Forgotten Ages Research

Ancient Manipulations of the Code of Life—Are Genetic Experiments from the Forgotten Past Still With Us?

Report Topics:

• Modern-day experiments in the cross-hybridization of humans with animals
• The monstrous results we have seen before portrayed in ancient literature and artwork
• The Graeco-Babylonian historian Berosus on genetic cross-breeding
• Evidence for human cloning from ancient Mesopotamia
• Was the AIDS virus originating out of Africa a carry-over from genetic experiments made in the unknown prehistoric past?
• Report Update—Creation of the First Modern Artificial Cell

Full Report:

The extreme extent to which ancient civilizations carried out their genetic studies may be hinted at in a development that has taken place in modern research. In 1975, Dr. Nils Ringertz of the Swedish Institute for Medical Research and Genetics announced the successful crossing of genes of entirely different genera to produce hybrid cells. His team combined the genetic material of a man with a rat, a man with a chicken, and even a man with an insect. In each case, the cell produced began to multiply, and if allowed to grow would have developed into the monstrosity created by the genetic combination—a man-rat, a man-chicken and a man-insect. Dr. Ringertz assured his colleagues that the purpose of the experiment was to prove the initial hybrid cells could be created, but these were destroyed once they began to multiply, so that the monstrosities could not mature into living beings.

However, the procedure he used was simple enough that it could be duplicated in any genetic laboratory. More recently, in 2003, Chinese researchers at the Center for Genetics in Shanghai successfully fused human cellular materials with rabbit eggs. Military leaders in several countries are presently looking at using the same procedures for developing “super-soldiers,” genetic hybrids with human and various animal aspects who would be capable of performing specialized tasks far beyond those of singularly human form. One serious consideration has been to develop a human-fish that would have gills for breathing underwater.

One wonders if over the past decades some geneticists have gone ahead and secretly allowed such creatures to live and grow. Because the possible genetic combinations are limitless, the kinds of hybrid creatures that could be created are also endless. And what would happen if such creatures ever accidentally escaped?

In imagining what kinds of monstrosities might one day be loosed upon the world, there is the sudden realization that we have seen these combinations before, in the artwork and mythology of practically every ancient civilization. There we find the mermaid (human-fish), the centaur (human-horse), satyr (human-goat), harpy (human-bird), and the sphinx (human-lion). And there are other well-known combinations—pegasus (horse-bird), griffon (bird-lion), capricorn (goat-fish), and the gargoyle (ape-bird). Berosus, the Graeco-Babylonian historian, records the memory of an age when genetic freaks abounded in the world:

“There once resided most hideous beings, which were produced by the two-fold principle (genetic hybridization?). Men appeared with two wings, some with four and with two faces. They had one body but two heads; the one of a man and the other of a woman. Other human figures were to be seen with the legs and horns of a goat. Some had horses’ feet; others had the limbs of a horse behind, out before were fashioned of men.

“Bulls likewise had the heads of of men; and dogs with fourfold bodies, and the tails of fishes. In short, there were creatures with the limbs of every species of animals. Add to these fishes, reptiles, serpents, with other wonderful animals which assumed each other’s shape and countenance. Of all these were preserved delineations in the temple of Belus at Babylon.”

Other elements of the advanced nature of ancient research into manipulation of the building blocks of life come to us from Sumerian inscriptions dated between four and five thousand years old. Several legends recorded in cuneiform speak of a time when “gods ruled the world.” The various King Lists left to us, such as the Weld-Blundell tablet which gives lengths of reigns for both post-Cataclysmic and pre-Cataclysmic rulers, indicates the “age of the gods” dates to before 10,000 B.C.E.

The various texts also portray a land of tremendous mineral wealth located far to the south of Sumeria which the god-rulers thoroughly exploited for their own gain. The sailing directions and length of voyage reveal that this land, called Apsu, was near the southeastern African coast. Here they decided to create a lulu, or primitive worker who would do the actual digging and other hard labor.

The god Enki, according to the texts, was placed in charge of the task to “bring abut the work of great wisdom” and he, with the mother goddess Ninhursag, began to fashion the lulu. The place where the creation took place was called the bit shimti, the “house where the wind of life is breathed in.”

One fascinating element in the Sumerian account is that male and female materials were combined into a single form inside a flask, but then the resulting embryos were placed within a series of third entities, who acted as birth-goddesses.

In 2003, a team of physicians at the Chinese Medical School of Zhejiang University performed a groundbreaking proceedure using in-vitro genetic enhancement, which matches the Sumerian experiment almost point for point.

The modern Chinese patient was a woman who conceived but her embryos would stop developing after two days. In the new IVF process, the woman’s egg was first removed and fertilized with her husband’s sperm outside the womb. Donor eggs were obtained from a second woman, their genetic nuclei was partially removed, and injected with the fertilized material from the first woman, then finally re-implanted into the first woman’s womb. In this way, the mitochondrial DNA or mtDNA of the second woman was preserved in the reconstituted egg, and the pregnancy was able to take hold. The child that was born thus had three parents. Future processes have also involved placement of the recombined egg into the womb of the donor rather than the initial woman—either womb, or even that of a surrogate mother, it now appears can successfully be used to sustain pregnancies to their full term.

