Mathematics to the Glory of God

Enrique Mota is a Mathematician and a founding member of GBU, the IFES Christian student movement in Spain. He’s also a founding member of the Spanish Christians in Science group, which is making great efforts to help people in Spain understand how science and faith can relate to each other. This is the third of four interviews from my recent trip to Spain. Mota is a mathematician who clearly feels called to work in his field to the best of his ability, and to encourage others to do likewise

I work on operational research at the University of Valencia. My field is transportation and vehicle routing problems. I’ve been in the Department of Statistics and Operational Research for more than thirty years, and I enjoy my work there very much.

My parents were both Christians. My great-grandfather was the first person to be converted to the Protestant faith through a Baptist missionary who came to Valencia in the 1880s. When I went to university I thought I was a Christian, but towards the end of my studies I went to a GBU conference where I heard Vinoth Ramachandra, an Indian staff worker from IFES, speak. He talked about the game of marbles. Sometimes we try to play with God, but we cheat and hide some marbles in our pockets. He said that we should give everything to God, and he was right. Up to that point I had made a compromise with God. Spiritual things and the difficult challenges that I could not tackle were for God, but decisions about my career, my future wife, and other things that were important to me – that was my job and I knew how to do it. Ramachandra’s point was that you have to give every marble that you have to God, and then it works perfectly. By then I was in my final year of university, and all my plans had been destroyed. I had to accept that I had failed at my job. I had to say to God, ‘Do what you want with me.’ And he did. I finished my studies in July, and in September I began my new job at the University. That sequence of events was a sign that I attribute to God, because by this time I was ready to accept whatever solution he presented. The doors were opened, and I entered.

I have always been linked with the Spanish Christian student movement. I was a member as a student, and when the first committee of student leaders was set up Pablo Martinez (a colleague of Raul Garcia the psychiatrist interviewed in an earlier post) was the president, and I was the secretary. I stayed in that post until my son joined GBU as a student, and I am now on the national council.

As part of my role at GBU I help to run a sub-group that supports scientists and encourages them to serve God with their work. What we call modern science came along at just the right moment. According to the historian Reijer Hooykas, the protestant movement gave people the desire to search for God in nature and that, basically, is science. So since the beginning science and faith have been together. Obviously sometimes there has been a conflict, but the overall history is one of working together.

An image that we sometimes get from the evangelical point of view is that if you want to serve God you should be a pastor. If you are not a pastor you can be a missionary, a doctor or a teacher. But there is no aspect of culture that is outside the grace of God. We need to be able to offer a perspective of God in every area, including mathematics. So when people ask me, ‘Why are you a mathematician?’ I respond that I like it and I think that I can do something useful through my work.

I think there is no ‘Christian mathematics’. There are good mathematicians or bad mathematicians, but there is no other distinction. There are some mathematicians who are also Christians, and who see their work as an act of service to God; I think that is totally acceptable. We should try to support these people.

Beautiful Cells

Chlamydomonas, www.gabi.de/pflanzen-chlamydomonas.php

It appears to be a universal experience for a scientist to find their experimental system beautiful. Perhaps this is because the daily discipline of examining anything in detail brings an appreciation of its finer points? Most, I think, simply delight in the beauty of nature. For some, this gives a sense of the transcendent: a sort of natural spirituality.

I’ve written about a number of Christians and their appreciation of beauty in their scientific work, but I also want to feature some others who don’t share those beliefs. Science is open to all comers, and that’s a good thing. Everyone can enjoy exploring the universe. In my browsings online I have found a biologist who has written beautifully on her own research, and I want to share the biology she loves with you*.

Lynne Quarmby is a cell biologist who’s passionate about explaining her work to people outside of the scientific community. She writes a regular column, a ‘nexus of mystery, art, literature, beauty and science’, for the online literary magazine Numéro Cinq.

…if we can recognize and acknowledge that our direct biological senses, as wonderful as they are, give us only a tightly pinched and cloudy view of the world, then we open ourselves to unimagined beauty.

