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Authors: Lynne McTaggart

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When a fertilized egg starts to multiply and produce daughter cells, each begins adopting a structure and function according to its eventual role in the body. Although every daughter contains the same chromosomes with the same genetic information, certain types of cells immediately ‘know’ to use different genetic information to behave differently from others and so certain genes must ‘know’ that it is their turn to be played, rather than the rest of the pack. Furthermore, somehow these genes know how many of each type of cell must be produced in the right place. Each cell, furthermore, needs to be able to know about its neighboring cells to work out how it fits into the overall scheme. This requires nothing less than an ingenious method of communication between cells at a very early stage of the embryo’s development and the same sophistication every moment of our lives.

Geneticists appreciate that cell differentiation utterly depends on cells knowing how to differentiate early on and then somehow remembering that they are different and passing on this vital piece of information to subsequent generations of cells. At the moment, scientists shrug their shoulders as to how this might all be accomplished, particularly at such a rapid pace.

Dawkins himself admits: ‘Exactly how this eventually leads to the development of a baby is a story which will take decades, perhaps centuries, for embryologists to work out. But it is a fact that it does.’
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In other words, like policemen desperate to close a case, scientists have arrested the most likely suspect without bothering with the painstaking process of gathering proof. The details of this absolute certainty, of how proteins might accomplish this all on their own, are left decidedly imprecise.
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As for the orchestration of cell processes, biochemists never actually ask the question.
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British biologist Rupert Sheldrake has mounted one of the most constant and vociferous challenges to this approach, arguing that gene activation and proteins no more explain the development of form than delivering building materials to a building site explains the structure of the house built there. Current genetic theory also doesn’t explain, he says, how a developing system can self-regulate, or grow normally in the course of development if a part of the system is added or removed, and doesn’t explain how an organism regenerates – replacing missing or damaged structures.
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In a rush of fevered inspiration while at an ashram in India, Sheldrake worked out his hypothesis of formative causation, which states that the forms of self-organizing living things – everything from molecules and organisms to societies and even entire galaxies – are shaped by morphic fields. These fields have a morphic resonance – a cumulative memory – of similar systems through cultures and time, so that species of animals and plants ‘remember’ not only how to look but also how to act. Rupert Sheldrake uses the term ‘morphic fields’ and an entire vocabulary of his own making to describe the self-organizing properties of biological systems, from molecules to bodies to societies. ‘Morphic resonance’, is, in his view, ‘the influence of like upon like through space and time’. He believes these fields (and he thinks there are many of them) are different from electromagnetic fields because they reverberate across generations with an inherent memory of the correct shape and form.
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The more we learn, the easier it is for others to follow in our footsteps.

Sheldrake’s theory is beautifully and simply worked out. Nevertheless, by his own admission, it doesn’t explain the physics of how this might all be possible, or how all these fields might store this information.
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In biophoton emissions, Popp believed that he had an answer to the question of morphogenesis as well as ‘
gestaltbildung
’ – cell coordination and communication – which only could occur in a holistic system, with one central orchestrator. Popp showed in his experiments that these weak light emissions were sufficient to orchestrate the body. The emissions had to be of low intensity because these communications were occurring on a quantum level, and higher intensities would be felt only in the world of the large.

When Popp began researching this area, he realized he was standing on the shoulders of many others, whose work suggested a field of electromagnetic radiation which somehow guides the growth of the cellular body. It was the Russian scientist Alexander Gurwitsch who had to be credited with first discovering what he called ‘mitogenetic radiation’ in onion roots in the 1920s. Gurwitsch postulated that a field, rather than chemicals alone, was probably responsible for the structural formation of the body. Although Gurwitsch’s work was largely theoretical, later researchers were able to show that a weak radiation from tissues stimulates cell growth in neighboring tissues of the same organism.
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Other early studies of this phenomenon – now repeated by many scientists – were carried out in the 1940s by neuroanatomist Harold S. Burr from Yale University, who studied and measured electrical fields around living things, specifically salamanders. Burr discovered that salamanders possessed an energy field shaped like an adult salamander, and that this blueprint even existed in an unfertilized egg.
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Burr also discovered electrical fields around all sorts of organisms, from molds, to salamanders and frogs, to humans,
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Changes in the electrical charges appeared to correlate with growth, sleep, regeneration, light, water, storms, the development of cancer – even the waxing and waning of the moon.
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For instance, in his experiments with plant seedlings, he discovered electrical fields which resembled the eventual adult plant.

