Grand Biocentric Design: How Life Creates Reality - Hardcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Robert Lanza, MD is one of the most respected scientists in the world-a U.S. News & World Report cover story called him a "genius" and "renegade thinker," even likening him to Einstein. Lanza is head of Astellas Global Regenerative Medicine, Chief Scientific Officer of the Astellas Institute for Regenerative Medicine, and adjunct professor at Wake Forest University School of Medicine. He was recognized by TIME magazine in 2014 on its list of the "100 Most Influential People in the World." Prospect magazine named him one of the Top 50 "World Thinkers" in 2015. He is credited with several hundred publications and inventions, and more than 30 scientific books, including the definitive references in the field of stem cells and regenerative medicine. A former Fulbright Scholar, he studied with polio pioneer Jonas Salk and Nobel Laureates Gerald Edelman and Rodney Porter. He also worked closely (and coauthored a series of papers) with noted Harvard psychologist B. F. Skinner and heart transplant pioneer Christiaan Barnard. Dr. Lanza received his undergraduate and medical degrees from the University of Pennsylvania, where he was both a University Scholar and Benjamin Franklin Scholar. Lanza was part of the team that cloned the world's first human embryo, as well as the first to successfully generate stem cells from adults using somatic-cell nuclear transfer (therapeutic cloning). In 2001 he was also the first to clone an endangered species, and recently published the first-ever report of pluripotent stem cell use in humans.

Matej Pavšic is a physicist interested in foundations of theoretical physics. During his more than 40 years of research at the Jozef Stefan Institute in Ljubljana, Slovenia, he often investigated the subjects that were not currently of wide interest, but later became hot topics. For example, in the 70s he studied higher dimensional, Kaluza-Klein theories, and in the 80s he proposed an early version of the braneworld scenario that was published, among others, in Classical and Quantum Gravity. Altogether, Pavsic has published more than one hundred scientific papers and the book The Landscape of Theoretical Physics: A Global View. He is among the pioneering authors in topics such as mirror particles, braneworld, and Clifford space, and has recently published important works explaining why negative energies in higher derivative theories are not problematic, which is crucial for quantum gravity. Pavsic studied physics at the University of Ljubljana. After obtaining his master's degree in 1975, he spent a year at the Institute of Theoretical Physics in Catania, Italy, where he collaborated with Erasmo Recami and Piero Caldirola. Under their supervision he completed his PhD thesis which he later defended at the University of Ljubljana. Pavsic has participated at many conferences as an invited speaker and regularly visited the International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) in Trieste.

Bob Berman is the longtime science editor of the Old Farmer's Almanac, and contributing editor of Astronomy magazine, formerly with Discover from 1989 to 2006. He produces and narrates the weekly Strange Universe segment on WAMC Northeast Public Radio, heard in eight states, and has been a guest on such TV shows as Late Night with David Letterman. He taught physics and astronomy at New York's Marymount College in the 1990s and is the author of eight popular books. His newest is Zoom: How Everything Moves (2014, Little Brown).

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

In all directions, the current scientific paradigm leads to insoluble enigmas, to conclusions that are ultimately irrational. Since World Wars I and II there has been an unprecedented burst of discovery, with findings that suggest the need for a fundamental shift in the way science views the world. When our worldview catches up with the facts, the old paradigm will be replaced with a new biocentric model, in which life is not a product of the universe, but the other way around.

A change to our most foundational of beliefs is bound to face resistance. I’m no stranger to this; I’ve encountered opposition to new ways of thinking my whole life. As a boy, I lay awake at night and imagined my life as a scientist, peering at wonders through a microscope. But reality seemed determined to remind me that this was only a dream. Upon entering first grade, students at my elementary school were separated into three classes based upon their perceived “potential”—A, B, and C. Our family had just moved to the suburbs from Roxbury, one of the roughest areas of Boston (it was later razed for urban renewal). My father was a professional gambler (he played cards for a living, which at the time was illegal—not to mention the dog and horse tracks) and our family was not exactly considered scholarly material. Indeed, all three of my sisters subsequently dropped out of high school. I was placed in the C-class, a repository for those destined for manual, trade labor, a class which included the students who had been kept back and those who were mainly known for shooting spit balls at teachers.

My best friend was in the A-class. “Do you think I could become a scientist?” I asked his mother one day in fifth grade. “If I tried hard, could I be a doctor?”

