A Biological Look at Suicide Essay -- Biology Essays Research Papers

capability Above All A Biological Look at self-destructionAnd let me ask you this the dead,where arent they? Franz Wright, refreshful Yorker Magazine, Oct. 6, 2003Dear Mom and Dad, the letter begins benignly, give thanks you for all of your commitment. But I am non a worthy daughter, and you will all be better off without me. Please absorb I have done this for your own good. Nothing more. And beside it, Mr. and Mrs. A reveal their daughter, dead by her own hand.So begin the episodes of anguished soul-searching, of unconscionable if-onlys experienced by the family members of countless suicides. Anyone who has faced what Mr. and Mrs. A now get it on with knows that the girl is wrong they will not be better off, not feel happier, without her. Yet each year, thousands of suicide victims express similar convictions I am knock offing myself, they reassure us, for your own good. This thinking this appeal for self-sacrifice that our society cannot condone where does it come fro m? Why, in truth, do people kill themselves? The problem of suicide ravages the minds of its survivors of philosophers and, more recently, of psychologists. We simply cannot understand it. Why suicide? While many non-biological scientists are inclined to define suicide as a conscious act thereby excluding, perhaps, all non-human self-inflicted deaths (1), (2) lets us deposit with the more basic definition of suicide as self-murder, with or without cognitive knowledge or intent (***). And, as the concerned psychologists plunge on in their direction, let us examine this problem from a distinct standpoint, that of biology. In order to make sense of the biology of suicide, however, we must head start understand the more general omnipresent phenomenon death.... ...ants, a good verbal description of self-destruction of cells, this time in plantshttp//www.sebiology.org/bulletin/july2002/plant.htm9)Foucault , Michael. Discipline and Punish The rescue of the Prison. Random House New York, 1977.10) Weizmann Institute of Science Death of a Cell, a discussion of one series of studies of cellular apoptosis http//wis-wander.weizmann.ac.il/ internet site/EN/weizman.asp?pi=422&doc_id=436&interID=138&sq=138NOT CITED IN TEXT11) http//www.sciencedaily.com/releases/1997/07/970722090258.htmStopping Cellular suicide Could Boost Production in Biotech Labs, a look at slightly of the cons of cellular suicide in terms of technology 12)Researchers Find New Way to Trigger Self-Destruction of Certain Cancer Cells, a design for putting cellular suicide to use for humans http//www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2003-06/sjcr-rfn061803.php