Never Mind the Bullocks, Here's the Science (29 page)

Compared to the worker bees, a queen is spectacularly fertile and long-lived.

The Life of a Worker Bee

The worker bees perform many different tasks once they have become an adult.

They clean the hive from Days 1-3. From Days 3-6 they feed the older larvae, and then graduate to feeding the younger larvae on Days 6-10. Then their food-producing glands begin to atrophy, and there is some overlap of various jobs. Days 8-16 can be spent accepting nectar and pollen from the foragers. They can become foragers themselves from Day 14, or they can guard the hive. They can make wax and build the comb cells from Days 12-18. The bees exude wax from special segments on their abdomens.

And it’s all over around Day 42.

History of Unbelievable Claims

The spectacular biological transformation of a larva into a queen bee provided the background to the claims that royal jelly is a miracle therapy for human beings. These claims appeared in the French beekeeping press of the 1950s, and continually referred to ‘research’ carried out in various hospitals. However, the vast bulk of this
so-called research could never be found in either the medical or scientific literature—only in the French beekeeping press.

The original claim for royal jelly’s power was made around the time when the first antibiotic, penicillin, was performing truly marvellous cures. The royal jelly promotion got piggybacked onto the good press for penicillin. The very first claims for it were that it would ‘rejuvenate’ you. You were supposed to take 0.2-0.5 g each day, for a few months. You could swallow it, or let it melt under your tongue. Either way, it was supposed to act as a tonic and stimulant if you were unhealthy, or a euphoric if you were healthy.

But the truth is something very different.

It has never been proven that royal jelly does anything positive for us. There were a few Russian studies that looked at the claimed good effects of royal jelly on human beings in the 1950s and 1960s. But they all had flaws. None of the studies were well-designed—they lacked details on the exact test methods, lacked controls, were not double-blind, had very small sample sizes, tried to measure human attributes (e.g. rejuvenation, wellbeing and euphoria) that are impossible to measure, and so on.

So why did the public fall for the hype, and hand over their cash?

First, the queen bee’s transformation is truly amazing. Second, the medical claims were amazing (but total fabrications). Third, there was a lot of advertising. And indeed, consumers wanted to believe that a simple outlay of cash would give them as dramatic a change as royal jelly did to a regular bee larva. Fourth, royal jelly was so rare, mysterious and exotic that it was possible to believe anything that was said about it.

I must admit that when I was a hippie, I was lured by the attractive claims, and briefly dabbled with royal jelly. But I was discouraged by the cost—similar to caviar—and the overwhelming lack of results.

Genetics 101

Regardless of the hype about the effect of royal jelly on human beings, it does do wondrous things to bee larvae.

To understand what’s going on, you need to know a little genetics. I’ll start with the Old School Genetics.

There are about 100 trillion cells in our bodies. Practically all of them have all the DNA needed to make another ‘us’. The only cells that don’t are the red blood cells (with no DNA at all) and the sex cells (sperm in males, ova in females). The sex cells have half the DNA needed to make a human being. Then, when a man and a woman love each other very much in a very special way, the sperm and egg combine, making a fertilised egg. The fertilised egg now has all the DNA needed to make a human being.

There are several hundred different types of cells in a human being—lung, liver, brain, heart, nerve, etc. What they all have in common is that they have DNA. The DNA in each cell looks like a ladder. This DNA ladder-of-life has about three billion ‘rungs’. One of the great discoveries of the 20th century was that any three of these ‘rungs’ has all the information needed to ‘tell’ the rest of the cell to ‘get’ an amino acid. If you put a few amino acids together, you get a protein. For example, the protein ‘insulin’ has about 1,000 amino acids. The section of the DNA which ‘made’ the insulin was called the ‘gene’ for insulin.

If you assemble enough proteins together, you get a human being.

So the Old School Genetics thought that the DNA would control the RNA—which in turn would control the manufacture of proteins, which made cells, and ultimately, our bodies. It used to be thought that this was a one-way flow of information, from the DNA to the RNA to the proteins. The DNA was thought of as an ‘architect’s plan’, which was simply read to make proteins. And a ‘gene’ was simply a section of the DNA that did one specific job.