“Good gracious!” she responded, explaining that she’d never known anyone in the C class to become a doctor, but that I’d make an excellent carpenter or plumber.

The next day I decided to enter the science fair, which put me in direct competition with the A-class. For his project on rocks, my best friend’s parents took him to museums for his research and created an impressive display for his specimens. My project—animals—was made up of souvenirs from my various excursions: insects, feathers, and bird eggs. Even then I was convinced that living things—not inert material and rocks—were the subjects most worthy of scientific study. This was a complete reversal of the hierarchy taught in our schoolbooks—that is, the realm of physics, with its forces and atoms, forming the foundation of the world and thus most key to its understanding, followed by chemistry and then biology and life. My project won me, a lowly member of the C class, second place behind my best friend.

Science fairs became a way to show up those who labeled me for my family’s circumstances. By trying earnestly, I believed I could improve my situation. In high school, I applied myself to an ambitious attempt to alter the genetic makeup of white chickens and make them black using nucleoprotein. It was before the era of genetic engineering and my biology teacher said it was impossible; my chemistry teacher was blunter, saying, “Lanza, you’re going to hell.”

Before the fair, a friend predicted I’d win. “Ha-ha!” the whole class laughed. But my friend was right.

Once, after my sister was suspended, the principal had told my mother that she wasn’t fit to be a parent. When I won, that principal had to congratulate my mother in front of the whole school.

I did go on to become a scientist, and during my scientific career, I continued to encounter intolerance to new ideas. Can you generate stem cells without destroying embryos? Can you clone one species using eggs from another? Could findings at the subatomic level “scale up” to tell us something about life and consciousness? Scientists are trained to ask questions, but they are also trained to be cautious and rational; their questioning is often aimed at the incremental change, not the paradigm-toppling one. After all, scientists are no different from the rest of our species. We evolved in the forest roof to collect fruit and berries while evading predators and staying alive long enough to procreate; it shouldn’t come as any surprise that this skill set hasn’t always served us perfectly in understanding the nature of existence.

“One thing I have learned in a long life,” said Einstein, “[is] that all our science, measured against reality, is primitive and childlike—and yet it is the most precious thing we have.” Science must work with simple concepts the human mind can comprehend. But as the evidence for biocentrism mounts, science may prove the key to answering questions previously thought to be beyond its borders, those that have plagued us since before the beginning of civilization.

This may be the beginning of this book, but it is not the beginning of our story.

That’s because we are plunging into an ongoing odyssey. It’s a movie that has already started, and we are seating ourselves long after the opening credits have rolled.

As we will soon see, the Renaissance witnessed a transformation in the way humans attempted to understand the cosmos. But even as superstition and fear slowly lost their grip, the established view that emerged dictated a firm division between two basic entities—we observers glued to the surface of our small planet, and the vast realm of nature that constitutes a cosmos almost wholly separate from ourselves. The assumption that these entities are two entirely different balls of wax has so permeated scientific thought that it is likely still assumed by the reader even now in the 21st century.

However, the opposing view is hardly new. Early Sanskrit and Taoist teachers unanimously declared that when it comes to the cosmos, “All is One.” Eastern mystics and philosophers inherently perceived or intuited a unity between the observer and the so-called external universe, and, as centuries elapsed, were consistent in maintaining that such a distinction is illusory. Some Western philosophers, too—among them Berkeley and Spinoza—challenged the prevailing views about the existence of an external world and its separation from consciousness. Nonetheless, the dichotomous paradigm remained the majority consensus, especially in the world of science.

But the maverick minority got a major megaphone a century ago, when some of the originators of quantum theory—most notably Erwin Schrödinger and Niels Bohr—concluded that consciousness is central to any true understanding of reality. While they reached their conclusions by way of advanced math, in the course of developing the equations that would form the basis for quantum mechanics and its innumerable successes, they thus were also pioneers who helped set the table for biocentrism a century later.

Today, oddities of the quantum world like entanglement have moved the minority increasingly into the mainstream. If it’s really true that life and consciousness are central to everything else, then countless puzzling anomalies in science enjoy immediate clarification. It’s not just bizarre laboratory results like the famous “double slit experiment” that make no sense unless the observer’s presence is intimately intertwined with the results. On an everyday level, hundreds of physical constants such as the strength of gravity and the electromagnetic force called “alpha” that governs the electrical bonds in every atom are identical throughout the universe and “set in stone” at precisely the values that allow life...