Programmed cell death and the consciousness of cell

populations
Grigore A.D.
Department of Clinical Pharmacology, Toxicology and Psychopharmacology, Floreasca Clinical
Emergency Hospital, Bucharest, Romania

Summary
The paper offers an alternate view of cell populations, including cancer. Key
discoveries unravel high social complexity of bacteria, securing the paradigm shift:
bacteria are now considered multicellular beings. Other insights from bacterial and
yeast programmed cell death (PCD) suggest an emerging, self-aware behavior of cell
populations. The search for consciousness in lower organisms is an exciting, rapidly
growing field, making bacterial and other cell populations consciousness plausible. The
documented acquisition of transplant donors personality traits by the recipients via the
cell population of the grafts further supports the idea. Cancer itself thus might appear
as self-aware; other important cancer/mankind similarities of growth and colonizing
behavior make it a rightful candidate for a multicellular taxonomic label.
In 1988, Shapiro first suggested that multicellularity is the rule rather than the
exception in the bacterial world (1). It was known that bacteria used specific patterns
for colony architecture and performed cellular differentiation. Although revolutionary,
the idea wasnt new: in 1877, Cohn had published a paper with beautiful hand-made
drawings depicting the multicellular nature of B. subtilis. In fact, bacteria are exquisite artists of multicellularity: wild bacterial colonies exhibit complex structural and
functional organization. However, they can be artificially forced to forget it all: when
grown in the laboratory, domestication occurs a selection of strains that have lost
many of the multicellular skills. Prokaryotic multicellularity is, nevertheless, more
flexible than the traditional eukaryotic multicellularity. Its extra features include:
a) any single bacteria can rebuild the colony; b) colonies can aggregate into multispecies multicellular populations; c) adaptable, ever-changing composition, structure
and metabolic functions of the populations (1). This is why I suggest the term supercellularity for bacteria.
Bacteria hold the secrets of programmed cell death. The phenomenon is altruistic
in nature: in harsh environmental conditions, a part of the bacterial population cells
undergo PCD, releasing their nutrients to keep the other bacteria alive until the con2011 by MEDIMOND s.r.l.

N627C0139

101

102

10th Congress of the EACPT

ditions become friendly again. There is always a risk for the rise of egoist cheaters
that will elude PCD no matter what and thus will always defect; however, this risk
is lowered by preventive suicide even in favourable environmental conditions, a
basal PCD rhythm exists within the bacterial population (2, 3). According to evolutionary game theory, altruism isnt a mere metaphor. Recent studies using computer
simulations demonstrate that it is a winning, evolutionarily stable strategy (i.e., the
individuals displaying that behavior cant be ruled out from reproduction by individuals behaving otherwise); altruistic suicide (as an extreme form of altruism) is also
evolutionarily stable (4). PCD within bacterial populations proceeds with masterful
timing and perfect elegance. Its ingenuity opens in my opinion two possibilities: 1) In
an analogous way to the human society, there are among bacteria some enlightened
individuals, more intelligent than the others, that realize the dangers posed by harsh
environmental conditions and egoist mutants, respectively, and then devise the rules
of protective PCD; 2) The bacterial population as a whole is aware of its own existence, not as a group of individuals, but as a unity i.e., it is self-aware. However,
since any bacterium from a population, if isolated on an agar plate, can regenerate
the whole population, it turns out that bacteria are equivalent to each other. Thus,
the idea of enlightened individuals doesnt hold anymore, the only possibility left
being the collective consciousness of bacterial populations.
Upsetting as it might seem, consciousness of bacterial populations is nevertheless
plausible. Scientists are already digging for consciousness or cognition throughout the living world, and it seems that the building blocks of consciousness are
wide-spread, both phylogenetically (not only in humans, but also in animals, plants,
protists, bacteria) and structurally (these highly complex functions can be seen at
every hierarchical level, including the whole organism and then the cellular, subcellular and even quantum level) (5-10). Language use in apes (6), representation of
complex concepts such as same and different in bees (7), communication, recall
of past events and complex computation in plants (8), maze-solving in amoebae (9),
memory, learning and computing in bacteria (10) are but few examples.
Protist populations also perform altruistic suicide during less favourable environmental conditions, releasing the nutrients to feed the rest of the population. Collective
consciousness might thus apply to eukaryotic cell populations, too, including higher
organisms such as ourselves.
The same conclusion of collective consciousness was suggested by Ben-Jacob
after analyzing the structural organization of bacterial colonies (11, 12). Paenibacillus
dendritiformis populations can take two different identities according to the environmental conditions: by an extraordinary interplay between whole-colony and individual
levels, P. dendritiformis populations can shift from a branching colony pattern to a
chiral pattern (12). Bacterial colonies seem to have collective memory and can learn
from experience (12). These findings strongly support my statement.
Collective consciousness of bacterial and eukaryotic cell populations would
imply that human consciousness isnt concentrated in the brain, but is rather dissipated, belonging to the organism (i.e., cell population) as a whole. This would explain
why organ transplant receivers experience changes of personality which parallel the
personality of their donors (13), since the transplanted cell population could then
conceivably possess and carry pieces of consciousness. Some authors have actually
started to compare organs with mini-brains (14).

