CHAPTER THREE
Beings of Light

Fritz-Albert Popp thought he had discovered a cure for cancer.

It was 1970, a year before Edgar Mitchell had flown to the moon, and Popp, a theoretical biophysicist at the University of Marburg in Germany, had been teaching radiology, the interaction of electromagnetic radiation on biological systems. He’d been examining benzo[a]pyrene, a polycyclic hydrocarbon known to be one of the most lethal carcinogens to humans and had illuminated it with ultraviolet light.

Popp played around with light a lot. He’d been fascinated by the effect of electromagnetic radiation on living systems ever since he’d been a student at the University of Würzburg.

During his time as an undergraduate he’d studied in the house, sometimes even in the very room, where Wilhelm Röntgen had accidentally stumbled on the fact that rays of a certain frequency could produce pictures of the hard structures of the body.

Popp had been trying to determine what effect you’d get if you excited this deadly compound with ultraviolet (UV) light. What he discovered was that benzo[a]pyrene had a crazy optical property. It absorbed the light but then re-emitted it at a completely different frequency, like some CIA operative intercepting a communication signal from the enemy and jumbling it up.

This was a chemical which doubled as a biological frequency scrambler.

Popp then performed the same test on benzo[e]pyrene, another polycyclic hydrocarbon, which is virtually identical in every way to benzo[a]pyrene save for a tiny alteration in its molecular makeup. This tiny difference in one of the compound rings was critical as it rendered benzo[e]pyrene harmless to humans. With this particular chemical, the light passed right through the substance unaltered.

Popp kept puzzling over this difference and kept playing around with light and compounds. He performed his test on thirty-seven other chemicals, some cancer-causing, some not. After a while, it got so that he could predict which substances could cause cancer. In every instance, the compounds that were carcinogenic took the UV light, absorbed it, and changed the frequency.

There was another odd property of these compounds.

Each of the carcinogens reacted only to the light at a specific wavelength - 380 nanometers. Popp kept wondering why a cancer-causing substance would be a light scrambler. He began reading the scientific literature, specifically about human biological reactions, and came across information about a phenomenon called ‘photo-repair’.

It is very well known from biological laboratory experiments that if you can blast a cell with UV light so that 99 per cent of the cell, including its DNA, is destroyed, you can almost entirely repair the damage in a single day just by illuminating the cell with the same wavelength of a very weak intensity.

To this day, conventional scientists don’t understand this phenomenon, but nobody has disputed it. Popp also knew that patients with a skin condition called xeroderma pigmentosum eventually die of skin cancer because their photo-repair system doesn’t work and so doesn’t repair solar damage.

Popp was shocked to learn that photo-repair works most efficiently at 380 nanometers - the very same wavelength the cancer-causing compounds would react to and scramble.

This was where Popp made his logical leap. Nature was too perfect for this to be simple coincidence. If the carcinogens only react to this wavelength, it must somehow be linked to photo-repair. If so, this would mean that there must be some light in the body responsible for photo-repair. A cancerous compound must cause cancer because it permanently blocks this light and scrambles it, so photo-repair can’t work anymore.

Popp was profoundly taken aback by the thought of it all.

He decided there and then that this was where his future work would lie. He wrote the paper up, but told few people about it, and was pleased, but not really surprised, when a prestigious journal on cancer agreed to publish it.¹

In the months before his paper was published, Popp was highly impatient, worried that his idea would be stolen. Any careless disclosure of his to the casual observer might send the listener off to patent Popp’s discovery. As soon as the scientific community realized he had discovered a cure for cancer, he would be one of the most celebrated scientists of his day. It was his first foray into a new area of science, and it was going to land him the Nobel prize.

Popp, after all, was used to accolades. Up until that point he’d won nearly every prize you could be awarded in academic life. He’d even picked up the Röntgen prize for his undergraduate diploma work, which consisted of building a small particle accelerator.

This prize, named after Popp’s hero, Wilhelm Röntgen, is given each year to the top undergraduate in physics at the University of Würzburg.

Popp had studied like a young man possessed. He’d finished his examinations far earlier than the other students. He was awarded his PhD in theoretical physics in record time. The postgraduate work required for German professorships, a five-year proposition for most academics, took Popp just a little more than two years.

At the time of his discovery, Popp was already celebrated among his peers for being a whiz kid, not only because of his ability but also because of his dashing, youthful looks.

When his paper was published, Popp was 33 and good-looking, with the set jaw and direct steel-blue gaze of a Hollywood swashbuckler and a boyish face always assumed to be years younger. Even his wife, who was seven years younger than him, was often mistaken as the senior partner. And indeed, there was something of the swashbuckler about him; he had a reputation among his fellow students as the best fencer on campus - a reputation which had been tested in various duels, one of which had left him with a gash all along the left side of his head.

