Dominique Richard: “Without PLANTS there would be no LIFE”

The Plant Kingdom is home to some weird facts.  For example:
·         Bamboo shoots can grow as much as three feet per day, which means the naked eye can actually see the shoots getting longer.
·         If you carve a notch into a tree five feet above the ground, no matter how tall that tree grows the notch will always remain the exact same five feet above the ground.
·         The average plant uses only about one-sixth of the energy it harvests from the sun for its own nutrition – it freely shares the remaining 83% of its energy with members of the larger (and much more understood) animal kingdom.
·         There are more than 400,000 documented species of plants and trees, and many scientists believe we have only begun to scratch the surface of the plant kingdom.
 
Interesting, right?  Well, here’s something even more interesting: the benefit to human health that Dominique Richard and his company, Plant Stem Cell (PSC) Distribution, deliver routinely is perhaps best understand when viewed through a John Hughes lens.  Bear with me here – this will all make sense a few paragraphs from now…
 
One of the most famous lines from the iconic 1980’s coming-of-age movie, The Breakfast Club, is spoken by Judd Nelson’s burned-out teenage rebel, Bender, who notes that “without lamps there would be no light.”  We can debate the accuracy of his observation from a technical standpoint, but there’s really no arguing with the basic logic.  In the 21st century, when we walk into a room, we expect to simply flip a switch and instantly illuminate the room.  Without lamps there would be no light…
 
Bender sings the praises of lamps in response to something Anthony Michael Hall’s character, a nerdy, straight-A student named Brian, tells him: “Without trigonometry there would be no engineering.”  
 
So Brian says we need trigonometry for engineering, and Bender’s comeback is to suggest that we need lamps for light.  Feels a little like apples and oranges, right?  Ah, but indeed that is the wisdom – that’s why the line is iconic.  Brian is clearly the smarter of the two (at least academically), but it’s Bender who sifts through the rhetoric of the chain of dependence that gets us from trigonometry to light: trigonometry – engineering – electricity – artificial illumination – lamps – light.  He instinctively understands that we need lamps to light our way.  It’s just that easy. 
 
The mystery that gets us from trigonometry to light baffles most of us and we prefer to remain in the dark (terrible pun intended).  The Benders of the world are thrilled that the Brians of the world understand the mystery, but mostly they just want the room to light up when they flip a switch. 
 
OK, so let’s see if we can bring this back to Dominique Richard…
 
Every science teacher in America, and frankly most of the collective student body, as well, believes whole-heartedly in the botanical (and more accurate!) version of the “without lamps there would be no light” mantra: without PLANTS there would be no LIFE. 
 
In fact, most of us understand on a conceptual (if not biochemical) level that through a process known as photosynthesis, the 400,000+ plant species on Earth do the profoundly important and incredibly thankless job of turning the sun’s energy into the very air that a good chunk of the animal kingdom needs in order to survive.  
 
Fewer of us understand the scientific (read: plant-based) equivalent of Brian’s chain of dependence.  It goes something like this:  chemistry – biology – botany – embryonic phytochemistry – plants – life.  We all instinctively know get that without plants there’d be no life, but the mystery of how we get from chemistry to life escapes us – and that’s OK.  After all, most of us are Benders – blissfully ignorant about the scientific explanation of the very air we breathe.  We just expect to be filled with a new lease on life with each inhale. 
 
But just as we need the world’s Brians in order to ensure the lights keep coming on, so too do we need the Dominique Richards of the world to ensure that with each breath we are getting everything we need to live and nothing that might kill us.  See, there’s a lot of stuff happening behind the scenes that leads to the mantra without plants there’d be no life... 
 
For example, PSC has discovered that certain plant stem cells, when extracted from the plant noninvasively, offer extraordinary healing power for the illnesses and diseases that affect the human condition.  So yeah, plants are far more than just the world’s photosynthesizers.  At a time when synthetic medicines seem to be introducing more potential side effects than the illnesses or diseases that have us taking the medicine in the first place, the 400,000+ plant species may hold the key to our ultimate survival.    Kinda makes you glad the Dominiques of the world understand how we get from chemistry to life, right?
 
Just as you want to flip a switch to light your way without contemplating how exactly we got to this point, you (and the world’s Benders) want to take a breath of the air the plant kingdom prepared for you without trying to figure out the delicate balance of the universe.  And you can, because the Brians and Dominiques of the world are doing all the dirty work behind the scenes.
 
And that, friends, is why you need the John Hughes lens to truly appreciate the work being done by Dominique Richard and PSC Distribution.  Oh, you still don’t get it?  John Hughes directed several iconic 1980’s coming-of-age films, including The Breakfast Club. 
 
 

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Nicola DiNatale

Marketing Director

PSC Distribution

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