﻿ What is Life; A Non Particle View | Canadian College of Homeopathic Medicine - Toronto

CCHM Video Showcase: What is Life; A Non Particle View

Oyang: Hello I'm Oyang Teng and with me is Larry Hecht, Editor of
21st. Century Science and Technology Magazine, who just wrote an article
entitled "New Evidence for a Non-Particle View of Life." The prevailing
view in science today, sometimes known as reductionism, is that life
results from the combination of non-living molecules get together the right
mix of amino acids and other basic ingredients, put them under the right
conditions and they will spontaneously come together into a primitive
living organism, from which more developed organisms can evolve. Such a
view has never been demonstrated and indeed every attempt to carry out such
an experiment has failed.

What has been recently presented as the creation of a primitive
living form or proto-living form such as DNA or a virus, always requires
the presence of another living form. No one has ever taken a collection of
non-living molecules and turned them into life.

An alternative view known as vital-ism, argues that living organisms
contain a force, a life principle distinct from the matter that makes them
up. Life is the combination of the right organic molecules with this living
force but no experiment has ever detected such a living force. Or
demonstrated that it is present within the living organism and absent in
the same collection of non-living matter.

What is life then? Today, we are going to examine a series of
experiments that shed new light on this question. Not by answering it, but
by raising some provocative questions that will help us to formulate for
ourselves, what it is we mean by life. The experiments were carried out by
Luc Montagnier, the leading French Virologist who won the Nobel Prize in
1983 for his discovery of the HIV virus. Among the fascinating results
observed by Montagnier and his team were the emission of low frequency
electromagnetic waves from bacterial DNA sequences and the apparent ability
of these waves to organize nucleotides, the raw material of DNA into new
bacterial DNA by mediation of structures within water.

By revisiting the question of the interplay of radiation including
atmospheric and implicitly cosmic radiation with life, the work has
revolutionary implications for biology and our fundamental view of the
universe. Before Larry and I get into our discussion of this subject, we
are going to present to you an illustrated summary of what Montagnier and
his collaborators did in these experiments and what were their results.

Doctor Luc Montagnier first noticed the remarkable interaction of
bacteria and water ten years ago, while studying a small bacteria known to
be a frequent companion of HIV. A mycoplasma pirum. Like HIV, this bacteria
loves human white blood cells, also known as lymphocytes. Starting with a
culture of human lymphocytes infected with the bacteria, Montagnier then
passed the culture through filters with pores small enough to prevent
passage of the bacteria and lymphocytes. What passed through the filter was
the fluid in which the bacteria had been cultured, minus the bacteria and
lymphocytes that had been filtered out.

Further tests on this fluid filtrate showed that it was indeed
negative for signs of the mycoplasma pirum bacteria. Then a curious thing
happened. When the filtrate containing no bacteria was incubated with a new
batch of bacteria free human lymphocytes, the original mycoplasma bacteria
was found to fully regenerate within the new lymphocytes. Where had this
bacteria come from? The evidence pointed to an exciting possibility that
somehow the original mycoplasma bacteria had transmitted into the structure
of the fluid medium itself, the information needed to regenerate itself at
a later stage.

But that wasn't all. Next came the big surprise. After multiple
dilutions with highly purified water the apparently sterile filtrates were
found to produce low frequency electromagnetic waves which were detected
after the filtrates were placed inside a copper coil attached to an
amplifier. Waves in the frequency range of 500 to 3,000 hertz, within what
is considered the low end of the radio frequency spectrum, were observed in
the dilutions of many different kinds of filtrates in solutions that had
been infected with bacteria and viruses in the plasma of the blood of
humans infected by these same agents. And in the diluted filtrates of DNA
extracted directly from these bacteria and viruses.

