A complex cell’s best friend

When I first studied mitochondria, back when I was a high school student, I didn’t appreciate their importance or their origin. I got a lot smarter recently, especially after reading "The Energetics of Genome Complexity," by Nick Lane and William Martin, in the October 21, 2010 edition of Nature (available online only to subscribers). I now realize that Mitochondria are organelles that generate energy in the form of ATP, and that without mitochondria, humans wouldn't exist. Lane and Martin begin their article by asking: "Bacteria made a start up virtually every avenue of eukaryotic complexity, but then stopped short. Why?” As I indicated, in this article, I learned many things about mitochondria. I have inserted excerpts from the Lane/Martin article in several locations. Mitochondria formerly existed as their own independent life form (they were proto-bacteria), but they now reside within other cells. This combining of mitochondria happened only once about four billion years ago and all eukaryotes descended from that symbiotic occurrence. All Eukaryotes had mitochondria (or once did but lost them).

All eukaryotes share a common ancestor, which arose from prokaryotes just once in 4 billion years. Genomic chimaerism points to the origin of eukaryotes in an endosymbiosis between eukaryotes. All eukaryotes either possessed mitochondria, or once did and later lost them, placing the origin of mitochondria and the eukaryotic cell as possibly the same event.

The host mitochondria were also prokaryotes. This was determined by Russian botanist Konstantin Mereschkowski in 1905 and, as you might expect, he was not believed. [More . . . ]

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God as a scientific explanation

Whenever I consider the magnificent structures of cells, I wonder “How could this possibly be?” There is no answer forthcoming, despite the incredible insight offered by scientists. What is, simply is, and I don’t have a reasonable answer for how such exquisite complexity can arise from a cosmic explosion and…

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Books, books and more books

I love libraries. More to the point, I love books. My wife also loves books, though now prefers her phone app to read when she gets the chance. I do read texts occasionally on my phone, and used to on my Palm, and I reluctantly read on/offline docs, but I prefer tradition. There are many reasons for going to libraries. I rarely use them for research anymore. I only go for a specific book maybe 20% of the time. I delight in taking in the experience and seeing where it leads me. I might have an objective in mind, but there are so many opportunities awaiting me, it’s hard to choose just one, or two, or several! My own library is not dissimilar from a public or university library in that respect, save perhaps its scale. That and it also serves as a music room (drum set, guitars, keyboard...) and an occasional media room. We have more than 5,300 books, though about 1,000 of them are for very young children (and mostly packed away now) and another 500 for young adults – combination homeschooling and love of books. I was putting books away the other night and looking for some references on homeschooling for a couple of pieces I am writing and went on a mini-adventure (every re-shelving trip up to my library results in armfuls coming back down with me)…. ...I rediscovered Masters of Deception, compiled by Al Seckel, is a wondrous collection of works of optical illusion by such well-known artists as Escher, Dali, and Arcimboldo, but also including Shigeo Fukuda’s incredible sculptures, and Rob Gonsalves’ realistic paintings. Scott Kim (whose work I first saw in Omni magazine in 1979) and his ambigrams, Ken Knowlton, Vik Muniz, Istvan Orosz, John Pugh, and Dick Termes are also among the 20 artists featured in this visual treat. The foreword was written by Douglas Hofstadter, which led me to… …Gödel, Escher, Bach, from which I first gained consciousness of the math in music, and of the music in math (math was something you do, not appreciate, even though I was quite good at “doing” it.) It’s been more than 25 years since I first discovered Hofstadter’s gem, and it occurred to me that I don’t recall finishing it…so that goes on the list; maybe sooner than later. Ooh! There’s John Allen Paulos, and Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences – a fantastic book of concepts, although at times disjointed like many of his works (A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper, Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don’t Add Up, and more – all most excellent, if a little scattered). And Friedman's "The World is Flat"... Hmm, Mark Tiedemann wrote a note on Heinlein recently (Robert A. Heinlein In Perspective)...but I only have six Heinlein books, and I promised myself I'd read Asimov's entire Foundation series from I, Robot to Foundation and Earth before I re-tried Heinlein. And I really do love Chalker, Farmer, Clarke, ... ... and Jared Diamond, and Richard Dawkins, and Martin Gardner, and Stephen Hawking,... ...Michael Shermer, Bart Ehrmann, Uncle Cecil, Gary Larson... No matter whether you get your education from electronic or print means, aural or visual, don't ever stop.

