CHEMISTRY AND THE PROVIDENCE OF GOD
I've got pneumonia. "Walking Bronchial Pneumonia" is what my doctor called it and laughed, and then he gave me antibiotics. (My doctor's all right - any man who has the theme for The Godfather as his cell phone's ring tone is ok with me.) Antibiotics.... which made me curious.
Modern chemistry is an astounding field. One of the most wonderfully valuable modern medicines, aspirin, was given to us by Felix Hoffman in 1897, when he was working for the Bayer company in Germany and synthesized acetylsalicylic acid (ASA). He was building upon the work of earlier chemists who had isolated salicylic acid but hadn't found a way to produce it in a useful or cost-effective form. Even these chemists were building on centuries-long knowledge that certain herbs such as sheep sorrel and other plant products like willow bark helped with pain and fever. I have a lot of sheep sorrel growing in my yard but I never thought to eat it for pain relief. Anyway, The Bayer chemists discovered that acetylated salicylic acid was stable and effective in reducing fever and inflammation and therefore pain, so Bayer called it "aspirin" and put it on the market. Aspirin is one of the most (if not the most) common, most used, and most valuable medicines we have.
Another indescribably useful medicine is penicillin, which legend says Alexander Fleming discovered in 1928, although the story is more complicated than the usual version suggests, as stories usually are. He discovered a clean spot in a petri dish he'd already stacked for washing in a sink full of lysol, but he was a messy guy and the stack was so tall that this particular petri dish hadn't been submerged yet. The clean spot turned out to be where a mold spore had landed and the conclusion eventually drawn was that the mold exuded something which killed bacteria. Legend has it that the mold floated in through his window, but historical research has shown that 1) the windows in his lab didn't open, and 2) the particular kind of penicillium mold growing in the dish (P. notatum) is not a kind that was prevalent in London. But there was a mycology lab downstairs and there were mold spores (maybe entire mushrooms! who knows...) floating around inside the building and into Fleming's lab. Fleming himself didn't do much with his discovery, but 11 years later Howard Florey and Ernst Chain in Oxford carried the discovery forward with much clearer vision about the pharmaceutical potential of penicillin and by the end of World War II, labs had become able to synthesize it in great quantities relatively inexpensively, and penicillin and its relatives had proved to be a massively valuable weapon against the things that trouble man's body.
By the way, penicillin doesn't kill bacteria - it prevents its reproduction by inhibiting the creation of certain, um, proteins? which the bacteria needs to build its cell walls. The bacteria currently in my lungs will have a short life-span, and when it dies there will be none to replace it. Bwahahaha!!!
Modern chemistry, like many other sciences, has been of inestimable value to mankind. There are many books out now recounting the so-called chances that resulted in such wonderful discoveries and inventions. But it's no accident that modern painkillers and antibiotics, as well as countless other valuable chemical inventions, were discovered or invented in the Western world where Christianity had produced a cultural belief in the basis trustworthiness of reason and the natural world. It's true that because of the failure of the Church to preach the gospel faithfully, this trust in reason has become a monster in many ways, but that doesn't change the fact that an understanding of reason as a tool (which came out of the Christian middle ages), and faith in a God whose creation is trustworthy because He is trustworthy (which came from two thousand years of Christianity), have resulted in material blessings (less pain, less disease, longer life, better food and more of it, oh and hot showers!) for the whole world. He promised these blessings over and over, and now that we have some of them, we forget Who gave them to us and call it "chance."
Praise the Lord for chemistry and chemists. Pneumonia has been a major killer over the centuries, but what might have killed me if I'd lived 150 years ago is now a relatively minor nuisance. Praise God.
Modern chemistry is an astounding field. One of the most wonderfully valuable modern medicines, aspirin, was given to us by Felix Hoffman in 1897, when he was working for the Bayer company in Germany and synthesized acetylsalicylic acid (ASA). He was building upon the work of earlier chemists who had isolated salicylic acid but hadn't found a way to produce it in a useful or cost-effective form. Even these chemists were building on centuries-long knowledge that certain herbs such as sheep sorrel and other plant products like willow bark helped with pain and fever. I have a lot of sheep sorrel growing in my yard but I never thought to eat it for pain relief. Anyway, The Bayer chemists discovered that acetylated salicylic acid was stable and effective in reducing fever and inflammation and therefore pain, so Bayer called it "aspirin" and put it on the market. Aspirin is one of the most (if not the most) common, most used, and most valuable medicines we have.
Another indescribably useful medicine is penicillin, which legend says Alexander Fleming discovered in 1928, although the story is more complicated than the usual version suggests, as stories usually are. He discovered a clean spot in a petri dish he'd already stacked for washing in a sink full of lysol, but he was a messy guy and the stack was so tall that this particular petri dish hadn't been submerged yet. The clean spot turned out to be where a mold spore had landed and the conclusion eventually drawn was that the mold exuded something which killed bacteria. Legend has it that the mold floated in through his window, but historical research has shown that 1) the windows in his lab didn't open, and 2) the particular kind of penicillium mold growing in the dish (P. notatum) is not a kind that was prevalent in London. But there was a mycology lab downstairs and there were mold spores (maybe entire mushrooms! who knows...) floating around inside the building and into Fleming's lab. Fleming himself didn't do much with his discovery, but 11 years later Howard Florey and Ernst Chain in Oxford carried the discovery forward with much clearer vision about the pharmaceutical potential of penicillin and by the end of World War II, labs had become able to synthesize it in great quantities relatively inexpensively, and penicillin and its relatives had proved to be a massively valuable weapon against the things that trouble man's body.
By the way, penicillin doesn't kill bacteria - it prevents its reproduction by inhibiting the creation of certain, um, proteins? which the bacteria needs to build its cell walls. The bacteria currently in my lungs will have a short life-span, and when it dies there will be none to replace it. Bwahahaha!!!
Modern chemistry, like many other sciences, has been of inestimable value to mankind. There are many books out now recounting the so-called chances that resulted in such wonderful discoveries and inventions. But it's no accident that modern painkillers and antibiotics, as well as countless other valuable chemical inventions, were discovered or invented in the Western world where Christianity had produced a cultural belief in the basis trustworthiness of reason and the natural world. It's true that because of the failure of the Church to preach the gospel faithfully, this trust in reason has become a monster in many ways, but that doesn't change the fact that an understanding of reason as a tool (which came out of the Christian middle ages), and faith in a God whose creation is trustworthy because He is trustworthy (which came from two thousand years of Christianity), have resulted in material blessings (less pain, less disease, longer life, better food and more of it, oh and hot showers!) for the whole world. He promised these blessings over and over, and now that we have some of them, we forget Who gave them to us and call it "chance."
Praise the Lord for chemistry and chemists. Pneumonia has been a major killer over the centuries, but what might have killed me if I'd lived 150 years ago is now a relatively minor nuisance. Praise God.
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