One other important condition was required for the emission of such
waves. The presence of an electromagnet background radiation of about 7
hertz which corresponds to the approximate frequency of the natural
resonating cavity formed between the surface of the Earth and it's
electrically charged ionosphere, known as the Schumann resonance. This
frequency could also be produced artificially in the laboratory. In further
experimentation Montagnier showed that different dilutions of the same
filtrates could communicate with each other in a form of cross-talk.

To test this, a sample of non-emitting dilution was placed alongside
a sample of emitting dilution of the same species. The non-emitting sample
appeared to silence the emitting sample. Indicating that some type of
electromagnetic signal does indeed emanate from the seemingly non-emitting
sample. But which, perhaps because it is too weak, is not recorded directly
by the copper coil. In another strange twist, when the now silenced sample
was further diluted, an electromagnetic signal reappeared.

We have already seen that species specific electromagnetic signals
emanating from the water of the diluted filtrate seemed to be connected to
a species specific imprint in the structure of the water itself. The next
phase of experimentation showed this in an even more dramatic way. A
fragment of DNA from the HIV virus was used as the source. A solution
containing a number of copies of the DNA fragment was filtered and then
diluted until an electromagnetic signal was obtained as in the previous
experiments. Then a further filtration and dilution was carried out on both
this sample as well as on a sample of pure water. Both samples were then
placed inside a copper coil which was inside a box of new metal, which has
the property of blocking out external low frequency electromagnetic fields.

A low intensity seven hertz electric current was fed through the
copper coil to generate the stimulating background radiation. After 18
hours, the tube containing pure water was removed and found to emit its own
electromagnetic signal. But, the most remarkable step came next. The
organic ingredients normally used for making copies of DNA were then added
to the two containing pure water. Normally, for these raw materials to be
able to assemble multiple copies of DNA, at least one strand of the DNA to
be copied needs to be present to serve as a template. In this case, none
was added and the pure water sample with the added ingredients of
nucleotides primers and polymerase was subjected to the normal cycle of
heat exposure used in the process of DNA replication. The results were
astounding. Not only was the DNA fragment produced within this sample, but
it was 98% identical in sequence to the original DNA fragment of HIV. How
is this regeneration from water possible?

Just as with the pure water sample, in all these experiments with
bacteria, viruses and their DNA, the emitting filtrates are so highly
diluted as to have almost no likelihood of containing the original genetic
material. To account for the measured effects, Montagnier has adopted a
hypothesis developed by a number of researchers into the anomalous
properties of water. Namely, that in a liquid state water is not a random
agglomeration of molecules, but rather the chains of water molecules can
constantly form coherent nano-structures which may be both the products of,
and the sources for, electromagnetic resonance phenomenon.

While Montagnier's experiments are not yet conclusive, they are
nevertheless consistent with the rigorous experimental approach that goes
back to such figures as Alexander Gurwitsch. Who had shown, in the 1920's
that the emission of electromagnetic radiation in the ultraviolet range was
involved in the process of cell mitosis.

[09:40: double narration commences]

More recent work by Fritz Popp and colleagues has confirmed that the
source of this UV spectrum light which he named bio-photons, is the DNA in
the cell nucleus and that bio-photon emissions correlate with known
biological rhythms of diurnal, lunar and other [inaudible 09:54]. There are many important questions posed by Montagnier's work so far. Further
experimentation and further refinement of the instruments involved must
obviously be carried out to begin to answer these questions.

A broad view of the results of Montagnier, however, touch upon a most
fundamental question as to the nature of life. The principle first
elaborated by Francesco Redi in the 17th century and later emphasized by
Vladimir Vernadski that all life comes from life has never been shown to be
violated in any experiment to date. But, in discussing the principle it is
usual to envision some material process such as egg and sperm, spore or
cell division as the responsible agent. In the results reported here
however, the life principle appears to be transmitted at least in part, not
by the immediate presence of the material substance,

Larry: Yes.

