After fifty years of broken biotech promises, we need a dose of reality.
I was working in the garden yesterday and cleared a few noxious weeds. Tiny stumps of would be trees like wooly nightshade which we cut down to the ground a month ago had sprouted anew and I wondered at the persistence of nature. Those tiny stumps of returning life illustrated one of the great marvels of natural law—the whole is contained in every part. Look at any seed, it contains the whole tree but you can’t see the WHOLE in the seed, it is not just too tiny, it is too abstract. Simultaneously, the whole is also more than the sum of the parts. The WHOLE is something bigger, too big to put your finger on because WHOLENESS, completeness, is an abstract concept whose reality can only be found in the fully developed human mind.
Fundamental to modern physics is a concept of supersymmetry or perfect balance. This field of WHOLENESS, at the nexus or home of all the laws of nature, is fully available at every point in creation. Even empty space, and every point in empty space, contains this inconceivable power which guides the cosmos. This abstract field of balance beyond any limitations of time and space is simultaneously that which maintains order and stability yet is also the fulcrum point of evolution.
Those who follow religion will identify in such physics the Will of God. The identity of the WHOLENESS of the human mind and the WHOLENESS of nature is expressed in Genesis where it says “God created mankind in his own image”. The process is described in similar terms in cultural texts around the world, the ancient Rig Veda says: “Tat sṛṣṭvā, tadevānuprāviṣat—having created it, the creator entered into it”. There is a sacred bond between man and nature, a gift of the Creator.
This bond has its physical counterpart, because we are also physical beings. The eyes of science which use experiment and logic to reach into the unseen have discovered the structure of the first physical moment of life—the first cell at the moment of conception which contains everything physical that will support a human life in seed form, whether a humble potter or a Michelangelo.
Very simply put:
The cell nucleus contains DNA which has the instructions for an organism to develop, survive and reproduce. It has around 20,000 genes which encode for proteins including RNA,
The cytoplasm surrounding the nucleus contains around 42 million proteins arranged in a number of dynamic complex structures. Proteins are vital molecules that perform many functions in the body, including building tissues, regulating the immune system, and storing nutrients
The cellular membrane which protects the cell and helps maintain balance. It acts as a selective gateway for nutrient molecules and signals to enter the cell, and proteins, signals and waste products to exit the cell.
None of these parts of the cell can function alone, the three together form an indivisible unit, a WHOLE cellular system which in its most abstract sense is not just an information system, but also a system which ultimately supports the expression of consciousness, self awareness. Consciousness faces out into the world of sensory objects via the physical body of cells, yet also faces inside as self-referral consciousness which creates and maintains the body, just as supersymmetry creates and maintains space and time.
Hence the structure of life is both physical and spiritual, body and mind, but consciousness is primary and matter secondary. The objective scientific method has no means to access the WHOLENESS of consciousness, only the objective counterparts of consciousness. Pure consciousness in its essence is inaccessible to the objective scientific method because consciousness is simultaneously both smaller than the smallest and larger than the largest. Consciousness can be inferred through its actions, but fully known only by itself.
This renders the science of biotechnology an incomplete science, chasing after an understanding it can never reach. As the Bible says “The peace of God passeth all understanding” or in the Upanishads “Neti, Neti—not this, not this”. Both mean that the ultimate reality of life cannot be defined by any limited concept or attribute. Despite its essential incompleteness, biotechnology still wants to masquerade as the master of life and act in place of God, whatever the consequences for our capacity to experience the WHOLENESS of our consciousness.
Nothing New — Though I am further upon my way — the same dream again Robert Frost, 1918
A conference of leading biotechnologists is currently taking place in Asilomar, California from February 23-26 entitled “2025 Spirit of Asilomar and the Future of Biotechnology”. Fifty years ago in February 1975, a small group of molecular biologists met at an Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA in Pacific Grove, California, to discuss matters arising at the dawn of genetic engineering. Today’s conference aims “to learn from a half century of history and discuss important topics and puzzles arising in biotechnology today, including artificial intelligence (AI), synthetic cells, pathogen research and biological weapons, deployment of biotechnologies beyond conventional containment, and framing biotechnology’s future”.
Fifty years ago, the first conference reached a consensus behind closed doors that biotechnology should be policed by bioscientists themselves, a convention that has been fiercely defended and continues to this day. Today’s conference is not an open meeting, scientists critical of biotechnology safety have been refused registration leaving a select group who stand to gain financially from a deregulated biotech research environment.
GM Watch reports that one of the organisers of the conference is Drew Endy, a synthetic biology expert at Stanford and a proponent of using genetic engineering to construct “an alternate path for propagating living organisms….disposable biological systems that don’t have to produce offspring.” If you are unsure what that might imply, possibly think about Huxley’s Brave New World with genetically engineered infertile children who are in some sense disposable. You can only ask: ‘who are these people and should they be in charge of the future of the human race?’
