But we may have unlocked the mystery of life’s creation in a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) of the United States this week. Scientists from the Ludwigs-Maximilian Universitat in Munich, the Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York, and the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, argue that the origin of life emerged out of randomness in the early Universe, and here on Earth. Molecular structures assembled spontaneously through random interactions leading to a process of sequencing that ultimately became alive. Darwinian principles of natural selection governed this molecular behaviour throughout.
The field of abiogenesis, life from inanimate matter, theorizes how life arose from non-living organic compounds. The first modern attempt to demonstrate this occurred in a laboratory in 1952 when two scientists tried to replicate abiogenesis in a laboratory beaker by exposing a solution of inorganic compounds to the equivalent of lightning, and radiation, while simulating early Earth atmospheric conditions. After allowing the chemical stew to “evolve” over time, amino acid compounds emerged. These were seen as precursors to life. The new paper described above refines the details of that beaker experiment by applying significant computer modeling and experimentation to the process.
Dieter Braun, from the Ludwigs-Maximilian Universitat, describes what he and his fellow researchers did:
“Our experiment starts off with a large number of short DNA strands, and in our model system for early oligomers, we use only two complementary bases, adenine, and thymine. We assume that ligation of strands with random sequences leads to the formation of longer strands, whose base sequences are less chaotic.”
The oligomers referred to above describes a molecule that consists of repeating units derived and incorporated from smaller molecules into it. Using human genome analysis the research team confirmed that out of disorder or randomness, organized sequences naturally evolved.
Primordial Earth would have had a vast number of oligomers evolving from random molecular interactions in the chemical soup within our atmosphere and oceans. What the researchers demonstrated is that oligomers naturally tend to form helical, double-strand structures over time as they interact. One of those helical, double-strand structures is what we know of as DNA. In their experiments, they used adenine and thymine, two of the four base chemicals that we know make up DNA to demonstrate chemical natural selection.
When Darwin theorized about the power of natural selection he based it on observations seen in nature, not on selection coming from inanimate chemistry. But it appears that the chaos of the early Universe and the primordial Earth may have led to the rise of molecular complexity that became life. The two are inextricably linked: that out of chaos emerged animate order with natural selection, mutation, and all that it entails contributing to what is alive here on Earth, and likely elsewhere in the Universe.
]]>Livio is an astrophysicist who lives in Baltimore, Maryland, and who authors a blog on the Huffington Post. His approach to this subject focuses on five famous men from the world of science, Charles Darwin, Lord Kelvin, Linus Pauling, Fred Hoyle and Albert Einstein. It is hard to think of these pre-eminent scholars having blundered in their scientific research but that is exactly what Livio exposes and he does it in an intriguing way. First he describes in wonderful detail each man’s contribution of each to scientific advancement. Then he shows that through their own human frailty displaying hubris, laziness, stubbornness or even an overweening urge for tidiness how they stumbled down the wrong path. Eventually others would pick up the slack and correct their mistakes. Livio is a good story teller and he makes the science palatable even to those who are laymen like myself.
In the story of Darwin he talks about how the father of evolution sought a mechanism that could explain how natural selection could lead to recessive traits could suddenly reappear in descendants of plants and animals. He ended up proposing pangenesis, a hypothesis that suggested somehow an unknown force within the body instructed reproductive cells. Darwin had done experiments similar to Gregor Mendel using snapdragons, not pea plants. But he never quite figured out the formula of Mendelian heredity. If he had we have seen the science of genetics advance in leaps and bounds. Poor Gregor Mendel. His work remained obscure and little known. With Darwin’s endorsement instead of a hiatus of 55 years from when Mendel first published in 1865 to almost universal acceptance of his observational research in the 1920s, the mechanism for evolution remained a bit of a mystery. Would we have discovered DNA sooner?
