BIOCENTRISM

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.