Therefore in an open statement, civil society groups, scientists, and academics are challenging the democratic legitimacy of any conclusions or policy proposals that may arise from the 2025 Spirit of Asilomar conference. It says that “GMO development companies heavily influence how agricultural GMOs are regulated and can evade safety checks and labelling simply by self-declaring their products conventional-like”, and continues: “Enormous harms can derive from biotechnology and these can arise by many routes, both directly and indirectly and from commercial products or laboratory experiments equally” and “biotechnologists have shown, for example, an hostility to the precautionary principle and a cultural unwillingness to study or learn from past mistakes”.
Their statement suggests that governments should take on the regulation of biotechnology, not the scientists themselves. Considering the Gene Technology Bill currently before the NZ Parliament, which opts for near total deregulation, we know that government control will not be a practical or safe solution. Both the public and governments have been deceived by relentless publicity promising miraculous cures that are always just around the corner, generated every year for fifty years by biotech dreamers with vested interests.
How many times and how many years do we have to be disappointed before reality dawns?
Take an article from SciTechDaily, a popular science digest, headlined “CRISPR Snips Away Extra Chromosomes, Offering New Hope for Down Syndrome Treatment“. It reports: “Scientists are exploring gene editing as a way to correct trisomy at the cellular level. Using CRISPR-Cas9, researchers successfully removed extra copies of chromosome 21 in Down syndrome cell lines, restoring normal gene expression.”
Down Syndrome is caused by an extra copy of chromosome 21 which ends up in all 37 trillion adult cells affecting about 1 in 700 births. Scientists have found a way of removing the extra chromosome from a few cells in vitro (outside the body). The article describes the results as a “breakthrough…offering a potential treatment”, but a closer look tells a very different story.
The so-called treatment cannot be applied to living organisms because for one thing CRISPR-Cas9 is inherently mutagenic and can alter the remaining chromosomes—a potential death sentence for the recipient. An article in the Journal of Molecular Sciences is entitled “CRISPR/Cas9 as a Mutagenic Factor” It concludes “The mutagenic activity of CRISPR/Cas9 is well established. It poses a risk when used in medicine due to its ability to cause DNA-damage factors and potentially induce unwanted mutations both in on-target and off-target sites.” As we have reported recently, double strand breaks caused by CRISPR gene editing need to be repaired, yet the Down Syndrome experiment had to completely suppress the target cells’ natural DNA repair mechanism, making the application of the technique in vivo (in the body) untenable. In other words, the ‘hope’ being publicised is actually a false hope, but perhaps a step towards renewed grant money for the researchers.
Interventions which cross the cell membrane of plants, animals, humans or microorganisms are inherently mutagenic, they need to be banned. Five long pandemic years should have taught us one thing about biotechnology—real regulation is long overdue, genetic structures by definition cannot be contained, recalled or remediated. Mistakes are inevitable and the risks unmanageable.
We don’t give little children loaded guns to play with, why would we allow biotechnologists the right to experiment with the genetic structures of life when they cannot even explain how or even if genes support human consciousness?
It is time for some realism. The public have been led up the garden path. The cures promised at the Asilomar conference 50 years ago have not materialised, instead biotechnology experimentation has plunged the entire world into a health crisis whose final outcomes are not yet known or understood.
When worlds collide
The Asilomar peninsula is a spectacular place, two ocean currents meet just off the coast with waves breaking in conflicting directions. You might say that two currents of thought are clashing at Asilomar. One circulating inside the conference centre dreams that ‘Man knows better than nature’. The other, expressed by people excluded from the conference, holds rightly that ‘Nature knows better than man how to organise’. At Asilomar, Nature’s abundance and wonder is on full display. The ocean visibly abounds with wildlife, sea otters, whales, sea lions, seals, dolphins and fish. There are some lessons there. Let Nature be. As Robert Frost concluded in his poem Good-by and Keep Cold, “Something has to be left to God”.
Well, you might say, God has been in charge for a while and things have gone awry, shouldn’t we step in and lend a hand? Yes, we should, but not by crossing the cell membrane and editing genes, rather develop our consciousness and thereby tap into the immense power of natural law. This is the final frontier we must cross to discover the secret of life. Just like the wooly nightshade we have regenerative powers that we need to rediscover within ourselves.
We have referenced before the power of prayer, reflection, meditation, diet and exercise. Some might try to disparage this view labelling it an unequal contest between true science and blind faith, not so. Science has verified the value of self knowledge. A study published in 1987 by David Orme-Johnson found significant reductions in medical utilisation across all disease categories among 2000 transcendental meditators participating in an insurance program. There are hundreds of published studies reaching similar conclusions. This appears to be the exact opposite of the Post Acute Covid Vaccine Syndrome recently discovered by Yale University researchers that we reported in our last release. It is the biotechnology dreamers who have lost touch with the principles of valid knowledge.
Image credit: Mike Anderson
Guy Hatchard PhD was formerly a senior manager at Genetic ID a global food testing and safety company (now known as FoodChain ID). You can subscribe to his websites HatchardReport.com and GLOBE.GLOBAL for regular updates by email.
He is the author of ‘Your DNA Diet: Leveraging the Power of Consciousness To Heal Ourselves and Our World. An Ayurvedic Blueprint For Health and Wellness’.
