Have you ever heard the phrase, "Who woulda thunk it?" If I am not mistaken, the first time that I heard it was on the movie "A Cabin in the Sky". Usually, when something is presented that is beyond belief or too simple to be true, that's a good phrase to use. I went to a seminar yesterday and the speaker was Dr. James Hildreth, Dean of Biological Sciences and the University of California at Davis. His talk centered around the role of cholesterol with respect to HIV replication. Quiet as it is kept, cholesterol drives HIV replication. HIV basically uses cholesterol as fuel. It was amazing to learn this information because I had never heard it before.
As Dr. Hildreth talked about his research, he mentioned a serendipitous discovery. What they found out was that a rather innocuous compound, beta-cyclodextrin, actually shows some activity versus HIV. They were using it to make a different drug soluble but what they found out was astounding. They found out that beta-cyclodextrin actually robs HIV of cholesterol and kills the virus! In some cases, it dropped the levels of the virus to undetectable levels. This is not an antiretroviral drug, it doesn't cost $10,000.00 per year, as HIV/AIDS treatments do (there is very little new data on the cost of treatment and many new therapies are combination therapies that are very expensive- see HIV therapies and The Business of HIV) and it is harmless to everything else in the body besides HIV. I sat awestruck at this discovery. How could something so simple have such a profound impact on one of the most dreaded diseases of the 20th century? Who woulda thunk it?
Beta-cyclodextrin (shown at right) is a molecule that is found in everything from toothpaste to cookies. The structure is simply several sugars linked together by ethereal bonds (please excuse the chemist in me). They are used to make cholesterol free products because one of their primary actions is the binding of cholesterol. The link between HIV, cyclodextrins and cholesterol is about as odd as finding Donald Trump in a room full of gay-rights activists that voted for Obama.
So, where am I going with this? Discoveries like these have to be divinely inspired! There is simply no way that anyone would ever make that connection and perform the requisite experiments to prove it. Which is where Dr. Hildreth impressed me to the point that I talked about him all the way home to myself and to my wife. When he was studying this compound and its effect on HIV and he noticed that the compound basically rips a hole in the HIV infected cell to remove cholesterol from it, he said that every time he looked into his microscope, he saw God's glory revealed to him. He immediately glorified God for this discovery and for the wisdom and ability to conduct this research. I was floored. He never denied the connection between God and science, which is what many scientists do because science is a humanistic area of study. Scientists want to believe that everything in the world and on the planet is a godless mess that we must figure out. My take, as a scientist and a Christian, is that everything in the world is a God-created miracle that God slowly removes the covers from and slowly gives man the wisdom to understand. Diseases and other harmful things that exist do so, not because of God's creation of defective things, but because of sin's destructive effects on God's once perfect creation. I also believe that the cure for every disease exists in some natural source, many of which we have yet to discover. Put another way, for every medical defect that sin causes, God put a cure in place to defeat it. We just have to find it. They are in the process of phase-I clinical trials which I am certain will be successful because of how benign cyclodextrins are to humans and how safe they have already proven to be. Dr. Hildreth has plans underway to develop a cream containing this compound, which could be literally be produced for $0.10 per tube and given away by the governments in places that have heretofore been devastated by HIV/AIDS.
A scripture that comes to mind is found in 1 Corinthians 1:25 which says simply that God's foolishness is wiser that man's wisdom. God is so infinitely intelligent and wise until man's wisdom could never figure Him out. He knew prior to Adam's sin what would happen and from the foundations of the world had a Lamb (Revelation 13:8; 1 Peter 1:20) prepared to deal with sin and its outworking. Thank God that every solution is in Christ Jesus! It is only by His Spirit that wisdom, that comes from God (James 1:5), is given to man. Thank you Jesus for being the solution and for being the creator and giving us all things that we need. Grace and peace be upon you.
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