Archive: Cells, Africa, Cloning, Microscopy, Stem Cells, Racism, Bladder, Faith
Here are some of the stories we were reporting in mid December 2001, restored from archives.
Note: some embedded links may no longer work.
Cells Squeeze Out Their Dead 12/13/2001
Cells die, and if left in place in tissues, they would shrivel, rot and leave a hole. Something must be done, and the cellular machinery is built to handle every contingency. At the American Society for Cell Biology meeting this week, the process was described by London biologists, reports Science Now. Early in its death throes, the dying cell sends out a warning to neighboring cells, who produce extra motor proteins actin and myosin. These go into action retracting the healthy cells around it into a contractile ring, as if saying Heave ho on cue, squeezing the dead cell out like toothpaste, then reforming the intact tissue. The scientists switched the proteins on and off in skin epithelial tissue to test their hypothesis.
There are thousands of things like this going on in our bodies that we take for granted, but are necessary. Even cell death (apoptosis) and tissue regeneration requires the motor vehicles we described in last week’s headline. A cell has been likened to a city; this story takes a look at the morgue.
African Rift Valley Mysteries Investigated 12/13/2001
Researchers from Penn State are trying to figure out the origin of the Great Rift Valley that runs from the Dead Sea to the southern part of the African continent. By mapping the distribution of rare earth minerals in lavas, they hope to shed light on the origin and evolution of the Rift Valley, which is “shrouded in mystery.” They suspect a mantle plume, unrelated to continental drift, has been rising and splitting the continent. Their isotopic analyses “suggest that plume lavas have been erupting at Turkana for perhaps 35 million years.”
The news media grant evolutionary geologists far too much license to weave tall tales. Just two sentences later, the article states, “The African Rift Valley is a heavily seismic area and there have been volcanic eruptions in the past 50 years. The area is actively changing, but while Furman and Knight know that the rift north of Ethiopia is now an ocean ridge and that the rift south of Turkana is not, they still do not know when, where and how the change from mantle plume to mid ocean ridge occurs.”
If they were not there watching it happen, and if they don’t know how it happens, and if the origin of the Rift Valley is “shrouded in mystery,” how can they say when it happened? How can they allege so confidently that Turkana had three separate rift events, and that a mantle plume was responsible, and that lavas have been erupting there for 35 million years? Evolutionary geologists do not know any of these things. We’ve seen before that radioactive dates of lavas can give wildly inaccurate results, so who’s to say that the valley could not have formed suddenly and catastrophically in much more recent times? Geologists gather a few pieces of a vast puzzle and try to fit them together into a plausible story, but like we reported last week, every geological story has anomalies and counterarguments. It’s more like watching sports than news, except there’s no referee to declare the winner.
Survival of Fittest Used to Produce Coal-Eating Bacteria 12/13/2001
Scientists at Brookhaven National Laboratory have been awarded a patent for producing coal-purifying bacteria. By pushing “survival of the fittest” to the extreme, they isolated a strain of bacteria that can eat away impurities in fossil fuels, yielding a clean burning coal.
This is not natural selection; it is old-fashioned artificial selection, like dog breeding, to accentuate characters through intelligent design. Using the phrase survival of the fittest is misleading and anachronistic, as if this supports evolutionary research. The bacteria are still bacteria, and the capabilities were present in the original genome.
Monkey Clones Are Monsters 12/12/2001
“A high percentage of cloned monkey embryos that look healthy are really a ‘gallery of horrors’ deep within,” reports New Scientist. This comment is from ACT, the company that claimed the first cloned human embryo last month. The trauma of taking a nucleus from another cell, or some other unknown process, causes developing clones to go horribly awry at some point, in most cases.
Even if they get it right some day, will that justify cloning humans? For now, even advocates should admit it is far too risky.
