Fractality — Patterns in Vascular Biology

FUNDAMENTAL FRACTALITY

The first time I learnt about cellular biology in school I was piqued.

The cell contains mitochondria - which generates energy particles. My house had the fuse box, which to me at the time was the source of power. There was the golgi apparatus, and my home had a work area. There was the ribosome, and mom ruled the kitchen. Finally there was the lysosome, and we of course had our toilet!

It wasn’t over. It happened again. This time with organ systems. I was flabbergasted then. What in the world was up?

The heart provided blood energy, the gut provided food, the kidneys screened away toxins, and the liver juggled complex multi-arrayed roles.

And then the revelation!
The town we lived in had an abattoir, a vegetable market, an energy grid, a sewage system, and a planning committee. It was getting ridiculously uncanny. Right from the micro-cellular level to the mega macro stage were ever self-repeating patterns of form and function. Say hello to the phenomenon of “fractality”.

This fractal nature of things is well known to scientists for a very long time, be it the patterns on a leaf, the arborescent arcs of a lightning bolt, the halos in interstellar galaxies, or simply the motif on a single snowflake. What works locally does globally too albeit on a different scale. One of the most outstanding areas of fractal discovery and research is in angiogenesis (the growth of new blood vessels in tissues). Small blood vessels sprout out from existing ones in a dizzying almost infinite regression.

But this begs the question. What does this signify? Is it pure evolutionary stochasticity? I believe that there is a deeper truth in this, there is something that feels right about this. It fits in well with the life cycle of an individual, where there is life and death. This also happens to be the case in a family, a community, and society at large. The individual and the civilisation dies ultimately, but there is something that lives on which joins them all in the eternal timeline. There is a truth in that everlasting spirit which has no end, and of which perhaps no beginning can be known. In such a panoramic and cosmic view, what could be more geometrically and aesthetically pure than the fractal pattern of nature?

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