Twilight of the Gods: The Mayan Calendar and the Return of the Extraterrestrials (13 page)

Stem cells, those mysterious microscopic monsters, are again the subject of front-page headlines these days. The reason for all this excitement is a decision by the British parliament: Great Britain is allowing the culturing of hybrids or chimeras consisting of human and animal genetic material.

Many politicians are still fuming about this, claiming that as far as bioethics is concerned Britain is "walking an ever more dangerous path."' Many scientists, though, such as John Burn, a professor at the University of Newcastle, think the new law on embryos is completely alright: "A cell cannot have a soul," he maintains.'

What are these geneticists actually up to? Are they playing God in their dubious laboratories?

Breeding is nothing new. We've been doing it with fruit trees, for instance, since time immemorial. Certain attributes from one tree are transferred to another tree by means of "grafting." In this way, genetic characteristics pass from one tree to another-without any need for people to interfere in the process. This kind of cultivation of trees, flowers, or cereals is part of everyday life, and nobody raises an eyebrow over it. Where's the difference between cultivation and genetics?

In genetics, nuclear material is artificially removed from one cell and implanted in the cell of another being that has previously had its nucleus removed. This was how the famous sheep Dolly was bred in 1997. She was a 100-percent copy of the donor animal. This process is called cloning and always involves cells from the same kind of animal. (Since then, Dolly has had her own, healthy young.)

Chimeras or hybrids, however, are created from different species, such as human beings and cows-as is indeed the case in Britain. The nuclei are removed from one human cell and one bovine cell. Then the human nucleus is implanted in the empty bovine cell. A short electrical impulse is used to stimulate cell division, and thus the human genetic information is multiplied manifold.

Madness? It happens in nature all the time-without any intervention from mankind. So-called "retroviruses," such as the AIDS virus, bore into cells and then copy their own genetic information into the DNA of the host. This cell reproduces and produces more AIDS virus cells. No geneticists are involved at all.

Why would scientists want to cross humans with cows? Have they lost their marbles? Surely, any basic research has some kind of longterm objective. Indeed, this is the case here. Geneticists hope thatsometime in the future-they will be able to manipulate genetic information in such a way that conditions such as Alzheimer's disease or multiple sclerosis will be eliminated forever. It's sometimes called "therapeutic cloning," and it is a science that is still in its infancy. But to advance their knowledge, the geneticists require cells, and up until now they have been using egg cells from young women. This has inevitably engendered political and religious problems, because this "practice material" is, after all, human. The egg cells from cows, on the other hand, are available in the billions from the slaughterhouses. The combination of man and cow has nothing to do with Frankenstein, however. It is not about creating talking cows or mooing bipeds. Why not?

Cells multiply into ever larger clumps. Before these can ever develop into an actual being, they need to be implanted into a uterus, and that is still strictly forbidden. But what happens if it is done in secret? British law requires that hybrid human-bovine embryos are destroyed after 14 days. What's more, the probability that any of these kinds of cell clumps live any longer than that is extremely remote-but not impossible. It depends on the biotechnological technologies used at a particular laboratory.

Outside of Great Britain, all sorts of even more outrageous things have been going on. Australian geneticists working on biologist Andrew Pask's team at the University of Melbourne managed to transplant the genetic material of a Tasmanian tiger into a mouse embryo and successfully managed to get the cells to multiply. The alarming thing about it is that the Tasmanian tiger has actually been extinct for many decades and the cellular material they used had been lying around in a jar of alcohol for at least 100 years! Professor Pask wasted no time in announcing that by using his technique it would even be possible to bring animals like dinosaurs back to life as long as they could scrape together enough DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid). And it would be no problem at all to produce a Neanderthal man.' Similar experiments are going in labs all over the world. In London there is even a "DNA bank" storing the basic genetic material of all kinds of animals.

emories of the Future

Strangely enough, I discussed all of these things that are now the object of extensive research in my book Chariots of the Gods 40 4 years ago. Here's a quote from that book:

And whence came the first audacious idea that the cells of the body had to be preserved so that the corpse, preserved in a very secure place, could be awakened to new life after thousands of years?... Did space travelers in prehistory already possess knowledge that we must gain anew? Did unknown intelligences already know the methods with which to treat bodies so that they could be revived in so many thousand years?'