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 nanometers 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 to 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 body ⁴ - 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 behaviors 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

Many biologists and physicists have advanced the idea that radiation and oscillating waves are responsible for synchronizing cell division and sending chromosomal instructions around the body.

Perhaps the best known of these, Herbert Fröhlich, of the University of Liverpool, recipient of the prestigious Max Planck Medal, an annual award of the German Physical Society to honour the career of an outstanding physicist, was one of the first to introduce the idea that some sort of collective vibration was responsible for getting proteins to cooperate with each other and carry out instructions of DNA and cellular proteins.

Fröhlich even predicted that certain frequencies (now termed ‘Fröhlich frequencies’) just beneath the membranes of the cell could be generated by vibrations in these proteins. Wave communication was supposedly the means by which the smaller activities of proteins, the work of amino acids, for instance, would be carried out and a good way to synchronize activities between proteins and the system as a whole.¹⁸

In his own studies, Fröhlich had shown that once energy reaches a certain threshold, molecules begin to vibrate in unison, until they reach a high level of coherence.

The moment molecules reach this state of coherence, they take on certain qualities of quantum mechanics, including nonlocality. They get to the point where they can operate in tandem.¹⁹

The Italian physicist Renato Nobili of the Universita degli Studi di Padova amassed experimental proof that electromagnetic frequencies occur in animal tissues. In experiments he found that the fluid in cells holds currents and wave patterns and that these correspond with wave patterns picked up by electroencephalogram (EEC) readings in the brain cortex and scalp.²⁰

Russian Nobel prize winner Albert Szent-Györgyi postulated that protein cells act as semiconductors, preserving and passing along the energy of electrons as information.²¹

However, most of this research, including Gurwitsch’s initial work, had largely been ignored, mostly because there was no equipment sensitive enough to measure these tiny particles of light before the invention of Popp’s machine. Furthermore, any notions of the use of radiation in cellular communication were utterly swept aside in the middle of the twentieth century, with the discovery of hormones and the birth of biochemistry, which proposed that everything could be explained by hormones or chemical reactions.²²

By the time that Popp had his light machine, he was more or less on his own with regard to a radiation theory of DNA.

Nevertheless, he doggedly pressed on with his experiments, learning more about the properties of this mysterious light. The more he tested, the more he discovered that all living things - from the most basic of plants or animals, to human beings in all their sophisticated complexity - emitted a permanent current of photons, from only a few to hundreds.

The number of photons emitted seemed to be linked to an organism’s position on the evolutionary scale:

the more complex the organism, the fewer photons being emitted.

Rudimentary animals or plants tended to emit 100 photons per square centimeter per second, at a wavelength of 200 to 800 nanometers, corresponding to a very high frequency of electromagnetic wave, well within the visible light range, whereas humans would emit only ten photons in the same area, time and frequency.

He also discovered something else curious. When light was shone on living cells, the cells would take this light and after a certain delay, shine intensely - a process called ‘delayed luminescence’. It occurred to Popp that this could be a corrective device. The living system had to maintain a delicate equilibrium of light. In this instance, when it was being bombarded with too much light, it would reject the excess.

Very few places in the world can claim to be pitch black. The only appropriate candidates would be an enclosure where only a handful of photons remain. Popp possessed such a place, a room so dark that only the barest few photons of light per minute could be detected in it. This was the only fit laboratory in which to measure the light of human beings. He began studying the patterns of biophoton emissions of some of his students.

In one series of studies, he had one of his experimenters - a 27-year-old healthy young woman - sit in the room every day for nine months, while he took photon readings of a small area of her hand and forehead.

Popp then analyzed the data, and discovered, to his surprise, that the light emissions followed certain set patterns - biological rhythms at 7, 14, 32, 80 and 270 days, when the emissions were identical, even after one year. Emissions for both the left and right hands were also correlated. If there was an increase in the photons coming off the right hand, so there would be a similar increase in the those of the left hand.

On a subatomic level, the waves of each hand were in phase. In terms of light, the right hand knew what the left hand was doing.

Emissions also seemed to follow other natural biological rhythms; similarities were noted by day or night, by week, by month, as though the body were following the world’s biorhythms as well as its own.

So far, Popp had studied only healthy individuals and found an exquisite coherence at the quantum level. But what kind of light was present in a person who was ill? He tried out his machine on a series of cancer patients. In every instance, the cancer patients had lost these natural periodic rhythms and also their coherence. The lines of internal communication were scrambled.

They had lost their connection with the world. In effect, their light was going out.

Just the opposite occurred with multiple sclerosis:

MS was a state of too much order. Individuals with this disease were taking in too much light, and this was inhibiting the ability of cells to do their job.

