Death gives life, science says so

I have added a new “category” to the blog called cool science. I am, after all, a scientist and very often there is a bit of science in the natural order of things that speaks of God to me. Technically, this is not kinesthetic – unless I pick it up and turn it over in my mind, in which case anything goes I suppose.

But this week I am at a sports medicine conference and everyone is speaking science. Very quickly and much of the time somewhat illegibly. Whoa. Can you say that about speaking? Slow your talking down; I can’t read your handwriting!!

Anyway, today’s cool science doesn’t come directly from the conference (That will go on my Fit2Finish business blog.) but instead from research done at UVA School of Medicine and published in the magazine Nature. In studies of muscle cells, they have found that dying cells (which have long been considered debris that must be removed from the body to avoid causing tissue inflammation) are necessary in the process of muscle cell formation. “A small number of myoblasts – precursor cells that develop into muscle tissue – must die to allow muscle formation.”

I am prone to think of death as a terrible thing. Such a waste. Such a mistake. So ill-conceived. Why in the world must we die? And then on the tiniest of scales, the most intricate of platforms, in the cells themselves, we literally can see that death is necessary for new life.

A cell must die so that others can live.

Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. ~ John 12:24

So Scientific. So Scriptural. Almost like we were made this way.