- coldtea 6y ago>Are there fewer ethical issues in plants than animals? Yes. There are no ethical issues in plants. Nobody gives a flying ducks about individual plants wellbeing... (not the same as environment and plants ecosystems in general).
- earthboundkid 6y agoI disagree. Plucking the leaf off of a tree for no reason is immoral. (Not as bad as a lot of things, but immoral on an absolute scale.)
- djsumdog 6y agoI pull off pine needles when I walk in the forest so I can crush them and put them up to my nose and smell the fresh pine. Would you consider that immoral?
- dcolkitt 6y agoDoesn't seem that surprising. Receptors and transmitters are highly conserved across the evolutionary hierarchy. Going the other way, there's plenty of molecules from plants and fungi that affect the human nervous system.
- dnautics 6y agoBut I think the point is that a bunch of anaesthetics (like halocarbon anaesthetics) very much don't bind to receptor sites in ion channels. One running hypothesis IIRC is that they intercalate into the membranes and alter their membrane fluidity... Then underpants gnomes... Then "reduced ion channel activity". Iirc We know it's not something more obvious like "conductivity of the membrane" because that's easy to measure and the effect is not enough to explain the observation.
- krisoft 6y ago> “Going the other way, there's plenty of molecules from plants and fungi that affect the human nervous system.” That is true. On the other hand it sounds like you are saying it is because “ Receptors and transmitters are highly conserved across the evolutionary hierarchy”. The most commonly used explanation for poisonous plants and fungi is that they make these chemicals as a defence mechanism. The mamal eats the thing, the mamal has a bad time and learns to avoid eating the thing. The thing thrives, which provides positive selection pressure for the fungi/plant which can make nasty chemicals. So it is not an accident that mamals react to the secreted chemicals, and it is not because “transmitters are conserved” or something like that.
- CamperBob2 6y agoIn general, it doesn't seem surprising that exposing carnivorous plants to large amounts of random chemicals causes them to stop moving, at least while the chemicals are present. In addition to trying lots of similar substances that don't have anesthetic properties in animals, it would be interesting to try xenon, which is all but inert chemically but still works as an anesthetic. Interesting (and more up to date) article here: https://theconversation.com/science-lesson-how-anesthetics-work-and-why-xenons-perfect-83744 https://theconversation.com/science-lesson-how-anesthetics-w...
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- Der_Einzige 6y agoI know that usually when Americans are seduced by a dharmic religion, it's Buddhism. I however find the teachings and doctrines of Jainism far more in touch with how I feel about ethics, and I think it is relevant to this notion of plants potentially feeling pain. My understanding of Jainism is that one of it's ultimate goals is the eradication of suffering on earth. However, they take this radically. You cannot be violent for any reason at all (and yes, this has kept the number of Jains throughout history to be quite small). This prohibition against violence is so extreme that they have a word for "Kitchen Violence" which is the violence that they accidentally exert onto the remaining plant matter when they are wishing their plates after eating. At least they acknowledge the impossibility of truly eliminating all violence on earth (you must clean things), so it's a little bit of necessary violence but it also leads to aestheticism and a general desire to not waste resources. I think Jainism is the only religion in the world that has a belief system which is similar of that to Negative Utilitarianism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_utilitarianism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_utilitarianism) which I strongly believe is that most intuitive and authentically ethically compassionate doctrine in our current society. Many of the folks who believe in negative util do so with further specifications that pain and pleasure (the hedonistic form) are one very good way of measuring this. Maybe it sounds absurd to give Anesthesia to a plant before cutting away at it or something, but the possibility that plants feel pain and have something ackin to an experience of reality was quite concerning for people ancient and modern - and those who think strongly enough about it may believe in plants as holding some sort of ethical value (no matter how small). I hope that sometime in the far future, we may eliminate pain and displeasure from the universe. Jainists, Negative Utilitarians, Anti-natalists, and others who recognize the possible horrors inherit to reality (and it's negative nature e.g. it tries to negate you if you take no actions via entropy), would be some of the most ethical actors in a society where we find out that "Plants feel things too" or "It's possible to imagine, or simulate the experience of being a plant that is harmed"...
