Explore
This article is from
Creation 27(3):16–18, June 2005

Browse our latest digital issue Subscribe

Back on solid ground

A scientist drifts for years before returning to the Rock

Carl Wieland and Gary Bates talk to animal embryologist/reproductive physiologist Albert Mills.

Photo by Albert Mills Dr Albert Mills
Dr Albert Mills has a B.S. and an M.S. (in zoology and reproductive physiology) from Lousiana State University, and a Ph.D. (in reproductive physiology) from the Animal Science Department of the University of Florida.

Albert Mills has been involved in some world-first science and technology in his lifetime. In the 1970s, he developed a completely new procedure for the non-surgical collection of bovine (cow) embryos. This was a breakthrough in cattle farming and breeding. The first centre in the world to apply this procedure was the Saskatoon Embryo Transplant Centre in Saskatchewan, Canada, where Dr Mills trained all the technical staff. At that stage, the embryos still had to be surgically transferred to the recipients.

After that, he developed another world-first refinement of the technique, such that the total transfer of these microscopic embryos from one cow to another could take place non-surgically. The firm he commenced to do this, called Portable Embryonics, was able to carry out the entire procedure ‘on-farm’, with a mobile laboratory.

‘Back then, we were the only ones doing it, but now we have over 400 competitors in the US alone’, he said with a smile.

Raised in a conservative Christian home, Albert says he came to Christ at an early age and joined his local Protestant church.

He says that in high school, he was ‘bombarded’ with evolution and long ages, which continued throughout university and his later studies. ‘I never questioned any of the science,’ he says, ‘so I bought into the non-literal interpretation of Genesis and came to believe that this was just how God had created everything.’

However, this began to have corrosive effects on his entire Christian walk. Because of what he had been taught in school, he felt that he could not really hold that all of the Bible was true.

Photos by Albert Mills
Petri dish
embyo

The totally non-surgical transfer of 7-day-old microscopic fertilized embryos from one cow (which can then generate more) to another (which does not have to have the same genetics) was pioneered by Dr Albert Mills. It has revolutionized cattle breeding and farming. Human reproductive technologies such as IVF have also borrowed from some of this work.

Ignoring the issues

Church and family had not equipped him to deal with the issues. ‘These things just weren’t addressed’, he says. ‘God made things in six days, rested on the seventh—everyone just believed it, but didn’t arm us with reasons or answers. So I just ended up making all sorts of compromises with what the Bible taught.’

Soon, even though he always believed in God, he had, in his words, ‘drifted an awful long distance. I couldn’t put it together exactly, but it was because I couldn’t trust all the Bible. Sort of like Jesus says in John 3:12, if you don’t believe Him on earthly things, how can you do so on heavenly things? So I gradually stopped praying, reading my Bible, all of that.’

The UFO twist

The evolution-inspired drift even extended to, as he puts it, ‘getting hung up on the possibility of alien life, UFOs, von Däniken and all that stuff. I even sort of hoped I’d meet one of those ETs on the road.’ He found that many of the people he met, even highly educated ones including scientists and a medical doctor, had the same beliefs. So he was fascinated to find that one of us (GB) had not long released a book1 dealing with those topics, and in particular analyzing the ‘evolution connection’ missed by so many. He certainly knew about this connection from first-hand experience; he said that people who had been drawn into that way of thinking ‘are going to be very hard to reach; they’ve got presuppositions about evolution—extended to other planets—and millions of years that are going to be awfully tough to crack.’

Like most scientists one asks, Dr Mills said that evolution had no real bearing on his work. We asked him, as an animal embryologist, about Haeckel’s (fraudulent) drawings showing the ‘similarity’ of various animal embryos to that of a human (see illustration and more on this fraud). He said they had actually helped to persuade him about evolution. ‘I didn’t pay attention to the fact that the actual embryos were in fact vastly different from each other, not like in those drawings at all. When I looked at it again, after the scales had fallen off, as it were, my reaction was, “No way it’s like that!”’

The message by magazine

The main factor in removing those evolutionary scales, he says, was CMI material, more particularly Creation magazine. In fact, his infectious enthusiasm for the magazine dominated the interview (and we weren’t exactly complaining!). He said, ‘I personally don’t see how any scientist who is prepared to forget all his presuppositions and read Creation for one to two years with an open mind, and be willing to think, could still believe in evolution or “long ages”.’

We asked him why so many of his colleagues in scientific fields are unwilling to even consider that Genesis might be true. He replied, ‘I think that many are “willingly ignorant”, as the Bible puts it [2 Peter 3:5]—they have blinders on, choosing to believe that things took millions of years. And anything that doesn’t fit, well, they’re just not going to think about it.’

Dr Mills says that it is ‘so clear’ to him now that Genesis is literal, real history and that the global Flood explains everything much better than what is being taught as ‘science’. He had already noticed how many of the geological features of the world looked as if large amounts of water had been involved in their formation. It ‘clicked’ later, he says, ‘when I started getting into Creation magazine.’

‘Reading the magazine the last four years or so’, says Dr Mills, ‘has turned me completely around—like a light turned on. It’s for the laymen, but if anyone wants to take things further from an article, you folks give them leads they can go to. When I get Creation, I put everything else aside, and I can’t put it down till I get through it.’

They need to know

He told us, ‘There is now for me no possibility of evolution or long ages being real.’ In fact, he says, ‘I’m disturbed that there are so many ministers who just accept these things, changing their ideas about the Bible to fit the secular views. Many of them are devout Christians, but they need to know how vitally important it is for them not to compromise—how compromise erodes the Christian lives of so many believers, especially scientifically trained ones like myself.’

Thanks, Dr Mills. Hopefully, as more and more people see the need to get this material ‘out there’, your testimony will be part of helping others to come to the point you have—to see the exciting truth and importance of the complete reliability of God’s Word.

Update, 28 June 2011: we were very sorry to learn that Dr Mills died on 18 June 2011 after a four-year battle with prostate cancer. CMI offers condolences to his wife Dotty, their six children and 14 grandchildren.

Posted on homepage: 17 May 2006

Note

  1. Alien Intrusion: UFOs and the evolution connection, Master Books, Arkansas, USA, 2005.