My fifth question is to what extent do we know about the biochemical activities in the world of bacteria?
They are basically everywhere from human digestive system to underground.
One cannot imagine a world without them.
What are your thoughts on this tragedy?
Yeah, it's astounding to me how prevalent bacteria are on our planet.
They are everywhere and they play a vital role in ecosystems, for example.
They play a critical role in generating the oxygen that we breathe, the photosynthetic bacteria.
They play a critical role in nutrient cycling on the planet.
They play a role as nucleation centers to help with precipitation.
So they're vitally critical to ecosystems.
Even bacteria that are disease-causing help to control the numbers of animals in ecosystems maintaining ecosystem stability.
And one of the things that I think is interesting now is that we're learning that bacteria are a critical part of a healthy human being.
They cover the surface of our skin.
They line our digestive tract.
And they're playing a number of vital roles in terms of helping us to digest important foodstuffs, keeping us healthy.
So a healthy person has the appropriate balance of bacteria.
And so I think this is very interesting because so often you'll hear people who are atheists, who are evolutionary biologists argue,
well, if a creator is responsible for life, why would he have created bacteria?
Well, the fact that bacteria are playing such an important role answers that question.
I see bacteria as part of a creator's elegant design.
And in fact, some of the most astounding examples of design that we see in biology are in bacterial systems.
And what's interesting too is that we now are learning that we can use bacteria to help develop new technologies.
So we can take the bacteria that exist in nature and use them as inspiration for new designs.
Or we can re-engineer them and use them as these little biochemical manufacturing facilities
that can produce incredibly expensive compounds that are medicines or have other uses that we couldn't make through chemical synthesis.
So I see bacteria as not only reflecting a creator, but I see them as God's gift to us as human beings.