Oyang: ...but immediately in connection with the signal detectable as
electromagnetic in origin. And seemingly connected to broader
electromagnetic characteristics of the environment. The further elaboration
of the mechanisms whether by formation of nano structures..

Larry: Yes.

Oyang: ...and water as suggested. Or perhaps, by additional means
remains to be worked out.

[11:15 double narration ends]

What is clear is that the results require an extension of that
usually limited conception of life. The principle of all life from life
still holds, but only on the condition that we adopt a non-particle
conception of life.

So, Larry, when I first read about this, it resonated in one sense
because there is as we mentioned this is ...

Larry: Resonated that's a good word.

Oyang: Right, exactly. In one sense there is a shocking element to
this. But in another sense it is something which harkens back to the kind
of experimental work that we saw with Gurwitsch and others. The shocking
element is that it is an in your face kind of demonstration that life is
not restricted to the presumed kind of simply biochemical view, the
biochemical construction.

Larry: Yes.

Oyang: Of and infinitely, continuing complexity of parts coming
together. And if we can only get smaller and smaller and find those
fundamental parts, that will eventually be able to put Humpty Dumpty back
together again and get life in the large. Here you have got clearly
something which is not only something which expresses an interaction,
right? The idea that you have that...

Larry: Yes.

Oyang: ...bacterial or DNA, bacteria, DNA, but in an intimate
association with that class that supposedly other alternative class of
phenomena that we call radiation.

Larry: Yes.

Oyang: But, both are necessary, what you see as the outcome, is a kind
of intersection...

Larry: Yes.

Oyang: ...of a process.

Larry: And then of course, here we have a demonstration assuming we
don't have an experimental error somewhere, we have a demonstration pretty
hard to deny of radio frequency, low frequency radiation interaction
between bacterial cells, or even the sliced up DNA pieces of the bacteria.
But then we also know of the interactions of, with cosmic radiation, with
gamma radiation, with what we call nuclear radiation. All of these
interactions have a relationship to life. We can isolate here in the
laboratory, a particular thing. This is the whole broadband and what is
radiating? This is something we haven't probably the work of Popp which you
mentioned in the narration. We have the whole electromagnetic spectrum.
There must be something going on everywhere, including sound also.

Here we have something in the range of the, they say, the dominant
signals around 1,000 hertz.

Oyang: Okay.

Larry: Which that actually if that were audio, that would be a high
"C", double high "C". Below it there is a range he says he detects between
about 500 and 3,000 hertz. Then we have light frequencies, way up there
considerably higher that have been detected. We have known interaction with
nuclear radiation, with electrons. All of these things can be looked at as
wave phenomena. So, we've got a whole array. What is it doing to the
organism? What is the organism doing with it?

At a certain point the separation, that's separation your mind has to
break down to really get to the next step on this thing.

Oyang: The separation between organism and maybe, environment?

Larry: Yeah. The part in the whole.

Oyang: Right.

Larry: We've reduced the part down to "okay this living organism", and
then you want to take the living organism apart and you have these pieces,
you have the DNA, by the way is just a somewhat overemphasized part the
whole deal.

Oyang: The emphasis on DNA as the ...

Larry: DNA alone is an important piece of things but that is not
everything either. Then it appears in Popp's work, with light radiation
which is the extension of Gurwitsch's work back in the '20's. You seem to
be able to isolate the DNA as the source of the signal. And that is
certainly intimated here too. So, the structure of the DNA, the emphasis
is always on the biochemical, the certain amount of geometry considered in
the thing.

What else is it doing? Is it just the chemical signaler? Now it's
putting out light, receiving light. It's putting out low frequency radio
and receiving it. We don't know the whole of things. We have always tried
to, the whole emphasis has been to try and reduce biology, even cognition,
to the laws of physics and chemistry.

Oyang: Right.

Larry: It really has to be the other way around. The higher domain
defines the lower domain. The laws of physics and chemistry are incomplete.

