Nevertheless, whether it fits into the contemporary scene or not, and even if it is unpleasant to sensitive ears, I claim that extraterrestrials did choose a specific race. Mythologies relate how certain ‘gods’ guided their own ‘race’, protecting it from hostile alien influences and placing its members in leading positions on our planet. The ancient sources do not tell us which race had special divine advantages, but we find many indications in the Old Testament that the elect were not to mix with others.
When Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt through the wilderness to the promised land on a trek that lasted 40 years, he forbade them any contact with other races, on God’s orders. And God watched over and was with the Israelites; he led them and accompanied them with a sign. Ahead of them went a pillar of cloud, which was white by day and shone like fire by night. In this way their jealous God protected them from enemies and strangers, and he fed them with manna, the miraculous bread.
At the end of their 40 years’ journey, the Israelites entered their home, the promised land, but only the new generation was allowed in. Access to the land where milk and honey flowed was strictly forbidden to the old people, including Moses.
What had happened?
I do not feel that the absurdity of this order can be got round by theological and historical interpretations.
I do not know if the idea I put forward ten years ago has become old hat or a smart up-to-the minute theory. Anyway, my reason for the quarantining of the chosen was that the ‘gods’ or extraterrestrials—which comes to the same thing—had formed a new generation with new genetic qualities during the 40 years’ journey through the wilderness, qualities which the men in the surrounding world did not possess. Was this compulsory isolation of the new genetic material the origin of the still valid rule that Jews should only mate with Jews? Has sticking to this Mosaic maxim preserved not a Jewish race, but a special ‘species’ of men, who exhibit special advantages and disadvantages vis-à-vis the rest of mankind?
Precisely in our own time, when racial prejudices are on the increase, such remarks may seem inopportune, because a whiff of racism may hover over them. I am aware of the responsibility inherent in raising the question of a chosen race, but I do not think that hushing up problems can ever help to solve them.
Inter alia, modern human genetical research produces racial specifications. In other words, it is treading on the same hot tin roof. One day it will undoubtedly tell us which genetic combinations of a race or species are beneficial and which should be eliminated. To put it in more concrete terms: if a defect in our DNA suddenly meant that we were all born with three fingers and one ear, everyone would be very glad if the fault could be cleared up quickly. Interference with the natural ‘patterns’ of the cells can be compared with what happens in the vegetable kingdom when a more resistant kind of short-stemmed corn is achieved by experiment, i.e. by programming the cells differently, or in the animal kingdom, when cows with a high milk yield are ‘developed’.
Will manipulation of man’s hereditary factors be possible in the foreseeable future? This is a frightening spectre that looms ahead of us.
What are we to say about this matter of fact text?
‘John Gurdon, the Cambridge University biologist, took embryo cells from a female albino frog. He removed their cell nuclei with the hereditary layout and put them into the egg cells of another female frog, from which the cell nucleus had previously been removed. Tadpoles developed from these egg cells. They turned into albino frogs, but they are not related to their mother.’25
The procedure used in this experiment was called cloning, derived from the Greek clon = branch. Günther Speicher makes it easily understandable:
‘The cutting of a plant that becomes a new plant when put in the earth is a carbon copy of the mother plant.’25
We must always remember that every organism consists of cells, each of which contains all the information needed for the reconstruction of the whole organism.
From this microbiologists and microsurgeons concluded that it must be possible to reconstruct the whole from a single cell (without fertilisation) so long as it was possible to remove the nucleus from a cell and then implant it intact in a cell with its egg removed. Once that was done, scientists suspected that it would be possible to multiply every animal, vegetable and human organism exactly after the pattern of the nucleus of the donor cell. It would be impossible to tell the new product from the original. The game that nature sometimes plays with one-egg twins, who are as alike as two peas, could be repeated artificially and without limit.
Professor Gurdon followed this method to the letter when producing his colony of frogs, and every frog resembled the other as closely as frogs do to our superficial gaze. But in this case each of the numerous frogs was a ‘genuine’ copy of the original. With no mistakes.
Mice are mammals and the first cloned mice are alive! Test-tube mice. Shortly after a mouse egg had been fertilised in vitro, a hair-thin cannula was used to remove the male cell nucleus from the egg cell. Consequently the mouse embryo no longer had the hereditary information of both parents, but only that of the mother, an exact copy of whom it would become.