New Microscope Technique Shows Cells in Action 12/12/2001
A secret new light microscope technique has been unveiled at the American Society for Cell Biology meeting in Washington DC this week, reports Nature Science Update (see also this report in Science). The technique achieves twice the resolving power of existing light microscopes and is able to image fine details of living cells without harming them. Tim Richardson and colleagues from a hospital in Toronto could not reveal details of the method since it has not yet been patented, but they awed participants at the conference by showing a colorful movie set to music of mitochondria zipping around inside the cell. Richardson said they were not expecting mitochondria to move, perhaps the little powerhouses, with their ATP synthase motors, rush around to the sites where energy is needed. Now wouldn’t that be nice if the gas station came to you?
Existing high-resolution microscopes damage or kill cells during the preparation, creating doubt about the validity of the observations. Electron microscopes, for instance, can only work on dead material. This new technique promises to open new windows on cellular processes at work with less interference. Richardson’s movie showed mitochondria zipping across the cell in five seconds, a surprising rate of speed that some biologists are not yet convinced is natural or an artifact of the imaging process. Microtubules (the intracellular railroad) were seen to “randomly branch and fuse,” though undoubtedly this will be found to be not so random as knowledge progresses. The secrecy of this new technique makes it somewhat controversial, but we can look forward to wonderful new motion imagery of cellular processes at work, and can safely predict amazing new discoveries within creation’s ultimate showcase of intelligent design, the cell.
[See my article on advances in Super-Resolution Microscopy at Evolution News, Dec 1, 2020.]
Mature Muscle Stem Cells Can Make Blood 12/11/2001
Nature Science Update is reporting that mature muscle cells in mice have stem cells that can migrate to form blood cells, then come back and make more muscle, an “amazing thing,” according to the University of Pittsburgh researchers who reported to the American Society for Cell Biology. They weren’t even looking for stem cells in the muscle tissue. Helen Blau at Stanford says, “It shows that cells can go in many different directions given the right environment.” She believes the traditional view that stem cells permanently lose their ability to produce other cell types is changing. Others argue that research on embryonic stem cells should continue.
More and more discoveries are taking the wind out of the sails of those who advocate tinkering with human embryos for medical progress. This is a highly charged ethical drama worth watching. If embryonic stem cell researchers can no longer claim it’s the only way to get the totipotent cells, will they have a case for continuing at all?
How Did Racism Evolve? 12/11/2001
Evolutionary psychologists ran experiments to see if racism is hardwired in the human brain, and concluded it is not, says Scientific American. While this is encouraging that racist feelings can be overcome, it leaves the psychologists at a loss to explain how racism evolved: “Yet whereas natural selection could conceivably favor automatic categorization according to those two factors [sex and age], exactly how our ancestors might have benefited from encoding race is difficult to imagine.” The authors of a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, “Can race be erased?”, propose that the ability to detect alliances might have provided an evolutionary advantage on early humans.
The authors are members of the University of California at Santa Barbara Center for Evolutionary Psychology. Evolutionary Psychology is a reductionist pseudoscience that tries to explain any and all human behavior in Darwinian terms. It’s a form of spin doctoring that deprives humans of any moral responsibility for their actions. Some of the worst instances of racism in history were rationalized by evolutionary thinking, from Nazi atrocities to the shooting gallery game against the Tasmanians, who were viewed as expendable evolutionary misfits. Darwin himself, and many of his followers, were racists; Darwin believed that whites by virtue of an alleged innate superiority would eventually eradicate non-whites.
Let us put a stop to this unscientific, immoral nonsense. Racism results from hatred and sin, and there is a Creator who will hold His creatures accountable for those who do not love their neighbors as themselves. See Answers In Genesis for more information on Biblical vs Darwinist views on race, and also their One Human Race website.
How the Bladder Stretches 12/11/2001
The human bladder can stretch from walnut size to basketball size in two hours; how does it do it? According to Nature Science Update, scientists from the University of Pittsburgh, reporting at the American Society for Cell Biology this week, are learning that it’s quite a neat trick. For one thing, folds of tissue in the empty bladder unfurl. But more amazing is how the inner surface of the bladder recycles itself through a process of fusing and budding. The scientists discovered that during stretching, vesicles in the inner edge of cells in the bladder lining fuse together, while those in back bud off. Fusing and budding fine-tunes the amount of surface area to keep the watertight seal between neighboring cells as the bladder constantly stretches or relaxes. This process also helps refresh cells damaged by proximity to urine toxins. In addition, this flexible, waterproof membrane helps defend against bacterial infection. “The bladder lining is gaining newfound respect,” says Monica Liebert of the American Urological Association.
