The Field

by Lynne McTaggart

  Popp’s looks and manner belied his seriousness of purpose. Like Edgar Mitchell, he was a philosopher as much as a scientist. Even as a tiny child he’d been trying to make sense of the world, to find some general solution he could apply to everything in his life. He’d even planned to study philosophy until a teacher persuaded him that physics might be a more fertile territory if he required some single equation that held the key to life. Nevertheless, classical physics, with its assertion of reality as a phenomenon independent of the observer, had left him profoundly suspicious. Popp had read Kant and believed, like the philosopher, that reality was the creation of living systems. The observer must be central to the creation of his world.

  Popp was celebrated for his paper. The Deutsche Krebsforschungszentrum (German Cancer Research Center) in Heidelberg invited him to speak before fifteen of the world’s leading cancer specialists during an eight-day conference on all aspects of cancer. The invitation to speak among such exclusive company was an incredible opportunity, and it increased his prestige on his university campus. He arrived in a brand new suit, the most elegant presence at the colloquium, but he was the poorest speaker, struggling with his English to make his voice heard.

  In his presentation as well as his paper, Popp’s science was unassailable, save for one detail: it assumed that a weak light of 380 nanometres was somehow being produced in the body. To the cancer researchers, this one detail was some kind of a joke. Don’t you think if there were light in the body, they told him, somebody, somewhere would have noticed it by now?

  Only a single researcher, a photochemist from the Madame Curie Institute, working on the carcinogenic activity of molecules, was convinced that Popp was right. She invited Popp to work with her in Paris, but would herself die of cancer before he could join her.

  The cancer researchers challenged Popp to come up with evidence, and he was ready with a counter challenge. If they would help him build the right equipment, then he would show them where the light was coming from.

  Not long after, Popp was approached by a student named Bernhard Ruth, who asked Popp to supervise his work for his PhD dissertation.

  ‘Sure,’ said Popp, ‘if you can show that there is light in the body.’

  Ruth thought it a ridiculous suggestion. Of course, there isn’t light in the body.

  ‘Okay,’ said Popp. ‘So show me evidence that there isn’t light, and you can get your PhD.’

  This meeting was fortuitous for Popp because Ruth happened to be an excellent experimental physicist. He set to work building equipment which would demonstrate, once and for all, that no light was emanating from the body. Within two years he’d produced a machine resembling a big X-ray detector (EMI 9558QA selected typed), which employed a photomultiplier, enabling it to count light, photon by photon. To this day it is still one of the best pieces of equipment in the field. The machine had to be highly sensitive because it would be measuring what Popp assumed would be extremely weak emissions.

  In 1976, they were ready for their first test. They’d grown cucumber seedlings, which are among the easiest of plants to cultivate, and put them in the machine. The photomultiplier picked up that photons, or light waves, of a surprisingly high intensity were being emitted from the seedlings. Ruth was highly sceptical. This had something to do with chlorophyll, he argued – a position Popp shared. They decided that with their next test – some potatoes – they would grow the seedling plants in the dark, so they could not undergo photosynthesis. Nevertheless, when placed in the photomultiplier, these potatoes registered an even higher intensity of light.2 It was impossible that the effect had anything to do with photosynthesis, Popp realized. What’s more, these photons in the living systems he’d examined were more coherent than anything he’d ever seen.

  In quantum physics, quantum coherence means that subatomic particles are able to cooperate. These subatomic waves or particles not only know about each other, but also are highly interlinked by bands of common electromagnetic fields, so that they can communicate together. They are like a multitude of tuning forks that all begin resonating together. As the waves get into phase or synch, they begin acting like one giant wave and one giant subatomic particle. It becomes difficult to tell them apart. Many of the weird quantum effects seen in a single wave apply to the whole. Something done to one of them will affect the others.

  Coherence establishes communication. It’s like a subatomic telephone network. The better the coherence, the finer the telephone network and the more refined wave patterns have a telephone. The end result is also a bit like a large orchestra. All the photons are playing together but as individual instruments that are able to carry on playing individual parts. Nevertheless, when you are listening, it’s difficult to pick out any one instrument.

  What was even more amazing was that Popp was witnessing the highest level of quantum order, or coherence, possible in a living system. Usually, this coherence – called a Bose – Einstein condensate – is only observed in material substances such as superfluids or superconductors studied in the laboratory in very cold places – just a few degrees above absolute zero – and not in the hot and messy environment of a living thing.

  Popp began thinking about light in nature. Light, of course, was present in plants, the source of energy used during photosynthesis. When we eat plant foods, it must be, he thought, that we take up the photons and store them. Say that we consume some broccoli. When we digest it, it is metabolized into carbon dioxide (CO2) and water, plus the light stored from the sun and present in photosynthesis. We extract the CO2 and eliminate the water, but the light, an electromagnetic wave, must get stored. When taken in by the body, the energy of these photons dissipates so that it is eventually distributed over the entire spectrum of electromagnetic frequencies, from the lowest to the highest. This energy becomes the driving force for all the molecules in our body.

