DNA, Kary Mullis and Jurassic Park
We are just taking a detour today - why? because we can and we want to cover all our bases.
The early 90's is quite an extraordinary time with regard to the UfO story, but lets just have a look at some interesting events that played a pivotal role in the thinking and development of these extraordinary times.
Well in the early 1990's Whilst I was busy exploring mysteries and conspiracies there were some pretty important and world changing events
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| Mandela walking out of Victor Vester prison outside Cape Town as a free man, 11 February 1990 |
Kurt Cobain committed suicide
or . . .
Did he?
AND . . .
Jurassic Park
Now I mention these three seemingly random and unrelated events merely to paint a backdrop to the particular time in which we are talking about
Jurassic Park, however, is going to play an important role in our discussion - particularly related to this idea of a materialistic world-view. This is obviously the central premise of this piece of evolutionary propaganda. (you think movies are made just for entertainment?)
Section One
The basis of the story pivots around a specific scientific finding. . . In the film, scientists extract dinosaur blood from the gut of a prehistoric mosquito, preserved in amber.
They then use the DNA in the dinosaur blood to revive various extinct species of dinosaurs who then proceed to create madness and mayhem on the island.
ok firstly . . . Back to School
DNA was first identified and isolated by Miescher in 1869 at the University of Tübingen, a substance he called nuclein, and the double helix structure of DNA was first discovered in 1953 by Watson and Crick at the University of Cambridge, using experimental data collected by Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins.
The following is taken from Genetics Home Reference
- NA, or deoxyribonucleic acid, is the hereditary material in humans and almost all other organisms. Nearly every cell in a person’s body has the same DNA.
- Most DNA is located in the cell nucleus (where it is called nuclear DNA)
- The information in DNA is stored as a code made up of four chemical bases: adenine (A), guanine (G), cytosine (C), and thymine (T). Human DNA consists of about 3 billion bases, and more than 99 percent of those bases are the same in all people.
- The order, or sequence, of these bases determines the information available for building and maintaining an organism, similar to the way in which letters of the alphabet appear in a certain order to form words and sentences.
- DNA bases pair up with each other, A with T and C with G, to form units called base pairs. Each base is also attached to a sugar molecule and a phosphate molecule. Together, a base, sugar, and phosphate are called a nucleotide.
- Nucleotides are arranged in two long strands that form a spiral called a double helix.
- The structure of the double helix is somewhat like a ladder, with the base pairs forming the ladder’s rungs and the sugar and phosphate molecules forming the vertical sidepieces of the ladder.
- An important property of DNA is that it can replicate, or make copies of itself. Each strand of DNA in the double helix can serve as a pattern for duplicating the sequence of bases. This is critical when cells divide because each new cell needs to have an exact copy of the DNA present in the old cell.
Thats about all my little brain can take in right now,
Just as an aside I always wonder if I could zoom down to the size of a cell, is that what I would be looking at (the double helix) or is that a diagrammatic construct that gives us a visual aid to something thats too small for the eye to see? Its all very interesting to me and I find it quite sad that I never took science class very seriously when I was young. So maybe we can try to piece it all together in future blogs - just one bit at time so we don't get too confused . . .anyway back to Jurassic Park. . .
So how do we extract this DNA from a dead fossil and build a living organism?
What on earth made this idea possible albeit theoretically?
Although molecular genetic research has gone on since the mid 1980s, apparently there has been research using ancient remains such as mummies, plant remains, and fossils going back to the 1930s.Most recent attempts at reviving an extinct species was an attempt to clone the Qagga which is a more recently extinct creature. The next goal was to get the DNA code from something far more ancient. The best preserved ancient bodies available are, ancient mummies.
The tremendous strides made towards isolating a DNA gene created a powerful optimistic atmosphere, it was confidently proclaimed that this research was going to prove the development of DNA in ancient fossils. The hope was to see a demonstrable changes in the DNA strain and thereby provide evidence once for all to prove the process of change and mutation in the theory of evolution.
