In 1972 Stanley Cohen, a Stanford medical professor and Herbert Boyer a biochemist sat down to dinner in a deli in Hawaii.
They discussed how to combine their respective knowledge of gene splicing and cloning to create a method for engineering and manufacturing new genes. Within four months of working together they had spliced together DNA fragments from different organisms and cloned millions of copies using E. coli bacteria. Biotechnology was born.
In 1974 they filed a patent application which was eventually approved. In effect, a judge had opened the floodgates for the patenting of life. In 1975, they formed a company called Genentech which by 1978 had created synthetic insulin using a process which copied the naturally occurring product. Their company rapidly became worth $100 billion. This launched biotechnology research into the stratosphere of profit. If you could patent life, you could rule the world.
Precursors to this research had centred around discovering how to create self-replicating genetic material. This was regarded as the secret of life. In other words, scientists were actively beginning to play God. Fast forward to 2019, scientists in Wuhan China used the methods discovered through decades of subsequent biotech research into gene editing, to create hundreds of self-replicating coronaviruses. One of the most deadly of these escaped from the lab……
There are now more than 1 million biochemists or bioengineers working in the field around the world, many of whom are involved in highly risky and largely unregulated experimentation using gene editing techniques. Continuing mistakes are inevitable and, as we now know only too well, these can spread around the globe without limit with drastic consequences. They can never be contained or recalled.
In 1975 an attempt was made to regulate biotechnology during a conference of 150 pioneers in the field convened at Asilomar, California. Paul Berg, 1980 Nobel Laureate and developer of recombinant DNA techniques, argued that the risks of using recombinant DNA to create new organisms were so hard to calculate that it should be banned. He didn’t prevail. The majority backed going ahead with some voluntary guidelines, others held fast to the idea that anything could be risked and still do so.
So what kind of distorted philosophies and ethics are justifying this mad rush to biotechnology armageddon?
To understand this question we need to go right back to Darwin and popular interpretations of his theory of evolution. Although Darwin never actually used the phrase, his work is encapsulated in the expression “survival of the fittest”. I have written extensively on evolution. You can download a PDF of one of my papers entitled Evolution, Genetics, Physics, and Consciousness from a link within an article on our GLOBE website. In this paper I explain that research reveals that nature is more cooperative than competitive. Crucially, recent research findings also show that life is simultaneously both designed and subject to environmental pressures.
Despite this, a philosophical and ethical misunderstanding has taken root in the popular imagination that life came about as a result of a series of random events. In other words, life is some sort of coincidence or even mistake. So what are the implications of this notion? For obvious reasons, the idea is surrounded by religious controversy. Darwin himself became beset with religious doubt. Whatever the outcome of this debate, the idea that life is random opens the door to a profane attitude concerning existence. The belief that it can be edited or altered with impunity.
Darwin’s theories also drove ideas of genetic superiority, especially so in Nazi Germany. Modern day reincarnations of eugenics even include the belief that there is a moral imperative to edit the human race epitomised in the 1974 book The Ethics of Genetic Control in which the author Professor Joseph Fletcher wrote:
“Producing our children by ‘sexual roulette’ without pre-conceptive and uterine control, simply taking potluck, is irresponsible. As we learn to direct mutations medically, we should do so. Not to control when we can is immoral.”
James Watson one of the co-discoverers of the structure of DNA said at a conference in 1998 designed to fend off government regulation:
“Evolution can be just damn cruel and to say that we have a perfect genome and there is some sanctity to it is utter silliness…The biggest ethical problem we have is not using our knowledge.”
At the conference, freedom to undertake germline genetic editing to alter the DNA of babies preconception was equated with the concept of individual freedom enshrined in the American constitution. The certainty of unintended consequences persisting through generations was dismissed by Watson as “just crap”.
These wild ideas and others like them have become embedded in the sprawling global biotechnology scientific community, many of whose members have begun to look upon genetic engineering as both a duty and messianic call to lead. As a result biotechnology has become littered with rogue operators and ineffective safety protocols. As we have reported several times, lab accidents are common and not rare.