In other words this method makes it possible to clone females exclusively. What luck! So what about cloning men? It’s quite simple! Listen to Professor Illmensee of the University of Geneva:
‘If we exchange the total hereditary material of a fertilised egg cell for the nucleus of a body cell, we can obviously make copies of male individuals as well.’25
The English physiologist Alan S. Parker was almost prophetic when he thought it possible to isolate a human cell nucleus and transfer it to a uterus, long before the possibility of cloning had been repeatedly proved experimentally. He even went a step further when he called for more intensive research into how long male sperm could be stored. He was obviously thinking of the replication of valuable material. Parker was in a very good company, for Professor Marshall W. Nierenberg, who was an important collaborator in the discovery of the genetic code, also thought that every difficulty would be overcome one day. The only question was: when. He conjectured that cells could be programmed with genetic information within the next 25 years. Professor Joshua Lederberg, a geneticist at Stanford University, California, shares his optimism. He is convinced that hereditary factors will be manipulable during this millennium.
It looks as if the experts have been too cautious in their estimates. Everything will happen much faster than we think. Are we beginning to play the role of fate?
Can’t we help acting as we do?
Are we living inside an armour plating of mental processes which we have to follow, because they are programmed in us? Because those who created us made us intelligent ‘in their own image’?
Because they were aware that one fine day we would repeat what they themselves had tried out on us?
Did not the gods predict this in Genesis:
‘. . . this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.’ —Genesis 11:6
Will it become possible to clone men one day? To produce images of a type in any desired quantity? Successful experiments on mammals are (nearly) always repeated on men after a certain lapse of time. Whether the first man cloned by the process minutely described and fully documented by the science journalist David Rorvik21 is still alive in the USA without anyone knowing, as Rorvik claims, is a question of secondary importance. Beyond the knowledgeable description of an individual case is the fundamental recognition that it will be possible to clone men in the easily foreseeable future.
There is always a purpose and target to stimulate every piece of research. How then can the horrific prospect of a multiplied man taken from one cell—whether from the blood, skin or some other organ—be meaningful and useful?
Once the method is practicable, shall we mass-produce politicians, soldiers, scientists, space pilots, workers, priests, soothsayers and comedians? Will the abyss that Orwell and Huxley p
ointed to open before us? Shall we create new ‘racial categories’ which will then fight each other because of their peculiarities? Shall we let past fashionable ideals of beauty lapse and use cloning to have male and female mannequins roll off the assembly line? Shall we create types of men specially suited for particular research purposes? Will a man or a woman hoard a couple of cells from his or her beloved spouse to have the original recreated in the case of sudden premature death?
Will tiny remnants of the cells of intellectual giants, geniuses in every field, be on call in ‘cell banks’, so that a new but identical man in their image can tread in the footsteps of the deceased?
I feel that a great chance for humanity would open up if the knowledge of the genius of the century were not lost with his death. How would the course of the world have been determined if Einstein had been virtually immortal? By the cloning process. The great thinker left instructions for his body to be cremated and his brain to be donated to research.27 It is shameful to learn that this bequest to science is in a glass jar full of formaldehyde in a cardboard carton in the office of a biological experimental laboratory in Wichita, Kansas. Parts of the brain went to specialists; cerebellum and sectors of the cerebral cortex were not dissected. Formaldehyde has a strong germicidal effect. It is most unlikely that a single cell has survived the 34 years since Einstein’s death.
No one can guess whether the great savant planned more than a purely academic examination. Did he foresee possibilities that no one could imagine in 1955? Has science destroyed a fantastic possibility for x day?
My speculation, but one motivated by the current state of cellular biology and microsurgery, is that extraterrestrials created homo sapiens by cloning, which they already knew all about. If they were masters of interstellar spacetravel, with outstanding technological knowhow, we can well believe that they were experts in genetic manipulation. They ‘planted’ the DNA of their race and transmitted it intact. From then on the ‘divine’ programme for the building up of man pursued its course. We are hunting for this primordial knowledge; we carry it within us; all we have to do is rediscover it.
In the decades to come we shall break through into interstellar space. The step will have to be taken, because supplies of raw materials on our planet are running out. This need will be a stronger stimulus than man’s curiosity to discover unknown peoples or even civilisations in the universe. It makes no difference what spurs us on; we shall have to penetrate the cosmos for our own survival.
If an uninhabited planet like earth is found in the depths of space, it will be only logical to want to colonise it. Previously there was one prickly point in the array of arguments against space travel and similar projects. We could hardly transport hundreds and thousands of men and women to the goal in gigantic space ferries, for the cost would be prohibitive and the advantages questionable. Besides even if there was a planet anything like earth, our colonists would only settle there under protest. Combinations of gases insupportable to us and different bacteria would harm our ‘race’. Under such conditions, how would our colonists ever get acclimatised? Perhaps there would also be differences in temperature varying from minus 80° to plus 80° centigrade on the hypothetical planet. How would men withstand them without heavy protective clothing (which would hinder them in any kind of physical work)?