Oyang: It is interesting, you point out Gurwitsch's work and then the
extension by Popp on these so called bio-photons or emission in the
ultraviolet range. Then now Montagnier's work showing emission in the radio
range. As you point out, you have implicitly between that the whole
spectrum, right?

Larry: Yes, what else is there?

Oyang: You have photo synthesis in the visible range.

Larry: Right.

Oyang: It really does give you, as far as saying, "let's redefine
physics from the standpoint of biology", minimally, right? Then you already
have it seems like the raw material to begin even redefining what we mean
by that range of radiation.

Larry: Yes.

Oyang: It is functionally and qualitatively, they have this, the
different radiations have different qualitative characteristics, which are
not expressed just in the abiotic kind of instrumentation that has been
used to define them.

Larry: Absolutely. I think we will find the famous paradoxes, the
fascinating wave particle paradox. These sorts of things that come up.
That's an indication of incompleteness when you get to things like that,
that stick there and they stick and they stick for a hundred years. There
is something missing. You have to go above that, go behind it.

Oyang: Right. You point out..

Larry: You go around back and see what is really ticking there.

Oyang: Right.

Larry: You are going to find, your model of the thing is all wrong.
Your conception even of what it is, it's something much larger.

Oyang: You point that out in the article in terms of what Schrodinger
tried to do.

Larry: Yeah.

Oyang: As a physicist who was really dealing with the wave particle
paradox, as it's called. To say, "how would a physicist define life?" in
the context of all of this work that was happening in the early part of the
20th century. That had run up against, you might say it really did run up
against the limits of abiotic physics to see that you had on the one hand
phenomena that seemed characteristically particulate and corpuscular and
phenomena, the other hand that seemed irreducibly continuous wave like and
continuous. As you point out, he wasn't able to resolve because frankly he
was operating within the wrong phase, space.

Larry: Right.

Oyang: He was trying to take life and bring it to what he knew and
what he was competent in.

Larry: He helped to define in physics.

Oyang: Right.

Larry: But, got stuck in his own box.

Oyang: Yeah.

Larry: Well that's that famous paper of 1946, Shrodinger's paper "What
is Life?", I think it was 46. Which defines an exciting question, but it
doesn't get out, well he gets trapped in this entropy thing. Well life is
obviously not entropic, but he ends up, it's too much of compromise and he
ends up with entropy rules but here is a local exception to it.

Oyang: Yeah.

Larry: Right? And it's an exception. That is generally, that is still
what is widely accepted because it is permitted. It is important to get
into the history of all of this. One thing to write, Montagnier having to
go to China.

Oyang: Right.

Larry: And he is probably happy to go, but he is from France. He is
working in a European environment. People have such a reaction to this
thing. I have seen it, I have put this out amongst certain people,
professionals in this field.

Oyang: The article.

Larry: Yeah, yeah. First just to not even mine, just what he had done.
People just have the heebie jeebies over this thing. They go wild. They go
ballistic if you just raise the question. I had a long dialogue with
somebody that found out after 10 or 12 e-mails, back and forth. The fellow
hadn't even read the original article and he was giving me all of these
objections to it.

Oyang: What are the objections? What is it that is so scary?

Larry: It is verboten to bring in this question of radiation.
Gurwitsch already faced this. Gurwitsch went through-, the Rockefeller
Institute mobilized to shut down any attempt to pursue Gurwitsch's work. We
had one of our colleagues had an interview, talked to the guy much later,
in the late 80's or early 90's who had done it. Who in 1938, who had ruled
that Gurwitsch wasn't to be pursued. Basically admitted then, 40 years
later that there was no-, 50 years later, there was no evidence to say what
was being said against Gurwitsch. It was just ruled out.

The same thing happened, there was work being done in America too, in
this direction. That direction of things was shut down. You weren't to go
in the direction, because what is the fundamental issue is, reductionism is
a state of mind. This is, it's [restitulionism]. It's the
conception, is if man is something higher than a bunch of mud, then that'd
the Republican principle too, isn't it.

