In Chapter Three of The Force, McTaggert adduces the work of Fritz-Albert Popp, a theoretical biophysicist at the University of Marburg, Germany. Popp is well-known for his state-of-the-art research into cancer, among other things.
For present purposes, I just want to get down to the nitty-gritty of certain passages in this work. Please do read the book if you want all the preliminary details.
To be brief, suffice it to say that Popp eventually conjectured that the mechanism of cancer in biological systems proceeded from cancer’s ability to neutralize the “photo-repair mechanism” at the cellular level of the cancer-invaded organism. In other words, there are photons capable of work in the organic body, and cancer interferes with and finally overcomes their ability to effect necessary cellular repairs. Popp conducted many successful experiments tending to confirm this active photon-as-maintainer-of-living-systems hypothesis. But still, the results were not dispositive. Fast-forward to the relevant passages:
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A particularly gifted student [of Popp’s] talked him into trying an experiment. It is well known that when you apply a chemical called ethidium bromide to samples of DNA, the chemical squeezes itself into the middle of the base pairs of the double helix and causes it to unwind. The student suggested that, after applying the chemical, he and Popp try measuring the light coming off the sample. Pop discovered that the more he increased the concentration of the chemical, the more the DNA unwound, but also stronger the intensity of light. The less he put in, the lower the light emission. He also found that DNA was capable of sending out a large range of frequencies and that some frequencies seemed linked to certain functions. If DNA were storing the light, it would naturally emit more light once it was unwound.
These and other studies demonstrated to Popp that one of the most essential stores of light and sources of biophoton emissions was DNA. DNA must be like a master tuning fork in the body. It would strike a particular frequency and certain other molecules would follow. It was altogether possible, he realized, that he might have stumbled upon the missing link in current DNA theory that could account for perhaps the greatest miracle of all in human biology: the means by which a single cell turns into a fully-formed human being.
One of the greatest mysteries of biology is how we and every other living thing take geometric shape. Modern scientists mostly understand how we have blue eyes or grow to six foot one, and even how cells divide. What is far more elusive is the manner by which these cells know exactly where to place themselves in each stage of the building process, so that an arm becomes and arm rather than a leg, as well as the very mechanism which gets these cells to organize and assemble themselves together into something resembling a three-dimensional human form.
The usual scientific explanation has to do with the chemical interactions between molecules and DNA, the coiled double helix of genetic code that holds a blueprint [information!] of the body’s protein and amino acids. Each DNA helix or chromosome – and the identical twenty-six pairs exist in every one of the thousand million million cells in your body – contains a long chain of nucleotides, or bases, of four different components (shortened to ATCG) arranged in a unique order in every human body. The most favored idea is that there exists a genetic ‘program’ of genes operating collectively to determined shape, or, in the view of neo-Darwinists such as Richard Dawkins [and don’t forget Steven Pinker here], that ruthless genes, like Chicago thugs, have powers to create form and that we are ‘survival machines’ – robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes.
This theory promotes DNA as the Renaissance man of the human body – architect, master builder and central engine room – whose tool for all this amazing activity is a handful of the chemicals which make proteins. The modern scientific view is that DNA somehow manages to build the body and spearhead all its dynamic activities just by selectively turning off and on certain segments, or genes, whose nucleotides, or genetic instructions, select certain RNA molecules, which in turn select from a large alphabet of amino acids the genetic ‘words’ which create specific proteins. These proteins supposedly are able to build the body and to switch on and off all the chemical processes inside the cell which ultimately control the running of the body.
Undoubtedly proteins do play a major role in bodily function. Where the Darwinists fall short is explaining exactly how DNA knows when to orchestrate this and also how these chemicals, all blindly bumping into each other, can operate more or less simultaneously. Each cell undergoes, on average, some 100,000 chemical reactions per second – a process that repeats itself simultaneously across every cell in the body. At any given second, billions of chemical reactions of one sort or another occur. Timing must be exquisite, for if any one of the individual chemical processes in all the millions of cells of the body is off by a fraction, humans would blow themselves up in a matter of seconds. But what the rank and file among geneticists have not addressed is that if DNA is the control room, what is the feedback mechanism which enables it to synchronize the activities of individual genes and cells to carry out systems in unison? [emphasis added] What is the chemical or genetic process that tells certain cells to grow into a hand and not a foot? And which cell processes happen at which time?
If all these genes are working together, like some unimaginably big orchestra, who or what is the conductor? And if all these processes are due to simple chemical collision between molecules, how can it work anywhere near rapidly enough to account for the coherent behaviours that live beings exhibit every minute of their lives?
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Whatever we might think of this, the PRC certainly takes it seriously.