by Robert Lanza
on his mind—what car he was going to drive after he got his license.
Dennis had led him to believe he was going to get the old Explorer,
which had almost 200,000 miles on the odometer. “Dad,” Ben had
asked, “you’re not going to give me the ‘Exploder,’ are you?” At Ben’s
birthday party last night, Dennis surprised him and gave him the
keys to his own car, which has all sorts of options, and even heated
seats. He’s out there washing the dirt off it right now.
Our current scientific worldview offers no hope or escape for
those scared to death of dying. But biocentrism hints at an alterna-
tive. If time is an illusion, if reality is created by our own conscious-
ness, can this consciousness ever truly be extinguished?
BuIldIng Blocks
15
of creAtIon
I had just published a scientific paper showing for the first time that
it was possible to generate an important type of cell in the eye that
could be used to treat blindness. I was on my way to work the follow-
ing morning—late as usual—and admittedly going a lot faster than the
posted fifteen miles per hour as I swung into the entrance of the park-
ing lot. At about that moment, I had a rush of adrenaline as I stepped
on my brakes, swerving around a police cruiser that had stopped to
question a pedestrian. “What unbelievably awful luck that the car hap-
pened to be a cruiser,” I thought, certain I was about to be arrested. I
continued into the lot, parking in the far corner and hoping the officer
had been too occupied to notice or come after me. With my heart still
racing, I hurried into the building. “Thank God,” I thought, as I glanced
over my shoulder, “there’s no sign of the officer in pursuit.”
Once safely in my office, I had calmed down and started to work
when I heard a knock on my door. It was Young Chung, one of the
senior scientists who works for me. “Dr. Lanza,” he said with panic
in his voice, “there is a police officer at the reception desk who wants
to see you. He has handcuffs and a gun.”
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There was a little stir in the lab as I went out to greet the police-
man standing there in his uniform. I think my colleagues were fear-
ful he was going to take me away in handcuffs. “Doctor,” he said in a
serious voice, “can we speak in your office?”
“It must be really bad,” I thought to myself. But once in my office,
he apologized and asked if I had time to speak with him about the
breakthrough he had just read about in the Wall Street Journal (in
fact, he had stopped the pedestrian in the parking lot to ask where
the company was located). He explained that he was part of a group
of parents who communicate with each other over the Internet
about new medical breakthroughs that might help their children. He
came on behalf of the group when he learned that I happened to be
located in the same city, Worcester, Massachusetts.
It turned out that his teenage son had a severe degenerative eye
disease, and that his doctors expected him to become blind in a cou-
ple of years. He also told me about a relative in the family who also
developed the disease at about the same age—and who is now totally
blind. He pointed to a cardboard box on the floor of my office, and
said, “Right now, my son can still make out the outline of the box.
But the clock is ticking . . .”
By the time he had finished his story, I was nearly in tears. It was
particularly difficult to take, especially knowing that I had frozen
cells put away that could have helped treat his son. The cells had just
been sitting in the freezer in a box for more than nine months. We
didn’t have the $20,000 we needed to carry out the animal experi-
ments we needed to show they could work (the amount the military
sometimes pays for a hammer). Unfortunately, it would be another
year or two before we would have the resources needed to show that
the cells—the same human cells that would be used in patients—
could rescue visual function in animals that otherwise would have
gone blind. Indeed, improvement in visual performance—that is,
sharpness of vision—was 100 percent better than untreated con-
trols without any apparent adverse effects. Currently (while this
book is being written), we’re involved in a dialogue with the FDA on
beginning actual clinical trials in patients with retinal degenerative
b U i L d i N g b L o C K s o f C r e a T i o N
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diseases, including macular degeneration, which affects more than
30 million people worldwide.
But there is an aspect to these cells that is even more amazing
than preventing blindness. In the same petri dishes as these reti-
nal cells, we also see the formation of photoreceptors—that is, the
cones and rods we see with—and even miniature “eye-balls” that
look like they’re staring at you up the barrel of the microscope. In all
of these experiments, we start out with embryonic stem cells—the
body’s master cells—which make all kinds of nerve cells spontane-
ously, almost by default. They are the first types of human body cells
they want to make. In fact, some of the neurons I’ve seen growing
in the laboratory have thousands of dendritic processes, with which
they communicate to their neighbor cells, which are so extensive
you would need to take a dozen different photographs to capture the
image of a single cell.
