Pastor Rob's Protein Count Russell Ogilvie (5-00)

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Pastor Rob's
Protein Count
Russell Ogilvie

Reference: Calvary Chapel Senior Pastor Spreads Lies About Atheists

From: "RGOGILVIE"
To: "PositiveAtheism" <editor@positiveatheism.org>
Subject: Positive_Atheism_Letters_Section
Date: Tuesday, May 23, 2000 2:30 PM

To whom it may concern,

'Pastor Rob' in the letters section made a few rather bold (to the point of striking me as quite amusing) statements about cells and proteins in the human body:

"Did you Know Tim that you have over 75 Trillion Living cells within your body. That within each one of those 75 trillion cells is another 200 trillion protein molecules."

I didn't see any responses pointing this out, so I hope I'm not being redundant. Proteins are made up of amino acids. Let's assume a ridiculously simple human made up of just one kind of protein, composed of nothing more than a single amino acid just to be on the safe side. And to drive the nail in a little further, let's assume it's glycine, the amino acid with the simplest structure: NH2 CH2 COOH. Add up the molecular weights and we get about 75.04g/mol of glycine molecules. Here's the math:

(75E12 cells/body)x(200E12 proteins/cell)x(75.04 g/mol)
------------------------------------------------------- = 1.87E6 g/body
            6.022E23 proteins/mol

Let's see -- 1870 kg, that's about 4120 lbs.

So, according what he's told us (and assuming I did the math correctly), an impossibly light human's protein content would weigh in at a minimum of just over 2 tons. (Just the protein -- I'm thinking this human is quite muscular.)

I suppose that is beside the point he was trying to make -- argument from design it would seem -- but did he say he could teach me something about Quantum Mechanics too?

Thank you for taking time out of your schedule to read this, and I hope you get a chuckle out of it. I appreciate what you are doing.

Sincerely,

Russell Ogilvie
Utah State University

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