Are we just a bunch of mud or clay that's been packed together into
something? The modern way of saying that is, you're reducible to molecules
that obey the laws of physics and chemistry.

Well, sorry buddy. The laws of physics and chemistry are going
to be re-defined and we're going to have fun doing it when we get to a
higher understanding of life and the interaction of life with the universe.

Oyang: The funny thing is that they say 'Yes, life is subject to the
laws of physics and chemistry, except where there are exceptions.' Right?

Larry: Right.

Oyang: As they pointed out with the [Enturo] principle
which is, to the extent that certain experimental evidence has to be
accepted, it will be accepted as an exception and so you have a strange
case of a science of exceptions instead of recognizing that the universe is
fundamentally negentropic or anti-entropic and that ought to re-define the
way that people then go back and look at the so-called fundamentals of

If it's not dismissed outright then it's considered that this is a
funny little exception that has to be boxed in. I think one thing that's
interesting, as was mentioned before, is that the effect that Montagnier
was studying seemed to be dependent on a so-called external electro-
magnetic activation or stimulation.

Larry: Yes.

Oyang: Something which could possibly be related to the Schumann
resonances of the surface of the Earth ...

Larry: Determine Earth's frequency.

Oyang: ... and the ionosphere, which the ionosphere itself is in
intimate connection with solar and cosmic radiation.

Montagnier also points out that a similar frequency range as is
produced in this kind of biospheric resonating cavity of the whole Earth is
produced in higher organisms like ourselves in our central nervous
system, which gave me the idea of a kind of a nested relationship.
On the one hand you're taking some relationship which may exist with
respect to this microbial organism in the biosphere as a whole and
evolutionary processes are able to encapsulate that, perhaps, in a higher
organism. Either way you look at it, it's clear that the question of this
broader so-called environmental aspect to what's happening in the small.

Larry: Yes.

Oyang: It forces you to recognize that really you are dealing with,
even if you can't account for all the principles at the time, you are
dealing with sensitivities to processes which are on a much larger scale.

Larry: Right, and then you've got the question even within biology.
What is an organism? If you have this communication which includes this
wave-like communication of multiplicity of frequencies. Here you're dealing
with very simple things, relatively simple things, the bacteria. Then you
get organisms that are themselves collectivities, like the syphonophores,
things that are collections of separate, actually can go off and be
separate organisms and then can come together and function as a whole.

Then you have us. Of course, you have mammals and then you have human
beings. We're different, but biologically speaking something that is a
collectivity of many, many different kinds of cells, operating together. If
those cells are doing this signaling and this signaling is amongst them and
also to the outside, and then of course, there's all our 10:1 ratio of
commensal bacteria which is always a fascinating thing too. They're in
there with us.

Oyang: You mean the fact that we've got ten times as many bacterial
cells in our body than we do of our own cells.

Larry: Yeah, and they're talking to each other too. There must be some very interesting signal going on there in this whole collection of things.

It really adds a new dimension to well what [Debraullie] and Schrodinger were interested in. The idea of every piece of matter
also having a wave-like property. It isn't much more complex wave-like
property than you can write in that equation.

Oyang: Yeah. Polyphonic probably is something that that they maybe
hadn't considered at the level that it needs to be.

Larry: Yeah, at the very least it's a Beethoven symphony.

Oyang: Yeah, if only Beethoven had gone into bio-physics?

Larry: Yeah, well that's what you need.

Oyang: Yeah. The other thing that strikes me about the experiments
here. There's this question of water. The mediation through water. In one
sense there's another area which maybe is not so surprising, given the fact
that we know that cell cytoplasm which, for a long time, I think maybe
people still have this implicit idea that the cell is just a bag of water.

Larry: Oh, no.