Lynne Quarmby, Numero Cinq, 2011

Biologists often label themselves according to the model organism they work on. I was a zebrafish person, and Quarmby is a Chlamydomonas person. Chlamydomonas is not an STD (you’re thinking of Chlamydia), but a gentle single-celled algae that is in all likelihood swimming around the standing water in your garden as you read. This microscopic creature is easy to grow in the lab (a jam jar on a sunny windowsill will do), its genome has been sequenced, and it is a surprisingly powerful tool for studying human disease.

Chlamydomonas was not an obvious choice for medical research, but the secret is in the cilia. Cilia are hair-thin appendages that wave around in a coordinated fashion to move their owner from A to B. A dish of Chlamydomonas algae in motion looks like the beginners pool during a breaststroke lesson (scroll down to the second video). But these algae don’t spend their whole lives swimming around. When they reproduce, their cilia are absorbed back into the cell body (scroll down to the 4th video). When conditions are stressful, the cilia simply drop off. Quarmby and her students studied mutants that hold on to their cilia, and discovered a family of proteins involved in the regulation of both cilia and cell division.

At the same time as Quarmby was studying the behaviour of cilia in Chlamydomonas, medical researchers were identifying genes that are mutated in humans. The same proteins involved in cilia and cell cycle control in Chlamydomonas were affected in some patients with polycystic kidney disease. What’s the connection?

Cell biologists knew that most of our cells have cilia on them, but assumed that they were not important. Our cells generally do not swim around, unless they’re sperm. It turns out that these tiny appendages are involved in a whole range of vital cell functions. The cilia on kidney cells are important for sensing the flow of urine, and without these the kidney cannot function properly.

Perhaps beauty is in the eye of the beholder when it comes to unicellular flagellates, but what I appreciate is the detail. To see the minutiae of cell structure is stunning, particularly when you find out how difficult it is to achieve images like this (click on figure 3**). This microscopic pond dweller has advanced our understanding of a devastating human disease. The combination of aesthetic experience and elegant solution is what I find beautiful.

Quarmby’s lab continues to probe the biology of Chlamydomonas for interesting behaviours that will in all likelihood prove very useful for humankind.

*I should highlight that I haven’t contacted Lynn Quarmby, and she has not in any way endorsed this blog.

** Apologies to those not on a university campus who don’t have access to academic journals.

 

References for the very keen:

http://quarmby.ca/

http://blog.quarmby.ca/

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=Lynne%20Quarmby

http://www.ciliopathyalliance.org/

 

Serendipity?

This is the second of my interviews with Spanish scientists. Elena de la Torre-Madrid’s love of her subject and struggles in the lab will be familiar to many in the sciences, and it’s interesting to hear about those experiences from a faith perspective.

I left the decision about what subject to study at University until the last minute. I was standing in the queue to register, and there were about twenty people in front of me. I thought, ‘Okay I have approximately twenty minutes to decide what I want to do with my life’. I began reading down the list: “A, architecture…maybe. B, biology…perhaps. M, medicine, mathematics…perhaps.” In the end I had 15 possibilities. I thought, “In the last exams, my best mark was in biology. Why not study that?” I don’t really know why I picked it, but I love it! I think it is very difficult to study biology in Spain because there’s not much work, and what work there is, is not easy. But at the end of all these years of study, if I had to start again I would choose biology.

I work for a biotech company that focuses on rare genetic diseases. My PhD was in biochemistry, and right now I am on a Masters degree programme in biotechnology. My work involves keeping up to date with the latest research in biology, searching for ways to develop new drugs.

When I was at University one of my fellow students said to me, ‘I don’t know how you can believe in God when you are studying science’. But I wonder how you can study science and not believe in God! I am a very passionate person, and when I am doing anything I usually put all my soul into it. When I study cells and the ways in which all the different biochemical pathways work I think, ‘It’s amazing! How can you say that it’s only cause and effect? It’s not possible. There must be something or someone who directs that process, because it’s too perfect to be only serendipity.’ My commute to University was one and a half hours each way. All the people on the train would sleep or stare into space, but I would look out of the window. Looking at the stars or the clouds, I’d think about the immensity of God and wonder how anyone could ignore such beautiful things – both outdoors and in the laboratory.