Another of the early interesting experiments was carried out in the early 1920s by Elmer Lund, a researcher at the University of Texas, on hydras, the tiny aquatic animal possessing up to twelve heads capable of regenerating. Lund (and later others) found that he could control regeneration by applying tiny currents through the hydra’s body. By using a current strong enough to override the organism’s own electrical force, Lund could cause a head to form where a tail should be. In later studies in the 1950s, G. Marsh and H. W. Beams discovered that if voltages were high enough, even a flatworm would begin reorganizing –
the head would turn into a tail and vice versa
. Yet other studies have demonstrated that very young embryos, shorn of their nervous system, and grafted onto a healthy embryo, will actually survive, like a Siamese twin, on the back of the healthy embryos. Still other experiments have shown that regeneration can even be reversed by passing a small current through a salamander’s body.
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Orthopaedist Robert O. Becker mainly engaged in work concerning attempts to stimulate or speed up regeneration in humans and animals. However, he has also published many accounts of experiments in the
Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery
demonstrating a ‘current of injury’ – where animals such as salamanders with amputated limbs develop a change of charge at the site of the stump, whose voltage climbs until the new limb appears.
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Many biologists and physicists have advanced the idea that radiation and oscillating waves are responsible for synchronizing cell division and sending chromosomal instructions around the body. Perhaps the best known of these, Herbert Fröhlich, of the University of Liverpool, recipient of the prestigious Max Planck Medal, an annual award of the German Physical Society to honour the career of an outstanding physicist, was one of the first to introduce the idea that some sort of collective vibration was responsible for getting proteins to cooperate with each other and carry out instructions of DNA and cellular proteins. Fröhlich even predicted that certain frequencies (now termed ‘Fröhlich frequencies’) just beneath the membranes of the cell could be generated by vibrations in these proteins. Wave communication was supposedly the means by which the smaller activities of proteins, the work of amino acids, for instance, would be carried out and a good way to synchronize activities between proteins and the system as a whole.
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In his own studies, Fröhlich had shown that once energy reaches a certain threshold, molecules begin to vibrate in unison, until they reach a high level of coherence. The moment molecules reach this state of coherence, they take on certain qualities of quantum mechanics, including nonlocality. They get to the point where they can operate in tandem.
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The Italian physicist Renato Nobili of the Universita degli Studi di Padova amassed experimental proof that electromagnetic frequencies occur in animal tissues. In experiments he found that the fluid in cells holds currents and wave patterns and that these correspond with wave patterns picked up by electroencephalogram (EEC) readings in the brain cortex and scalp.
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Russian Nobel prize winner Albert Szent-Györgyi postulated that protein cells act as semiconductors, preserving and passing along the energy of electrons as information.
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However, most of this research, including Gurwitsch’s initial work, had largely been ignored, mostly because there was no equipment sensitive enough to measure these tiny particles of light before the invention of Popp’s machine. Furthermore, any notions of the use of radiation in cellular communication were utterly swept aside in the middle of the twentieth century, with the discovery of hormones and the birth of biochemistry, which proposed that everything could be explained by hormones or chemical reactions.
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By the time that Popp had his light machine, he was more or less on his own with regard to a radiation theory of DNA. Nevertheless, he doggedly pressed on with his experiments, learning more about the properties of this mysterious light. The more he tested, the more he discovered that all living things – from the most basic of plants or animals, to human beings in all their sophisticated complexity – emitted a permanent current of photons, from only a few to hundreds. The number of photons emitted seemed to be linked to an organism’s position on the evolutionary scale: the more complex the organism, the fewer photons being emitted. Rudimentary animals or plants tended to emit 100 photons per square centimetre per second, at a wavelength of 200 to 800 nanometres, corresponding to a very high frequency of electromagnetic wave, well within the visible light range, whereas humans would emit only ten photons in the same area, time and frequency. He also discovered something else curious. When light was shone on living cells, the cells would take this light and after a certain delay, shine intensely – a process called ‘delayed luminescence’. It occurred to Popp that this could be a corrective device. The living system had to maintain a delicate equilibrium of light. In this instance, when it was being bombarded with too much light, it would reject the excess.

Very few places in the world can claim to be pitch black. The only appropriate candidates would be an enclosure where only a handful of photons remain. Popp possessed such a place, a room so dark that only the barest few photons of light per minute could be detected in it. This was the only fit laboratory in which to measure the light of human beings. He began studying the patterns of biophoton emissions of some of his students. In one series of studies, he had one of his experimenters – a 27-year-old healthy young woman – sit in the room every day for nine months, while he took photon readings of a small area of her hand and forehead. Popp then analysed the data, and discovered, to his surprise, that the light emissions followed certain set patterns – biological rhythms at 7, 14, 32, 80 and 270 days, when the emissions were identical, even after one year. Emissions for both the left and right hands were also correlated. If there was an increase in the photons coming off the right hand, so there would be a similar increase in the those of the left hand. On a subatomic level, the waves of each hand were in phase. In terms of light, the right hand knew what the left hand was doing.

Emissions also seemed to follow other natural biological rhythms; similarities were noted by day or night, by week, by month, as though the body were following the world’s biorhythms as well as its own.

So far, Popp had studied only healthy individuals and found an exquisite coherence at the quantum level. But what kind of light was present in a person who was ill? He tried out his machine on a series of cancer patients. In every instance, the cancer patients had lost these natural periodic rhythms and also their coherence. The lines of internal communication were scrambled. They had lost their connection with the world. In effect, their light was going out.

Just the opposite occurred with multiple sclerosis: MS was a state of too much order. Individuals with this disease were taking in too much light, and this was inhibiting the ability of cells to do their job. Too much cooperative harmony prevented flexibility and individuality: it is like too many soldiers marching in step when they cross a bridge, causing it to collapse. Perfect coherence is an optimum state just between chaos and order. With too much cooperativity, it was as though individual members of the orchestra were no longer able to improvise. MS patients were drowning in light.
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BOOK: The Field
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