#5 Empathetic Inquiry
I’m guarding a way of talking about science, or maybe a way of talking about just about anything.
People seem to find me simultaneously trusting and skeptical. Empathetic and detached. Open-minded and rigid. A stickler yet adaptable.
People didn’t break barriers in this session. “How do you know?”
Hybrid plant do well because they’re friends with bacteria. “Is that the only reason?”
No one can go anywhere without a vaccine anymore. “Is that true?”
The government is trash. “How so?”
Vaccines will mess up your DNA. “How so?”
Eastern society is beginning to accept Christian principles as universal. “What makes you say it that way?” and “Why not the other way around?”
Vaccines are not effective. “What makes you say that?” and “Are you referring to one of them specifically?”
We’re completely locked down. “Is that true?”
One friend has begun mirroring me — “Is that true?” he’ll sprinkle the question in from time to time as we banter about the customs of buying flowers on Valentine’s day, the best types of grapes, and the best way to manipulate meat on the BBQ.
Back to guarding this way of talking about science.
What does “this way” mean?
It means leading with curiosity throughout an inquiry even when the goal is to get answers.
Say, for example, you want to understand whether a vaccine can mess up your DNA and if therefore you should not get it.
I would ask you a few questions — which vaccine, or which type of vaccine, do you have in mind? This is me checking to see if you’re aware that there’s different types of vaccines.
I would ask you what are you picturing about how this works? What is scary about that for you?
Moreover, I’d like to know, what have you heard about how the virus works — the one that the vaccine is supposed to prevent you from getting?
Until now, I’ve asked four questions and not provided an opinion or explanation.
I want to know your starting point.
If you’re not aware of how the virus acts inside your body once it infects you, we can talk about that. We can talk about how any virus, in general, gets inside your cells and uses your cells machinery to get its own genetic material replicated. For viruses, this genetic material can be DNA or RNA.
Does the virus’s DNA or RNA become part of your DNA and then mess it up?
Honestly, I don’t know and I could ask a friend who know more about virology if that is true — always, sometimes, or never.
Does the virus somehow trick your cells to treat its DNA or RNA as if it is your DNA and therefore reproduce it?
Yes. Normally your cells replicate DNA as part of the process for making new cells.
When a virus successfully infects your cells, your cells’ DNA replication machinery end up replicating the virus’s DNA or RNA, creating loads of virus inside your cell until it the cell bursts, releasing tons of new viruses that can then drift through your bodily fluids until they latch with new cells to infect.
So, the virus itself messes with your DNA replication system. If you get infected, your DNA replication system will be messed up.
On a side note — over tens of thousands of years of evolution, some of our DNA sequence has been changed incorporating viral genes. More on that another time.
Back to vaccines, and back to my earlier question — which vaccine were you referring to when you asked about whether it will mess with your DNA?
There are different types of vaccines. Let’s take the two types available to us here in Hong Kong.
One type is an mRNA vaccine. The other type is an inactivated virus.
The inactivated virus’s RNA (the COVID virus has RNA as its genetic material) has been effectively destroyed. The way this type of vaccine works does not involve your body getting to know a foreign source of RNA or DNA.
The mRNA vaccine does — it contains mRNA. What is mRNA?
Messenger RNA is the middle step in your cells’ process to make DNA into a physical protein — the proteins that give our body structure and enzymes that do things for us, like build structures, degrade structures, and more.
When the virus infects your cells, it also uses your cells’ protein building machinery so that its genetic code gets translated into proteins — the one that forms the outer shell of the virus.
By the way, a virus is basically two things — some genes in the form of RNA or DNA, and a protein capsule protecting its genes. That’s it.
When your body fights a viral infection, it learns to recognize the outer proteins of the virus, often one or a few specific proteins.
The mRNA in the mRNA vaccine is a code for one of the virus’s outer proteins.
What your cells do with the mRNA in the vaccine is one step in exactly what they would be hijacked to do if infected by the virus.
Your cells take the mRNA code delivered by the vaccine and use that to make only ONE specific protein of the virus.
The presence of this foreign protein trains your immune system such that when that protein shows up again, your body has already prepared immune cells and antibodies that can prevent the virus from infecting your cells.
How did we do?
Has this discussion changed anything for you?
What questions do you have now?
I have aimed to lead you step-by-step through a discussion of not only what we know about viruses and vaccines but the string of questions that connect these ideas.
This process is intended to inform while preserving the listeners’ right to their own decisions and their right to feel skeptical, uncomfortable, or uncertain about something.
Did it work for you? Let me know.
What shall we call this?
My best idea, for now, is ‘Empathetic Inquiry.’
What do you think?
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This is the fifth assignment in ‘Don’t Break the Chain’ — a daily writing course led by Cole Schafer. Today’s prompt: What is an idea or thing I guarding now that I hope will outlive me long after I’m gone?
