ABSTRACT
One of the criteria to a strong principle in natural sciences is simplicity. The conventional view holds that the world is provided with natural laws that must be simple. This common-sense approach is a modern rewording of the medieval philosophical/theological concept of the Multiple arising from (and generated by) the One. Humans need to pursue unifying frameworks, classificatory criteria and theories of everything. Still, the fact that our cognitive abilities tend towards simplification and groupings does not necessarily entail that this is the way the world works. Here we ask: what if singularity does not pave the way to multiplicity? How will we be sure if the Ockham's razor holds in real life? We will show in the sequel that the propensity to reduce to simplicity the relationships among the events leads to misleading interpretations of scientific issues. We are not going to take a full sceptic turn: we will engage in active outreach, suggesting examples from biology and physics to demonstrate how a novel methodological antiunitary approach might help to improve our scientific attitude towards world affairs. We will provide examples from aggregation of SARS-Cov-2 particles, unclassified extinct creatures, pathological brain stiffness. Further, we will describe how antiunitary strategies, plagiarising medieval concepts from William od Ockham and Gregory of Rimini, help to explain novel relational approaches to quantum mechanics and the epistemological role of our mind in building the real world.
ABSTRACT
BACKGROUND: Gene-environment interactions are relevant for several respiratory diseases. This communication raises the hypothesis that the severity of COVID-19, a complex disease where the individual response to the infection may play a significant role, could partly result from a gene-environment interaction between air-pollution and Alpha-1 Antitrypsin (AAT) genes. METHODS: To evaluate the impact of the AAT and air pollution interaction on COVID-19, we introduced an AAT*air pollution global risk score summing together, in each country, an air pollution score (ozone, nitrogen dioxide and fine particulate matter) and an AAT score (which sums the ranked frequency of MZ, SZ, MS). We compared this global score with the ranking of European countries in terms of death number per million persons. RESULTS: The ranking of the AAT*air pollution global risk score matched the ranking of the countries in terms of the observed COVID-19 deaths per 1M inhabitants, namely in the case of the first European countries: Belgium, UK, Spain, Italy, Sweden, France. We observed parallelism between the number of COVID deaths and the AAT*air pollution global risk in Europe. AAT anti-protease, immune-modulating and coagulation-modulating activities may explain this finding, although very speculatively. CONCLUSIONS: Even if further studies taking into account genetic background, population density, temporal dynamics of individual epidemics, access to healthcare, social disparities and immunological response to SARS-CoV2 are needed, our preliminary observation urges to open a discussion on gene-environment interactions in COVID-19.