But they soon hit upon a snag - this was the simple fact that ancient DNA was damaged and the chief damage was caused immediately upon death.
What is needed is a "Genome Template" in other words they need to have an intact genetic code to copy and paste (I admit my limitations in understanding this). But this is not that simple a process.
DNA simply degrades over time and there was never a scenario where scientists could ever realistically hope to reproduce an ancient life.
section 2
So another amazing event occurred in the early 90's
Enter Kary Mullis
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| http://www.karymullis.com/altermune.shtml |
Dr. Mullis received a Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1993, for his invention of the POLYMERASE CHAIN REACTION or (PCR).
This discovery was (in my layman understanding). . . a method used to amplify (or multiply) DNA particles, by this the PCR process causes a microscopic strand of genetic material to multiply itself billions of times within a few hours (how? I couldn't tell you) |
| http://www.karymullis.com/pcr.shtml |
It was this process of reproducing DNA strains in ancient fossils and recreating, theoretically at least, extinct creatures such as the dinosaurs.
The process has multiple applications in medicine, genetics, biotechnology, and forensics. PCR, which was the theoretical basis for the novel and motion picture Jurassic Park because of its ability to extract DNA from fossils, is in reality the basis of a new scientific discipline, paleobiology.
With renewed passion a special taks force was headed up a a team of scientists headed by Edward M. Golenberg who had been interested in using PCR on aDNA for some time.
So began another attempt to track the changes in DNA in ancient fossils and again to find the truth of evolution in the DNA record.
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| http://bio.wayne.edu/profhtml/golen/golenberg.html |
In 1990, Golenberg and his team set about extracting DNA from the 20 million year old Miocene plant fossil and guess what? they discovered it was found to differ from living relatives by 17 base pairs which apparently is quite significant!
They then extracted the DNA they found a fossilised termite. The DNA was sequenced, and it too was analysed and found to differ from living species, this time by 10%.
They then tried it on some beetles fossilised in Amber (just like Jurassic Park) the results were released around the time Jurassic park was published and the idea exploded. Insects in amber were in high demand.
But the conclusions were loudly celebrated before the results were concluded
Enter Tomas Lindahl
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| http://www.sussex.ac.uk/broadcast/read/19992 |
Not so loudly announced was the entry upon the scene of a certain Tomas Lindahl, a Swedish born scientist with a background in cancer research.
He made it clear from the outset that he was not so sure about any such conclusive proof of evolutionary traits in fossilised DNA . Again to put it simply. . . he simply doubted whether the DNA molecule can survive for such long periods of time.
He demonstrated that in order to obtain the samples they had to be contaminated in the process.
Obviously creating a false result. Also he raised an objection that the extraction of DNA samples totally destroyed the fossil sample they were taken from. So having established these a huge outcry went out about the destruction of rare and precious fossil finds.
In 1993 he published a major critical review of the reports outlining the problems associated with aDNA preservation in fossils. Suddenly it was a race against time to prevent more fossils being destroyed for worthless DNA.
This blew the lid off the whole experiment, to further its demise the scientists were not allowed any more access to precious fossils, but , very importantly as it turned out, they returned to working with the same samples they used previously they discovered the results were totally un-replicable.
Lindahl was right. The millions of years old aDNA samples were just contaminants. By the end of the craze around 1996, reports of ancient DNA from fossils were met with widespread scepticism.
read the whole article in scientific American HERE
Well what has this got to do with UfO's you may ask?
The whole UfO story is a very complex situation in which our view of reality is being completely challenged.
My Issue is with the "Materialist" world view
- It places so many limits on our assumptions that, to my thinking, creates a huge problem on our interpretation and understanding of the world we live in.
- The problems are also associated with a "uniformitarian" understanding of world History that simply means the conditions of the world are as they always have been and this universe developed in exactly the same environment we have around us today. A big topic to be sure but we can and will go there.
