The Field (11 page)

Popp also examined the effect of stress. In a stressed state, the rate of biophoton emissions went up – a defense mechanism designed to try to return the patient to equilibrium.

All of these phenomena led Popp to think of biophoton emissions as a sort of correction by a living system of Zero Point Field fluctuations. Every system likes to achieve a minimum of free energy. In a perfect world, all waves would cancel each other out by destructive interference. However, this is impossible with the Zero Point Field, where these tiny fluctuations of energy constantly disturb the system. Emitting photons is a compensatory gesture, to stop this disturbance and attempt a sort of energy equilibrium. As Popp thought of it, the Zero Point Field forces a human being to be a candle. The healthiest body would have the lowest light and be closest to zero state, the most desirable state – the closest living things could get to nothingness.

Popp now recognized that what he’d been experimenting with was even more than a cure for cancer or
gestaltbildung
. Here was a model which provided a better explanation than the current neo-Darwinist theory for how all living things evolve on the planet. Rather than a system of fortunate but ultimately random error, if DNA uses frequencies of all variety as an information tool, this would suggest instead a feedback system of perfect communication through waves which encode and transfer information.

It might also account for the body’s capacity for regeneration. The bodies of numerous species of animals have demonstrated the ability to regenerate a lost limb. Experiments with salamanders as far back as the 1930s have shown that an entire limb, a jaw, even the lens of an eye could be amputated but entirely regenerate as though a hidden blueprint were being followed.

This model might also account for the phenomenon of phantom limbs, the strong physical sense among amputees that a missing arm or leg is still present. Many amputees who complain of utterly realistic cramps, aches or tinglings in the missing limb may be experiencing a true physicality which still exists – a shadow of the limb as imprinted on the Zero Point Field.
²⁴

Popp came to realize that light in the body might even hold the key to health and illness. In one experiment he compared the light emitted from free-range eggs to those produced by battery hens. The photons in the eggs produced by the free-range chickens were far more coherent than those in the battery eggs. He went on to use biophoton emissions as a tool for measuring the quality of food. The healthiest food had the lowest and most coherent intensity of light. Any disturbance in the system would increase the production of photons. Health was a state of perfect subatomic communication, and ill health was a state where communication breaks down. We are ill when our waves are out of synch.

Once Popp began publishing his findings, he began to attract the enmity of the scientific community. Many of his fellow German scientists believed that Popp’s bright spark had finally gone out. At his university, students wanting to study biophoton emissions began to be censured. By 1980, when Popp’s contract as an assistant professor was finished, the university had an excuse to ask him to leave. Two days before the end of his term, university officials marched into his laboratory and demanded that he surrender all his equipment. Fortunately, Popp had been tipped off about the raid and had hidden his photomultiplier in the basement of the lodgings of a sympathetic student. When he left campus, he left with his precious equipment intact.

Popp’s treatment at the hands of the University of Marburg resembled that of a criminal without a fair trial. As an assistant professor of some years standing, Popp was entitled to substantial compensation for his years of service, but the university refused to pay him. He had to sue the university to get the 40,000 marks that were due him. He won his money, but his career lay in ashes. He was a married man with three young children and no apparent means of employment. No university at the time was prepared to touch him.

It looked as though Popp’s academic career was finished. He spent two years in private industry with Roedler, a pharmaceutical manufacturer of homeopathic remedies, one of the few organisations to entertain his wild theories. Nevertheless, Popp, a stubborn autocrat in his own labs, was equally stubborn in persisting with his work, convinced of its validity. Eventually, he gained a patron in Professor Walter Nagl of the University of Kaiserslautern, who asked Popp to work with him. Once again, Popp’s research caused a revolt among the faculty, who demanded his resignation on the grounds that his work was sullying the university’s reputation.

Eventually Popp gained employment from the Technology Center in Kaiserslautern, which is largely sponsored by government grants for application research. It would take some 25 years for him to gather converts from among the scientific community. Slowly a few select scientists from around the globe began to consider that the body’s communication system might be a complex network of resonance and frequency. Eventually they would form the International Institute of Biophysics, composed of fifteen groups of scientists from international centres all around the world. Popp had found offices for his new group in Neuss, near Düsseldorf. The brother of a Nobel prizewinner, the grandson of Alexander Gurwitsch, a nuclear physicist from Boston University and nuclear research laboratory CERN in Geneva, two Chinese biophysicists – noted scientists from around the globe at last were beginning to agree with him. Popp’s fortunes were beginning to turn. Suddenly he was receiving offers and contracts for professorships from reputable universities around the world.

Popp and his new colleagues went on to study the light emissions of several organisms of the same species, first with an experiment with a type of water flea called
Daphnia
. What they found was nothing short of astonishing. Tests with a photomultiplier showed that the water fleas were sucking up the light emitted from each other. Popp tried the same experiment on small fish and found that they were doing the same. According to his photomultiplier, sunflowers were like a biological vacuum cleaner, moving in the direction of the most solar photons in order to hoover them up. Even bacteria would swallow photons from the medium they had been placed in.
²⁵

It began to dawn on Popp that these emissions had a purpose outside the body. Wave resonance wasn’t simply being used to communicate inside the body, but between living things. Two healthy beings were engaged in ‘photon sucking’, as he called it, by exchanging photons. Popp realized that this exchange might unlock the secret of some of the animal kingdom’s most persistent conundrums: how schools of fish or flocks of birds create perfect and instantaneous coordination. Many experiments on the homing ability of animals demonstrate that it has nothing to do with following habitual trails or scents or even the electromagnetic fields of the earth, but some silent communication, acting like an invisible rubber band, even when animals are separated by miles from humans.
²⁶
For humans there was another possibility. If we could take in the photons of other living things, we also might be able to use the information from them to correct our own light if it went awry.

