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.18
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.19
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.20 Russian Nobel prize winner Albert Szent-Györgyi postulated that protein cells act as semiconductors, preserving and passing along the energy of electrons as information.21
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.22
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.23
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 ph
otons 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 resea
rch 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
IN 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
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