Discussions about this and other points carried out behind tightly closed doors came to one conclusion. Cloning! if the planet were uninhabited, a race suited to the conditions of the new planet would be programmed. If there were unintelligent life, human hereditary factors would be introduced into the egg cells of the most developed species. History repeats itself. We shall be doing what the extraterrestrials did to primates on our blue planet!
Does the earth hold any indications or points of reference to support my audacious ideas?
Many mythologies and the traditions of ancient religions say that the ‘gods’ created men in their own image and that they had to make several attempts before they were successful.28
Several peoples claim, some of them even today, that the rulers of their dynasties are direct descendants of the ‘gods’. . . for example, the Egyptian Pharaohs, the ancient Sumerian kings, the Ethiopian and Persian royal houses, the Japanese imperial house, etc.
The Toradja, a South-Sea tribe in the Sulu Sea, swear that they came from heaven and that their ancestors, the Puangs, originally had white blood in their veins, until it turned red through mixed marriages with earth dwellers.29
Until 1962 the Uro tribe lived on reed islands in Lake Titicaca. The Uros had black blood. They did not mate with the members of neighbouring Indian tribes, because they were convinced that they came from space and wanted to preserve their exclusive origin. They lived a solitary and withdrawn life, always on the move in order to avoid contact with other tribes. Originally the Uros lived on the shores of Lake Titicaca. Not until the warlike Indian Aimara, over 1400 years ago, and later the hordes of the Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro (1478-1541) stormed the Bolivian plateau did the Uros build the reed islands on which they lived from then on. They were disdainful of other tribes, but avoided any kind of conflict. Their special qualities led them to a certain arrogance. They said that they did not die in water or feel icy cold. That violent storms could not affect them, that the damp cold fog which made the other Indians ill did not bother them, just as the ‘fire from heaven’ (lightning) did not harm them. The Uros conversed in a language unknown on this earth.
They obstinately preserved the belief that they were not men. In 1960 there were still eight genuine Uros on the reed islands of Lake Titicaca. The last of them died in 1962.
What race did these conceited hermits belong to? From the beginning of their existence they did not defile themselves by breeding with terrestrials, so they may have preserved a race which remained unchanged from its creation to its demise. Who created these Uros and for what purpose? Were they destined for a special mission and did they fail to carry it out?
If the basic races of mankind are in some way connected with ‘my’ extraterrestrials, we must ask whether the ‘gods’ wanted a mixture of race or strict segregation.
If we look for the answer in legends, myths and early religious traditions, the jealous gods were opposed to a racial pool. To avoid repeating what I have long been saying and writing on the subject, I shall only remind you of the quarantine-like separation of the new generation that grew up during the 40 years in the wilderness from the older one, the strict isolation of the Puangs and Uros, and that the ancient Egyptian Pharaohs regularly committed incest to keep things ‘in the family’.
We know that all races of the same species can interbreed. If the ‘extraterrestrials’ did not want this racial miscegenation to take place, they could have imposed genetic limitations by providing sexual organs which were unsuitable for intercourse with other races or by changing the chromosome counts. In other words, the unvarying human chromosome count is the secret code for intelligence! Is that why every intelligent being has 46 chromosomes and autosomes since the prehistoric mutation?
By means of cloning, it will be possible to multiply intelligence (or other desired racial characteristics) after the image of the model cell. A development has got under way that is dangerous because it is attractive. Surgeons may point out that organ transplants could be carried out without problems, because there would be no immune reactions. One might also say a clan of clones represents the ultimate in inbreeding, but that is an erroneous view which presupposes that only one or a few types of men would be cloned. Once several types were cloned, they could mate with each other and ‘normal’ relations would continue.
We should be very naive if we imagined that the process would only be used in the positive sense. Apart from the extreme example of murderers and dictators being cloned, there is the possibility of production going wrong and resulting in monsters, because using the ‘raw material’ is so indescribably difficult. What would happen to the unsuccessful examples? They would
be human beings too. Ethical and religious sensibilities command us to preserve human life. Every advance has its unconditional responsibilities.
Chance and danger are very close neighbours. On which side are the scales coming down? Should a strict ban be put on research into molecular biology and gene surgery? Apart from my view that we act under a compulsion to acquire knowledge, a research ban would have to be observed in every country and corner of the earth. Only comparatively small rooms are needed for genetic research, not great halls with thousands of machines and apparatus. Who is going to control them? Who will know if the ban has been universally obeyed? Moreover, research has never yet been restrained from reaching goals that were ripe for discovery.
In addition to biological and ethical problems, there would certainly be legal problems to solve as well. Who is the testator in a series of clones? Who are the heirs? Where are the limits of direct descent? When everyone comes from one cell?
Signs of the Gods? Page 7