- The narrowminded idea that there are a limits to dimensionality and our own physical dimension is the only reality there is. We can see that even materialist approach to scientific study observes all kinds of anomalies and in the end they find its all so much vaster and smaller and higher and longer than they ever imagined, and the very fabric of reality is not as straightforward as the paradigm would have us believe. A huge topic . . . and we can and will go there too.
There are so many examples of these basic premises that are rendered totally useless in the light of people's experiences, UfO reports are really just the tip of an enormous iceberg of anomalies and sightings and experiences that totally demolish the idea that our material world is the only truth in people's experiences.
We will have al look at as many of these events as we can - there are so many we simply do not have the space or time for everything.
But getting back to to Kary Mullins
Now I have to be fair and admit from the start that he certainly is a bit "different" when thinking about the image we have in mind of the average scientist.
It seems to be that he indeed goes out of his way to present himself as an independent thinker, a rebel and non-conformist. Personally I find that quite appealing.
Certainly not your average white coated laboratory geek with his his eye clamped over a microscope and clipboard in hand
He's also great fun to listen to Kary Mullis on TED
No not so our Kary, his image of himself is presented with Clarity on his website where his "Devil may Care" attitude is demonstrated with his nonchalent pose with feet up on his desk (shown above)
He has written an autobiographical book titled Dancing Naked in the Mind Field (published by Pantheon Books in 1998), in which he is seen with surfboard and DNA strain together on the cover the "maverick genius".
Well having said all that lets just have a look at his achievements
Bachelor of Science degree in chemistry from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1966. He earned a Ph.D. degree in biochemistry from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1972 and lectured in biochemistry there until 1973. That year, Dr. Mullis became a postdoctoral fellow in pediatric cardiology at the University of Kansas Medical School, with emphasis in the areas of angiotensin and pulmonary vascular physiology. In 1977 he began two years of postdoctoral work in pharmaceutical chemistry at the University of California, San Francisco.Dr. Mullis joined the Cetus Corporation in Emeryville, California, as a DNA chemist in 1979. During his seven years there, he conducted research on oligonucleotide synthesis and invented the polymerase chain reaction.
In 1986, he was named director of molecular biology at Xytronyx, Inc. in San Diego, where his work was concentrated in DNA technology and photochemistry. In 1987 began consulting on nucleic acid chemistry for more than a dozen corporations, including Angenics, Cytometrics, Eastman Kodak, Abbott Labs, Milligen/Biosearch, and Specialty Laboratories.
Kary's Website
Not bad: I think he probably feels quite satisfied with his accomplishments and we would have to agree he is a pretty clever guy.
That doesn't mean he doesn't have issues just like the rest of us, but it does mean that when it comes to out of this world experiences he is not just some fringe nut . . . I think we can safely assume that.
OK , so in his autobiography Dancing Naked in the Mind Field he tells a really bizarre story in chapter 13 which I will summarise below. . .
I must say he has a great sense of humour and I found myself chuckling along with his account, but it also does describe a rather sinister tale which he feels important enough to add to his autobiograhy.
He begins by giving us the background to a very unusual event, which he is reluctant to categorise but does draw a parallel to "alien intervention".
He bought a property in 1975 I along the Navarro River in Mendocino County, California. It was a retreat and he explains it was a place to cultivate trees, but was more a good escape to go to on weekends.
He tells how he travelled there on his own and arrived around midnight. He describes a rather dark and eerie path he had to take to get down to the outside Loo. He was about to go round a turn in the path when he noticed . . .
"at the far end of the path, under a fir tree, there was something glowing. I pointed my flashlight at it anyhow. It only made it whiter where the beam landed. It seemed to be a raccoon. I wasn't frightened. Later, I wondered if it could have been a hologram, projected from God knows where.
The raccoon spoke. "Good evening, doctor," it said. I said something back, I don't remember what, probably, "Hello."