Lord Kelvin who was born William Thomson is best known for his work in the field of physics where he advanced the science of thermodynamics. Kelvin invented the thermometer that bears his name. It describes a hypothetical zero temperature where an object exists in the absence of any heat energy. With all his brilliance Kelvin foundered on the subject of the age of the Earth coming up with calculations that indicated an age of no more than 100 million years. His measurements were based on false assumptions about the heat source within the Earth. That’s because he didn’t know about radioactivity and even after its discovery remained unconvinced that it could help determine the Earth’s real age. Those who followed Kelvin in refuting his hypotheses advanced our understanding of radioactive decay and gave us an accurate picture of the Earth’s real age, 4.5 billion years. Why did Kelvin stubbornly stick to his hypotheses? Livio argues it was cognitive dissonance, a sense of discomfort knowing that his theories no longer matched the reality of scientific advancement leading to denial.
Linus Pauling on the other hand is one of the outstanding minds of the 20th century when it comes to the field of chemistry. Self-taught, he won a Nobel Prize for his work on understanding the nature of chemical bonds and molecular constructs. He discovered the cause of sickle cell anemia, determined the structure of proteins and invented oxygen meters for use in submarines. But when it came to discovering the structure of DNA, Pauling’s triple helix hypothesis proved to be his brilliant blunder. When he published both James Watson and Francis Crick knew Pauling had gotten it wrong. They subsequently published a paper describing the double helix and its mechanism. Pauling missed the boat and he may have done this out of laziness. He had access to the same x-ray crystallography as Watson and Crick but chose not to look at it.
Fred Hoyle always intrigued me as young boy growing up. I remember reading a science fiction novel written by him and published in 1957 called The Black Cloud. Like his contemporary in England, John Wyndham, both wrote catastrophic fantasies that were compelling reads. Hoyle was the first to make us aware that we were composed of star stuff, that most of the elements in the periodic table came out of the nuclear interactions happening within stars. Before Hoyle astrophysicists were in a quandary trying to figure out how the elements beyond helium could form. And the mechanism for spreading these elements around the Universe was also suggested by Hoyle – supernovas. These explosions of stars ejected the heavier elements of the periodic table into interstellar space and hence planets and life became possible in our universe.
Hoyle is also associated with the field of cosmology, the science that looks at the Universe and attempts to make sense of its origin, its composition and its future. He may have even been the first to coin the term The Big Bang, describing the point in time when our Universe came into being. But Hoyle didn’t accept that cosmological model. Instead he proposed a steady state universe in which new galaxies and matter appeared out of nothing. For several decades Hoyle’s steady state universe model competed with The Big Bang until the science caught up with the hypothesis. Hoyle had gotten it wrong. Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson working on an antenna for communication satellites at the Bell Labs in New Jersey picked up background cosmic microwave radiation in the form of radio noise which led to a confirmation of The Big Bang. Hoyle stubbornly clung to his steady state theory believing that a Universe formed in an explosion and evolving into increasing disorder could not lead to the emergence of life. Evolutionary scientists soon described his theory as “Hoyle’s fallacy.”
But Hoyle wasn’t finished in proposing ideas of consequence to the scientific community. One of these is panspermia, a hypothesis for the origin of life which argues that the stuff of life can be found in interstellar space and that comets and asteroids are the messengers and carriers of life and the reason there is life on Earth today. Livio doesn’t delve into this Hoyle theory of life in the Cosmos, probably because it doesn’t fit with his brilliant blunder theme. But we still don’t know if Hoyle was right. We have discovered amino acids and complex polymers in interstellar space. We have disputed evidence that Martian microbes may have been delivered to Earth from meteorites that have been found in the Antarctic.
And finally we come to Albert Einstein, the face of modern physics, the man who gave us space-time and explained gravity in ways Isaac Newton would have appreciated. The theory of relativity was always seen as untidy to Einstein. He wanted a universal theory that explained the Universe on a cosmic scale and one that also took into consideration what was happening at the subatomic scale, the world of quantum physics.
