The Nose Knows

Job 10:10-11
“Hast thou not poured me out as milk, and curdled me like cheese? Thou hast clothed me with skin and flesh, and hast fenced me with bones and sinews.”

We all know that we each started out as a single cell in our mother’s womb. Then those cells began to divide and within 21 days we had a working nervous system and a beating heart. How did all those new cells know how to hook up to each other to knit together our nerve connections? How do other cells know to hook up with each other to make our circulatory system, or form the heart? A fascinating new theory has now been proposed, based on the fact that every cell in your body has the same active genes that your nose uses to enable you to smell.

Known as olfactory genes, these genes have no known reason to be active in every one of your cells. Mammals and humans have more than a thousand different olfactory genes. One or another of these crisscrosses each of your cell seven times. Researchers already know that these genes were crucial to the development of your sense of smell as you formed in your mother’s womb. As you formed, the nerve cells in your nose sent out growths, called axons, toward your brain. Each of those axons finally grew into the part of the brain called the olfactory bulb. Once there, it hooked up with the cell designed to sense the specific scent detectable by the nerve cell in your nose that sent it out.

It has now been proposed that olfactory genes are active in every one of our cells because this same method of wiring our noses for smell is used to link all our cells as we form in the womb. If so, this system of knitting our unborn bodies together is an elegant and precise product of a loving Creator. You weren’t put together by chance or by mindless forces.

Prayer: Father, I thank You that Your hand made me and You still love me. Amen.

Author: Paul A. Bartz

Ref: John Travis, Dialing up an Embryo, Science News, v.154, p.106. Photo: Pixabay (PD)