Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowships in Science & Religion

Even with his celebrated skill for making meticulous observations of nature, Charles Darwin never could have seen anything like the E. coli glowing fluorescent green in a laboratory at the University of Minnesota.

The natural forces of evolution Darwin described so famously 150 years ago did not craft these bacteria.

Laboratory workers did. They took the basic parts list for life — DNA's four defining chemicals — and created a suite of genes that aren't naturally present in E. coli. The synthetic genes transformed the bacteria into living microprocessors, capable of the logic exercises you find on a silicon chip.

Such are the products of an exciting and controversial scientific thrust called synthetic biology.

Biologists are poised to take over evolution, diverting species from their natural Darwinian courses and turning them in directions scientists want them to take.

Darwin observed evolution. Synthetic biologists are learning to control it — breaking down and reassembling life's basic parts as if they were so many Lego bricks on the floor on Christmas morning.

In the process, they are amplifying debate over one of the most profound questions humans face: Is the world ours to make and transform as we wish?

Ordering life by email

Instead of waiting for Darwinian evolution to produce useful mutations as it has for some 4 billion years, synthetic biologists

Here's a news item you've probably never read or heard: The issue was evolution. It drew some 40 Christians to the Augsburg College campus in Minneapolis. But this was no protest. These Lutherans were celebrating the 150th anniversary of the publication of Charles Darwin's "On the Origin of the Species."

Religious opposition to the theory of evolution has dominated America's headlines for so long that you could be forgiven for thinking that evolution forced stark choices for all people of all faiths: If Darwin was right, the scriptures must be wrong — or vice versa. If God created man in his own image, then humans couldn't have evolved in a process that led through swamps to apes to me writing this article on a tool created with dazzling human intelligence?

The tradeoff never was that clear, though. While the spotlight focused on controversy, most people of faith were forming a far more nuanced understanding of how belief squares with Darwin's theory.

And some actually embraced evolution. Take those Lutherans. Their Oct. 31 symposium was billed as a celebration of "our knowledge of the world — of God's creation — gained through science and evolutionary biology."

Now comes the to be sure, inevitably essential in a report about anything as complex as religion. There are Lutherans — indeed, whole congregations of them — who reject Darwin's theory.

Here's professor Sehoya Cotner's "Five Cent Tour of Human Evolution" in summary: Fossils, DNA and other evidence add up to the unassailable conclusion that humans gradually emerged more than 100,000 years ago as part of the great ape family.

For many of the 200 students in Cotner's University of Minnesota biology class her "tour" was the first serious exposure to the subject, even though evolutionary theory is a foundation for biology and many other courses they should have prepared to study in college.

"They didn't allow evolution to be taught in my high school because of the controversial issues," student Brandi Ziegler said after the class.

It is 150 years ago today since Charles Darwin published "On the Origin of the Species," laying down a theory for understanding the intricacies of life on the planet. If Darwin could come back today and walk through laboratories and libraries in Minnesota alone, he surely would be amazed see the vast body of knowledge built upon that theory.

Still, evolution remains so culturally volatile that many high-school teachers shy away from it, leaving students with major gaps in their understanding of basic science, according to research by Cotner and professor Randy Moore, another U of M biologist who has written books about evolution.

Here are highlights from survey findings they reported in BioScience, a journal of the American Institute of Biological Sciences:

• Minnesota law requires that academic standards — including the theory of evolution — be taught in the state's public schools. Yet,

Two years ago, when I was applying for a science journalism fellowship at England's Cambridge University, my screening interview halted briefly after I dropped a comment that American newspapers were abandoning science coverage.

Could that be possible in the United States — the world's capital of scientific discovery — wondered Sir Brian Heap, a prominent Cambridge biologist who was on the screening panel for the Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowships.

Oh yes, indeed, Americans on the panel told him sadly.

The demise came even faster than those of us sitting around that table expected. As print journalism saw itself falling off a cliff, it pushed science coverage over the edge first.

This week, the British journal Nature published an obituary of sorts, making some disturbing points about the implications for our knowledge about science.

Before discussing the highlights, let's consider the context. Truth is that the United States never has been a wellspring of scientific knowledge, even given its great achievements in that regard.

We wring our hands over low math and science test scores, but few adults bother themselves with the details. We get steamed over the politics of stem cells and global warming, but few voters know even the basics of cellular development and carbon emissions.