If life is random, it is perfectly conceivable that inequality rather than equality is the norm. Within this paradigm it is also possible to imagine that a sort of super race can be created in the laboratory. Nothing that has so far been created even vaguely matches this idea. There has been a proliferation of biotech companies offering dubious and dangerous treatments.
Millionaire biohacker Bryan Johnson, 46, reveals he’s undergone a $20,000 ‘extreme medical procedure’ to ‘edit his DNA’ in a bid to ‘live forever’. Johnson claims that due to his careful diet he already feels five years younger which is quite possible, but now he has bonded with a genetic startup called Minicircle. The Minicircle program is illegal in the USA so Johnson has travelled to a remote island off the coast of Honduras so that Minicircle can edit his DNA with a drastic procedure previously trialled only on mice. Johnson admits this could cause cancer but believes that a genetic kill switch (???) can save him if this occurs. I think I might first have asked if the mice lived forever (they didn’t), before jumping the gun on immortality, but then Darwin’s ideas have been spawning similar flights of fancy for almost 200 years. So let’s return to the fundamental principles of science rather than the fantasies of a millionaire caught up in the hands of mad scientists.
A scientific theory gains validity when it explains the full range of phenomena associated with the object of study.
James Clerk Maxwell’s theory of electromagnetism unified the understanding of electricity, magnetism, and light, but eventually the framework he created couldn’t adequately explain the distribution of heat radiation emitted by a so-called black body. Ultimately this was explained by Planck and Einstein with the understanding that energy was quantised, it comes in distinct packets. This was a departure from classical physics. This illustrates how scientific understanding grows by explaining more, rather than just a few parts, and thus aims to uncover more universal truths.
When we come to the secret of life, I suppose that life should be no secret to us. We are living it everyday but if you read the scientific papers on biotechnology they certainly don’t immediately strike us as relevant to our everyday experience of life. The two are realms apart. This is because biotechnology doesn’t succeed in explaining human life, it studiously ignores its essence—the capacity to be awake. Bodies do not last forever, but consciousness does.
The functioning of our body is not random, it is highly specified. It is able to support a level of continuity of awareness which we call the Self, our individual identity. If this continuity breaks down in any way we are rightly classified as sick. Schizophrenia for example is characterised by a breakdown in personal continuity. The body maintains genetic continuity among its 37 trillion cells. This is essential to life. Cancer is a breakdown in genetic continuity.
In practice, the vast majority of biotechnology experimentation is breaking down genetic continuity. In its essence, biotechnology experimentation is opposed to the continuity of life. CRISPR Cas9 gene editing techniques for example are based on the cellular mechanisms of bacteria that destroy the genetic characteristics of invasive viral material.
The relationship between the continuity of life and its changing values can form the basis for a post biotechnology world.
To begin to explore this, let’s start with our familiar experience. Consciousness has a three-in-one structure: togetherness of observer, process of observation and object. Enlarging on this, our consciousness moves from its holistic state to point values of attention. It can focus on eight types of point values: perception through the five senses, ideas, decisions and self reflection. The collapse of wholeness to a point is the essential characteristic of life. Consciousness is continually collapsing to the point of attention.
The Vedic literature of ancient India presents the largest collected knowledge concerning the mechanics of consciousness. It contrasts WHOLENESS with the eight-fold structure of nature. The collapse of the Wholeness of consciousness (known as Akshara), as if spiralling through eight somersaults to a point is considered to be the fundamental dynamic of creation that gives rise to the laws of nature.
In our discussion of consciousness based medicine, we have previously described the structure of single human cells in similar eight-fold terms. The whole cell functions through the nucleus, transcription regulation, molecular vibration and shape, electromagnetic fields, electricity, soluble processes, and chemistry. The activity of the whole cell collapses to specific functions in these eight modes.