So he invented a mathematical construct that would clean it all up called the cosmological constant. But Einstein never truly believed in this theoretical solution to explaining the geometry, composition and age of the Universe. In some respects his constant was a way to placate those scientists who believed in Hoyle’s steady state or static Universe, and not the model of The Big Bang. And the scientific community went along with him seeing the constant as a repulsive countering force to gravity which physicists knew worked well in explaining solar systems and galaxies, but really didn’t when describing the Universe.
Einstein never discovered that our Universe’s expansion was actually accelerating. This new science emerged long after his death. And Einstein never knew about dark matter and dark energy, a science that is very much part of cosmology today. His cosmological constant, what he described as a tidying up exercise, and one that he soon rejected, could have forecast these later discoveries.
From Darwin to Einstein, Livio has given us a series of biographical pictures of individuals who were subject to all our foibles, while still brilliant contributors to the advancement of human knowledge. I highly recommend his book to all my readers.
Through all of this expansion in our universal understanding of the physical world we can see and touch, the metaphysical has remained the same. Modern science and technology, born in the Christian world (some say Judeo-Christian), in its early stages was embraced by the religious. Nicholaus Copernicus studied canon law before publishing his perspective on a heliocentric Solar System. Gregor Mendel, an Augustinian friar, gave us unique insights into how genetic traits are inherited. Charles Darwin planned to be an Anglican clergyman and studied theology before embarking on his voyage around the world that led to On the Origin of Species and evolution. So one can argue that Judeo-Christianity, science and technology are mutually compatible.
But there are many within Christianity including scientists and engineers who see the expansion of scientific and technical knowledge as a forewarning of a coming millennium. They see “scientism” as having devastating consequences. They argue that science and technology has led to a material world and false gods and that the knowledge we have gained is very much like the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden and will only lead to the planet’s destruction. Some call for a moratorium on scientific progress as the only way to re-balance humanity with the planet.
How does Christianity, a religion that has a belief system based on a god who manifested a son to save humanity by sending him to Earth where he died and was resurrected, deal with the potential through biomedical advancements of enormously extending human life even to the point of creating machine-human immortality? Does the end of mortality correlate with a spiritual Heaven where humans go upon death? Does the merger of man and machine run counter to the notion that humanity was created in the image of a god?
One would think these types of questions would shake the foundations of anyone’s faith. But from the mouth of an evangelical Christian scholar, Martin Buerger of both MIT and University of Connecticut, in a discussion with six Christian scholars that took place in 1973, I quote:
“Modern man has advanced so far in technology that he thinks everything is under his control and no divine control is really needed. Man has everything he wants and thinks he can do anything he wants. He can even stand on the moon these days, and not only stand on it but come back. But one of the things we need to get around is the idea that the Bible is inconsistent with science and that science is inconsistent with the Bible. I don’t think that is so at all.”
Dr. Buerger, a mineralogist, is convinced that the Book of Genesis can be reconciled with all that modern science has discovered over the last several centuries from the creation of light to the flood. Another in that conversation, V. Elving Anderson, a geneticist and cell biologist at the University of Minnesota, stated:
“I believe that God made a perfect creation. It is pretty obvious to all of us that it no longer appears that way. And the reason is that man in the form of Adam sinned. Some scientists see a world that is no longer perfect and tend to blame God for it, or to ask, if it is this bad, how could any God have ever existed? The great advantage that the Christian has over the scientist who will not look at the Word of God is that the Christian believes in the sovereignty of God…”
So Christians who are technologists and scientists can rationalize faith and a literal interpretation of biblical text with scientific and technological advancement.
It is interesting that we live in the age of the God Particle and that in its discovery we may have found the essential element that allows matter to bond and differentiate into all that we see in the Universe. God Particle – it’s a good name. Maybe that’s how Christianity can reconcile itself with science and technology going forward. Maybe future Christian scientists and technologists will argue that the god they believe in is present in subatomic forces that bind matter together and lead to the chain of material development that has turned into you and me and the planet on which we reside. That the divine is essentially in all of us. Maybe that will be the Christian argument for the 21st century and beyond.