Oyang: But it's very structured. From that we already know that
you're dealing with a material substrate here, which is susceptible of a very high level of organization and it's now being, in these experiments in the test tubes with the diluted filtrates, it seems like you have an echo of that kind of organization, maybe on a slightly larger scale and now connected to this very distinct emission of low frequency electro-magnetic radiation.

Larry: What's beautiful about it is the ambiguity of it all. The very
thing that people react against. You know there's there instinctive
reaction. There are levels to it. I was speaking before of the...there is
an ideological level to this thing of this insistence on reductionism. It's
the Huxley, it's the Thomas Huxley program within biology that's been defined, literally, defined within the British Empire since the 19th century, but there are other levels to the thing. There's this natural resistance to people who think they have it all figured out. It's upsetting to them, as people get older, they've mastered a lot of things and they don't want to be challenged any further. You get a lot of that with these kind of things too.

It's better to stay alive, to use a word, and be attuned to the
exciting nature of these new things. This is just fun. We're just
scratching the surface here. What we've got here, we're just defining a new
problem. It's got to be worked out. Maybe some of it will turn out to be
error, the whole thing is in error. Parts of it may turn out differently.
We'll try different things with it. Find out what's going on there.

Everything begins with something that doesn't quite fit. Or it
began, as you pointed out in the narration, it began with this culturing of
a bacterial, culturing these mycoplasma from what appeared to be a sterile
solution. How did that happen? We don't know.

One of my immediate thoughts since I've been looking in this
direction, on this interesting, fascinating question of the bacterial
pleomorphs. The distinction between bacteria and virus, well before we had
electron microscopes, was originally defined as filterable and non-
filterable. That is, how small could they get, and there was a fascinating
famous paper in 1948 I think it was by Emmy Klieneberger someone who'd come
out of [inaudible 30:01] and had to leave Germany and ended up at the Lister Institute who wrote a paper called "Filterable Forms of Bacteria."

Well, the upshot of this thing was it was a pulling together of work
that had been going on for many decades and then her own follow-up work on
it, demonstrating that bacteria go through life cycles. You could prove it
and you could culture them in different stages of these life cycles
including some that are very small. It occurred to me, well, perhaps you're
re-culturing a pleomorphic form that had passed through the filter.

Oyang: Something that before took on a form that allowed it to pass

Larry: Yeah. Well there was a control for that. There was an attempt
to use these PCR techniques. DNA amplification techniques.

We presume. But what are the limitations of that? We don't
know. We presume that if the DNA is there we're going to find it, we're
going to culture and amplify it out of ... prove that it's there. But, I
don't know, maybe it's hiding in a lymphocyte or something.

Until you take experimental work like this and people do it and other
people do it, not from a standpoint, don't give it the treatment they gave
cold fusion. It's got to be disproven so a bunch of people did some phony
experiments and said, "Oh, it didn't work for us." No. Take it on as a
really fascinating challenge and look at what's going on there.

Every step of the way I think some new things are going to be

Oyang: Right. There is, as you mentioned, the question of disease.
That's one of the things that's obviously tantalizing about this kind of

Larry: Yes.

Oyang: If you find sort of a new degree of freedom in our ability to
interact in specific ways, in precise ways with living systems, then you've
got an opportunity to be able to address things which seem intractable or
seem totally mysterious, as diseases in a totally new way. That's partly I think going to have to come from the idea that research is going to have to be taken into space, for example. You really need to push the boundaries of the radiative conditions, the whole array of possible processes that are interacting on the system that you are studying, but here you've got a case where perhaps, as Montagnier points out, there are certain diseases right now which either are hard to identify in terms of their source, or simply hard to treat.

Larry: Yes.

Oyang: That now ...

Larry: If we could get in there with radio frequencies what a
wonderful breakthrough that would be.

Oyang: Right.