Too much cooperative harmony prevented flexibility and individuality:

it is like too many soldiers marching in step when they cross a bridge, causing it to collapse.

Perfect coherence is an optimum state just between chaos and order. With too much cooperativity, it was as though individual members of the orchestra were no longer able to improvise. MS patients were drowning in light.²³

Popp also examined the effect of stress. In a stressed state, the rate of biophoton emissions went up - a defense mechanism designed to try to return the patient to equilibrium.

All of these phenomena led Popp to think of biophoton emissions as a sort of correction by a living system of Zero Point Field fluctuations. Every system likes to achieve a minimum of free energy. In a perfect world, all waves would cancel each other out by destructive interference. However, this is impossible with the Zero Point Field, where these tiny fluctuations of energy constantly disturb the system.

Emitting photons is a compensatory gesture, to stop this disturbance and attempt a sort of energy equilibrium. As Popp thought of it, the Zero Point Field forces a human being to be a candle. The healthiest body would have the lowest light and be closest to zero state, the most desirable state - the closest living things could get to nothingness.

Popp now recognized that what he’d been experimenting with was even more than a cure for cancer or gestaltbildung.

Here was a model which provided a better explanation than the current neo-Darwinist theory for how all living things evolve on the planet. Rather than a system of fortunate but ultimately random error, if DNA uses frequencies of all variety as an information tool, this would suggest instead a feedback system of perfect communication through waves which encode and transfer information.

It might also account for the body’s capacity for regeneration.

The bodies of numerous species of animals have demonstrated the ability to regenerate a lost limb. Experiments with salamanders as far back as the 1930s have shown that an entire limb, a jaw, even the lens of an eye could be amputated but entirely regenerate as though a hidden blueprint were being followed.

This model might also account for the phenomenon of phantom limbs, the strong physical sense among amputees that a missing arm or leg is still present.

Many amputees who complain of utterly realistic cramps, aches or tinglings in the missing limb may be experiencing a true physicality which still exists - a shadow of the limb as imprinted on the Zero Point Field.²⁴

Popp came to realize that light in the body might even hold the key to health and illness. In one experiment he compared the light emitted from free-range eggs to those produced by battery hens. The photons in the eggs produced by the free-range chickens were far more coherent than those in the battery eggs. He went on to use biophoton emissions as a tool for measuring the quality of food.

The healthiest food had the lowest and most coherent intensity of light.

Any disturbance in the system would increase the production of photons. Health was a state of perfect subatomic communication, and ill health was a state where communication breaks down. We are ill when our waves are out of synch.

Once Popp began publishing his findings, he began to attract the enmity of the scientific community. Many of his fellow German scientists believed that Popp’s bright spark had finally gone out. At his university, students wanting to study biophoton emissions began to be censured. By 1980, when Popp’s contract as an assistant professor was finished, the university had an excuse to ask him to leave.

Two days before the end of his term, university officials marched into his laboratory and demanded that he surrender all his equipment. Fortunately, Popp had been tipped off about the raid and had hidden his photomultiplier in the basement of the lodgings of a sympathetic student. When he left campus, he left with his precious equipment intact.

Popp’s treatment at the hands of the University of Marburg resembled that of a criminal without a fair trial. As an assistant professor of some years standing, Popp was entitled to substantial compensation for his years of service, but the university refused to pay him.

He had to sue the university to get the 40,000 marks that were due him. He won his money, but his career lay in ashes. He was a married man with three young children and no apparent means of employment. No university at the time was prepared to touch him.

It looked as though Popp’s academic career was finished. He spent two years in private industry with Roedler, a pharmaceutical manufacturer of homeopathic remedies, one of the few organizations to entertain his wild theories. Nevertheless, Popp, a stubborn autocrat in his own labs, was equally stubborn in persisting with his work, convinced of its validity.

Eventually, he gained a patron in Professor Walter Nagl of the University of Kaiserslautern, who asked Popp to work with him.

Once again, Popp’s research caused a revolt among the faculty, who demanded his resignation on the grounds that his work was sullying the university’s reputation.

Eventually Popp gained employment from the Technology Center in Kaiserslautern, which is largely sponsored by government grants for application research. It would take some 25 years for him to gather converts from among the scientific community. Slowly a few select scientists from around the globe began to consider that the body’s communication system might be a complex network of resonance and frequency.

Eventually they would form the International Institute of Biophysics, composed of fifteen groups of scientists from international centres all around the world. Popp had found offices for his new group in Neuss, near Düsseldorf.

The brother of a Nobel prizewinner, the grandson of Alexander Gurwitsch, a nuclear physicist from Boston University and nuclear research laboratory CERN in Geneva, two Chinese biophysicists - noted scientists from around the globe at last were beginning to agree with him. Popp’s fortunes were beginning to turn. Suddenly he was receiving offers and contracts for professorships from reputable universities around the world.