A scene depicted on a rock carving found in the mountains of Elam near ancient Sumer shows a seated god holding a flask from which water is pouring, a familiar representation of Enki. A goddess is seated next to him—Ninhursag—and about the pair are lesser deities, very likely the birth-goddesses and other assistants who partook in the great experiment of creation. Facing the birth-goddesses, Enki and Ninhursag are row upon row of dwarfish long-haired human-like creatures who look like a multitude of identical twins, as if they had been produced from the same mold—the lulu. Who were these cloned dwarfish creatures?

Curiously, the ancient Sumerian people—whose skeletal remains modern anthropologists have had a difficult time equating with any other known racial group in the Middle East—regarded themselves as distant offspring from the lulu creatures. We remember that the purpose of the lulu was to be a primitive worker in the mines of Apsu or southern Africa. It is here that anthropologists have found forms of early humanity that are a real puzzle, because they date to such a later period in human history, where elsewhere humanity evolved more rapidly. In fact, there were many finds of Homo habilis unearthed in the Olduvai Gorge area of Tanzania that were existing contemporary to modern human remains—a find which Dr. L. S. B. Leakey found very disconcerting.

These appear related to a curious discovery made in 1890 at the Champion Mine in what is now Rwanda. Within a prehistoric part of the mine, workers reported excavating a petrified human of enigmatic origins. He was light skinned, stocky in build, crouched over wearing nothing but a loin cloth, and had straight black hair worn in a pigtail. His features were strikingly similar not only to the skeletal reproductions of late Homo habilis, but in appearance looked very much like the lulu or worker humanoids portrayed in Sumerian art.

In our present modern period, genetic engineering has now become commonplace, and we are coming face to face with some hard questions of how far we can go with it. There is even some evidence suggesting that the epidemic AIDS virus is not of natural occurrence, but was a secret genetic experiment which somehow got loose with devastating results. The question is, is AIDS a product of our genetic experiments today—or is it possible it is a form of something left over from the experiments by an earlier civilization more than twelve millennia ago, that by some means has lingered dormant until now? Is it only coincidental that Africa saw some of the earliest and most widespread cases of AIDS recorded? Perhaps this is a ghost still haunting us from the distant past—haunting us with the message of what can result if we are not careful with taking responsibility for our scientific discoveries in our age here and now.

Report Update—Creation of the First Modern Artificial Cell

The latest edition of the journal Science (May 20, 2010) has announced that molecular biologist J. Craig Venter, leading a team of geneticist colleagues at Synthetic Genomics, after two and a half years of ongoing rigorous experimentation, has successfully manufactured a single cell of yeast with a complete set of artificial DNA that fully functions and acts like a natural cell of yeast.

More specifically, the team assembled a set of DNA composed of 1,080,000 units long that directly mirrors an actual strand of yeast DNA, inserted it into a cell stripped of its own DNA content, which then began reproducing and creating similar cells. Dr. Venter called the new parent cell, “the first self-replicating species we’ve had on this planet whose parents are a computer.” As he elaborated further:

“This is the first synthetic cell that’s been made. We call it synthetic because the cell is totally derived from a synthetic chromosome, made with four bottles of chemicals on a chemical synthesizer, starting with information in a computer.”

The participating scientists can recognize that the resulting parent cell is not derived from regular yeast because they deliberately added thousands of additional pairs of nucleotides in order to “watermark” the DNA and distinguish it from a natural one.

Written into the new genome code are the names of the experimenters and even several philosophical quotations, complete with punctuation. As one biologist described it, “They rebuilt a natural sequence and they put in some poetry.”

As the created parent cell divided and replicated, the slighty altered tell-tale DNA signature was also found to be contained in all its resulting offspring. One wonders if, many millennia ago, did the ancient geneticists of Sumeria similarly leave their names and a special message in the human cloned children they created using a similar method?

Of course, chemical imprinting, synthesizing and assembling a chromosome strand of only one million units long in a single simple yeast cell is a far cry compared to the human genome that is more than three billion base pairs long. Yet it is a start. Again.

Dr. Venter and his associates are by no means looking to re-create anything as complex as a human cell. Instead, his goal is to synthesize new forms of fast-growing algae that could be used as a cheaper renewal super productive biofuel, or which might help absorb the present overabundance of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, and thus greatly help reduce global warming.

As Dr. Venter envisioned it in an interview with BBC News:

“If we can really get cells to do the production we want, they could help wean us off oil and reverse some of the damage to the environment by capturing carbon dioxide.”

Yet now that the basic process is known and reproducible, someone somewhere will certainly begin applying it to higher life form modulations—in similar fasion to the way it was once before manipulated ages ago.

As molecular biologist Dr. Anthony C. Forster of Vanderbilt University described the new development, “This is akin to Jurassic Park or Frankenstein. I think it will probably be regarded as the dawn of synthetic genomics.”

Molecular geneticist Paul Keim of Northern Arizona University likewise added, “It points to a future in genetic engineering that will involve the combination of many genes and many complex biological functions.”

Already, environmental groups such as Friends of the Earth, have already denounced the created synthetic genome as a “dangerous new technology,” demanding that “Venter should stop all further research until sufficient regulations are in place.”

The fear is that, if a similar such artificial yet more virulent single-cell species were to accidentally get loose, its impact on the rest of the natural living world could have devastating repercussions.

Could the synthetic materials threaten to completely replace the real living matter they mimic? And has this possibility ever happened before?

In truth, we are now heading down the same pathway of genetic manipulation our distant advanced ancestors once took thousands of years ago.

[Copyright 2009, 2010. Joseph Robert Jochmans. All Rights Reserved.]