As a PhD student I worked in a biomedical research institute, looking at the effect of morphine and other cannabinoids on the brain. I spent long days in the lab deciphering the signalling processes that go on within cells. One of the discoveries I made was that a protein called ‘Rap-1’ is dispersed throughout the inside of the cell, while ‘Rap-2’ is restricted to the outer membrane. It’s just basic research, and perhaps some people don’t think that matters – for me it was exciting.

My most important experience in the lab was something more personal. I had a really hard time with my PhD, and it took me six years to complete. Sometimes I would think, ‘I can’t go ahead.’ At those times I felt that God was with me. I knew I was there for a reason, even if I didn’t know what that reason was at the time. Now I can see that all my past experience made me ready for the next step, both personally and professionally. Working for this company, I feel that I am doing something that makes sense.

My boss – who’s not a Christian – asked me a couple of weeks ago, ‘Do you know why God brought you here?’ I wondered if it might be something to do with telling people about God. He disagreed: ‘No it doesn’t work like that. You are here to help cure all the children who don’t have any treatment right now.’ I realised that he was probably right. I’m here because God wants someone to discover these things. So I said, ‘Okay, let’s keep it at that!’ God has a reason for everything and a purpose for everyone, and I am discovering my purpose.

Transcendence

I am becoming more and more convinced that the vast majority of scientists value what one could call transcendent realities. I’m not talking about ‘religion’, which for some has negative connotations*. By ‘transcendent’ I mean experiences and ideals that are consonant with but go beyond scientific evidence: that feeling of pure joy when you find yourself discovering something for the first time; delight in the beauty of nature or scientific data; the standards we set for ourselves; or the importance we place on certain relationships.

I think nearly everything that’s fun in life has the potential to get a scientist talking like a mystic. For example, a cell biologist wins a new grant to study a tiny protein involved in signalling pathways, and she starts speaking about getting closer to the truth. A neurologist studying a particular sensory experience understands the neural mechanism but not how the individual perceives it, and he becomes interested in the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness. Or a developmental biologist is expecting her first child, and suddenly embryology takes on a whole new meaning.

The theologian and former biochemist Alister McGrath has written about transcendence and human perception his book The Open Secret: A New Vision for Natural Theology. The sorts of experiences that might be labelled as ‘transcendent’ include a sense of ‘the numinous’: a significant feeling of being part of something ‘wholly other’. There’s also the transient, almost mystical sense that one has grasped a deep truth about the unity of reality. Perhaps more common is the moment of ‘epiphany’, the unexpected and fleeting glimpses of clarity that so fascinated James Joyce.

Our search for meaning and moral guidance, as well as our aesthetic enjoyment of the world, draws on what might be termed ‘transcendent ideals’. The novelist and moral philosopher Iris Murdoch spent much of her career defending the reality of the transcendent ideal that we strive to meet in our search for ‘The Good Life’. Roy Bhaskar, who developed the concept of ‘critical realism’ that is so central to modern philosophy of science, was convinced that the aim of science is to discover an objectively knowable reality. Even John Dewey, one of the founders of pragmatist philosophy, thought that a transcendent ideal emerged through our interaction with nature.

In spite of everything, we keep on talking about God.

Alister McGrath, The Open Secret: A New Vision for Natural Theology, p23

But, as McGrath points out, epiphany doesn’t necessarily equal theophany. Murdoch did not believe in God, and neither does Bhaskar. Looking at nature, you will most likely end up with a set of values or experiences that depend on the personal schema that guides your thoughts. If there’s an objective reality out there, the only way to discover it is by investigating the claims of different belief systems to see what matches reality in the most satisfying way**.

I think that the majority of scientists do have transcendent ideal and experiences, and a sizeable proportion would self-identify as belonging to a faith tradition. But I’m interested to find out, is my evaluation too sweeping a generalisation? What’s your experience?

*It does for me at times too. The word ‘religion’ has a number of uses, and is often used to refer to sets of rituals or other external factors that may or may not have anything to do with a real experience of God.

