A few years ago I posted on my Spanish language blog, Buenas Aventuras, a story I entitled “I Want to Do Something Useful”. It is
still receiving “hits” as people all over the Spanish-speaking world ask their
web browsers to find articles about being useful. I can only conclude that this
is a major concern for a lot of people who want to find meaning for their lives.
So now here is the same story in English.
A long time ago, back in the 1960s when you could get
funding for basic research, I had a brand-new straight-out-of-the-box master’s
degree in chemistry, and I was swirling test tubes at the New England Institute
for Medical Research. Back then you could investigate something because it was
interesting and might lead to better understanding of nature, even if there
were no apparent uses for the knowledge.
We were trying to find out how dihydroorotate
dehydrogenase worked. This enzyme which living things use in producing the
nucleic acids which make up DNA and RNA was even less known then than it is
now, but there were theoretical reasons why academicians were interested in its
reaction mechanism.
It was a fun intellectual exercise, but I realized that
outside of providing the down-payment on my house my work was essentially
useless. We were finding out interesting things, but that wasn’t enough for me.
In contrast to the people in the next lab, anything I discovered probably wouldn’t
get anyone well.
The lab next door was home to the smelliest research ever
invented. Someone had observed that sharks don’t get sick, and they wanted to
find out why. The theory was that there was a substance in shark liver which
would activate the immune system, and they were trying to find out what it was.
Mostly the smell of decaying shark mixed with hexane just made my stomach
queasy. But some of their extracts of shark liver did keep mice from getting
cancer, and that kept the investigation going.
I prayed and I asked God to let me do something useful.
Meanwhile I saw that our own research needed to expand a
bit. Other enzymes similar to ours needed ubiquinone, another chemical found in
the original cell, to function better, and I reasoned that our enzyme also needed
this “co-enzyme”. It would be part of the recently-discovered electron
transport system, probably associated with the cell’s mitochondria. My boss was
interested in other parts of the problem, though, so I didn’t have the chance
to find out if I was right. Then the summer rolled around and my boss was going
on vacation. He gave me a list of things he wanted me to accomplish while he
was gone, but when I looked at it, I realized that I could finish them off in a
couple of hours, and then I would have two weeks to work on my own project. He
was giving me permission to go ahead.
It took only an hour or so to prove that we did indeed
have ubiquinone in the system, and that it worked with the enzyme. But there is
more than one ubiquinone. The compound consists of a cyclic part, the quinone,
and a tail or long side chain of isoprenyl units. In nature it exists with between six and ten isoprenyl units, and I
needed to find out which variety we had. (Diagram is from a Wikipedia article).
The best way to do that was to use thin layer
chromatography, in which the substance would be carried by a solvent up a plate
which had a special coating. Our lab was not equipped to do that, and it would
have been extremely expensive and time-consuming to set it up. But the lab next
door used this technique all the time, doing hundreds of plates a day. I asked
permission to run a plate, and they gave me everything I needed.
I put my samples on the plate, labeled it carefully so
that it wouldn’t get mixed up with the other research, and put it to soak in
one of their tanks. When I came back a couple of hours later, my plate was
gone. I looked all over the lab, and finally found it in the hands of one of
their assistants, who was about to spray the plate with sulfuric acid. I
shouted “stop!!” just in time, but he insisted that it was one of their plates
and he was going to spray it. With considerable difficulty I got him to read
the label on the plate, and he gave it to me. He was very excited because the
spots on my plate which corresponded to ubiquinone-10 were identical to the
spots they were getting from the shark liver extracts which were
especially powerful protectors against
cancer.
Less than half an hour later, the head of the shark
project came to see me and commandeered all the materials I had on ubiquinone.
Within a week, the shark livers disappeared. My little co-enzyme was what they
had spent years and many thousands of dollars searching for.
In the next few years, research on this substance
multiplied. It was renamed CoQ-10 for convenience, “Co” from co-enzyme, Q from
quinone, and 10 from the length of the side chain. It is important for cell
metabolism, and also has powerful anti-oxidant effects. You can buy it in
various forms and brands over the counter. Apparently it is useful to keep the
heart functioning well, and there is some evidence that it helps one resist
cancer.
It does not smell like shark liver or hexane.
So the Lord answered my prayer. I wanted to do something
useful. I didn’t know I was doing something useful at the time I did it, and
that was maybe the nicest part of it. There was no way I could have arranged to
discover what the other lab was looking for. But God put it together.
Do you want to do something useful with your life? Offer
yourself to the Lord and ask Him to use you. He’ll find a way.
It might not be what you expected, though!
Have you ever very much wanted to be useful? How have you
handled that wish? Have you been able to do something? Share your comments. Do.