Larry: Yeah, and of course this is the man who discovered the AIDS
virus, who's been digging into the AIDS virus ever since. He's not
convinced that's the whole story. AIDS is the virus involved, but he thinks
there are other things involved. I think, the last time I heard him
speaking on this he thinks the mycoplasma. In fact one of the reasons he
was looking at the mycoplasma. These are very small organisms.

Mycoplasma, without cell walls. These pleomorphs by the way,
also one of their features is some of them get into cell wall deficient
forms. So, these things are very small. These things can get inside
cells. These things can hide. LaRouche called for a program back
when the AIDS scare back in the early to mid '80s when this thing was
burgeoning, to mobilize the capabilities of our physics labs, the
capabilities of our national labs. He described as optical bio physics. The
same capabilities which we are looking at from the standpoint of creating a
beam defense, when LaRouche had made the proposal for a U.S./Soviet joint
effort to develop a beam defense, to neutralize the danger of imminent
rapid response nuclear warfare that you couldn't stop.

What he was proposing was mobilize that same capability to an all out
science driver program for use of the electro-magnetic spectrum. In the
same way that we are talking about it now ...

Oyang: Exactly.

Larry: ... with a slightly different feature towards [inaudible 34:26] but that was of course the first thing that popped into my mind when I first saw this and I saw what Montagnier was doing to develop that capability. Then of course, it gets into these fascinating, broader questions of what we're
dealing with. Disease is going to be around a long time.

It's there because it's a part of the dynamic process of
evolutionary life. It involves this question of symbiogenesis. The things
that are adapted so well adapted to us and are with us and are in us all
the time. We are, the disease process is not simply some invading organism.
It has to be some distorted state.

Of the whole totality of an organism in its relationship to a totality of environment. That's where you get into these things, that so far we tend to know only statistically but these questions of why diseases tend to come at certain times. What is their relationship to seasonal cycles that must be, of electromagnetic radiation that must be working on a solar system and even galactic scale. Or even extra-galactic, where a lot of those cosmic rays come from.

Oyang: Right. Obviously there's sort of an idea that you start
building up and there's maybe a point at which you get something which is
alive, yet there is no, there has never been an experiment to prove
that. You do have experiments now, recently, Venter is one of them, which
are making certain claims about, they get close to saying we're creating
something that's alive from something that was non-living before, but yet,
as you point out, it always has to be done in the presence of a living
organism or something that's alive. It's the Redi principle, right?

Larry: Yeah, well, of course the paradox, Montagnier mentions what the
Venter group had done in the summer of 2010, what they had reported. The
paradox in Montagnier's experiment is if you have a test tube over here
that had something living in it although then it went through this multiple
dilution process...

Oyang: And filtration.

Larry: Filtration, multiple dilution and shaking, which is another
thing certain people go crazy about and then over here you had this
distilled water. You put it into the solenoid with a 7 hertz frequency, 18
- 24 hours or so and suddenly this one is now also capable of putting out
this signal, but then, the final incredible step, you put raw materials,
nucleotides and primers the things that you would use to do the standard
PCR polymerase chain reaction except that, in the normal case, you would
have a sample which serves as what you call a template for the development.
So the raw materials are there...

Oyang: A sample of DNA.

Larry: You have a sample of the DNA of the thing that you are trying
to make assemble into that DNA and it must use, at least as we
conceptualize, it must use that sample as a sort of template to get the
pattern to grow.

It appears, as I'm understanding what Montagnier is doing, that that
sample isn't there. That what, apparently substituted for that sample was
whatever had happened to the water, which he wants to term nano-structures within the water and whatever that radio frequency emission. If that's all it was. Another thing to realize is just because what we're detecting with relatively simple apparatus, what appears to be 1000 hertz signal and some other things, that doesn't mean that's all that's there. I would be very surprised if that's all that's there.

Oyang: Right.

Larry: I think there's a lot more there, and I don't even think... Our
conception of what a radio frequency signal is or what light is, these are
primitive conceptions because they are conceptions based on simply the
physical. But now we see these things are working with life, with a higher
form of organization so what are these things?