- Apocryphon 6y agoSomething that's always fascinated me about Jainism is how Mahavira seems to resemble the Buddha so closely, at least at first glance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahavira https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahavira https://www.dhammawiki.com/index.php?title=Buddhism_and_Jainism https://www.dhammawiki.com/index.php?title=Buddhism_and_Jain...
- manfredo 6y agoReading the article it looks like we do know why: > Neurons... transfer information about sensation and motion from peripheral parts of the body to the brain and back. By sending electro-chemical signals in the form of atomic ions, neurons can communicate great distances through the body... Most of this information is passed as sodium ions — atom-sized charged particles that pass through channels to zap from one neuron to the other. Lidocaine, a local anesthetic commonly used by dentists, blocks these sodium channels, stopping neurons from sending information to each other. That’s why they make your mouth numb, the neurons there can’t send pain sensations to your brain. They’re stopped. > ...they [Plants] do pass information from cell to cell just like we do, via ion channels. That’s probably where lidocaine does its work in plants, blocking these channels and cutting off communication. That’s why the hair cells in the Venus flytrap can’t tell the motor cells to contract, there’s no signal being passed between them. And ether works by blocking cell membranes in both plants and animals. I think there are some specifics about how organisms with cell walls are blocked by ether - but that's more of a "how?" rather than a "why?" In summary: even though plants don't have nervous systems like animals, their motor functions are still ultimately controlled by ion channels with are blocked (or their cell membranes are blocked, thus blocking the ion channel) by certain anesthetics. This post (of all things) seems to be rate limited: > Sorry, I'm confused. What's the difference between "how" and "why" here? We know the cause and effect behind why anesthesia works in plants: plants' motor functions are controlled by ion channels, and anesthetics block those ion channels. We know that Lidocaine blocks the sodium channels themselves, and that ether seems to block the entire cell membrane. The remaining unknown is how ether blocks the cell walls in plants. In short the answer to why anesthetics works in plants is known: because it blocks ion channels. Saying we don't know how anesthetics work in plants is sort of like saying we don't know how asymmetric encryption works because we still haven't solved whether P = NP. There exist remaining unknowns, but we do have an understanding of why it works.
- tantalor 6y agoThe Sound Machine By Roald Dahl September 10, 1949 A man named Klausner invents a machine that can hear sound the human ear cannot hear. It reproduces the sounds on a lower pitch so that human beings can hear it. With this machine he hears roses scream as his neighbor cuts them. The next morning he hears a tree scream when he cuts into it with an axe. He calls his doctor excitedly and asks him to come over at once. The doctor comes and Klausner says he wants him to listen to the tree's screams. He starts cutting into it with an axe and a large branch begins to fall. They barely get out of the way in time. He asks the doctor if he heard the scream but the doctor will not say that he did. Klausner is very upset and demands that the doctor paint the two gashes with iodine. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1949/09/17/the-sound-machine https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1949/09/17/the-sound-mach...
- phkahler 6y agoIodine not only disinfects wounds, it helps them heal. I liked when the tree tried to kill them by dropping a branch too.
- spullara 6y ago"Would we cut down trees if they screamed? We might, if they screamed all the time and wouldn't shut up." -- Deep Thoughts by Jack Handy
- alexose 6y agoOne of my favorites from Jack Handey, although this quote is more of a paraphrase. The original reads: “If trees could scream, would we be so cavalier about cutting them down? We might, if they screamed all the time, for no good reason.”
- spullara 6y agoLol, thanks, that was from memory which is, of course, imperfect.
- jgjot-singh 6y ago
- FartyMcFarter 6y agoDon't even need plants, anesthesia works on single-cell organisms too: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096098221931262X https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096098221...
