Letter to the editor

Sirs:

Allow me to correct an error in your cover article of May 20, “Resonance and harmonics in woods of North America.” In ref. #20 to my 2007 paper, “Dissonance between chromosomal and mitochrondrial DNA;” the wood under discussion was Picea sitchensis, not Picea engelmanni.

Also, the article refers to the “late” author and Nobel laureate, reiterating a persistent rumor of my death. The rumor, though utterly unfounded, arose from the blanket removal of my name from all U.S. publications after 2008. In fact, your footnote is the first publication of my name since that date, and I welcome this opportunity to explain this long absence to American readers.

What I’m about to tell you here is a ghost story. Yes, a Nobel laureate telling a ghost story. Don’t laugh yet! First, think on the role of ghosts throughout history and literature. The word ghost comes from an Anglo-Saxon word for spirit, soul or breath. Most if not all religions past and present are based on some form of ghost phenomena — ancestor worship or nature spirits or holy ghost – that promise or imply immortality. Shakespeare is unashamedly full of ghosts, and even that prince of skeptics, Mark Twain, gave more than lip service to them, tongue in cheek nothwithstanding. Ghost armies have haunted battle grounds from ancient Assyria to Gallipoli and Vietnam. Indeed, people have been seeing ghosts since humans invented themselves. Whether or not this reflects a genetic predisposition to lurid imaginings has long been an open question for those bold enough to ask.

Science, of course, has never countenanced the existence of ghosts; e.g., how do you replicate a ghost manifestation? Scientifically, therefore, ghosts were dismissed and scorned as superstition, hysteria, paranormal phenomena, hallucinations, spiritualism, indigestion, etc. The last thing a reputable scientist would ever do is explore the possible existence of ghosts, much less admit an interest in them. Some of us, however, had that interest thrust upon us.

This was back when smashing protons and accelerating particles were the latest thing in the search for a Unified Theory of the universe. There’s probably at least a paragraph or two in current science texts about the great Failed Experiment of the CERN particle accelerator in 2008. In case you don’t remember, it was a seven billion dollar machine that some people said could destroy the entire planet by creating a singularity or a black hole, but when they plugged it in and started it up with world-wide fanfare, the thing shorted out and never did get started. That was the official story, anyway. I was there. And what happened was so unexpected and so bizarre and so frightening, and most of all so unscientific, that no one ever spoke of it again, at least not publicly.

I don’t pretend the slightest knowledge of particle physics, you understand. My own field was, and is, genetic chemistry, particularly the role of mitochondrial DNA in dominant and recessive inheritance. I was only present at the CERN debacle by serendipity, having run into an old friend and colleague at an international genetics conference in Geneva. Following my lecture he invited me to the start-up of the CERN accelerator. He had worked on its design for six years and was eager as a young pup to show it off.

It’s just as well, probably, that the start-up was a kind of dry run. They were just going to zip some particles through the seven-mile tunnel at half speed or less, to make sure their systems worked. There were no media there; the big celebration wasn’t scheduled until late that fall. There were only the physicists and tekkies and math nerds – and me, truly a fish out of water. No one was expecting much to happen, just watch the monitors, make sure the valves and baffles worked, and pop a few champagne corks. So there wasn’t much excitement or anticipation, just the usual tension when you plug something in for the first time. And for a few minutes all went as designed, or so they said. I mean, I couldn’t see the particles they said were racing round the tunnel, but everyone seemed pleased so apparently the thing was working.

Then, as if a fog settled over us suddenly, everyone went quiet. In the silence I distinctly heard a child laugh. The electrically charged air crackled and I smelled the unmistakable odor of wet wool and manure. For one fleeting, unbelievable fraction of a second, what appeared to be a living, breathing wooly mammoth lumbered toward us from the wall of the tunnel. On its back was a tiny child, laughing and clutching the matted, hairy mane. Then the whole cavern went black and silent, punctuated only by a distinctly American voice saying “Oh fuck!” in the depths behind us.

When the klieg lights came on, no one in the place would look anyone else in the eye. Clearly people thought no one else had seen or heard or smelled the same thing, but from their stunned faces I was certain they’d all experienced exactly what I had. The difference was that I’d had a similar experience before, examining textile fibers from Urumchi mummies when someone switched on a mass spectrometer in the lab next door. I did not know at the time – nor, as far as I can discover, did anyone else present there – that in constructing the CERN accelerator, excavators had uncovered fossil remains of several mammoths of various ages along with a cache of human bones and worked tools. This discovery had been kept quiet so as not to delay construction of the accelerator. I only found out about it through persistent questioning of both the excavators and the CERN directors who’d suppressed it.

I described the Urumchi event, and explained my resonance theory and attempts to replicate the frequencies that allow us to “read” or perceive residual or fossil DNA as a kind of holographic ghost of its original form. Once the CERN team understood the theory, they almost forgot the original purpose of the accelerator. So although a few “breakthroughs” in particle physics have been announced over the years, the real research being done with the machine is systematic “ghost-raising” on a grand scale. Until recently, that research has all been done in strict secrecy for fear of its repercussions, both political and social.

In the United States, the very mention of these discoveries has been condemned as blasphemy during decades of fundamentalist frenzy and isolationist policy. Like the whole issue of stem cell research, misinformation and deliberate falsehoods have triggered the worst and most violent public reactions. My name was, as I said, deleted from all publications, and I moved to Switzerland. Europe, untainted by the mass hysteria of the U.S., will soon be announcing some transformative discoveries, among them confirmation that “ghosts” and their intimations of an afterlife result from interactions between living and dead DNA fragments at certain wave frequencies.(1)

In a nutshell, what this means is that nerve cells for multiple senses can tune in or resonate with fossil DNA so closely that our perceptions reconstruct or “resurrect” the entire organism. Although the resurrected entity is as ephemeral and insubstantial as a hologram, its image, odor, sound and even touch are no less vivid. In development now are nanomechanisms for recording these phenomena.

Just as exciting are emerging resonance techniques for resurrecting particular events and sequences from source DNA. Such one-way communication with the past has already yielded valuable clues – and some startling revelations — about our heritage and destiny. Based on some of these insights, Europe and Africa have made great progress in land use, water policy, energy, and conservation, leaving the United States sadly far behind in self-destructive isolation.
My hope here is to dispel the deceptive myth prevalent in America that the CERN accelerator project is an infernal machine for time travel to past or future. While the machine may provide fleeting glimpses of past lives it cannot do so for the future, absent DNA samples from future organisms, an obvious impossibility. As a colleague points out, future generations may well resurrect our DNA, but that raises philosophical goosebumps inappropriate for this letter.

Footnote:

(1) The religious implications of these discoveries are beyond the scope of this letter, though it must be noted that the pragmatism of many old world societies has simply incorporated scientific revelations into a generalized reverence for creation, however it may be manifest.