Even the secret organs we don’t like to talk about are pretty amazing. The bladder lining is not just like a stretchy rubber glove; it is a complex system of cells that continuously maintains a barrier to liquid waste and holds it in till safe to discharge. We take it for granted until something goes wrong, but day after day, for decades, most of us have fully functioning equipment that allows us to drink the supersize cola and drive a hundred miles before the alarm goes off, which is another wonder in itself. (If your baby grows a bladder the size of a basketball, better get the king-size Pampers.)
Nature’s Perfect Snack Food: Bugs 12/11/2001
In a story sure to gross out the teens, scientists have determined that mealworms are good for you: “Next time you find worms in your sack of flour, try adding water, salt and oil and cooking the mixture on a hot griddle,” suggests Nature Science Update. Doug Whitman, an entomologist at Illinois State University, says, “Anyone splitting logs for winter is going to come across lots of big, juicy beetle grubs full of protein and lipids.” Mealworms, instead of being pests, could be viewed as a blessing in disguise for poor countries; the larvae are excellent sources of protein and essential fatty acids. Volunteers found ground-up mealworms in tortillas delicious. “Entomologists have been eating chocolate-chip mealworm cookies at conferences for years,” says Chris Carlton from Louisiana State University.
Or try out the John the Baptist diet of locusts and wild honey; he seemed pretty healthy. Why, with the right outlook, the next locust plague could be a bountiful harvest for free. Keep the kid away from the stinkbugs, however.
Dark Matter Mapped 12/11/2001
A team of 30 astronomers has mapped the distribution of dark matter surrounding 200,000 galaxies, according to a Rutgers University press release, which includes a picture of the finished map.
Of course they are not seeing the dark matter (it’s dark, remember?), but they are inferring it from the clustering of galaxies. See a previous recent article that complained that dark matter theory is in trouble.
Mayo Clinic Cautiously Advises Faith Is Good for Health 12/11/2001
Patients who have an optimistic belief system that gives life meaning and purpose in the setting of pain and suffering, those who have a large group of supportive friends committed to their welfare, and those who live healthier lifestyles and abuse their bodies less often with drugs, alcohol, and cigarettes, are bound to be healthier and recover more quickly from illness. Who could deny that such factors are relevant to the practice of medicine?
Thus concludes Harold Koenig of Duke University Medical Center, summarizing two studies in the Mayo Clinic Proceedings December 2001. The first of the two studies in the December 2001 Proceedings is entitled, “Religious Involvement, Spirituality, and Medicine: Implications for Clinical Practice” by Paul S. Mueller et al. Combing the research literature on spirituality and health, Mueller’s group concluded that faith does appear to have positive health benefits, primarily through “psychosocial, behavioral, and physiological mechanisms that are known, understood, and accepted within the field of traditional science,” according to Koenig.
The second study by Jennifer M. Aviles and colleagues is entitled “Intercessory Prayer and Cardiovascular Disease Progression in a Coronary Care Unit Population: A Randomized Controlled Trial.” The abstract states, “The results of 26 weeks of intercessory prayer, a widely practiced complementary therapy, were studied in 799 patients randomized to an intercessory prayer group or to a control group after discharge from a coronary care unit. As delivered in this study, intercessory prayer had no significant effect on specifically defined medical outcomes, regardless of risk status.” Commenting on the results, Koenig admits,
The weakness of the study is that the effect explored has no basis within the current scientific paradigm. If found to be true, such an effect would indeed challenge our understanding of the universe and perhaps even overturn much scientific knowledge accumulated to date. Not only are there scientific difficulties with such a finding, there are also theological ones. Thus, not only would most scientists expect a null result from such a study, but most Western theologians would as well. Furthermore, this study contributes almost no information to the area of research reviewed by Mueller and colleagues (who have not included a single intercessory prayer study among the 146 references cited in their article).
