RELG 340 - Science and Religion
Course Notes for Module 10
The Language of God : chapters 3, 4 & 5
- p.60 - Stephen Hawking
- See the Biographies page for information
- p.60 - Ernest Rutherford
- See the Biographies page for information
- p.61 - the names given to "flavors" of quarks
- The names given are completely arbitrary - they are just sets of names agreed-upon by scientists because they have to have some way of referring to the particles and their differences. "Quark" is actually a German dairy product, like a cross between yoghurt and cottage-cheese; it now also refers to one of the (presently-accepted) fundamental particles. "Gluons" are so called because they seem to glue other parts together. "Gravitons" are associated with gravity. A "Photon" is a particle of light (the Greek word phos means light).
The current interest of particle physicists is the "Higg's Boson" which may exist for extremely short periods of time and under extreme circumstances). - p.62 - Eugene Wigner
- See the Biographies page for information
- p.80 - quote by Einstein
- The full quote is "God does not play dice with the universe."
- p. 86 - Cicero
- See the Biographies page for information
- p.89 - DNA
- DNA stands for Deoxyribonucleic acid. There are many DNAs, but all are composed of chains of linked "nucleotide units", with four main units predominating : Adenine, Cytosine, Guanine, Thymine. The sequence of units varies from one type of DNA to another. DNA is found in the nucleus of the cell, and is the means by which information is transferred from one generation to another during cell-division. The chromosomes which carry the information for our cells are composed of DNA. see p.102-103 for more details.
- p.91 - RNA
- RNA stands for Ribonucleic Acid. RNA has a very similar chemical structure to DNA - the difference is that the chains are built from ACGU units instead of ACGT units. RNA is found in the cytoplasm of the cell - outside the nucleus. RNA directs the way in which proteins are built up by the cell. Some viruses contain RNA and no DNA. I was one of a research team working on the structure of t-RNA (Transfer-RNA, which transfers amino-acids to the ribosome, where they are built into proteins) and also TMV (Tobacco Mosaic Virus - an RNA virus which has a helical structure)
- p.91 - life forms from outer space
- This is a cop-out. To say that life started on earth because it came from somewhere else does not answer the questions of where life came from or how it started. I've worked with Francis Crick - he was way brighter than to really believe that.
- p.94 - Cambrian explosion
- The Cambrian Explosion refers to a sudden proliferation of fossils in rocks of the "Cambrian age". Some of the most famous of these are the rocks of the Burgess Shale in the Canadian Rocky Mountains.
"Cambrian" refers to rocks which were first identified in Wales. The Latin name for Wales was Cambria - p.101 - Rosalind Franklin
- Rosalind Franklin was the leader of a team of X-ray crystallographers working on the structures of nucleic acids and viruses. She purified the DNA and obtained the photos which helped Crick and Watson to their insight that DNA forms a helix with the bases turned inwards (others were thinking that the bases turned outwards). Rosalind Franklin died of cancer before the Nobel Prizes for the structure of DNA were awarded. Following her death, most of her team, under the leadership of Aaron Klug, were relocated to the MRC Labs (Medical Research Council) at Cambridge. Aaron Klug was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1982 for the structure of viruses. When the main team left Birkbeck College (London University) they left another group working on protein structure without a Biochemist. At that time I was a Chemist, wanting to move into crystallography as applied to life processes, and I got the job. Eventually Ken Holmes, who had been Rosalind Franklin's first doctoral student, was invited to become Director of a new Department of Biophysics at the Max Planck Institute in Heidelberg. Ken knew me, and invited me first to Cambridge, then to Heidelberg to join the team there.
- p.104 - only twenty amino acids
- There are 20 predominant essential amino acids, but there are also several others which are much more rare but are still essential for life.
- Stereoisomers
- Dr. Collins does not mention one further complexity, which has always intrigued me as a chemist - the amino acids (from which proteins are built), the sugars (from which carbohydrates are built), and the nucleotides (from which nucleic acids are built) all exist as stereo-isomers. Stereoisomers are compounds which have the same chemical formulae and differ only in the spatial arrangement of four dissimilar groups around a carbon atom. They can be differentiated from each other, not by chemical properties, but by the way they interact with a beam of polarized light. One form rotates the plane of polarization to the left (so is called the laevo- or l- form, the other rotates it to the right (and is called the dextro- or d- form). If we synthesize them in the lab, we obtain a 50/50 mixture of both isomers. However, in nature, amino-acids occur as the l-form, and sugars as the d-form (not as 50/50 mixtures). The spatial structural forms are intimately related to the spatial structures of the proteins of the cell. Given that all living creatures have l-amino acids (and d-sugars) it points to a common one-time-only origin which just so happened to go one way rather than the other. If there had been multiple "origins" then one would expect to find some organisms with l-forms and some with d-forms.
- p.120 - Craig Venter
- For Craig Venter's account of his work on the genome, and for his reasons for patenting some of the work, see his book A Life Decoded.
See the Biographies page for information
Copyright © 1999 Shirley J. Rollinson, all Rights Reserved