 

**Realistic for me means looking at what actually happens in life, and not being gripped by cultural dogma, eg. The ‘natural-supernatural’ divide accepted by many or most in the West.

The Heavens Declare: Natural Theology & the Legacy of Karl Barth

Natural theology is what we can discover about God outside of ‘special revelation’ (which for Christians is mainly the Bible and the person of Jesus Christ). If you are itching to add to or clarify this one-liner you’re not alone, because so many scholars have addressed natural theology that one could easily convene a very large international conference to address the issue of definitions alone.

The influential Swiss protestant theologian Karl Barth famously rejected natural theology because it was a human-led enterprise that distracted from God’s revelation of himself, and many others have followed suit. But was Barth throwing the baby out with the bathwater? Faraday Course Director Revd Dr Rodney Holder has recently written about the work of Barth and a number of other theologians who were either influenced by or responded to him.

Rodney Holder is a cosmologist who swapped science for theology and church ministry, and soon found himself writing on science and faith.  His personal interest is in the evidence for God from cosmology, and his critique of Barth and later theologians is fascinating. In his book ‘The Heavens Declare: Natural Theology & the Legacy of Karl Barth’ (published this month), Holder looks at five theologians and their approach to natural theology. They are: Karl Barth, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Wolfhart Pannenberg, Thomas Torrance and Alister McGrath.

Barth was passionate about returning theology to its roots. He focused on God’s revelation of himself in Christ, and rejected any other source of knowledge. The problem was that Barth failed to recognise the need for external verification of beliefs and left himself open to accusations, by Bonhoeffer and others, of isolating theology from rational debate. Bonhoeffer interacted more with science in his theology, and recognised the importance of engaging with the world.  Pannenberg took this further, and held that a dialogue with the sciences was essential for theology, and vice-versa.

If the God of the Bible is the creator of the universe, then it is not possible to understand fully or even appropriately the processes of nature without any reference to that God.

Wolfhart Pannenberg, Towards a Theology of Nature, 1993

 

Thomas Torrance, the Scottish theologian responsible for bringing Barth’s work to the English speaking world, takes a position somewhere between Barth and Pannenberg. He suggested that a ‘theology of science’ might be more appropriate, and preferred to explore scientific ideas within a theological framework. Finally, McGrath has endeavoured to rescue natural theology and redefine it in a way that satisfies both evangelical scholars and serious scientists.

One of the points that Holder stresses in his book is that Christians should be able to defend their faith without recourse to Christian texts or traditions, and that scientific evidence is an important part of that defence. I agree. There’s no point believing in something that can’t be verified in any way by external sources. I do think, though, that there’s a very important place for the thought experiment approach that McGrath puts forward in many of his writings. If God exists, and if he really did reveal himself in the person of Jesus Christ, then what we see in the world should make the most sense in the light of Christian theology.  I think it’s important to move as quickly as possible from examining evidence for the existence of God to imagination (or thought experiment) and real-world experience. It’s only then that we find out what’s actually out there, and can have the most useful dialogue.

The Spirituality of Scientists

Darek Krzeminski, 2005. www.sxc.hu

Last month I wrote about sociologist Elaine Ecklund’s survey of American scientist’s beliefs. One interesting result of this survey was that a large proportion of scientists considered themselves to be ‘spiritual’*.

Ecklund and her team predicted that elite scientists in the US would be largely irreligious, and that ‘they would eschew the fuzzier forms of religiously eclectic spirituality which have become common in the general population.’ What they found was quite the reverse: that many scientists (including 20% of atheists) considered themselves ‘religious’, and 70% considered themselves ‘spiritual’ in their beliefs, experiences and practices.

Many of the scientists surveyed saw their spirituality as a personal journey of discovery, a sort of ‘meaning-making without faith’ similar to science. There was a rejection of religion, which was seen as dogmatic, judgmental, controlling, involving believing things without evidence, and incompatible with science.