Although neither of these studies provide conclusive empirical evidence for the effect of religion/spirituality on health, Koenig thinks doctors should take these factors into account: “Despite the many unknowns and the need for further research and greater understanding of these relationships, physicians can even now begin to address the spiritual needs of patients and yet avoid most of the dangers and pitfalls.” They can do this by taking a spiritual assessment of the patient (understanding his or her faith background) to allow for cooperation with the patient’s clergy, but must avoid endorsing or prescribing religion for nonreligious patients or favoring one over the other.
It is noteworthy that Koenig starts his summary with the recognition that it was primarily Christians and religious people who founded hospitals and advanced medical care:
Religious groups built the first hospitals in Western civilization during the fourth century for care of the sick unable to afford private medical care. For the next thousand years until the Reformation and to a lesser extent until the French Revolution, it was the religious establishment that built hospitals, provided medical training, and licensed physicians to practice medicine. … Likewise, the profession of nursing emerged directly from religious orders that until the early 1900s staffed the majority of hospitals both in the United States and other Western countries.
Though the association of religion to medical practice had divided by the late 1600s, Koenig says that, “Over the past decade, the medical community has become increasingly interested in the possibility of bringing down the wall that has separated religion from medicine for more than 2 centuries.” The question is how to go about it without appearing coercive, or how to know what really works.
You can’t submit the sovereign Lord of the universe to the scientific method. Prayer is not a vending machine. Most people know a family member that died despite prayer, partly because God calls everyone home sooner or later, by His own sovereign will. Even if it could be proved prayer works, would God submit Himself to a scientific test, so that the Mayo Clinic could be the ones to announce to the world what the Bible already teaches? Wouldn’t prayer become a bandwagon, with every hospital patient calling up as many friends as possible to do “intercessory prayer” with no regard for repentance from sin or trust in the will of God?
Nor is prayer some kind of natural law or force guaranteed to work, some “effect” to be discovered within a “scientific paradigm” as Hoenig characterizes it. It is a Person responding to another person’s plea. Sometimes the answer is “No” or “Not now; wait.” You can’t submit that to a double-blind test. Jesus demonstrated instantaneous power over death and disease, but that doesn’t mean it is always God’s will to heal everyone instantly. Sometimes healing will come in the form of spiritual strength to grow in wisdom in spite of suffering.
Not just any prayer is acceptable to God, either; He will not hear the prayers of those worshiping false gods or living in sin. How many of the prayers in this study were directed to Allah or the spirit of the coyote? Will having the local witch doctor dance around the bed with a rubber chicken be effective, just because it includes faith or spirituality? Even good prayer with the right words and directed to the true God can come from a heart that has the wrong motives. How is a scientist supposed to account for all these variables?
For these and other reasons, one cannot conclude anything from the second study about the efficacy of prayer. Pray without ceasing anyway. Following Biblical lifestyles will not give you eternal physical life, clearly; but in most cases, it will make your threescore and ten more joyful and productive. Follow the chain links on health for more recent stories on the relation of faith and health.
Rutgers Continuing Faraday Tradition 12/11/2001
Rutgers University has announced its fourth annual Faraday Christmas Children’s Lecture for December 22 on the campus, free of charge and open to the public. Patterned after the popular lectures given to children at Christmas time by Christian physicist Michael Faraday in London during the mid-1800’s, the lecture is “designed not just to inform students but with an eye toward humor and exciting the imagination. The object of the show is to emphasize the fun in science.” Demonstrations will include an exploding hydrogen balloon, a man lying on a bed of nails and the use of a fire extinguisher to shoot a person on roller skates across the room.
This should be great fun, but it is doubtful Rutgers would present science from a theistic viewpoint like Faraday’s. For terrific stage demonstrations on science from a Christian perspective, contact Dean Ortner, the renowned “Million Volt Man,” at Wonders of Science.