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The health care “free market”

Many American conservatives argue that we need to step back and allow the "free market" continue to offer the most efficient health care system in the world. The facts on the ground starkly conflict with this way of thinking. The International Federation of Health Plans recently released its 2010 Comparative Price Report detailing medical costs per unit. The study starkly illustrates that health care costs are much higher in some countries than others. The average U.S. prices for procedures are the highest of those in the 12 countries surveyed for nearly all of the 14 common services and procedures.

For example, total hospital and physician costs for delivering a baby are $2,147 in Germany, $2,667 in Canada, and an average of $8,435 in the United States. The survey shows that the cost for a hospital stay is $1,679 in Spain, $7,707 in Canada, but these costs can range from an average of $14,427 to $45,902 in the United States. The survey also found that the cost of a widely prescribed drug like Nexium can range from $30 in the United Kingdom to $186, the average cost in the United States. In addition to providing comparative cost data across the countries, the survey provides information about the wide range of costs being charged in the United States for common services, procedures and drugs. One example from the survey is hip replacement surgery which cost $12,737 in the Netherlands, but ranged from a low of $21,247 to a high of $75,369 in the United States. Five percent of U.S. prices are higher than $75,369. The differential between unit prices was greatest for surgery, according to the survey data. One of the highest differentials was for cataract surgery hospital and physician costs. The range for cataract surgery ran from $1,667 in Spain to an average of $14,764 in the United States.

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Life manufactured in space

Every once in a while, I would read an article that claimed that life originated somewhere else and then came to earth on an asteroid. This claim puzzled me, because it sounded like an eternal regress. If life began on some other planet and then came to earth, how did it originally develop on that other planet? It turns out that I misunderstood the claim, and I have been set straight by a recent article called "Cosmic Blueprint of Life," by Andrew Grant, published in the November 2010 edition of Discover Magazine (this particular article is not yet available on the Internet). The claim is not that life developed on some other planet and then eventually came to earth on asteroid. Rather, the claim is that many of the basic chemicals necessary for life were manufactured in space, and then showered upon earth (and presumably other planets where--presumably--life exists). In this article, Grant writes that:

[The notion that the] underlying chemistry of life could have begun in the far reaches of space, long before our planet even existed, used to be controversial, even comical. No longer. Recent observations show that nebulas throughout our galaxy are bursting with prebiotic molecules. Laboratory simulations demonstrate how intricate molecular reactions can occur efficiently even under exceedingly cold, dry, near vacuum conditions. Most persuasively, we know for sure that organic chemicals from space could have landed on Earth in the past--because they are doing so right now. Detailed analysis of a meteorite that landed in Australia reveals that it is chock-full of prebiotic molecules. Similar meteorites and comets would have blanketed earth with organic chemicals from the time it was born about 4.5 billion years ago until the era when life appeared, a few hundred million years later. Maybe this is how Earth became a living world.
According to Grant, there's two ways to look at the famous 1953 experiment by Stanley Miller and Harold Urey. They prepared a closed environment with the gases they assumed constituted the early Earth atmosphere (methane, ammonia, hydrogen and water). They then simulated lightning strikes through the use of electric sparks. Within a week, the process had produced a variety of prebiotic compounds. As Grant points out, however, the experiment did not show that "all the building blocks of life could have emerged on Earth from non-biological reactions."

Even the simplest lifeforms incorporate two amazingly complex types of organic molecules: proteins and nucleic acids. Proteins perform the basic task of metabolism. Nucleic acids (specifically RNA and DNA) encode genetic information and pass it along from one generation to the next. Although the Miller-Urey experiment produce amino acids, the fundamental units of proteins, it never came close to manufacturing nuclear bases, the molecular building blocks of DNA and RNA.

Grant points out that space was long considered to cold and too low-density to form molecules, but this has now been disproved. Scientists have now found ammonia molecules near the center of the Milky Way using a radiotelescope. They have also found formaldehyde, formic acid and methanol. Laboratory simulations of the environment of outer space had produced "dozens of prebiotic molecules, among them the same amino acids that Miller and Urey found." Further, these experiments have produced "intricate molecular rings containing carbon, nitrogen and hydrogen: fatty acid like molecules that look and behave like the membranes protecting living cells; and nucleic acids or nucleotides, the primary components of RNA and DNA. [More . . . ]

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