Nowadays, the field of genetics is actually realizing the sciencefiction idea of Jurassic Park!

What is being tried today-and will someday succeed-was already being done thousands of years ago. And there are ancient witnesses: Manetho is the name of one of them. He was a scribe in the holy temples of Egypt. The Greek historian Plutarch mentioned Manetho as one of the contemporaries of the first Ptolemaic kings (304-282 Bc).' Manetho wrote his three-volume work in Sebennytos, a city on the Nile Delta. The second witness, Eusebius (who died in 339 AD), is another classic historian. He is recorded in church annals as the Bishop of Caesarea and in his magnum opus, Chronographia, he quoted many ancient sources, which he deliberately and meticulously recorded. Manetho and Eusebius complement each other in their descriptions of the ancient records. Manetho begins his history by listing the names of the gods and demigods, and even quotes the years of their dominion-citing spans that would have most archaeologists in paroxysms. The gods of Egypt, he asserts, ruled for 13,900 years, and the demigods that followed them for another 11,000 years.' The gods, Manetho wrote, created various beings: monsters and chimeras of all kinds. Eusebius confirmed exactly the same thing. The following quote from ancient sources fits in incredibly well with the contemporary debate on these hybrids:

...In those times, the gods created monstrous beasts with strange appearances. There were men with two wings, and some with four wings and two faces. They had one body, but two heads, of a man and a woman, and two sets of genitals, male and female. Other men had the legs and horns of a goat, or the hooves of a horse, or the rear end of a horse and the front of a man.... Other beasts they made, such as bulls with human heads; dogs with four bodies and fish tails protruding from their rear end; horses with dogs' heads... and other monsters with the head and body of a horse, but the tail of a fish; and other beasts with the form of all kinds of wild animals. As well as these [beasts], there were fish and reptiles and snakes and many other strange creatures, each of which had a different appearance. Representations of them were set up in the temple of Belus.8

It's pretty strong stuff that Eusebius serves up from the ancient sources. Men with wings? Is this nothing but old nonsense? If so, why are there so many reliefs depicting just this on columns and sculptures in all the major museums of the world? In the world of archaeology they even have a name for them. They call them "winged geniuses." Men with the "the legs and horns of a goat"-utter claptrap? How about taking a look at some Sumerian and Babylonian cylinder seals? (See images 2.3, 2.4, and 2.5.) They feature images of these chimeras in their hundreds. And men with the "the hooves of a horse" and the "rear end of a horse and the front of a man"-did they exist, too? Say hello to the centaur! And the gods created "bulls with human heads"? Holy Apis in Egypt help us! Including the Minotaur of Crete!

Winged geniuses working by the tree of life. Author's own images.

Hybrid creatures on a Sumerian cylinder seal. Author's own images.

ousters From the Past

The past steamrolls the future. Up until now, all these chimeras have been explained away in psychological terms-wishful thinking, reveries, and mythology. So, what is a sphinx? Simple, it's a hybrid. Of course, if you mention the word sphinx then everyone immediately thinks of the huge lion figure with the human head next to the Great Pyramid of Gizeh. But sphinges (yes, that's the plural of sphinx) come in all shapes and sizes: lions' bodies with rams' heads, dogs' or goats' bodies with human heads, rams' bodies with birds' heads, human bodies with birds' heads, and so on and so on! There are whole avenues lined with all kinds of sphinges in among the desert sand. Anyone who has whiled away a few hours in a large museum or browsed through a book about Sumer, Assur, and Egypt will be able to sing the song of songs about these "strange creatures," as Eusebius calls them.