The Biochemical Juggling Act: What Really Makes Us Alive? - FAS2623

SPEAKER A If I gave you a dead bacteria that had all its parts—every protein, every DNA strand, everything intact—could you make it come alive? The answer is no. Science calls this the zombie paradox. Once a cell hits chemical equilibrium, it dies. Today we are asking: if we can't jump-start a perfectly preserved dead cell, How could a puddle of mud do it billions of years ago? Welcome to Faith and Science. I'm Kaysie Vokurka. Joining me to discuss this topic is Dr. John Ashton. Welcome once again, Dr. John. Hello, Kaysie. Dr. John has written a book called The Big Argument: Does God Exist? And in today's program, we'll be drawing on insights from this book, particularly from chapter 7 by George Jayvor. So in this chapter, um, Javer uses the example of an E. coli cell that's been killed by a solvent. And of course, it still has all its proteins, nucleic acids, but it is now dead. So what does this tell us about the difference between chemicals and life? SPEAKER B Yes, so this is a very, very important area to understand when we're looking at the problem of biogenesis, or non-living cells forming a living organism. So the example that Dr. Javer uses is that, and he had done a lot of research in the area of E. coli. If you just put a tiny little drop of toluene on a little E. coli bacteria, you damage the outer membrane. Now, once you damage the outer membrane, which is where it's getting its food source and this sort of thing, this sets up a chain of reactions that actually stop reactions. So the reactions begin to close down because you've disrupted what is a constant state of disequilibrium. Now this is something a little bit hard to understand. So if you remember perhaps a high school experiment where you put some zinc into hydrochloric acid and it bubbles away, and it bubbles away quite vigorously and hydrogen gases being produced there and the zinc slowly dissolves and then the reaction stops. Now what's happened there is that all the, the zinc has been converted to zinc chloride. And it— and so in the molecule hydrogen chloride, because zinc is above hydrogen in the electrochemical series,, it displaces the hydrogen and bonds to the chlorine, or it's in solution as an ionic compound and displaces the hydrogen. So we have a chemical reaction there and it has reached equilibrium. All the hydrogen has been produced, all the zinc has been converted to zinc chloride. And so the reaction has stopped. So it's now dead. Before it was bubbling away, it was producing hydrogen, which we could use. Now, if we wanted to continually have that hydrogen, so say we were burning that hydrogen that was being released, right? And using it to heat some water to make steam to drive a little turbine or something like that, we've stopped producing energy. So the same thing happens in a cell. So the cell requires some energy to some food source to be coming in, which provides energy. Now, this then goes through a series of chemical reactions and that. So once the cell has the energy coming in, it's sort of like we needed— if we're going to keep that turbine running, we need to continue to put in the amount, just the right amount of hydrogen— sorry, of zinc to generate just the right amount of hydrogen to keep it going. Now, again, we also would have to have acid coming in and dripping in at the same time so we didn't run out of acid. And we'd have to have a process to be taking the zinc chloride excess away as well. So it's quite a complex thing there if we wanted to continually have this as a source of making energy to run the little turbine. So what has to happen is we have to have another process that is dropping in the zinc at just the right rate, right? If compared to the rate at which the acid is dripping in as well. If we don't have enough acid coming in at the time and we have too much zinc coming in, then all that acid will be used up quite quickly, and, you know, we'll stop producing hydrogen or, you know, this sort of thing. Unless we have a balance there, we won't be producing hydrogen at the, at the right amount. So we've got to have those two things happening at the same time. Now, the same thing happens in, in our car. We have to have petrol coming in and air coming into the carburetor, which we burn and produce energy.. And if we don't, if we, you know, don't have the right amount of air, we block off the air, the engine will stop. If we block off the fuel, the fuel, the car will stop as well. Or if we get that mixture out of correct ratio, and that's involved in tuning a car, the car will run roughly and then may stop of itself as well. Now the same thing happens in the cells. In that we've got all these chemical reactions happening, but it's like this where A reacts with B to produce C, where C reacts with D to produce E, where E reacts with F to produce G, which reacts with H to produce A. Oh, okay. All right. So we're right back. So we've got a cycle. We've got all these cyclic processes. Occur. And the thing is this, that the concentrations just have to be right or the reaction will go too fast or it'll stop. The same with our, you know, hydrochloric acid and zinc sort of thing. We've got to have the ratios and the concentrations just right for the reaction to be able to go. SPEAKER A And we're talking about hundreds of these reactions all strung together, right? SPEAKER B Now, that's, that's the other thing. That it's not just one little set of chemical reactions producing one set of processes. So for example, if we take glucose. So E. coli cells can metabolize glucose for food. But we find that that glucose molecule goes through about 10 different steps where it's used in parts and combined with different processes in this whole— reaction of glycolysis that occurs in the cell. There's 10 steps to that. That's just that one food. Now, of course, E. coli