- nicoffeine 6y agoAnd what do all three have in common? Microtubules, as predicted by Orch OR. It will take a long time for the entrenched interests heavily invested in AI to admit artificial general intelligence is not possible with classical hardware. > Within intra-protein hydrophobic regions, anesthetic gas molecules bind by London force dipole couplings, and thereby (somehow) exert their effects on consciousness. Historically, views of anesthetic action have focused on neuronal membrane proteins, but actual evidence (e.g. from genomics and proteomics), points to anesthetic action in microtubules. In the most definitive anesthetic experiment yet performed, Emerson et al. used fluorescent anthracene as an anesthetic in tadpoles, and showed cessation of tadpole behavior occurs specifically via anthracene anesthetic binding in tadpole brain microtubules. Despite prevailing assumptions, actual evidence supports anesthetic action on microtubules.[1] > I talked about paramecium, single cell organisms which could swim nimbly, find food and mates, avoid obstacles and predators, learn, and have sex, all without synapses, using their microtubules. For information capacity we calculated a billion tubulins per neuron switching at, for example, 10 megahertz, giving 1016 operations per second per neuron, 1027 ‘ops/sec’ in the brain. This pushed the AI target for brain equivalence in computers far into the future. ‘Simulate a paramecium before worrying about a brain!’, I insisted — I became unpopular among AI people, and remain so.[2] [1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1571064513001188 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S157106451... [2] https://www.quantumconsciousness.org/sites/default/files/SHameroffJCSConscMicroandOrchORASpacetimeOdyssey2014.pdf https://www.quantumconsciousness.org/sites/default/files/SHa...
- FartyMcFarter 6y agoEven if that's all true, it doesn't mean that microtubules are the only way to generate strong AI. Consciousness isn't even particularly well defined, let alone proven to be a requirement for strong AI.
- jonplackett 6y agoIt seems strange to be so sure that it's weird when ether affects both plants and animals, while simultaneously not being sure how ether actually works.
- djmips 6y agoI agree wholeheartedly. It's like when a programmer is surprised their optimization didn't help when they also admit that don't really know how a computer works.
- LordDragonfang 6y agoI actually disagree, but think your analogy is perfect here. Most programmers (even good ones) don't really know how a computer works, but they have notions of how it does. As such, they have a good idea of what they think should work, but can still often be surprised by behavior that falls outside that expectation. There's a lot of computer behavior that's "weird" due to low-level quirks.
- signa11 6y agocheck out sir jagdish chandra bose work on plant research and development of crescograph. if is quite cool and very instructive.
- srean 6y agoThis comment should have had more upvotes. I think link to relevant articles and Marconi plagialirizing his design of radio device would have piqued HN reader's interest.
- dmix 6y agoMedium's automatic dark mode made this hard to read and I couldn't find a toggle to turn it back to white... This is a bit concerning to me as a web developer who likes OS dark mode but is not convinced of web dark mode (especially an automatic non-immediately obvious optional one).
- FlyMoreRockets 6y agoYou might consider this: https://txtify.it/ https://txtify.it/ It strips everything out and provides a plain text file. Alternatively, there's always Ctrl-A or Ctrl-U.
- dmix 6y agoThat looks great thank you. My main concern was the image of the molecules obviously not fitting with a black background. I fear that will get lost in translation entirely but I’ll give it a shot when I’m back on desktop.
- KingFelix 6y agoI was following a scientist who was looking at anesthesia in plants. I can't seem to find any of his published work on the topic but some pretty wild stuff. Anesthesia causing plants to stop following the sun, something like that. Ill see if I can find an article edit / Here is an interesting article on Plant consciousness https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/02/science/plants-consciousness-anesthesia.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/02/science/plants-consciousn...
- lowrads 6y agoAccording to wikipedia, diethyl ether inhibits processes such as oxidative metabolism of a range of compounds. The article doesn't go into specifics, much less the mechanism.
- z3t4 6y agoI would say most functions in our bodies do not involve the central nervous system.
- kordlessagain 6y agoInteresting. No comments regarding consciousness!
- snow_mac 6y agoDid they make sure the plant was still alive after the Ether and Lidocaine were applied?
- thisrod 6y agoThere are a lot of basic mistakes in this article. It claims that cells haven't changed much in 1.5 billon years, when in fact eukaryotic cells and multicellular life are only 0.5 billon years old. The details of action potentials are wrong too. Those mistakes are just details. But I'm a physicist, so I can't tell if there are more serious mistakes that break the whole argument. Any biologists want to comment?