Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: Electricity Forms Your Heart

Prabhupada, March 31, 1977, Bombay: […] They do not know that the soul is there. Because they have misunderstood. So when the soul goes away, they think their heart has pain. Material cause. They do not know because the soul has left, the heart is not working. They take it on the other way, that because the heart is not working, therefore he’s lying down. (Full Conversation)

spacer

“Electricity Forms Your Heart”
Creation-Evolution Headlines — Did you know your heart is an electrical appliance?  That’s right.  Currents of electrical ions are vital to its function as a contractile organ.  Now, researchers at the University of California have found another thing electricity does for your heart: it guides the developing heart into the proper shape.  This is a key study showing how epigenetic factors – factors above and beyond the genetic code – are essential for the formation of body parts.

The research team, publishing in PNAS,1 explained the purpose of their investigation (Note: morphogenesis refers to the origin of shape, and cardiomyocytes are the specialized muscle cells that make the heart beat):

Cardiac morphogenesis is a complex process that is mediated by a coordinated set of cellular and molecular as well as environmental factors.  Recent studies have shown that epigenetic forces such as cardiomyocyte contractility and intracardiac hemodynamic flow regulate this process.  Furthermore, in vitro studies suggest that cardiomyocytes can realign themselves according to electrical conduction directionality.  However, because electrical cardiac conduction and mechanical contractile forces are intimately coupled in the intact heart, it is difficult to assess the individual contribution of these influences to overall heart organogenesis.  Here, we make use of several zebrafish cardiac mutants to uncouple these two influences, and find that electrical conduction exclusive of contractile influences can directly participate in remodeling and morphogenesis of the vertebrate heart.

In other words, electrical conduction guides the individual heart cells into position during heart development and repair.  They said in the Discussion part of their paper that it is known that “The direction of growth and orientation of various cell types in tissue culture can be influenced by externally applied electric fields.”  They added, “Furthermore, endogenous [inside organism] electric currents exist in a variety of tissues and have been hypothesized to influence cell migration and shape.”  This paper announces confirmation of that hypothesis for heart formation: “Our in vivo results [using living zebrafish] indicate that physiologic electric currents can indeed have an impact on cell morphology and overall cardiac organogenesis.”  The mutant fish without the electrical conduction working properly developed heart disease.
So how does this work?  They explained, “These electrical effects might be mediated through intracellular calcium fluxes which can affect cell polarization.  Furthermore, a number of cell surface receptors… can also be redistributed in the cell membrane by electric fields.”  Does this finding provide hope for heart patients?  Patients with electrical conduction disorders get better when the beats are re-synchronized.  The researchers explained why that works: “Thus, overall cardiac improvement from the resynchronization of the ventricles in heart failure patients manifesting conduction disorders may be due to beneficial realignment and improved remodeling of the myocardium primarily from proper and synchronized electrical signaling.”  Get the electricity right, and the heart shapes up.  Now those defibrillation devices and electrical heart stimulators start to make more sense.
This means that stem cell therapy (07/20/2010) may need an electrical jumpstart to work properly: “Given that previous cardiac cell-based therapy has provided only a modest improvement in cardiac function,” they ended, pointing therapy in a new direction, “electrical cell–cell communication and stimulation may be required for optimal integration and alignment of engrafted embryonic cardiomyocytes and skeletal myoblasts in the injured myocardium to improve overall myocardial performance.”  Live better electrically!


1.  Chi, Bussen et al, “Cardiac conduction is required to preserve cardiac chamber morphology,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, published online July 30, 2010, doi: 10.1073/pnas.0909432107.

This fascinating discovery is but the tip of an iceberg that will guide biology into the future: epigenetics.  We have learned much about genetics – the DNA code that provides the information for building proteins and the cell’s building blocks.  But genetics does no more than deliver the bricks, pipes and wire to the construction site and drop off a blueprint.  What directs the parts into their correct position at the correct time?  What makes some genes get expressed in cardiac cells, and other genes get expressed in nerve cells?  If all the genes have same blueprint, why do they become so different in different parts of the body?  Clearly much more is going on than providing each cell with a blueprint.
Here we see one example of an epigenetic factor, where electrical currents are involved.  Imagine how precise these currents must be positioned to guide cells into the shape of an auricle or ventricle, to say nothing of guiding all the ancillary nerve cells and blood vessels into place.  What switches on the electrical currents, and orients them properly?  Do you get a brief glimpse of mind-boggling complexity going on inside the womb as a baby’s heart forms and begins beating in just 9 or 10 weeks from the time the baby began as a single cell?
The complexity of development was presented briefly in the second half of the recent film Darwin’s Dilemma from Illustra Media.  Scientists like Richard Sternberg and Jonathan Wells commented that the complexity of development and epigenetic factors is so vast, so poorly understood, so impermeable to an origin by chance, it leaves regular genetics far behind.  Did these scientists need to ask Darwin for help?  Ha!  They needed him like a hole in the heart.  They never mentioned evolution once in their paper.  Odd, isn’t it, when the Darwiniacs assure us that nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.
Science is only beginning to ask the questions about how factors beyond genetics guide molecules into specialized cells, then tissues, then organs, then a complete organism (the computer graphics in Darwin’s Dilemma are excellent for illustrating this).  Morphogenesis cannot be described in a one-dimensional code.  There are hierarchies of codes involved in the development of each cell and organism.  If Darwin could not survive a genetic code arising by chance (see online book), how on earth will he survive hierarchies of codes?  Have a heart for design.  The future looks healthy for intelligent design science.

Comments

  1. abhaya carana seva das says:

    pamho
    agtACBSP,

    one must be devotee to SRI SRI GURU GAURANGA first to become a pukka scientist i mean they don’t study the vedic literature which contain all the perfect knowledge because it comes from the supreme personality of godhead SRI KRSNA BHAGAVAT vedais ca sarvair AHAM eva vedyo vedanta krd veda vid eva CAHAM bg 15.15,they don’t know how the genetic and the dna are working because they don’t believe in the law of guna and karma which make the next life through the dna and genetic look of the human animal and demigods races to be rectify externally through the factor time of the material world,

    only the ARYA race is perfect in everything because they are completely surrender to the KNOWER of everything SRI ASAMAURDVAM ,the heart is the centre of all energies because the SUPERSOUL ,the soul and also the subtly body is situated in the heart but when the living entity leave his material gross body the soul become even more electrical like ghosts they can fly from a planet to another through the electric power of the subtly body they don’t eat they don’t drink they don’t sleep and they can’t hold physical things therefore they are superior to people who are trapped inside a physical body but the sabda brahma of SRI SRI GURU GAURANGA is superior to any electrical sound vibration we know that where there is a sound there is also the power of the action because there is no sound without action including the electrical power which is connected with the water also and the waves of the brain called alfa teta and beta,all the water signs astrologically have more the tendency to become telepatic but when one become a pure devotee as HDG ACBSP all this power and siddhi perfections are automatically reached ,

    SRILA PRABHUPADA is not a ordinary living entity as a transcendental visionary beyond the factor time and all the others things connected to the limited research of this planet , whoever come in connectcion with HIS books get a huge spiritual benefit beyond the science of tiny brains who are still struggle to become immortal through their limited power, then everything is moving by SRI KRSNA this consciousness is krsna consciousness these are the last words that our guru maharaj said before to leave this world

    agtACBSP
    ys haribol

Leave a Reply to abhaya carana seva das Cancel reply

*

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.