From a biocentric viewpoint, these nerve cells are the funda-
mental units of reality. They are the first thing nature seems to want
most to create when left alone. Neurons—not atoms—lie as the bed-
rock and base of our observer-determined world.
The circuitry of these cells in the brain contains the logic of
space and time. They are the neuro-correlate of the mind and con-
nect to the peripheral nervous system and sense organs of the body,
including the photoreceptors growing in my petri dishes. Thus, they
embrace everything we can ever observe, just like a DVD player
sends information to a television screen when someone watches a
movie. When we observe the words printed in a book, its paper,
seemingly a foot away, is not being perceived—the image, the paper,
is the perception—and as such, it is contained in the logic of this
neurocircuitry. A correlative reality encompasses everything, with
only language providing separation between external and internal,
between there and here. Is this matrix of neurons and atoms fash-
ioned in an energy field of Mind?
The millennia-old attempt to understand the nature of the cos-
mos has been a very odd, precarious undertaking. Science is cur-
rently our main tool, but help sometimes arrives in unexpected
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form. I remember a very ordinary day when everyone else was still
asleep or already at the hospital making morning rounds. “It doesn’t
matter,” I thought, as I filled my cup with coffee, the steam condens
-
ing on the kitchen window. “I’m already late.” I scraped off a patch
of ice crystals. Through the clear area, I could see the underlying
apparatus of the trees lining the road. The early morning sun slanted
down, throwing into gleaming brightness the bare twigs and a little
patch of dead leaves. There was a feeling of mystery contained in
that scene, a powerful feeling that something was veiled behind it,
something that was not accounted for in the scientific journals.
I put on my white lab jacket, and over the protests of my body,
set off on my way to the university. As I strolled toward the hospi-
tal, I had some curious impulse to detour around the campus pond.
Perhaps I was postponing seeing only harsh-etched things, now dur-
ing the singular magic of morning. The sight of the stainless-steel
machines, perhaps, or the stark lights in the operating room, the
emergency oxygen cylinders, the blips on the oscilloscope screen.
It was this that had brought me to pause at the edge of the pond, in
undisturbed quiet and solitude, when at the hospital the bustle of
activity and excited voices was in full swing. Thoreau would have
approved. He had always considered morning as a cheerful invita-
tion to make his life of simplicity. “Poetry and art,” he wrote, “and
the fairest and most memorable of the actions of men, date from
such an hour.”
It was a comforting experience on a cold winter day, to stand
there overlooking the pond, and watch the photons dancing on its
surface like so many notes from Mahler’s Ninth Symphony. For an
instant, my body was beyond being affected by the elements, and my
mind merged with the whole of nature as much as it has ever been
in my life. It was really a very small episode, as are most meaning-
ful things. But in that unassuming calm I had seen beyond the pads
and the cattails. I had felt Nature, naked and unclothed, as she was
for Loren Eiseley and Thoreau. I rounded the pond and headed to
the hospital. Morning rounds were nearly finished. A dying woman
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sat on the bed before me. Outside, a songbird had its trill, sitting on
a limb over the pond.
Later on, I thought of the deeper secret denied me at earliest
dawn, when I had peeped through that little ice-crystal hole into the
morning. “We are too content with our sense organs,” Loren Eiseley
once said. It is not sufficient to watch at the end of a nerve the danc-
ing of photons. “It is no longer enough to see as a man sees—even
to the ends of the universe.” Our radio telescopes and supercollid-
ers merely extend the perceptions of our mind. We see the finished
work only. We do not see how things stand in community with each
other as parts of a real whole, save for a space of perhaps five seconds
on some glorious December morning when all the senses are one.
Of course, the physicists will not understand, just as they cannot
see behind the equations of quantum reality. These are the variables
that, standing on the edge of the pond in such a day in Decem-
ber, merge the mind with the whole of nature, that lurk concealed
behind every leaf and twig.
We scientists have looked at the world for so long that we no
longer challenge its reality. As Thoreau pointed out, we are like the
Hindus, who conceived of the world as resting on the back of an
elephant, the elephant on the back of a tortoise, and the tortoise on a
serpent, and had nothing to put under the serpent. We all stand on
the shoulders of one another—and all together on nothing.
For myself, five seconds on a winter’s morning is the most
convincing evidence I should ever need. As Thoreau had said of
Walden:
I am its stony shore,
And the breeze that passes o’er;
In the hollow of my hand
Are its water and its sand . . .
whAt Is thIs plAce?