In 1859 Darwin published “The Origin of the Species.” Between 1856 and 1863 Mendel studied pea plants and made two discoveries which he called the Law of Segregation and the Law of Independent Assortment, the fundamentals of how inherited traits get passed along. When Mendel was promoted to abbott in 1868 he ended his experiments. Neither man knew of each other. Interestingly in 1869 another scientist, Friedrich Miescher identified something he called the nuclein inside human white blood cells. Miescher had found DNA. But it was 84 years later that James Watson and Francis Crick discovered the unique characteristics of the DNA molecule.
DNA Allows Us to Bio Engineer Living Things
DNA is found in every chromosome in the nucleus of almost every cell in our bodies (red blood cells have no nucleus so they are the exception) as well as in all the cells in plants and animals on this planet. Every strand of DNA contains genes and it is genes that determine inherited traits. Sexual reproduction combines the DNA of two parents in the offspring. When egg and sperm meet each represents half of the genetic content of each parent. This means that not all characteristics of a parent get expressed in an offspring. When Mendel studied his pea plants he uncovered how traits could be transmitted from generation to generation, some traits dominant and some recessive. Mendel didn’t know about genes when he was recording his observations. But he had discovered the mechanism of genetic manipulation. Today agricultural science manipulates genes in living things, not only intraspecies but interspecies.
Why Do We Want to Modify Agricultural Products Using Genetics?
On Monsanto’s website, a company that is heavily invested in genetically engineered crops, herbicides and pesticides, it describes our human dilemma caused by population growth. Monsanto is seen by environmentalists as a pariah because its genetically modified crop solutions help bolster the sales of its own herbicide and pesticide products. But nonetheless Monsanto is not wrong in stating the facts that by 2050 the planet will have a human population exceeding nine billion. That more than nine billion represents a 30% increase over our present human population, a number equivalent to adding a today’s China and India to the planet. What that means is we simply need to produce much more through agriculture to meet food demands. In Monsanto’s words “farmers must produce more in the next few decades than they have in the past 10,000 years combined.”
Genetic Engineering in Modern Agriculture
Genetic engineering is playing a significant role in worldwide agricultural production today. What proportion of foods today are genetically manipulated?
For farmers the attractions are obvious. Genetically engineered crops produce higher crop yields and cost far less to maintain.
A brief discussion on some of the most commonly grown genetically modified crops follows:
Tomatoes
In attempting to stop tomatoes from rotting the Flavr Savr was invented in 1994. It was the first genetically engineered food crop to receive human consumption approval. A tomato enzyme polygalacturonase, PG for short, was identified as having the ability to contribute to the ripening of tomatoes. Researchers at Calgene, Inc., introduced an altered antisense gene to reduce the formation of PG. The benefit to farmers was immediate. Tomatoes with the antisense gene could be left to ripen longer in the field. Rather than being treated chemically to ripen, Flavr Savr tomatoes could naturally mature enhancing the flavour of the end product.
Extensive testing by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration determined that these altered tomatoes posed no harm to humans. But what was an agricultural success in genetic engineering turned into a commercial failure when the product was introduced and labelled as genetically engineered. Today genetically engineered products are not so blatant in their labelling.
Corn
Corn of all plants cultivated in North America seems to be most associated with genetic engineering. Corn was domesticated in North America very early in the Neolithic Revolution. It has been engineered from its ancestral form, teosinte, a grass, into modern corn varieties. Farmers cross-bred various strains of primitive corn to improve yields and cultivate desirable traits. This manipulation of corn was intraspecies.
The genetic modification being made by agribusiness research companies today are more interspecies than intraspecies. Corn is no exception.