  Photons switch on the body’s processes like a conductor launching each individual instrument into the collective sound. At different frequencies they perform different functions. Popp found with experimentation that molecules in the cells would respond to certain frequencies and that a range of vibrations from the photons would cause a variety of frequencies in other molecules of the body. Light waves also answered the question of how the body could manage complicated feats with different body parts instantaneously or do two or more things at once. These ‘biophoton emissions’, as he was beginning to call them, could provide a perfect communication system, to transfer information to many cells across the organism. But the single most important question remained: where were they coming from?

  A particularly gifted student of his talked him into trying an experiment. It is known that when you apply a chemical called ethidium bromide to samples of DNA, the chemical squeezes itself into the middle of the base pairs of the double helix and causes it to unwind. The student suggested that, after applying the chemical, he and Popp try measuring the light coming off the sample. Popp discovered that the more he increased the concentration of the chemical, the more the DNA unwound, but also the stronger the intensity of light. The less he put in, the lower the light emission.3 He also found that DNA was capable of sending out a large range of frequencies and that some frequencies seemed linked to certain functions. If DNA were storing this light, it would naturally emit more light once it was unwound.

  These and other studies demonstrated to Popp that one of the most essential stores of light and sources of biophoton emissions was DNA. DNA must be like the master tuning fork in the body. It would strike a particular frequency and certain other molecules would follow. It was altogether possible, he realized, that he might have stumbled upon the missing link in current DNA theory that could account for perhaps the greatest miracle of all in human biology: the means by which a single cell turns into a fully formed human being.

  One of the greatest mysteries of biology is how we and every other living thing take geometric shape. Modern scientists mostly understand how we have blue eyes or grow t
o six foot one, and even how cells divide. What is far more elusive is the manner by which these cells know exactly where to place themselves in each stage of the building process, so that an arm becomes an arm rather than a leg, as well as the very mechanism which gets these cells to organize and assemble themselves together into something resembling a three-dimensional human form.

  The usual scientific explanation has to do with the chemical interactions between molecules and with DNA, the coiled double helix of genetic coding that holds a blueprint of the body’s protein and amino acids. Each DNA helix or chromosome – and the identical twenty-six pairs exist in every one of the thousand million million cells in your body4 – contains a long chain of nucleotides, or bases, of four different components (shortened to ATCG) arranged in a unique order in every human body. The most favored idea is that there exists a genetic ‘program’ of genes operating collectively to determine shape, or, in the view of neo-Darwinists such as Richard Dawkins, that ruthless genes, like Chicago thugs, have powers to create form and that we are ‘survival machines’ – robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes.5

  This theory promotes DNA as the Renaissance man of the human body – architect, master builder and central engine room – whose tool for all this amazing activity is a handful of the chemicals which make proteins. The modern scientific view is that DNA somehow manages to build the body and spearhead all its dynamic activities just by selectively turning off and on certain segments, or genes, whose nucleotides, or genetic instructions, select certain RNA molecules, which in turn select from a large alphabet of amino acids the genetic ‘words’ which create specific proteins. These proteins supposedly are able to both build the body and to switch on and off all the chemical processes inside the cell which ultimately control the running of the body.

  Undoubtedly proteins do play a major role in bodily function. Where the Darwinists fall short is in explaining exactly how DNA knows when to orchestrate this and also how these chemicals, all blindly bumping into each other, can operate more or less simultaneously. Each cell undergoes, on average, some 100,000 chemical reactions per second – a process that repeats itself simultaneously across every cell in the body. At any given second, billions of chemical reactions of one sort or another occur. Timing must be exquisite, for if any one of the individual chemical processes in all the millions of cells in the body is off by a fraction, humans would blow themselves up in a matter of seconds. But what the rank and file among geneticists have not addressed is that if DNA is the control room, what is the feedback mechanism which enables it to synchronize the activities of individual genes and cells to carry out systems in unison? What is the chemical or genetic process that tells certain cells to grow into a hand and not a foot? And which cell processes happen at which time?

  If all these genes are working together like some unimaginably big orchestra, who or what is the conductor? And if all these processes are due to simple chemical collision between molecules, how can it work anywhere near rapidly enough to account for the coherent behaviours that live beings exhibit every minute of their lives?

  When a fertilized egg starts to multiply and produce daughter cells, each begins adopting a structure and function according to its eventual role in the body. Although every daughter contains the same chromosomes with the same genetic information, certain types of cells immediately ‘know’ to use different genetic information to behave differently from others and so certain genes must ‘know’ that it is their turn to be played, rather than the rest of the pack. Furthermore, somehow these genes know how many of each type of cell must be produced in the right place. Each cell, furthermore, needs to be able to know about its neighboring cells to work out how it fits into the overall scheme. This requires nothing less than an ingenious method of communication between cells at a very early stage of the embryo’s development and the same sophistication every moment of our lives.

