Creation Moment 12/9/2020 - How Rabies Revealed a "Map"

Now when the sun was setting, all they that had any sick with divers diseases brought them unto him; and he laid his hands on every one of them, and healed them. 

Luke 4:40

 "....Strick seems to have solved his own problem. In the journal

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the Pittsburgh neuroscientists showed that they have discovered a discrete, elaborate network in the cerebral cortex that controls the adrenal medulla. It seems that the connections between the brain and the adrenal medulla are much more elaborate than previously understood.

Rabies can be a fantastic tool, in the right hands. Inject it into an organ, and the nerves that feed that organ will take the virus up and carry it backward toward the central nervous system. En route, the virus hijacks the machinery of the nerves in the cell body and dendrites to replicate and grow its numbers, then cross the synapse from a neuron backwards into all of its inputs.

By charting the progress of the virus, scientists can map out the neural connections between an organ and the brain in ways that were previously impossible. In this case, Strick and his team injected the adrenal glands of monkeys.

Rabies moves at a predictable rate, replicating every eight to 10 hours, moving rapidly through chains of neurons and revealing a network. The researchers could allow the virus to move up the nervous system and reach the brain but could sacrifice the monkey before it showed any symptoms of infection.

“If someone dies of a herpes infection, their temporal lobes look like soup,” Strick explained to me. He contrasted that with the brain of someone who dies of a rabies infection, which looks grossly normal.  It’s still an open question how exactly rabies disables our nerves. It can live inside a neuron for a while innocuously—which allows rabies to move through a population. 

When the virus has had enough time to travel a predictable distance, the researchers anesthetize the animal, wash out its blood, perfuse the central nervous system with fixatives, and use antibodies to detect where the virus has spread. The kills were timed to various stages to create a map. By the time you’ve gone through several sets of synapses that mapping is an enormous task. There’s an exponential increase in the number of neurons.

Once they managed to chart the connections, though, the researchers were astounded at what they saw. The motor areas in the brain connect to the adrenal glands. In the primary motor cortex of the brain, there’s a map of the human body—areas that correspond to the face, arm, and leg area, as well as a region that controls the axial body muscles (known to many people now as “the core”).

The Pitt team didn't think the primary motor cortex would control the adrenal medulla at all. But there are a whole lot of neurons there that do. And when you look at where those neurons are located, most are in the axial muscle part of that cortex." ePocket