The Cell
An adult is composed of some 100 trillion cells, each of which is incomprehensibly complex. To illustrate the complexity, Newsweek magazine compared a cell to a walled city. “Power plants generate the cell’s energy,” the magazine said. “Factories produce proteins, vital units of chemical commerce. Complex transportation systems guide specific chemicals from point to point within the cell and beyond. Sentries at the barricades control the export and import markets, and monitor the outside world for signs of danger. Disciplined biological armies stand ready to grapple with invaders. A centralized genetic government maintains order.”
Consider how you—some 100 trillion cells of you—came about. You began as a single cell that was formed when the sperm from your father united with an egg cell from your mother. At that uniting, the plans were drawn up within the DNA (short for deoxyribonucleic acid) of that newly formed cell to produce what eventually became you—an entirely new and unique human. The instructions within the DNA “if written out,” it is said, “would fill a thousand 600-page books.”
In time, that original cell began dividing, making two cells, then four, eight, and so on. Finally, after about 270 days—during which time thousands of millions of cells of many different kinds had developed within your mother to form a baby—YOU were born. It is as if that first cell had a huge room full of books with detailed instructions on how to make you. But just as wonderful is the fact that these complicated instructions were passed along to every succeeding cell. Yes, amazingly, each of the cells in your body has all the same information as the original fertilized egg contained!
Consider this also. Since each cell has the information to produce all kinds of cells, when it came time, say, to make heart cells, how were the instructions to make all the other cells suppressed? Seemingly, acting like a contractor with a complete cabinet of blueprints for making a baby, a cell picked from its file cabinet a blueprint for making heart cells. Another cell picked out a different blueprint with instructions for producing nerve cells, yet another took a blueprint for making liver cells, and so on. Surely, this still unexplained ability of a cell to select the instructions needed to produce a particular kind of cell and at the same time suppress all other instructions is another of the many “miracles that take us from conception to birth.”
Yet, there is much more to it. For example, the cells of the heart need to be stimulated so that they contract rhythmically. Thus, within the heart a complex system was constructed for generating electrical impulses to cause the heart to beat at a proper rate to sustain the body in the activity in which it is engaged. Truly, a miracle of design! No wonder doctors have said of the heart: “It is more efficient than any machine of any kind yet devised by man.”
The Brain
An even greater wonder is the development of the brain—the most mysterious part of the human miracle. Three weeks after conception, brain cells start forming. In time, about 100 billion nerve cells, called neurons—as many as there are stars in the Milky Way—are packed into a human brain.
“Each one of these receives input from about 10,000 other neurons in the brain,” reported Time magazine, “and sends messages to a thousand more.” Noting the possible combination possibilities, neuroscientist Gerald Edelman said: “A match head’s worth of the brain contains about a billion connections that can combine in ways which can only be described as hyperastronomical—on the order of ten followed by millions of zeros.”
What potential capacity does this give the brain? Astronomer Carl Sagan said that the human brain can hold information that “would fill some twenty million volumes, as many as in the world’s largest libraries.” Author George Leonard went further, exclaiming: “Perhaps, in fact, we can now propose an incredible hypothesis: The ultimate creative capacity of the brain may be, for all practical purposes, infinite.”
Thus, we should not be surprised by the following statements: “The brain,” said molecular biologist James Watson, codiscoverer of the physical structure of DNA, “is the most complex thing we have yet discovered in our universe.” Neurologist Richard Restak, who resents the comparison of the brain to a computer, said: “The brain’s uniqueness stems from the fact that nowhere in the known universe is there anything even remotely resembling it.”
If that is true, why do we grow old? What went wrong? Why, after some 70 or 80 years, do we die, even though our bodies evidently were designed to last forever?
