Page 62 - The Miraculous Machine that Works for an Entire Lifetime: Enzyme

Harun Yahya

which reason carbonic anhydrase catalyses the system, speeding it up

by 10 million times, setting 600,000 water molecules and an equal num-
ber of carbon dioxide molecules into reaction every second. In other
words, the enzyme enters into a reaction every 2 microseconds—a tru-
ly astonishing speed. To make this more comprehensible (and dramat-
ic!), if you expanded a second out to the length of a whole year, a mi-
crosecond would last the same amount of time as a soft-drink com-
mercial. 32
The breaking down of a molecule, the digestion of a foodstuff, or
the elimination of a waste product is due to the enzymes that function

every instant, non-stop, by Allah's leave. As you shall shortly see, the
working of special digestive enzymes permits food to be digested in the
stomach and intestines. The process of human digestion lasts between
three and six hours, depending on the particular food involved. Were it
not for enzymes, however, it would take you more than 30 years to di-
gest a single meal! 33 To make this enormity clearer, just 30 grams of
pepsin, one of the chief elements in digestion, can digest 2 tons of egg
34
white. Were it not for enzymes, you would need years to digest even
a single egg; and a normally five-second reaction might last up to 1,585
years. For example, it would take you 115,000 years to read this page! 35
Regarding this amazing speed of enzymes, the late evolutionist

Carl Sagan gave the following description:
A living cell is a marvel of detailed and complex architecture. Seen
through a microscope there is an appearance of almost frantic activity. On
a deeper level it is known that molecules are being synthesized at an
enormous rate. Almost any enzyme catalyzes the synthesis of more than
100 other molecules per second. In ten minutes, a sizeable fraction of to-
tal mass of a metabolizing bacterial cell has been synthesized. The infor-
mation content of a simple cell had been estimated as around 10 12 bits,
comparable to about a hundred million pages of the Encyclopedia
Britannica. 36

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