Miracles of the Gods: A New Look at the Supernatural (526 page)

There was also, to name just one example from our own day, the physiologist and pharmacologist Professor Otto Loewi (1873-1961), who taught at Graz and emigrated to New York. His fields of research were the physiology of the metabolism and the physiology and pharmacology of the vegetative nervous system. Once again we must ask what would have become of mankind without the visionary dream that helped Loewi to become the first man to demonstrate the chemical transference of nervous impulses in the nervous system (previously scholars had assumed that the transference was electrical). In 1936 Otto Loewi was awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine (for his dream). Just imagine our stress-ridden world without a single tranquillizer or any of the neuropsychological medicaments, and you will realize the epoch-making significance of Loewi's vision. When he

'received' it, he was ready for the impulses which, so I believe, extraterrestrial beings transmit when they think X day has come.

There is one more comment I want to make.

In 1968 I was spellbound and absorbed by The Double Helix, unquestionably a unique book in its description of a scientific discovery that took place gradually. The book was (and is) all the more stimulating because the author, Harvard Professor James D. Watson, and his colleagues Francis H.C.

Crick and Maurice H.F. Wilkins, solved one of the greatest mysteries of life: the make-up of the DNA molecule which contains all the hereditary information and cell-building plans of a living creature. In 1962 the team received the Nobel Prize for Medicine.

I share the opinion of Nature's critic, who said that if Watson had not already been awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine he should have got the prize for literature. What I had read in 1968 left me with the unforgettable impression of having been within an ace of participating in the growth of a discovery myself. Because it all stayed so fresh in my mind, I picked up the book seven years later and read it again when my years of investigation had spurred me on to track down the phenomenon of visions.

Now the sequence of signals that drove the researchers on appeared to me in a new light. Watson related how lightning-like and often phantasmagoric hints at possible solutions kept on cropping up, whether he was playing tennis, flirting or spending a pleasant week-end.

Unannounced and unwanted (because he was amusing himself), a signal relating to the subject of his research would appear in his brain quite unexpectedly, in situations that were worlds apart from his university laboratory .... 'I huddled as close to the chimney as possible and dreamed of several DNA chains folded up in attractive and scientifically productive ways .... Soon after it had struck midnight, I was much happier. How often had Francis and I worried that the DNA structure might turn out to be quite boring in the end. ... But now, to my surprise and delight, the solution proved to be extremely interesting. I lay awake for more than two hours, sleepless but happy, and saw a pair of adenin remains whirling round before my eyes. Only for brief moments was I afraid that such a good idea could be wrong ....'

These two quotations from Watson's book were not specially chosen by me: these flashes of summer lightning on the way to the goal form the excitement of the book. From the point of view of my theory of visions, Watson's detailed account indicates how he and his highly trained intellectual team were dominated by a series of encouraging impulses and finally by the idea that solved the problem, all of which came from an intelligent energy-emitting force. These men, who thought in formulae and codes,