16
RelIgIon, ScIence, and BIocentRISm
look at RealIty
The last several chapters discussed the makeup and structure of
the universe. It’s amazing that we humans have the capacity to
do this at all. One day, we each found ourselves alive and aware
and, around the age of two in most cases, an ongoing memory track
started recording selective inputs. In fact, years ago I carried out a
series of experiments with B.F. Skinner (which we published in Sci-
ence) that showed even animals are capable of “self-awareness.” At
some point in childhood, most people eventually ask themselves,
“Hey! What is this place?” It isn’t enough for us to just be aware. We want to know why, what, and how existence is the way it is.
We were still children when we started to be bombarded by
competing answers. Church said one thing, school another. Now,
as adults, it’s no surprise that if we discuss The Nature Of It All,
we generally spout some combination of the two, depending on our
individual inclination and mood.
We may struggle with attempts at merging science and religion,
when, for instance, we watch the Christmas planetarium show, Star
of Wonder, which purports to find logical explanations for the Star of 1 5 3
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Bethlehem. This is also seen in such best-selling books as The Tao of
Physics and The Dancing Wu-Lei Masters, which purport to show that modern physics says the same thing as Buddhism.
By and large, however, such efforts are futile and even trashy, even
if they are popular. Actual physicists insist The Tao of Physics doesn’t talk about the actual science, but a barely recognizable flower-child
version. The annual planetarium Christmas presentations, for their
part, dishonor both religion and astronomy because all planetarium
directors know that no natural object in the sky, whether conjunc-
tion, comet, planet, or supernova, can come to a screeching halt over
Bethlehem or anywhere else. Only an object in the northern sky, the
North Star itself, can appear to be motionless. But the Magi weren’t
going north but southwest to get to Bethlehem. Bottom line: none
of the offered explanations work. The directors know this, yet offer
them anyway, because such shows have been well-attended holiday
traditions for three-quarters of a century. Meanwhile, on the religious
side of things, those who take the “star” story literally are being told
that no miracle unfolded; it was merely some brilliant conjunction
of planets that happened to occur at just the right time and come to
a halt in the sky—as if this in itself wouldn’t be indistinguishable
from a miracle. (If one doesn’t mind a digression here and happens
to be curious about the answer, the explanation of the “star” almost
certainly belongs to neither science nor religion. What’s left? At the
time, the births of great kings were superstitiously believed to be
accompanied by astrological omens, and when the Biblical account
was written, a full lifetime after the event, someone clearly thought
Jesus deserved no less. Because Jupiter
was in Aries—the “ruling
sign” of Judea—at the probable time of Jesus’s birth, an excellent
match existed. So the story was astrological in origin—an explana-
tion that would currently sit far out of favor with both science and
Christianity, and hence gets little mention by either.)
Because science and religion make odd bedfellows whose off-
spring is usually malformed, let’s keep them properly separated as
we summarize the various widely accepted answers to the most basic
questions of existence: What is this universe? What is the relation of
w H a T i s T H i s p L a C e ?
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the living to the non-living? Is the Great Computer’s basic operating
system random or is it intelligent? Is it fathomable by the human
mind? While we’re at it, let’s also review the fundamental ques-
tions with which each view has chosen to intertwine themselves,
and then see whether these selected areas of emphasis, at least, have
been answered successfully.
Classic science’s basic Take on the Cosmos
Everything started 13.7 billion years ago when the entire universe
materialized out of nothingness. Expanding ever since, first rapidly,
then more slowly, the expansion started speeding up once again
some 7 billion years ago due to an unknown repulsive force, which
is the main constituent of the cosmos. All structures and events are
created entirely randomly, given the four fundamental forces and a
host of parameters and constants such as the universal pull of grav-
ity. Life began 3.9 billion years ago on Earth and possibly elsewhere
at unknown times. It too occurred by the random collisions of mol-
ecules, which in turn are made of combinations of one or more of
the ninety-two natural elements. Consciousness or awareness arose
out of life in a manner that remains mysterious.
Classic science’s answers to basic Questions
How did the Big Bang happen?
Unknown.
What was the Big Bang?
Unknown.
What, if anything, existed before the Big Bang?
Unknown.
What is the nature of dark energy, the dominant entity of the cosmos?
Unknown.
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What is the nature of dark matter, the second most prevalent entity?
Unknown.