These spiritual scientists didn’t want to compartmentalise their lives – in fact that’s probably impossible in such an all-consuming career. They valued aesthetics, and for some their spirituality flowed directly from their work. Their experience of making sense of complex systems and grasping something of the immensity and great age of the universe gave them a strong sense of awe and wonder at the natural world. There was a sense of mystery; a belief that there is something transcendent that cannot be explained using the tools of science, perhaps similar to the Eastern religious traditions. Their spiritual values often motivated these scientists to spend more time teaching so their students could share the same experience, to choose what they saw to be more worthwhile fields of research, or to change their behaviour outside of the laboratory. Overall the picture is that these US-based scientists are defying the usual social categories and pioneering a new approach to religion. Einstein appears to be a role model here, in his belief in a meaningful force beyond our understanding but rejection of organised religion.

In response to this data part of me wants to spend time explaining a few things: what Christian theology is actually about; that faith in God can be defended rationally (though that’s not the whole story); that we all exercise a great deal of faith every single day in our human relationships; and that science involves certain assumptions that at times amount to faith. The other part of me is excited that a good proportion of scientists in the US** share my experience of wonder at the processes that science reveals. There’s definitely the potential for some very interesting conversations here.

*You can find Ecklund’s paper on this data here.

**And perhaps also European: surveys are underway

People

Image from Test of FAITH project, by Contrapositive

I interviewed a number of scientists on a recent trip to Spain, and this is an extract from the first of those conversations. Dr Raul García has a background in medicine and neuroscience, and is a Children and Adolescents Psychiatrist in Madrid.

I started university as a civil engineering student, but I didn’t enjoy my studies. I was more interested in people than numbers and equations, and towards the end of my first year I was looking for something else to do.  At the same time, I was involved in supporting a family friend who was suffering from mental illness, and I went with him to an appointment at the hospital where he was being treated. This person was a Christian, and during the interview he said that his future was in God’s hands. The medical staff laughed sceptically at him, interpreting his optimism as delusional thinking. This incident had a huge impact on me, and I began to think about studying medicine. I realised that I wanted to help people like my friend, and that this was both a scientific and a theological ambition. So I changed track, and studied medicine.

After I qualified as a psychiatrist I studied theology part-time. So now, alongside my clinical work and teaching I teach pastoral counselling and am part of the leadership team of a small church. In the history of psychiatry there are some well-known examples of psychiatrists who become philosophers or theologians. I think that the relationship between science and faith should be dialogic. Science has much to say to theology and theology has much to say to science, especially on the meaning of life and personal experience.

The challenge of neuroscientific advance is an anthropological question: what kind of human being is displayed in neuroscience? The brain is the cause of our thinking or feeling, but I think that there is another reality. We are not just our brains – we are also our experiences and choices, our motivations, longings, and desires. Christian theology says that God created us in his image and likeness. So we are intelligent and creative, able to express and receive love, and we have the capacity to take free moral decisions. A theological point of view is the most comprehensive one from which to interpret the human being, because it takes account of the transcendent.

What gives me a sense of wonder in my day-to-day work with children and their families is our developmental capacity. We have an amazing ability to adapt to an unfavourable environment and resist even the most negative situation. It is wonderful to see that, with a little help from me as a therapeutic agent, people have the capacity to ‘keep on keeping on’ in their daily life – they have resilience. Spiritually, they can transcend their difficulties, troubles and trials. Another source of wonder for me is the grace of God going in search of the ‘Prodigal Son’. In a certain sense we are all prodigal sons; God reaches out for us from difficult situations, even severe mental illness. And if someone has faith in God, he or she is in a better position to overcome their problems.

Maybe my year in engineering helped me to have a more objective point of view; but I haven’t really thought about it. I admire engineers very much because they build bridges and wonderful constructions, but I have always had a special interest in people: their mind, their behaviour, their conflicts, their gratefulness and their miseries. Studying medicine gave me the opportunity to understand the physical and psychological aspects of the human experience more deeply.

Raul García’s interest in the human person and how we function, for better or worse, is infectious. I wrote this while listening (not at exactly the same time) to Oxford philosopher Keith Ward’s lecture [not online yet, watch this space] from the recent Faraday Institute ‘Science, Religion & Atheism’ course. Ward’s emphasis on experience and meaning is, I think, complementary to García’s approach. 

