I want to do something useful

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.