What is light then? What is a radio frequency and so forth? The
answer is going to be much more interesting when we see how it works on
that level.

So yeah, that raises the question then, let's just take in that case,
was life formed without life? Did we produce life de novo? Well, certainly
we had to have the other, we had to have a test tube over here of life to
make whatever happened over here, if we weren't fooling ourselves and
something else was happening. We had to have that.

Oyang: Not to mention the fact that what was created was a DNA
fragment, it wasn't a fully living ...

Larry: In this case, yeah. Then of course what the Venter experiment
involved really the PCR technique can, what Venter demonstrated, as a
technique it's not to be belittled, it's a marvel. But the problem is that
the claims about it and the phraseology of the thing and the thing there's
a certain kind of hyping there. It's only hyping from the standpoint of, I
mean, what discouraged me about it is, what has to be challenged is this
prevailing reductionist ideology.

What has to be challenged is the idea that life is only this.
It's easier, you know, you can sell magazines or get a lot of internet hits
by saying, "Oh, we created life." So they published a paper in the summer of
2010 creation of a mycoplasma, was it pirum? I forget the species. A
particular mycoplasma bacterial cell.

Oyang: Right.

Larry: Well, what they did was they used their techniques which are
marvelous techniques to assemble nucleotides in to this DNA of a
relatively,... They used a bacteria that has a relatively simple one. Now
how was the assembly done? They assembly itself involves other organisms.

You are using other organisms. Alternately a yeast organism to
do the gene combinations. Bacteria do this all the time. What we do with
genetic engineering, what we've mastered just within the last several
decades, is something that bacteria have been doing since the beginning of
time, or at least since the beginning of life. So essentially you swapped
out DNA and put another one in there. That's not creation of life, and it's
an interesting thing to do.

Oyang: Yeah.

Larry: It's an interesting thing to do, but from the standpoint of
technique, I think what Montagnier did, which is a lesser claim in those
terms, created life. Montagnier is not out there trying to say, "I created

Montagnier is, I think, this is a man committed to
understanding the disease process and what is this process of generation.
The way he's been treated is just horrible. He has to leave his own country
and go, what the Chinese are doing for him, of course, is wonderful. Of
course they are naming a laboratory in Shanghai, Jiao Tong University, I
think, they are giving him, there is going to be a Luke Montagnier
Institute there, where he and lots of Chinese students and graduates and so
forth will work with him to pursue this work, which is a great thing.

It's a sorry thing for Western science.

Oyang: France, yeah.

Larry: For France and the whole of Western science. Anything like
that. And for me, it's reminiscent of cold fusion that the guys who worked
on it were driven out of their own countries.

Oyang: Right.

Larry: People think, "Oh, don't compare it to that." People
don't want to rock the boat. Everybody who finds something new. I have a
lot of experience with this in terms of editing the 21st century Magazine.
We're on the lookout for things that are new and things that don't quite
fit and that are unusual and you have always got the question, is it real?

The big question is always is this real? Is there an outright fraud
here, is somebody just deceived, or is it a real discovery? And sometimes
it can even be a combination, not the outright fraud part, but there can be
combinations of things and there's something new there and always there's
this tendency among people because of the environment that they've got
something new but they don't want to be compared to something else new that
might be the direction their thinking should be going. They are afraid of
getting hit. Because anybody who gets into something new is hit. Is hit

Oyang: Right.

Larry: If you've got the credentials of Montagnier and so forth, some
people are going to listen to you and you can go somewhere with it. But
we've got to break that, we have this mass strike process that is
going on. It has to break out there too and of course it does, it just
means freeing the mind from these shackles of, "You must think this way."
This is why it's a total cultural phenomena. The political revolutions, if
they are not linked to a whole cultural intellectual phenomena like that of
advancement, then they go nowhere. When they are, then you have a