Embryos are beautiful

Crawling C. elegans. Timelapse, Bob Goldstein

This is the message that developmental biologist Jeff Hardin tries to get across to his students. Hardin constantly sees beauty in his work, so I thought I would spend some time explaining what he does.

One of the best tools for studying development is the tiny roundworm C.elegans, which must be one of the most studied organisms in the world. Adult humans have around 50 trillion cells in their bodies, but human development is so complex and our bodies are so large and vary so much in size, that estimates vary from 10 to 100 trillion. C.elegans, on the other hand, is a relatively simple organism with about 1,000 cells.

One of the most striking (and useful) things about C. elegans is the ‘invariant lineage’ of its cells. As the embryo grows, development proceeds along a minutely prescribed pattern. A cell in the growing embryo replicates its DNA and divides in two. The ‘daughter cell’ will now follow instructions, either keeping the character of its parent or developing a new trait to form part of a different tissue. Each new cell has its fate mapped out in advance, so there is no room for teenage rebellion among the cells of the C. elegans embryo.

The other useful thing about this worm is its complete transparency, which has allowed biologists to trace the lineage of all 959 of its cells*, including the 131 cells that died along the way.

959. The life of a small organism can be completely prescribed: hatch, grow, moult four times, then mate. Most C. elegans adults are hermaphrodites – they make sperm, then switch to making eggs, and fertilise themselves. One could find this cycle depressing, but that’s not the take-home message for Hardin.

Biologists always seem to find their chosen organism beautiful, perhaps because they have come to appreciate its features in great detail. It certainly helps if you find beautiful the thing that you spend most of your days staring at. Being able to understand an organism in such detail is beautiful in itself. And the elegance of an animal that is so tiny and yet so detailed is astonishing. Long gone are the days when cells were thought to be homogenous, gelatinous blobs.

The world we inhabit is highly ordered and that order brings complexity. Creatures in some way make themselves, and reproduction is the best example of our being granted some part in the creative process. Even if we don’t completely understand the details, we get to ‘make’ whole new living things – worms on a Petri dish, geranium cuttings, kittens, children…

* Excluding the gametes, which have variable cell numbers

If you want to know more about C. elegans, you can read to your heart’s content in this online text book, http://www.wormbook.org, to which Jeff Hardin has contributed a chapter on epidermal morphogenesis. 

Inevitable Humans?

Last weekend, the Faraday Institute ran a course on ‘Science, Religion and Atheism’. The aim was to examine questions of science and religion from both theistic and atheistic positions. The speakers were more than usually candid about their own views, which was both refreshing and a fascinating sociological exercise.  (See the Faraday website for recordings when available).

To continue last week’s theme of biology raising questions that in the past have been left to cosmologists, I will focus on Simon Conway Morris’s presentation at the course. I have already written on biochemical fine-tuning but the related theme of convergence, which is the focus of Conway Morris’s research, is also an important one.

Simon Conway Morris is one of those thinkers who prefer to limit themselves to the most risky fields of investigation. He is genuinely interested in upsetting the applecart of received dogma, and getting closer to the truth. As a PhD student, Conway Morris worked with Harry B. Whittington on the Burgess Shale in British Columbia, and was part of the huge revival of interest in the Cambrian Explosion.

At first the Burgess Shale fossils seemed to point to the randomness of the evolutionary process – a point that Stephen Jay Gould elaborated on in his book ‘Wonderful Life’. It has become something of a convention in the biological world to avoid using teleological language, and Gould famously suggested that if you ‘reran the tape of life’ you would get something completely different. That strikes at the heart of who we are, and the theological consequences are enormous. Is the existence of human beings a happy accident? How could people of faith even consider evolution if the implication is that intelligent beings such as ourselves are an accidental dot on the cosmic landscape, rather than lovingly created by God?

But as Conway Morris proceeded in his career in palaeobiology it seemed to him that evolution had repeatedly navigated towards similar solutions in different contexts. An example of this is the sabre-toothed cat. In North America this deadly cat was a placental mammal, and in South America it was marsupial – sabre-toothed cats evolved at least twice. Other examples include the ‘camera eye’ that has evolved many times independently, and the octopus’s tentacle that bends in a similar manner to a jointed arm.* The conclusion that can be drawn from the vast number of examples of convergent evolution is that there seem to be a limited number of ways of solving the same problem. One could describe these solutions as points towards which evolution navigates. So if you reran the tape of life, the emergence of intelligent beings like us might actually occur every time.

