About Loneliness, Colon Cancer, And Woolly Mammoths

This newsletter is a composite of three things that caught my attention last week:
• Being thankful can reduce loneliness.
• Regular exercise can help prevent colon cancer.
• Can DNA engineering create a woolly mammoth?

Being thankful can reduce loneliness.

Oral Roberts once said loneliness was the main problem he encountered in his far-reaching ministry.

New research suggests that you say to yourself each night three things you were thankful for on that day. Such as an act of kindness by another person toward you. Pretty soon this begets a habit that reminds you that other people care for you, and that you are a part of a community. This can reduce loneliness.

I’ve always believed that to reach out and help another person takes your mind off yourself, and makes you feel better. This can help your loneliness too. Helping others, sometimes called serving, is one of the hallmarks of Jesus’ time on earth, and the holy scriptures are filled with examples. And, yes, let’s be honest, everyone has problems and needs help from time to time.

Regular exercise can help prevent colon cancer.

This came over National Public Radio last week. Researchers studied nearly 3,000 colon cancer patients and logged their exercise habits before and after treatment for colon cancer.

How much exercise? Walking an hour a day for six days in a week at a pace of 2-3 miles per hour.
The study showed that exercise can help prevent colon cancer, but also reduce the risk of dying after you have had colon cancer.

“What you might think of is that all of our cells are bathed in a soup of sorts, and the constituents of that soup change as a result of being more physically active,” one doctor said. Your immune system is present in the soup, and if you are physically active, the immune system becomes stronger. But if you aren’t active, your cells are more prone to inflammation and this can cause cancer cells to mutate and spread.

Can DNA engineering create a woolly mammoth?

If you watched the Jurassic Park movies, you will remember that the mad scientist created T-Rex from remnants of DNA preserved in nature for 60 million years. It seemed far-fetched at the time, but now a company called Colossal Laboratories in Dallas, has moved a step closer to doing just that.

The photo shows two mice with yellow fur that was what kept a woolly mammoth warm in the ice-age that they lived in before 10,000 years ago. They died out 4,000 years ago, but remnants of their DNA have been found in 60 mammoth specimens preserved in permafrost in the Arctic north.

The trick was to pinpoint the gene segments in the DNA that were responsible for the woolly fur. Then to cut and splice these DNA segments into the embryo of a mouse. The process is called gene editing.

But why a mouse? Ideally it would be a modern-day elephant, but the gestation time for an elephant is two years. Instead, they use a mouse whose gestation time is only three weeks. It’s a hit-or-miss process where the scientists have to do this experiment on hundreds of embryos, before they find one that has been successful.

Finally, mouse pups were born with long, wavy, woolly hair of a mammoth. It’s hard to believe, but gene editing was also applied in one other way: the mice in the photo also have the mammoth’s fat metabolism, which is accelerated to deal with the cold of the last ice age.

But to create a mammoth involves much more, because a mammoth is a lot more than its fur and its fat. Scientists would have to engineer dozens of other genes, such as the distribution of fat layers around a mammoth’s body.

Well its springtime, and except for the allergies, I can be thankful for warmer weather, budding trees, and singing birds. May you find things to be thankful for this week.

The GrayNomad.
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But [in fact] He has borne our griefs,
And He has carried our sorrows and pains;
Yet we [ignorantly] assumed that He was stricken,
Struck down by God and degraded and humiliated [by Him].

But He was wounded for our transgressions,
He was crushed for our wickedness [our sin, our injustice, our wrongdoing];
The punishment [required] for our well-being fell on Him,
And by His stripes (wounds) we are healed.

All of us like sheep have gone astray,
We have turned, each one, to his own way;
But the Lord has caused the wickedness of us all [our sin, our injustice, our wrongdoing]
To fall on Him [instead of us].
[Isaiah, chapter 53, Amplified Bible]