TWO ODD EXPERIMENTS

Afficionados of the bizarre will relish the following odd experiments performed over a decade ago in Naessens's laboratory. In a quart jar on Naessens's window sill, absorbing the sunlight, sits a piece of what appears to be meat. Naessens explains that many years ago he injected a piece of rabbit muscle the size of his fingertip with cultured rabbit somatids, then vacuum sealed this small sample in the jar and left it to soak up the sun.The sealed-up meat then began to grow, until it filled the whole bottom of the jar, about three inches deep.

Last winter [1993], there was a particularly bitter cold snap in Québec, and the specimen froze and turned black. But after a few days, a section of it was literally 'in the pink' again. We examined the sample closely on two occasions. The "meat" definitely looks alive. Naessens has opened the jar and analyzed it under the microscope and reports that the specimen has the morphological structure of normal rabbit tissue. The date on the top of the jar is December 9, 1977.

Naessens believes that this sample represents the conversion of energy from sunlight into matter. He is as aware as anyone that this is "impossible" according to the conventional understanding of matter-to-energy conversions. Yet he is a good enough scientist not to turn his back on the evidence of his senses.

In another jar, soaking in formaldehyde, are about five hideously deformed newborn rabbits. Naessens had injected their mother with somatids from a duck some time before she became pregnant. Then every baby rabbit was born deformed. Naessens believes that such experiments demonstrate that somatids are in some sense the precursors of DNA, although they themselves do not contain any nucleic acids.

Wild? Perhaps. But not to be dismissed out of hand just because it conflicts with current beliefs, no matter how strongly such beliefs may be held. At this time in biology, no belief is held more fervently than faith in DNA. Yet orthodox scientists now find themselves uncomfortably grappling with a new class of entities called prions. These cause a number of hereditary ailments such as Jakob-Kreutzfeldt disease or scrapie in sheep and goats. Yet prions have no demonstrable nucleic acid, but contain some form of protein. Therefore, they shouldn't cause hereditary diseases—but, alas, they do.

The moral is that true scientists follow the data, and park their dogmas at the laboratory door.