Budapest, Hungary, 26-29 June, 2011

103

All these ultimately imply that cancer itself might be a self-aware, intelligent structure. Cancer also seems to match the bacterial multicellularity criteria. Cooperation
among neoplastic cells, as well as cellular differentiation within tumor cell populations
(i.e., cancer stem cells and non-stem cells (15)) are very similar to supercellularity.
Moreover, there is growing evidence that metastatic behavior resembles human colonizing endeavours (16, 17). Metastatic tumors develop independently of, and by a totally
different rhythm from, the primary tumor, ultimately killing the host (and dying with
it) but they dont spread horizontally to other people. For their part, humans grow
and reproduce, generate enormous pollution issues, destroying the host-planet but still
arent able to spread horizontally (i.e., colonize) to other planets. Since nobody has
questioned our multicellular nature and given all these striking similarities, might it
be rightful to see cancer itself as a truly multicellular organism?

Acknowledgements
My
to me,
own. I
of this

gratitude goes to my mentor, Prof. Victor A. Voicu, for everything he means

and to Prof. Eshel Ben-Jacob, for his refined ideas that partly support my
apologize to all the authors whose works I ommited due to the short format
paper.

References
1. SHAPIRO, J. A. Thinking about bacterial populations as multicellular organisms. Annu.
Rev. Microbiol. 52:81-104 (1998).
2. LEWIS, K. Programmed death in bacteria. Microbiol. Mol. Biol. Rev. 64:503-514
(2000).
3. ENGELBERG-KULKA, H., et al. Bacterial programmed cell death and multicellular
behavior in bacteria. PLoS Genet. 2(10):1518-1526 (2006).
4. MASCARO, S., KORB, K. B., and NICHOLSON, A. E. Suicide as an evolutionarily
stable strategy. In ECAL 2001:120-132, Springer-Verlag (2001).
5. NARBY, J. Intelligence in Nature: An Inquiry into Knowledge, New York, Jeremy P.
Tarcher/Penguin (2006).
6. SAVAGE-RUMBAUGH, S., FIELDS, W. M., and TAGLIALATELA, J. Ape consciousness human consciousness: a perspective informed by language and culture. Amer.
Zool. 40:910-921 (2000).
7. GIURFA, M. et al. The concepts of sameness and difference in an insect. Nature
410(6831):930-933 (2001).
8. TREWAVAS, A. Aspects of plant intelligence. Annals of Botany 92:1-20 (2003).
9. NAKAGAKI, T., YAMADA, H., and TTH, . Maze-solving by an amoeboid organism.
Nature 407(6803):470 (2000).
10. HELLINGWERF, K. J. Bacterial observations: a rudimentary form of intelligence? Trends
Microbiol. 13(4):152-158 (2005).
11. BEN-JACOB, E. Bacterial wisdom, Gdels theorem and creative genomic webs. Physica
A 248:57-76 (1997)
12. BEN-JACOB, E., AHARONOV, Y., and SHAPIRA, Y. Bacteria harnessing complexity.
Biofilms 1:239-263 (2005).
13. PEARSALL, P., SCHWARTZ, G. E. R., and RUSSEK, L. G. S. Changes in heart transplant recipients that parallel the personalities of their donors. J. of Near-Death Studies
20(3):191-206 (2002).

104

10th Congress of the EACPT

14. ARMOUR, J. A. The little brain on the heart. Cleve. Clin. J. Med. 74 Suppl. 1:S48-S51
(2007).
15. DICK, J. E. Stem cell concepts renew cancer research. Blood 112:4793-4807 (2008).
16. FIDLER, I. J. The pathogenesis of cancer metastasis: the seed and soil hypothesis revisited. Nat. Rev. Cancer 3(6):453-458 (2003).
17. MERLO, L. M., et al. Cancer as an evolutionary and ecological process. Nat. Rev. Cancer
6(12):924-935 (2006).