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.
