ATP Synthase: Nature's Rotary Motor Decoded - FAS2611

SPEAKER A Inside every cell in your body, molecular machines are building proteins at lightning speed. Ribosomes read genetic instructions, transfer RNA delivers amino acids, chaperone proteins fold the final product. This assembly line operates at the molecular level with precision that makes human factories look primitive. And here's the kicker: all these machines are themselves made of proteins. So, which came first? Welcome to Faith and Science. I'm Kaysie Vokurka. Joining me to discuss this topic is Dr. John Ashton. Welcome to the program, Dr. John. SPEAKER B Hello, Kaysie. SPEAKER A Dr. John has written a book called The Big Argument: Does God Exist? And in today's program, we'll be drawing on some insights from this book. And we will be discussing a little bit more from chapter 5, which is about the human body and written by Frank Sherwin and contributed by him. And in that chapter, it describes a process of protein synthesis with messenger RNA, ribosomes, and other enzymes working together. Is there any part of that system that could evolve on its own and still be useful? SPEAKER B [Speaker] Well, that is one of the really conundrums for biologists, is protein synthesis. And because we have the DNA code, for an organism that's there. And so if it's going to reproduce or produce the parts of the cell that it is, it has to generate those components from the code in the DNA. And it does that using a ribosome. And so the DNA component itself doesn't actually leave the cell, but parts of that DNA code are copied with an amazing, system that spins at huge speed, about 20,000 revs per second or something like that, to unwrap the protein, to unwrap the two copies of the DNA that are wrapped together. And it copies both strands, copies one strand forward, the second strand it cuts off as a separate because otherwise it'd be copied backwards and turns it around. And copies it as well from the other side. It's, it's an amazing system. There's some really good animations on the internet showing DNA replication. A really excellent one is from the Walter Elias Hall Institute, which is one of the medical research institutes at the University of Melbourne in Australia, and on DNA replication. And it explains— it's an amazing system. Now, once it makes those 2 copies of messenger RNA, they travel out through the cell to the ribosome, which is this amazing complex molecular machine that takes in raw amino acids or basic amino acids that have been broken down from food and circulating in the blood, and takes those in and then assembles them according to the code to make the new protein. Might be an enzyme, might be part of a cell or whatever. Now this is an amazing machine system. And the fascinating thing is that the ribosome— sorry, the DNA code by itself is useless. You've gotta have this code reader or this machine that can read and assemble that code that works with that particular language that is going to read and assemble things according to those 4 little chemicals, A, C, T, and G, and assemble them according to that code. And that, the ribosome, matter of fact, the structure of the ribosome was only elucidated in 2009. And the guys that did that, or the team that did that, were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for understanding structure. In this particular molecular machine, there's over 300,000 atoms have been assembled to make this machine. And while we have now from X-ray studies and so forth, the structure of the machine, we still don't fully understand how it all works. Wow. We're still working on that. So this is one amazing molecular machine that we have that assembles and constructs these particular proteins. The other fascinating thing is that the code to make that ribosome for that cell is in the DNA. But unless a ribosome exists already, the code is useless. It can't read the code to make another ribosome. So it's— so again, this points to the fact that life is not only super intelligently designed, life was also started. Supernaturally. You had to have the first chicken and egg. SPEAKER A Yeah, you couldn't have one without the other. They both depend on each other in order for the system to function, which is incredible. So complex system. So you mentioned about molecular machines, and there's another molecular machine in the cell called ATP synthase. It spins at about 21,000 RPM. At body temperature, and it helps to power your cells. It can make about 100 ATP molecules per second at near— and it works at about 100% efficiency, close to. Now, this kind of— this information is like that— that type of efficiency is better than the best engines that man has been able to create in terms of what it can do. So can a machine like a molecular turbine motor evolve to spin it such precise speeds and efficiency? Like, is that even possible? SPEAKER B Yeah, well, obviously there's a lot more to it than that too. You know, you've got to have the structure of this machine's little bearings and all those sort of things for all these motors. And from memory, does that run on— does it run on proton? SPEAKER A Yeah, it's a proton pump. SPEAKER B Yeah, proton pump. Yeah, that's right. SPEAKER A Yeah. Amazing. SPEAKER B Yeah, yeah, so it's quite fascinating. And of course we've got a similar one, for example, in bone marrow. SPEAKER A Okay. SPEAKER B That's generating the little blood cells for us. Again, we've got the DNA code being read and the machine that is spinning off those sections of messenger RNA to make haemoglobin are spinning at a similar speed, about 20,000, revolutions. I forget whether it's per minute or second, but it's very, very fast, very, very high speed, these molecular machines that are operating. And the fascinating thing is that millions of these are happening, you know, these processes are occurring in our bodies right now, all the time. Probably more than millions. Yeah, yeah, definitely. So it's an amazing system that's fully coordinated. And the thing is, You know, we can talk about ATP synthase and, you know, the different— there's