  Geneticists appreciate that cell differentiation utterly depends on cells knowing how to differentiate early on and then somehow remembering that they are different and passing on this vital piece of information to subsequent generations of cells. At the moment, scientists shrug their shoulders as to how this might all be accomplished, particularly at such a rapid pace.

  Dawkins himself admits: ‘Exactly how this eventually leads to the development of a baby is a story which will take decades, perhaps centuries, for embryologists to work out. But it is a fact that it does.’6

  In other words, like policemen desperate to close a case, scientists have arrested the most likely suspect without bothering with the painstaking process of gathering proof. The details of this absolute certainty, of how proteins might accomplish this all on their own, are left decidedly imprecise.7 As for the orchestration of cell processes, biochemists never actually ask the question.8

  British biologist Rupert Sheldrake has mounted one of the most constant and vociferous challenges to this approach, arguing that gene activation and proteins no more explain the development of form than delivering building materials to a building site explains the structure of the house built there. Current genetic theory also doesn’t explain, he says, how a developing system can self-regulate, or grow normally in the course of development if a part of the system is added or removed, and doesn’t explain how an organism regenerates – replacing missing or damaged structures.9

  In a rush of fevered inspiration while at an ashram in India, Sheldrake worked out his hypothesis of formative causation, which states that the forms of self-organizing living things – everything from molecules and organisms to societies and even entire galaxies – are shaped by morphic fields. These fields have a morphic resonance – a cumulative memory – of similar systems through cultures and time, so that species of animals and plants ‘remember’ not only how to look but also how to act. Rupert Sheldrake uses the term ‘morphic fields’ and an entire vocabulary of his own making to describe the self-organizing properties of biological systems, from molecules to bodies to societies. ‘Morphic resonance’, is, in his view, ‘the influence of like upon like through space and time’. He believes these fields (and he thinks there are many of them) are different from electromagnetic fields because they reverberate across generations with an inherent memory of the correct shape and form.10 The more we learn, the easier it is for others to follow in our footsteps.

  Sheldrake’s theory is beautifully and simply worked out. Nevertheless, by his own admission, it doesn’t explain the physics of how this might all be possible, or how all these fields might store this information.11

  In biophoton emissions, Popp believed that he had an answer to the question of morphogenesis as well as ‘gestaltbildung’ – cell coordination and communication – which only could occur in a holistic system, with one central orchestrator. Popp showed in his experiments that these weak light emissions were sufficient to orchestrate the body. The emissions had to be of low intensity because these communications were occurring on a quantum level, and higher intensities would be felt only in the world of the large.

  When Popp began researching this area, he realized he was standing on the shoulders of many others, whose work suggested a field of electromagnetic radiation which somehow guides the growth of the cellular body. It was the Russian scientist Alexander Gurwitsch who had to be credited with first discovering what he called ‘mitogenetic radiation’ in onion roots in the 1920s. Gurwitsch postulated that a field, rather than chemicals alone, was probably responsible for the structural formation of the body. Although Gurwitsch’s work was largely theoretical, later researchers were able to show that a weak radiation from tissues stimulates cell growth in neighboring tissues of the same organism.12

  Other early studies of this phenomenon – now repeated by many scientists – were carried out in the 1940s by neuroanatomist Harold S. Burr from Yale University, who studied and measured electrical fields around living things, specifically salamanders. Burr discovered that salamanders possessed an
energy field shaped like an adult salamander, and that this blueprint even existed in an unfertilized egg.13

  Burr also discovered electrical fields around all sorts of organisms, from molds, to salamanders and frogs, to humans,14 Changes in the electrical charges appeared to correlate with growth, sleep, regeneration, light, water, storms, the development of cancer – even the waxing and waning of the moon.15 For instance, in his experiments with plant seedlings, he discovered electrical fields which resembled the eventual adult plant.

  Another of the early interesting experiments was carried out in the early 1920s by Elmer Lund, a researcher at the University of Texas, on hydras, the tiny aquatic animal possessing up to twelve heads capable of regenerating. Lund (and later others) found that he could control regeneration by applying tiny currents through the hydra’s body. By using a current strong enough to override the organism’s own electrical force, Lund could cause a head to form where a tail should be. In later studies in the 1950s, G. Marsh and H. W. Beams discovered that if voltages were high enough, even a flatworm would begin reorganizing – the head would turn into a tail and vice versa. Yet other studies have demonstrated that very young embryos, shorn of their nervous system, and grafted onto a healthy embryo, will actually survive, like a Siamese twin, on the back of the healthy embryos. Still other experiments have shown that regeneration can even be reversed by passing a small current through a salamander’s body.16

  Orthopaedist Robert O. Becker mainly engaged in work concerning attempts to stimulate or speed up regeneration in humans and animals. However, he has also published many accounts of experiments in the Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery demonstrating a ‘current of injury’ – where animals such as salamanders with amputated limbs develop a change of charge at the site of the stump, whose voltage climbs until the new limb appears.17