Life

By Professor Jim Lynch, OBE

The threats to life of the pandemic and global warming have caused us to consider how life started and it can be sustained. As the COVID-19 pandemic started, I was inspired by the weekly Reflections offered by Canon David Parmiter and by my discussions with him. With a lifetime background in relevant science, I agreed with the CRC Division of the publishers Taylor and Francis to write a book What is Life and How Might it be Sustained: Reflections in a Pandemic, and this will be published in July 2022. Cosmology is the branch of astronomy involving the origin of the universe, from the Big Bang to today. An important early participant was Galileo (1564-1642) in Italy who proposed that the earth moves around the sun, but this brought him into conflict with the Catholic Church and he spent much of his life under house arrest; it was not until 1979 that Pope John Paul II absolved him. In 2020 Roger Penrose from Oxford was awarded the Nobel Prize for his work on black holes, the region of space-time cut off from the rest of the universe by gravity, giving a robust prediction of the theory of relativity. Some of the evidence for the first life on the planet has been obtained using chemical markers, often through the science of palaeontology. The Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955) used this science in

Scanning Electron Microscope image of a human T-cell which are part of the immune system and protect the body from infection

his theory of evolution, but like Galileo he came into conflict with the Catholic Church, until Cardinal Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI) cautiously accepted his views in 2009. My own early research investigated biological markers in primitive bacteria which grow on methane and found that they produced markers akin to those found in ancient sediments about 3.2 billion years old, indicating that they may have been one of the first forms of life on the planet. Whatever their origins, there

is at least one bacterium associated with every living cell in our bodies. Some are harmful and cause disease, but others can be beneficial and protect against disease. They group as communities, now known as microbiomes, and the figure on Page 88 shows such a community in the human gut. Getting a balance in favour of healthy bacteria can prevent many diseases and give us healthy and longer lives. Bacteria are very small (about a millionth of a metre), but viruses are even smaller (less than one tenth the size of a bacterium) and do not exist as distinct cells even though they carry genetic information which can cause or prevent disease. The challenge in pandemic was to combat a particular virus, COVID-19, and its

The COVID-19 virus (Ed Hutchinson and Annabel Slater, Glasgow University/ MRC Centre for Virus Research

variants. Fortunately, against the odds, vaccines to prevent infection were developed much quicker than many scientists and medical practitioners thought would be possible. Some drug therapies were also developed to cure those infected, but we need more. Imaging has become immensely powerful in determining the health of our bodies, but it is also increasingly powerful in determining the health of the planet on which life depends. My own work has also used such imagery to monitor deforestation. The livelihoods of the about 1.2 billion people, or one fifth of the world’s population, depend on forests. Deforestation is also a major factor in climate change, which can compromise the supply of food to us all. Toxic chemicals in the environment can have negative effects on the biosphere and this was identified many years ago by Rachel Carson in her book Silent Spring and Jim Lovelock in his book Gaia. However, in my opinion one of the best critical analyses of environmental dangers is by Pope Francis in his Encyclical Letter in 2015 Laudito Si’. There is no doubt that life is beautiful, and we need to do all we can to protect it. Bioethics and governance are

Microbiome of the human gut (Getty)

Satellite image of deforestation in Amazonia, red is forest and blue is felled (Airbus)

NASA photo of deforestation in Tierras Bajas project, Bolivia - taken by astronauts from the International Space Station

critical in this. Richard Dawkins in his books The God Delusion and Outgrowing God says there is no reason to invoke God in the creation and protection of life. However, he provides no proof for his opinion. It must be admitted as Christians that we cannot prove the opposite, but the biblical evidence is strong, and in my opinion, faith is vital in our future. While writing my latest book I asked Bishop Richard where God is during pandemic and he replied, ‘he is present in the sick and dying and in those who care for them’. We must take comfort from his words.