But more recently we have learnt that information can flow in both directions.

Genetics 202

Yes, information can flow back to the DNA—and this can alter the DNA, or at least alter how it is read. (This is what happens with the bee larvae and royal jelly.)

Under the Old School Genetics theories, there were a lot of unanswered questions. For example, if the DNA is the same in each cell, how then do some cells turn into liver cells, while others turn into kidney cells?

The answer is that the genes are controlled, or regulated. For example, the kidney is made of kidney cells. These kidney cells have (like all the cells in the body) the potential to make any organ. But most of that potential is switched off. Only the genes to make kidney cells are switched on in the cells of the kidney.

It’s the same in the liver, and the heart, and so on. Only the genes to make that particular organ are switched on, while all the others are switched off.

This process of making a kidney cell can be controlled at many different ‘levels’. This control is called ‘Gene Regulation’. The control can happen in the gene in the DNA, or when the RNA is made, or when the RNA is exported from the centre of the cell to where the proteins are made, etc.

The DNA is the same in all of our cells. This process of Gene Regulation is how the same DNA makes very different cells. In other words, the DNA is the same in every cell. But the process of what happens to the DNA, and how it is ‘read’ to make proteins, is very different in different cells.

If you haven’t already guessed, Gene Regulation is a part of the New Genetics.

And this process of Gene Regulation is involved in how identical DNA in fertilised bee larvae can make very different creatures—a worker bee, or a queen bee.

At Last, Royal Jelly

So now we can understand what is happening with royal jelly. (Sorry that it took so long to get here, but this knowledge has taken the combined work of tens of thousands of scientists, spread over a period of a century and a half. It’s a lot of knowledge.)

In 2008, Professor Ryszard Maleszka and his colleagues from the Australian National University lifted the lid on how royal jelly turns a regular egg into a queen bee.

Professor Maleszka showed that changing the methyl groups that were added to the DNA could start the process of turning what would be worker bees into queen bees.

The ‘rungs’ on the DNA are still unchanged. But chemical and possibly physical changes have been made to the DNA. This new branch of science is called epigenetics. The chemical change is that methyl groups (CH
₃
) have been added to the rungs. If the rungs are read by the various mechanisms in the cell, they will produce the same proteins. But the methyl groups stop the rungs from being read. (This chemical change is called ‘methylation’.)

The physical change is related to how the DNA is packaged up. After all, this ‘ladder’ with three billion rungs is about 2-3 m long. It has to be all curled up very tightly so that it can fit into a cell only a few millionths of a metre across. The bits of the DNA that are at the very centre of the curled-up DNA can’t be read—in the same way that the very inside of a tightly balled-up sock won’t get washed in the washing machine. But the bits of the sock on the outside can get washed free of dirt—just like the bits on the
outside of the curled-up ball of the DNA can be read. (This physical change is called ‘chromatin remodelling’.)

So now we know that if you feed lots of royal jelly to a bee larva, methyl groups get added to the bee’s DNA and it turns into a queen. (But we are still not sure exactly what chemicals in the royal jelly do this, or exactly which sections of the DNA they act on.)

It seems that royal jelly alters how the bee DNA is read. But, it works only on bee DNA, not on human DNA.

Prostate Cancer

Today we know that it’s not just the DNA that you got from your parents that controls what happens to you—it’s also your environment.

First, let’s look at prostate cancer and the effect of a healthy lifestyle.

The prostate is a gland that in men is wrapped around the urethra. We used to think that only some men got cancer of the prostate. Today, we think that virtually all the men that reach their 80s will have some kind of prostate cancer. In the vast majority of cases, the cancer will not bother them, and will not shorten their lives.

One study showed that a healthy lifestyle could act on the DNA in the prostate cancer and trigger genetic changes. In other words, information could flow from outside the cell (good diet and exercise) and modify the DNA to slow down the prostate cancer.