Popp and his new colleagues went on to study the light emissions of several organisms of the same species, first with an experiment with a type of water flea called Daphnia. What they found was nothing short of astonishing. Tests with a photomultiplier showed that the water fleas were sucking up the light emitted from each other.

Popp tried the same experiment on small fish and found that they were doing the same. According to his photomultiplier, sunflowers were like a biological vacuum cleaner, moving in the direction of the most solar photons in order to hoover them up.

Even bacteria would swallow photons from the medium they had been placed in.²⁵

It began to dawn on Popp that these emissions had a purpose outside the body. Wave resonance wasn’t simply being used to communicate inside the body, but between living things. Two healthy beings were engaged in ‘photon sucking’, as he called it, by exchanging photons.

Popp realized that this exchange might unlock the secret of some of the animal kingdom’s most persistent conundrums:

how schools of fish or flocks of birds create perfect and instantaneous coordination.

Many experiments on the homing ability of animals demonstrate that it has nothing to do with following habitual trails or scents or even the electromagnetic fields of the earth, but some silent communication, acting like an invisible rubber band, even when animals are separated by miles from humans.²⁶

For humans there was another possibility. If we could take in the photons of other living things, we also might be able to use the information from them to correct our own light if it went awry.

Popp had begun experimenting with such an idea. If some cancer-causing chemicals could alter the body’s biophoton emissions, then it might be the case that other substances could reintroduce better communication. Popp wondered whether certain plant extracts could change the character of biophoton emissions of cancer cells, so that they would began to communicate again with the rest of the body.

He began experimenting with a number of non-toxic substances purported to be successful in treating cancer. In all but one instance, the substances only increased the photons from tumor cells, making it even more deadly to the body. The single success story was mistletoe, which seemed to help the body to ‘resocialize’ the photon emission of tumor cells back to normal.

In one of numerous cases, Popp came across a woman in her thirties with breast and vaginal cancer.

Popp tried mistletoe and other plant extracts on samples of her cancerous tissue and found that one particular mistletoe remedy created coherence in the tissue similar to that of the body. With the agreement of her doctor, the woman began forgoing any treatment other than this mistletoe extract. After a year, all her laboratory tests were virtually back to normal.

A woman who was given up as a terminal cancer case had her proper light restored, just by taking a herb.²⁷

To Fritz-Albert Popp, homeopathy was another example of photon sucking. He had begun to think of it as a ‘resonance absorber’. Homeopathy rests upon the notion that like is treated with like. A plant extract that at full strength can cause hives in the body is used in an extremely dilute form to cure them.

If a rogue frequency in the body could produce certain symptoms, it followed that the high dilution of a substance which would produce the same symptoms would still carry those oscillations. Like a tuning fork in resonance, a suitable homeopathic solution might attract and then absorb the wrong oscillations, allowing the body to return to normal.

Popp thought that electromagnetic molecular signaling might even explain acupuncture. According to the theory of traditional Chinese medicine, the human body has a meridian system running deep in the tissues of the body through which flows an invisible energy which the Chinese term ‘the qi', or life force.

The qi supposedly enters the body through these acupuncture points and flows to deeper organ structures (which do not correspond to those of Western human biology), providing energy (and thus the life force). Illness occurs when there is a blockage of this energy anywhere along the pathways. According to Popp, the meridian system may work like wave guides transmitting particular bodily energy to specific zones.

Scientific studies show that many acupuncture points on the body have a dramatically decreased electrical resistance compared with points on the skin surrounding it (10 kilo-ohms at the center of a point, compared with 3 mega-ohms in the surrounding skin).²⁸

Research has also shown that painkilling endorphins and the steroid cortisol are released through the body when the points are stimulated at low frequency, and important mood-regulating neurotransmitters like serotonin and norepinephrine, at high frequency. The same doesn’t occur when the skin surrounding these points is stimulated.²⁹

Yet other research has proved that acupuncture can cause blood vessels to dilate and increase blood flow to distant organs in the body.³⁰

Other research demonstrates the existence of meridians as well as the effectiveness of acupuncture for a variety of conditions. Orthopaedic surgeon Dr Robert Becker, who performed a great deal of research on electromagnetic fields in the body, designed a special electrode recording device which would roll along the body like a pizza cutter. After many studies it showed up electrical charges on the same places on every one of the people tested, all corresponding to Chinese meridian points.³¹

There were many possibilities to explore, some of which might pan out, and some not. But Popp was convinced of one thing: his theory of DNA and biophoton emission was correct and this drove the processes of the body.

There was no doubt in his mind that biology was driven by the quantum process he’d observed.

All he needed were other scientists with experimental evidence to show how it might be so.

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