A protein toxic to caterpillars found in a strain of bacteria called Bacillus Thuringiensis (Bt) has been bioengineered into corn plants. The gene allows the corn to express the toxin and kill the caterpillars that feed on its leaves and cobs. But it has become an arms race between genetic engineers and the insect pests. By planting too much bioengineered product farmers are speeding up evolutionary resistance to the toxin by new generations of caterpillars and ultimately crop yields have been affected.
Companies like Monsanto have invested heavily in developing new types of corn engineered to tolerate herbicides such as Roundup(TM), a popular weed killer used on home gardens and lawns. Monsanto is the inventor of Roundup. So developing Roundup-ready crops that contain genes tolerant to glyphosate, a chemical toxic to weeds, means crops can be sprayed and only the weeds die. But some weeds over time develop resistance to herbicides and these survivors pass along inherited traits. You see, Darwin was right.
Soybeans
Corn isn’t the most genetically manipulated crop grown globally. That honour goes to soybeans. Genetically modified soybeans containing resistance to herbicides like Roundup were first planted in the United States in 1996. By 2006 genetically modified soybean plantings extended to 9 countries.
In countries like Argentina almost 100% of the soybean crop is genetically modified. The United States is a close second. Today 58.6% of worldwide soybean production comes from genetically modified crops.
We ingest food additives laced with genetically modified soybeans. Our domestic farm-bred animals are raised on soybean-derived feeds.
When Monsanto developed Roundup-Ready(TM) soybeans the goal was to create plants that could be dosed with a less toxic herbicide than atrazine. Atrazine was a commonly used herbicide before Roundup. Atrazine had long-term environmental consequences where Roundup was perceived to have a shorter impact in the environment. But glyphosate, the active chemical in Roundup has proven to be highly toxic to many plants, and to aquatic life when it enters lakes and streams through agricultural runoff.
In some areas where Roundup-Ready soybeans are grown, nearby plants have begun to exhibit glyphosate resistance. When these plants are weeds the benefit of the herbicide is diminished impacting crop yields. As more weeds become Roundup resistant, new genetically modified soybean variants will need to be developed to counter this escalating arms race. New herbicide treatment plans will potentially introduce more herbicide residue into the larger environment.
New methods of tillage, crop rotation, growing of cover crops, and other biointensive techniques including weed tolerance may prove to be far more effective tools for maintaining quality and crop yield.
Rice
Rice provides basic nutrition to much of South and East Asia. Golden Rice, developed in 1999, contains two turned-off and two inserted genes that cause beta-carotene to accumulate in the rice grains. The golden colour indicates the concentration of Vitamin A to meet the recommended daily dosage in 100 to 200 grams of rice. Golden Rice is contributing to reductions in diseases related to Vitamin A deficiency. Vitamin A Deficiency (VAD) causes blindness in 250,000 to 500,000 children annually. The blindness is an indicator of a more serious problem that leads to half of these children dying within a year of becoming blind. That’s because VAD impacts a child’s immune system putting them at increased risk to common infections.
Cabbage, Broccoli, Sprouts and Cauliflower
Even members of the cabbage family have been targets for genetic modification. The insertion of a Bacillus Thuringiensis (Bt) genes in cabbage, broccoli and cauliflower was introduced as a toxin to kill Cabbage Butterfly larvae. Increasing resistance on the part of the butterfly population eventually led to a decline in Bt-cabbage. More recently a gene responsible for the poison in scorpion tails has been inserted into cabbage plants. The poison expressing genes are modified to not harm humans.
Using Genetic Engineering to Turn Plants into Medicine
Hepatitis B and cholera are among a number of diseases that may be treated by making humans eat fruit or vegetables that are genetically modified to produce vaccines. Researchers are engineering bananas, potatoes, lettuce, carrots and even tobacco to produce a way to vaccinate people without a needle.
Bananas are particularly useful. An altered form of the disease virus is injected into banana saplings. The altered virus genetic information is reproduced in the plant and fruit. When consumed by humans the bananas help build immunity to fight these diseases.
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