Team:OUC-China/Project/Background
From 2011.igem.org
Philosophical background
Our team’s creation comes from a world view advocated by ancient Chinese people 2000 years ago, which is called “Five Elements Theory”. We are dedicated to constructing a new signal system of E.coli to make the cellular communication correspond to the “Five Elements” concept by Lao Tzu. Furthermore, our program aims to build a new model of bacterial interaction based on our ancestor’s intelligence to demonstrate their profound ancient philosophy.
![](https://static.igem.org/mediawiki/igem.org/0/0b/OUC-China.background1.jpg)
According to “Five Elements Theory”, the relationship among the five elements was called “allelopathy”. In another word, people thought these five elements were not constantly stable, but transformed to and contained each other. Ancient Chinese material view considered the world as a two-dimension system. Looking up to “History of The Three Empires and Five Sacred Mountains”, which was dated about 1800 years ago, we can find such sentences, “The earliest universe was like a nuclear turbid as an egg, in which a god named Pangu was born. Pangu cleaved the universe with his ax, making the universe disassociate all things according to their ‘Yin’ or ‘Yang’ property. The lithe floated up to form the sky, and the heavy sank down to form the ground.” People of that era thought “Yin” and “Yang” as two fundamental properties of substances, and their separation contributed to the emergence of all the things in the world. When “Yin” and “Yang” interacted orderly, things then derived the five statuses of “Metal”, “Wood”, “Water”, “Fire” and “Earth”, transforming and containing each other to reach balance. The relationship, as the picture shows, can be summarized as: Metal derived Water, Water derived Wood, Wood derived Fire, Fire derived Earth, Earth derived Metal....Metal restrained Wood, Wood restrained Earth, Earth restrained Water, Water restrained Fire, Fire restrained Metal....forming a cycling, repeating and balanced system thus ensured the stability of the universe. Had the order been destroyed, “Yin” and “Yang” would have mixed again and the universe would have disappeared back to its initial turbidity.
Surprisingly, this law of development has been trusted by Chinese people through thousands of years and has been found corresponding and proved by new scientific technology discoveries. For instance, the anti-matter theory, the negative feedback regulation of bio-metabolism and the balance relationship in ecosystem all reveal high correspondence with this fundamental material views model (“Five Elements”). More interestingly, five is just the minimum cardinality to form a stable reverse regulatory system.
![](https://static.igem.org/mediawiki/igem.org/3/32/OUC-China.background2.jpg)