This small study followed 30 men with low-risk prostate cancer. There was no need for them to have any medical treatment such as surgery, chemotherapy or radiotherapy.

These men then underwent major lifestyle changes. They started eating a diet rich in healthy foods, such as fruit, vegetables, legumes, soy products, whole grains, etc. They also started spending half an hour each day doing moderate exercise. And,
finally, they spent as much as an hour each day on stress management methods such as meditation.

After three months, there were obvious changes. They lost weight, had lower blood pressure, felt better, had more energy, etc.

But the DNA in their prostate cancer had also been changed!

To get this information, they biopsied the prostate cancer both before and after the lifestyle change.

In their DNA, these men naturally had genes to fight the prostate cancer. Unfortunately, before the lifestyle change, these genes had been switched off. But now about 48 of these protector genes had been turned on, and were fighting the prostate cancer.

In their DNA, these men also naturally had genes that could help the prostate cancer grow. Unfortunately, before the lifestyle intervention, these genes had been switched on. But now about 453 of these genes were turned off, and were no longer helping the cancer grow.

In other words, the environment external to the prostate gland (what they ate, how they handled stress and their new exercise regime) changed how the DNA in their cancer was now being read.

Dutch Famine, 1944

So the bottom line of epigenetics is that information can flow back to the DNA, and change what it does.

Sometimes these changes to the DNA can last for generations.

In mid-1944, the Allies landed in Europe, to boot out the occupying Nazi forces. In Holland, the Allies started Operation Market Garden, to gain control of the bridge across the Rhine River at Arnhem. (This is the subject of the movie
A Bridge Too Far.
) The local Dutch also rose in rebellion against the Nazi rulers. But Operation Market Garden failed, and the Dutch were punished by having their food restricted.

The adult rations were dropped to as low as 580 calories per day (about one-quarter of the minimum daily requirement). Unfortunately, the winter of 1944-1945 was unusually harsh, making food demands higher than usual. It was later called ‘The Dutch Famine of 1944’ or the ‘Hunger Winter’.

As you would expect, the pregnant women gave birth to smaller than normal children. But apparently there were epigenetic changes to the DNA of these wartime babies. When these girls grew up, and had babies themselves, their new babies were also smaller than normal, and so on to the next generation.

So the terrible famine experienced by the pregnant mothers made permanent changes to the DNA of their children. The ‘rungs’ of the DNA were still the same, but how the rungs were read and turned into proteins was changed.

Epigenetics—Twins

Identical twins can be very similar, or a little different.

They start off with identical DNA, when the fertilised egg splits into two. But from that moment on, they are treated differently. One might be fed more nutrients through a short and fat umbilical cord, while the other would get fewer nutrients through a long and thin umbilical cord.

There are cases where one twin is schizophrenic, while the other is not. Yep, it’s probably epigenetics at work—the environment changing how the DNA is read.

One study looked at 40 pairs of identical twins from Spain, Denmark and the UK. Their ages ranged from 3 to 74 years, and 25 pairs were female.

The big surprise (at least, it would be a surprise if you didn’t know about epigenetics, which has already told us why and how a combination of diet and exercise can alter the course of some cancers, or how your lifestyle can affect your DNA) was that the
youngest twins had the most similar DNA. The older the twins were, the more likely that their DNA was different. And the more time the twins spent apart from each other and in different environments, the more their DNA was different.

These are still early days, but scientists think that foods, exposure to environmental chemicals and pollutants, levels of physical activity, and perhaps even powerful emotional experiences could affect how the DNA is read.

More Epigenetics

One study looked at male rats that were exposed to the crop fungicide vinclozolin while they were still in the uterus. Once they grew into adult rats, they were less fertile than unexposed rats. They also had more cancer and kidney problems. That was to be expected. What was unusual was that these problems were passed down the male line for three more generations. The ‘rungs’ in the rats’ DNA were unchanged, but there were lots of methyl groups added to the DNA.