Popp had begun experimenting with such an idea. If some cancer-causing chemicals could alter the body’s biophoton emissions, then it might be the case that other substances could reintroduce better communication. Popp wondered whether certain plant extracts could change the character of biophoton emissions of cancer cells, so that they would began to communicate again with the rest of the body. He began experimenting with a number of non-toxic substances purported to be successful in treating cancer. In all but one instance, the substances only increased the photons from tumor cells, making it even more deadly to the body. The single success story was mistletoe, which seemed to help the body to ‘resocialize’ the photon emission of tumor cells back to normal. In one of numerous cases, Popp came across a woman in her thirties with breast and vaginal cancer. Popp tried mistletoe and other plant extracts on samples of her cancerous tissue and found that one particular mistletoe remedy created coherence in the tissue similar to that of the body. With the agreement of her doctor, the woman began forgoing any treatment other than this mistletoe extract. After a year, all her laboratory tests were virtually back to normal. A woman who was given up as a terminal cancer case had her proper light restored, just by taking a herb.
²⁷

To Fritz-Albert Popp, homeopathy was another example of photon sucking. He had begun to think of it as a ‘resonance absorber’. Homeopathy rests upon the notion that like is treated with like. A plant extract that at full strength can cause hives in the body is used in an extremely dilute form to cure them. If a rogue frequency in the body could produce certain symptoms, it followed that the high dilution of a substance which would produce the same symptoms would still carry those oscillations. Like a tuning fork in resonance, a suitable homeopathic solution might attract and then absorb the wrong oscillations, allowing the body to return to normal.

Popp thought that electromagnetic molecular signalling might even explain acupuncture. According to the theory of traditional Chinese medicine, the human body has a meridian system running deep in the tissues of the body through which flows an invisible energy which the Chinese term ‘the
qi
, or life force. The
qi
supposedly enters the body through these acupuncture points and flows to deeper organ structures (which do not correspond to those of Western human biology), providing energy (and thus the life force). Illness occurs when there is a blockage of this energy anywhere along the pathways. According to Popp, the meridian system may work like wave guides transmitting particular bodily energy to specific zones.

Scientific studies show that many acupuncture points on the body have a dramatically decreased electrical resistance compared with points on the skin surrounding it (10 kilo-ohms at the center of a point, compared with 3 mega-ohms in the surrounding skin).
²⁸
Research has also shown that painkilling endorphins and the steroid cortisol are released through the body when the points are stimulated at low frequency, and important mood-regulating neurotransmitters like serotonin and norepinephrine, at high frequency. The same doesn’t occur when the skin surrounding these points is stimulated.
²⁹
Yet other research has proved that acupuncture can cause blood vessels to dilate and increase blood flow to distant organs in the body.
³⁰
Other research demonstrates the existence of meridians as well as the effectiveness of acupuncture for a variety of conditions. Orthopaedic surgeon Dr Robert Becker, who performed a great deal of research on electromagnetic fields in the body, designed a special electrode recording device which would roll along the body like a pizza cutter. After many studies it showed up electrical charges on the same places on every one of the people tested, all corresponding to Chinese meridian points.
³¹

There were many possibilities to explore, some of which might pan out, and some not. But Popp was convinced of one thing: his theory of DNA and biophoton emission was correct and this drove the processes of the body. There was no doubt in his mind that biology was driven by the quantum process he’d observed. All he needed were other scientists with experimental evidence to show how it might be so.

CHAPTER FOUR

The Language of the Cell

I
N A WHITE PORTAKABIN
in Clamart, in the unfashionable outskirts of Paris, a tiny heart, propped atop a bit of purpose-built scaffolding, carried on beating. It was being kept alive courtesy of a small team of French scientists, who administered the right combination of oxygen and carbon dioxide, part of the type of state-of-the-art surgical technique used for heart transplants. In this instance, there was no donor or recipient; the heart had long been divested of its owner, a prime male Hartley guinea pig, and the scientists were only interested in the organ itself and how it was about to react. They’d applied acetylcholine and histamine, two known vasodilators, then atropine and mepyramine, both agonists to the others, and finally measured coronary flow, plus such mechanical changes as beat rate.

There were no surprises here. As expected, the histamine and acetylcholine produced increased blood flow in the coronary arteries, while the mepyramine and atropine inhibited it. The only unusual aspect of the experiment was that the agents of change weren’t actually pharmacological chemicals but low-frequency waves of the electromagnetic signals of the cells recorded using a purpose-designed transducer and a computer equipped with a sound card. It was these signals, which take the form of electromagnetic radiation of less than 20 kilohertz, which were applied to the guinea pig heart, and were responsible for speeding it up, just as the chemicals themselves would.
¹

The signal effectively could take the place of the chemicals, for the signal
is
the molecule’s signature. The scientific team, which had successfully substituted it for the original, were quietly aware of the explosive nature of their achievement. Through their efforts, the usual theories of molecular signaling and how cells ‘talk’ to each other had been profoundly modified. They were beginning to demonstrate in the laboratory what Popp had just proposed – that each molecule in the universe had a unique frequency and the language it used to speak to the world was a resonating wave.