Each cell of the 37 trillion in a single human contains identical DNA, but each cell performs specific unique functions, playing its part in creating the holistic and unique characteristics of the individual person. The memories stored in cells stimulate not just protective immune responses and repair mechanisms but also human actions.
Life begins with a single whole cell which has all the information needed to create the whole person. In a sense we are a holographic image of the information in our first cell. The continuous duplication of the eight-fold functions in the first cell as it divides and multiplies support the expression of the eight-fold functions of the adult human.
The tiny acorn has given rise to the mighty oak. The whole tree is contained in the tiny seed. Throughout this process of expression, the continuity of the wholeness of life is maintained. This is illustrated by the uniformity of DNA among all the cells which the immune system is fully committed to preserving. As we have argued elsewhere, this uniformity is essential for the preservation of identity.
It doesn’t stop there. Quantum mechanics also describes the functioning of the physical world we perceive in terms of the collapse of all possibilities (holistic value) to a point. This is described by measurement theory. Physical states evolve in an abstract multidimensional virtual Hilbert space where all probable values exist until a measurement (observation), at which time the wave function of the state collapses to a single observed value.
The human cell, human consciousness, and the cosmos are joined together as if by a symmetric continuity of existence and process.
As is the macrocosm, so is the microcosm. The universe is set up so that the whole is contained in every part. All the laws of nature function at every point in creation. The whole person is contained in every cell of the body. Everything moves ahead pushed on by the memory of past events, but guided by the decisions taken at the cutting edge of consciousness.
There is however a distinct difference between human intelligence and cosmic intelligence. Whereas human intelligence can only know one thing at a time, cosmic intelligence or natural law, (referred to by the religious as God’s Will), computes all things in all places simultaneously. Despite this, because of the symmetric relationship between natural law and human biology, it is possible to enjoy a close relationship with natural law wherein a state of perfect balance and harmony is maintained. This is described in the Vedic Literature as a state of enlightenment, where human consciousness becomes so established in its pure holistic state that it is no longer overshadowed or distracted by experience to the exclusion of Wholeness. It fully knows itself and life proceeds in harmony with natural law.
This highest attainment of human consciousness, the purest expression of universality and humanity which is treasured in cultural histories, relies on the preservation and continuity of our cellular genetic structure. Biotechnology has failed to realise that genetic structure functions holistically throughout the whole cell not just our DNA. This led to a reckless program of mRNA vaccination which altered the balance of genetic functioning for billions of people in billions of their cells without regard for the possible consequences. Nor has biotechnology even begun to investigate the relationship between biology and consciousness. It has simply ignored the obvious reality of human awareness.
The problem is not that there are some rogue operators like those associated with the Wuhan experiments, but that the entire biotechnology movement has completely failed to assess the full extent of the precision of our genetic structure and how it supports the full extent of human attainment.
These deficiencies speak to a compelling need for the International Genetic Charter. Its simple terms spell out in a few sentences the safeguards necessary to protect human life from genetic degradation. Please take a couple of minutes to sign up to The International Genetic Charter here.
This discussion has moved from our simple everyday experience that consciousness collapses to the point of attention, to the understanding that there is a symmetry between cells, human life and the cosmos. This is not a philosophical flight of fancy, it is the expression of the unified structure of life. Technologies of consciousness exist which can develop the full potential of consciousness. They approach life from the level of Wholeness thus offering a means to develop health, happiness, and intelligence in an integrated and balanced way. This contrasts with biotechnology whose approaches disrupt the integrated wholeness of cells and thereby put the health and consciousness of humanity at grave risk.
From this perspective consciousness is primary and matter secondary
There is a need to emphasise the fact that the exploration of consciousness is not a difficult journey, it is completely natural and simple. Anyone can practice deep meditation. It is found in many forms in philosophical, cultural and religious traditions. It is like diving, you learn how to take a correct angle and then let go, the whole process is automatic. If you want to find out more about the effects of deep meditation, they are discussed more fully in my book Your DNA Diet and in my paper Evolution, Genetics, Physics, and Consciousness.
Image credit: Unsplash+
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’.