The next thing I remember, it was early in the morning. I was walking along a road uphill from my house. What went through my head as I walked down toward my house was, "What the hell am I doing here?" I had no memory of the night before. I thought maybe I had passed out and spent the night outside. But nights are damp in the summer in Mendocino, and my clothes were dry, and they weren't dirty.
In his house he felt disorientated and confuse, the events of the previous night slowly came to mind and he ran out to look for his flashlight. Upon returning he felt exhausted and slept for several hours.
later that day he went down from the cabin to clean out a blocked pipe that fed a pond. So he headed toward the woods where there was a spring that watered the pond. He then began to experience fear and panic as he walked into that area of the woods.
He could not bring himself to go near to this place which was difficult to understand since previously he had always enjoyed going there. It took him a couple of years to get the courage to go back there. He describes getting an automatic rifle, attaching a new torch onto the end with some tape and heading off to the woods. . .
"I stood outside the first trees and yelled into the dark. "This is my property, and I'm coming in. Anything moves - I'll shoot it. If it doesn't move, I may shoot it anyhow. I'm pissed off." I was yelling really loud. "Get out of my woods. Now. If you can't move, scream. Maybe I'll have mercy. Maybe not. Get the fuck out of my woods." John Wayne would not have said "fuck," but times have changed.
I felt like that kind of screaming would at least clear out anybody who was innocently there. It was also part of the therapy. My D-cells cut a clean beam into the darkest part of the forest. There was a giant old hollowed laurel growing right out of a little waterfall full of ferns. I was fifty feet away from it. I loved it, but it had become the focus of my fears. John Wayne, at my side, wearing the same kind of hat I had donned for the occasion, said, "Let 'em have it, kid." I opened up with the AR-15 and riddled the area of the laurel. "Blow 'em to hell, kid!"
But here's a really strange connection
He describes going into a bookstore sometime later. There he sees Whitley Strieber's book Communion.
Striker's account of a strange experience in his own cabin in the woods "He wrote of waking up in his cabin in the woods of New York State and seeing an owl staring at him. He spoke to the owl, then two beings, who looked like the figure on the cover of the book, appeared in his doorway and escorted him out of the house."
And then even Stranger . . .
His daughter Louise then phones him while he is busy reading the book and says
"Dad, there's a book I want you to read. It's called Communion."
"I'm reading it right now."
She began to tell me what had happened to her in Mendocino. She had arrived at the house with her fiancé late one night. And just like me, she had wandered down the hill.
She was gone for three hours. Her fiancé had spent the time frantically searching for her everywhere, calling her name, but she was nowhere to be found.
The first thing she remembered was walking the same road on which I’d found myself, hearing her fiancé calling her name. She had no idea where she had been.
When she saw the book, she had experienced the same sort of vague recognition as I had. After she finished telling me her story, I told her about my experience. It was the first time I’d told anyone."
I love his statement about the event
I wouldn’t try to publish a scientific paper about these things, because I can’t do any experiments. I can’t make glowing raccoons appear. I can’t buy them from a scientific supply house to study. I can’t cause myself to be lost again for several hours.
But I don’t deny what happened. It’s what science calls anecdotal, because it only happened in a way that you can’t reproduce. . . But it happened.
He is saying that the scientific fraternity is limited in examining this event because it simply has no frame of reference in which to deal with it, but he adds with certainty that "it was real" .
This so beautifully illustrates what generally happens with these kinds of reports.The people involved are told they are hallucinating or dreaming or lying, anything that can fit within the limitations of the materialistic viewpoint of reality.
I can only say that our limited frame of reference is just that: Limited. This doesn't mean our white jacketed guys won't figure it out eventually but I submit that the frame of reference that materialistic world view will have to shift as well, but this will be seen in the science itself and in fact it already has. . .
Next: This Story was picked up by Australian UFO Research Network