multiple hundreds of molecular machines. If we were thinking about it's impossible just for one, we got all these hundreds of these and possibly thousands. You know, I forget in the series, but there's an enormous number, all of which are machines that have a specific purpose. And they work. And they all require inputs at specific concentrations to arrive at just the right time. They also have to do their job and be coordinated, just like robots in a factory, just like anything assembling in a factory. And we know in human factories, for example, things make— people make mistakes. One of the things that slowed down the production of Rolls-Royce Merlin engines in the Second World War was that they had the Rolls-Royce engine sitting in a place and they brought the parts over to it. If a part wasn't perfectly right, it was discarded, but the guy had to go and get another part. When Packard started making the Rolls-Royce Merlin engines, they moved the engine to where the part was. And so if the guy found, oh, this part's faulty, the other part was right there. So they sort of— yeah, yeah, they speed it up, you know, by a factor of a, you know, 3 times or something like that. The same problem you have with these factories in the cell. And the thing is, there were a team of engineers designed the Rolls-Royce Merlin engine, you know, before. And they did experiments and so forth. There was a lot of work done fine-tuning, increasing the horsepower. It all took intelligent minds. Evolutionists have to believe that blind, random mutations chemical alterations, random blind chemical alterations in the code produce these amazing molecular machines all in the right place, all so that they're all coordinated. Because if we look at a factory, for example, where you're assembling anything, where you've got robots that pick things up, put them in the right place, another robot comes down, welds it in place. Not only have you got to build those robots, but you've got to have them tuned so that the welder comes down and it touches and makes that spot weld at just the right time, at just the right frequency for the part to move along to the next bit to be put in place to weld. Yes. Right? That takes teams of engineers, draftsmen, the guys working in the workshops building those industrial robots that make those, whole team of people behind those. They're all trained people. You can't get your little 5-year-old boy to go in there, you know, and operate the system and make it all work usually. And yet the evolutionists have to assume that blind chemical reactions, right, uncontrolled, irrespectively, they can't— chemical reactions can't sense what is going on. Chemical reactions can't sense what a need is. And yet they're saying these random mutations to DNA produce these complex machines that allow living organisms to function. And they're not just in the human body. You know, in this chapter, Frank's talking about the human body and the amazing structures there. But all living, you know, if we go to fish, we go to bacteria, we go to plants, yeast, fungi, you know, trees, all these sort of things, flowers. They've all got these amazing machines that are involved in assembling their components and functioning and maintaining their physiology so that they continue to live. SPEAKER A Yeah, the complexity is mind-blowing. You know, the best— as you talk about factories and things that we have, that humans have constructed, you know, they pale in comparison to the amount of complexity and intricate design that we see in the human body, in various organisms together. And, and there's also the interdependency. I mean, molecular machines are made of proteins, right? But you need molecular machines to make proteins themselves, right? SPEAKER B Exactly. SPEAKER A Yes. So you've got all of these layers going on and, and they've got to. SPEAKER B Be the right protein. They've got to be the right enzymes. See, so many of these processes are controlled by enzymes. So these are proteins that in themselves carry particular functions that enable specific chemical reactions. So they only enable a particular chemical reaction to occur, just not any chemical reaction, just a particular chemical reaction. And because of that, and this enables regulation and control of concentrations, it means that the right chemical has produced at just the right place at the right time, that it itself then has the right chemical function to allow the next reaction to occur. Because the fact that we're alive depends on a cascade of chemical reactions, like this ATP synthase system, right? Providing energy for our cells to function, to do their bit. Once you close down any of these systems, right, you either have an organ failure of some kind, which may lead to death of the organism, and certainly several failures will lead lead to death of the organism. And it's just with modern medicine, we can understand and often repair these either physically or with other chemicals that we put in to try and reestablish the homeostasis in the system. One of the things that again we have though is that these systems are so complex. We haven't cured all the diseases with pharmaceutically. You know, we are nowhere near it. A matter of fact, we seem to be evolving more diseases actually, as we're accumulating more mutations in our body. So it's the very opposite to what evolution claims occurs. And this is staring us in the face. And it really frustrates me that this isn't being taught to our students. That, let's face it, evolution is absolutely impossible as an explanation for how our amazing biochemistry came to be. SPEAKER A Wow, thank you for just really fleshing that out and explaining that. Impressing us to think about just the complexity that we're dealing with here. And, um, yeah, how evolution really cannot explain that. Um, yeah, so thank you for sharing about that today. Have you ever struggled with doubts about God's existence or known someone who has? What helped you through it? Share your thoughts and stories in the comments. Your journey could inspire someone else who's searching for answers.