in the wild can use other things as food, like citric acid and this sort of thing. But we're just talking about one little set there in the metabolism. There are about, in an E. coli, there's about 600 of these cyclic chemical reactions that are occurring. All at once, providing just the right concentration of enzyme for just the right reaction to go for just the right synthesis of this particular protein to occur at just the right concentration so it can link with that compound and so forth. So again, with that little E. coli cell that we've just killed, we've just stopped the reaction, we've just stopped the reactions. All the chemicals are there. They're all probably in the right concentration. But what it means is we just can't start up one reaction. We've got to start up all 600 reactions at the same time where the components are just at the right critical concentration so that they keep going. So that they just have— they're at sufficient concentration so the reaction will go and they're not at too high a concentration where the reaction will go to equilibrium and stop. They've got to be at just that right concentration so that as the new product forms, it's being utilised in the next step that provides just the, you know, the right concentrations and balance for the reactions to keep going at that change. SPEAKER A That's crazy. I mean, it's almost like, you know, it's a constant juggle. Everything has to be happening at the right point. And if you— in the case of a juggler illustration, if you drop all the balls, then that's it, it's all done. But otherwise, everything has to be going, and that takes a lot of skill. And in this case, um, it seems like from this angle that would be very difficult, at least for a human, to try and do, um, let alone a random chance. Like, how do you How do you get all of those things just right and then push the start button, whatever that is? SPEAKER B Well, that's right. And this is the problem that chemists have in the laboratory. They can't just drop in those chemicals at the right concentration at the right time. And because it's actually even more common, it's, it's so complex, it's just so hard to describe it just with simple words without detailed diagrams. But in a lot of these cases, these compounds have to be, for example, absorbed onto the catalysts and this sort of thing. So we've got these structural things where the, the— for the reactions to go, the molecules actually have to link on to a particular receptor structure to be available then to have their active sites exposed for the next chemical reaction to occurring. Wow. So, you know, so you've got all these reactions to occur, right? That you've gotta imbalance that are extremely complex. And this is why the whole system points to a creator. You can't have, in my view anyway, random processes just then, through a random process, just happens to orientate a molecule at the right way on the site so this particular site that's needed for the next chemical reaction is available and then you happen to place the right chemical that it needs on an active site right near it so it can react as well. And everything is just at the right concentration because otherwise you get any of that balance out and the system goes to equilibrium one way or another. It'll close down and die. And that's exactly how we die as well. That happens, we begin to have failure in one particular system That leads to the collapse of another to another, and then we close down and we die. SPEAKER A That's a fascinating point that you bring up, that it's not only do we need all of these free chemicals in perfect state of non-equilibrium in all the right concentrations, but all of those are actually integrally dependent upon physical structures that are built in the cell in order for that whole process to actually run. SPEAKER B Yes, yes, it's extremely complex and reeks of design. It reeks of a super designer, of a super intellect beyond any known human intellect to construct this thing. You know, we can't even write a code to make, for example, and insert it in, say, a pig DNA to make a pig grow wings. You know, we can't do that to make pigs fly, right? You know, with all our knowledge of, you know, DNA codes for wings and all this sort of thing. —because there's so much interplay. The DNA code is so much more complex than what we think. You know, when we looked at earlier on, people thought there was this junk DNA, and now we know this DNA controls a whole lot of processes, has a whole lot of regulatory purposes, all this sort of thing. And so this all comes into the fact, and it's powerful evidence, the fact that we can have a complete cell there we can't make it alive again. Just like we can have complete humans and they die and we can't make them alive again. And it's the same process as much as we start. Once those systems, once enough systems go into equilibrium, we can't start them up again. It's too, too complex. We just can't have the biochemical concentrations at the right level to just kickstart those reactions because it's just kickstarting one reaction won't do it. You've got to kickstart all the reactions at the same time. And people don't understand that. That's a requirement of life. SPEAKER A Wow. Oh, that is— that's crazy to think about how complicated just that one little E. coli cell, right? I can't even see one on our finger, you know, and it takes that much to get that little thing to run. And yeah, it's so carefully put together that random processes couldn't really explain that. Even with our technology, we can't even begin to come close to replicating that. And so, as you pointed out before, the logical answer is there must be a super intellect that has put this thing together because it's just so mind-blowingly complex. That's correct. Hmm, thank you for explaining all of that. 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.