In his seminar Conway Morris took his thesis further, speaking about extraterrestrial intelligence, consciousness, and language. The fact that we can see beyond the limits of our inbuilt sensory systems, and have capabilities way beyond any other animal species has prompted many to ask questions about humanness that sound like religious questions.  I realise that this is a vague theological ending to a largely scientific piece, but Conway Morris is often tentative in his theological conclusions. Hopefully another book is on the way that will take this line of thinking further.

*You can see these and many other examples of evolutionary convergence at mapoflife.org.

Replication

DNA1, Artyom Korotkov, 2008

The scale of the universe is truly mind-boggling, and it’s worth dwelling on. But it’s important to keep looking in other directions. Every day your body produces millions of new cells without you even thinking about it. Each of your cells contains the same set of DNA instructions*. Your cellular DNA quota (genome) is an incredibly thin chemical chain with about 6 billion links called nucleotides, and is approximately 2 metres long** (don’t test this at home!) Each time a new cell is produced, that DNA has to be copied to an extremely high level of accuracy.  It was the same for all 50 trillion cells in your body – it all started with DNA replication.

When a cell is about to divide, a number of proteins recognise and bind to the DNA at specific points. Geneticist John Bryant has said that it’s harder to begin DNA replication than it is to start a nuclear war – the process is that tightly controlled. At least forty different proteins have to be in position before replication can begin.

DNA replication, Madprime, 2007

Once initiated, DNA replication happens relatively quickly. The clue to how this works is in the iconic DNA double helix image that is represented in art and architecture the world over. DNA consists of two complementary strands twined together: one is a mirror image of the other. This helix is unwound, and each chain is used as a template to build a new complementary strand of DNA.

When you were conceived, you received a copy of each of your parents’ DNA. Making DNA is like writing: without proper editing mistakes will undoubtedly slip in. For DNA replication, multiple layers of proofreading ensure a high level of accuracy. So out of your 6 billion inherited DNA chain-links, only 30-70 of the links are wrongly copied. That’s a maximum of one mistake in every 100,000,000***. If I could do anything that accurately I’d be very happy! And this is all happening at great speed: 6 billion chemical reactions often in less than 24 hours.

I remember writing about DNA replication in great detail during an exam at University. At the end of my essay I waxed lyrical about how this process was happening incredibly fast, at such a high level of accuracy, and without any conscious effort on our part. I’m not sure what the person marking my exam thought about my reverie, but I was impressed!

I often find that looking in detail at the universe – even just standing outside on a dark night – gives me a feeling of smallness. Staring at the stars, or studying cosmology in depth, has given some people an awareness that there might be a God out there after all. What does looking at the very small and complex make people think? Tiny packages like cells or atoms can contain surprisingly complex systems, and immense power. Nothing is as simple as it seems. Perhaps as biology proceeds over the next few decades we’ll hit up against similar philosophical questions to those raised by the older sciences of physics and astronomy.

 

*Apart from the lenses in your eyes and your red blood cells, in which the DNA is broken down to make way for crystallins and haemoglobin, respectively.

** This 2m of DNA is not a single unbroken strand but comes in 46 chunks, packaged into chromosomes.

*** The vast majority of those mistakes don’t cause any problems, mostly thanks to the large proportion of noncoding DNA (which is often more flexible in terms of nucleotide sequence than sections of the DNA that code for proteins) in our genome. There is also redundancy in the genetic code, so that mutations in ‘coding’ DNA are not always destructive.

 

References for the exceptionally keen

DNA replication:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK21113/

Human mutation rates:

http://www.nature.com/nrg/journal/v13/n4/full/nrg3206.html

http://www.nature.com/ng/journal/v43/n7/full/ng.862.html

http://www.nature.com/news/2009/090827/full/news.2009.864.html

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22345605