One in four Americans surveyed in a recent test of scientific literacy did not correctly answer the question, "Does the Earth go around

In Gary Larson’s wacky Far Side world, cows and humans swap traits with hilarious results.

Nobody is laughing, though, over a real-world bid to mix cow and human DNA, something scientists here say they must do in order to advance stem cell studies.

Debate over this step in the exploration of stem cells already has reverberated across the Atlantic. Sen. Norm Coleman, R-Minn., is a co-sponsor of a bill that would ban the research in the United States.

From the first test-tube baby to the first cloned animal, scientists in this part of the world have led a biological revolution that set off an uproar in the United States but met relative calm here.

Now, though, the research is crossing a line that has shattered the calm and ignited fiery debate all the way up to Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s cabinet.

The line at issue is the notion that the human animal is fundamentally different from all other creatures on Earth—in a sacred sense for many people of many faiths.

“From a Christian viewpoint, the teaching is, of course, that we are made in the image of God, and there is something special about human life in relation to divinity,” said Sir Brian Heap, a prominent Cambridge University biologist who has helped his government

Blockbuster news from Wisconsin and Japan today appears to pack the potential to end America's political and ethical battle over destroying embryos to extract their stem cells.

"This could take stem cell research out of the abortion debate," said Jeffrey Kahn, director of the Center For Bioethics at the University of Minnesota.

First, the news. Scientists genetically reprogrammed ordinary human skin cells to create the equivalent of embryonic stem cells. No embryos or human eggs were involved. In other words, these new-found cells could realize the healing potential that is expected for stem cells without the controversy that has stifled research on the embryonic version.

Two competing research teams reported the finding simultaneously. One team, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, works in a laboratory led by James Thomson, the scientist who set off the controversy in 1998 by first isolating lines of stem cells from human embryos.

Key questions

Debate over embryonic stem cells has raged for years from church pulpits to Capitol Hill. Since 2001, the United States has banned federal funding for research on all but a few lines of the cells. Last year, President Bush vetoed a bill that would have lifted the ban, saying "it crosses a moral boundary that our decent society needs to respect."

Nothing in the research reported this week should disqualify these new studies from federal funding, said Kahn, who has written and

Two-lane Gardena Avenue and a stand of oak trees are all that physically separate the Al-Amal Muslim School and Totino–Grace Catholic School in Fridley. But in the science classrooms, the schools are divided by deep tenets of faith and centuries of East–West tradition.

Totino–Grace’s biology teacher, Marcia Wiger, opens a lesson on evolution by reading from Genesis and then explaining Charles Darwin’s landmark theory. She sees no conflict between the two: “We look at religion as religion and science as science.”

Across Gardena, though, evolution stops before it reaches humans. “We cannot believe that man came from apes,” said Al-Amal’s science teacher, Hala Bazzi. “Allah gave man full conscience and intelligence and knowledge that made him superior.”

Still, science has served as a bridge for Wiger and Bazzi, who started out as collaborators and along the way became friends.

At a time when tension between the Muslim world and the West is dangerously high and news is dominated by violence and body counts, the rarely told story is the quiet diplomacy conducted close to home as Muslims and Christians seek to understand one another.

Mukhtar Thakur was not surprised Tuesday by a major new poll finding that American Muslims are more likely than their European counterparts to reject Islamic extremism and express satisfaction with their lives.

"The United States is truly much more of a melting pot than Europe can ever be," said Thakur, a civil engineer who has lived in London and now works for the Minnesota Department of Transportation.

In one of the most comprehensive surveys of Muslim Americans, the Pew Research Center concluded that they are "largely assimilated, happy with their lives and moderate with respect to many of the issues that have divided Muslims and Westerners around the world."

About half of the Muslims surveyed had attended college, for example, and their annual incomes were fairly comparable with those of the overall American public, Pew reported.

That is not to say Muslim Americans are blissful. They overwhelmingly oppose the war in Iraq, and they were far more disapproving than other Americans of President Bush's job performance. More than half of those polled said anti-terrorism efforts single out Muslims for scrutiny.

A quarter of Muslim adults younger than 30 and 13 percent overall said suicide bombing could be justified at least in rare circumstances. On that score and other contentious issues, American Muslims took more moderate views than their counterparts