Divine Engineering
Unraveling DNA's Design
by Dr. Jerry Bergman
Recent research into the structure and workings of genes and DNA has revealed incredible evidence of God's wonderful design. Dr. Jerry Bergman, professor of science at Northwest College, Archibold (Ohio) has recently published an excellent technical paper in the Creation Ex Nihilo Technical Journal, detailing how genes manufacture plants and animals.
We have excerpted portions of his report for this article.
Vast Databases
At the moment of conception, a fertilized human egg is about the size of a pinhead. Yet it contains information equivalent to about six billion "chemical letters." This is enough information to fill 1000 books, 500 pages thick with print so small you would need a microscope to read it!
If all the chemical "letters" in the human body were printed in books, it is estimated they would fill the Grand Canyon fifty times!
This vast amount of information is stored in our bodies' cells in DNA molecules and is coded by four bases-adenine, thymine, guanine and cytosine. The key to the coding of DNA is in the grouping of these bases into sets that are further sequenced to form the 20 common amino acids. Together, these genetic codes form the physical foundation of all life.
We've all been exposed to the basic concepts of DNA and its double-helix structure in our high school biology classes. Perhaps you remember being taught that cells divide through the "unzipping" and subsequent replication of the double helix. In all likelihood, though, the incredible evidence of design in this process was not discussed.
A Complex Engineering Puzzle
Suppose you were asked to take two long strands of fisherman's monofilament line-125 miles long-then form it into a double-helix structure and neatly fold and pack this line so it would fit into a basketball.
Furthermore, you would need to ensure that the double helix could be unzipped and duplicated along the length of this line, and the duplicate copy removed, all without tangling the line. Possible?
This is directly analogous to what happens in the billions of cells in your body every day. Scale the basketball down to the size of a human cell and the line scales down to six feet of DNA.
All this DNA must be packed so the regulator proteins that control making copies of the DNA have access to it. The DNA packing process is both complex and elegant and is so efficient that it achieves a reduction in length of DNA by a factor of 1 million. 3
When the cell needs to divide, the entire length of DNA must be split apart, duplicated, and repackaged for each daughter cell. No one knows exactly how cells solve this topological nightmare. But the solution clearly starts with the special spools on which the DNA is wound.
Each spool carries two "turns" of DNA, and the spools themselves are stacked together in groups of six or eight. The human cell uses about 25 million of them to keep its DNA under control. 4 (As shown in Figure 3 on the previous page, DNA is wound around histones to form nucleosomes. These are organized into solenoids, which in turn compose chromatin loops. Each element in this complex, yet highly organized arrangement is carefully designed to play a key role in the cell replication process.)
Click here for the entire article:
http://www.khouse.org/articles/technical/19971201-143.html