CHAPTER I IMMORTALITY How did this immortality potential come into being anyway? Alternatively, how did mankinds mortality come into being? No one knows really, but here is one possible scenario. Even if it didn't happen this way, at least pretending that it does provides us with a framework of understanding. Other than that, at this late stage it doesn't really matter. * * * * The dull, black sphere materialized into normal space about ten planetary diameters out from the third planet of a minor star in an isolated spiral arm of the Milky Way galaxy. Old and scarred, the ship (for such it was) switched immediately to planetary drive and commenced the relatively short journey towards the planet. Deep within the hull relays clicked excitedly and some extremely sensitive and sophisticated instrumentation awoke to life and began the task of observing, analyzing and measuring the planet towards which it was making its way. The planet itself was young and still sterile, with no local life forms of any kind (so said the instrumentation). It was, however, evolving rapidly. Already there were wispy patches of atmospheric cloud. The planetary surface was dotted with large areas of warm water, heavily laced with inorganic chemicals. In effect, these chemicals formed a soupy mixture ideally suited to the ships purpose. This in spite of the danger posed by the not inconsiderable volcanic activity that covered the remainder of the planetary surface. The ships instrumentation module quietly and efficiently measured surface and atmospheric conditions as the ship closed the planet. Carbon - - check. Nitrogen - - check. Hydrogen - - check. Radiation - - within acceptable limits, and so on down a long list of minerals and gases that have no concern to us now. As the ship entered a non-decaying orbit, the information was fed continuously into the ships main computers, which then matched the planets characteristics against a built-in master list they contained. The probability curve that resulted was high enough to meet the somewhat rigid specifications. As a result, the computers issued more instructions and deep within the bowels of the ship a long, torpedo shaped rocket probe was made ready for flight. The small vessel was fueled and navigational information transferred to the small computer that controlled it. Quietly and efficiently, a system of servo-mechanisms whirred into life and packed thirty five small, waterproof packages into a magazine like contrivance in the belly of the probe. Loaded, fueled and readied for atmospheric flight, a further series of automated conveyors carried the probe to a launching rack nearer to the outer hull of the ship. As the mothership entered a stable orbit, the launching bay doors opened. The probes engine roared into life, shooting the tiny vessel out into space where it immediately set a course for the planet below. As it entered the tenuous upper atmosphere (such as it was!) it commenced a controlled series of deceleration maneuvers which eventually reduced its speed to less than two hundred kilometers an hour, allowing it to dip low over the large body of water that the computer had selected for its seeding run. At a height of some twenty or thirty feet above the surface of the proto-ocean, the probe commenced its run, ejecting the first of the thirty five waterproof packages as it did so. It ejected a package at the rate of one every hundred kilometers of distance traveled, until its entire cargo was exhausted. Once this was accomplished, the tiny onboard computer closed down all circuits and switched itself off. The engine sputtered and failed and the tiny craft nose dived into the water below, broke up on impact and rapidly sank. Already, the outer, waterproof covering of the first package had dissolved just as it was designed to do and a few tiny, frozen bacteria, Prokaryotes in this case, were showing signs of reviving in the warm, chemical soup that was to be their new home. One day, in the as yet unimaginably distant future, the body of liquid would become one of the major oceans on a planet known as Sol III, or, to its inhabitants, planet Earth. Now you have to use your imagination to even more effect. Imagine that a considerable time has passed. About three or four billion years, give or take a month or two. The original inhabitants of planet Earth, the Prokaryotes, had not only survived their introduction, they had flourished and evolved. First of all into a higher bacterial form, Eukaryotes. This was a very important first step, since Eukaryotes differed from Prokaryotes in that they had cells that possessed a nucleus, highly developed chromosomes and a minute quantity of DNA. The Eukaryotes in their turn evolved into ever more complex organisms that culminated in the diversified life forms that now covered the earth. They included the reptiles, a prolific and varied sea life, the local flora and some early mammals. A little further along the time-line we find that the list has been expanded to include early man - - Homo Neanderthalis to be precise. The Neanderthals were our immediate predecessors. Probably they, in their turn were preceded by even more primitive hominid forms - - - Homo Erectus, Australopithecus and a number of other early variations which may or may not have resulted in Homo Neanderthalis depending upon which school of thought you subscribe to! Neanderthalis did exist however, and although they were human in every sense of the word, they were not quite like us. Similar in many aspects and infinitely more like us than their predecessors, there were nevertheless some important differences and these differences were not in the game plan. For one thing, Neanderthal wasn't quite as intelligent as we are. Their brain was just as large (sometimes larger!) and nearly as well developed as ours, but there was a major structural difference in the skull structure and partiularly in the pharynx. As a result, they had some difficulty in communicating with each other and this inability to communicate rapidly caused a slowdown in the development of intelligence. The Neanderthals had already achieved superiority in their world. The intelligence they did possess gave them dominion over the lesser species and they knew and used fire and tools. They even had a religious concept as evidenced by their excavated burial sites. (The movie 'Clan of the Cave Bear,' starring Darryl Hannah comes pretty close to depicting the Neanderthal society, particularly in the matter of speech as depicted by the actors and actresses. Neanderthal communicated at about one seventh of the speed of which our own species is capable and the movie portrayed this extremely well). While Homo Neanderthal had achieved an acceptable status quo in the world they occupied, apparently it was not quite good enough for whoever, or whatever was watching over us at that time. Perhaps left to their own resources for a little too long, our forebears had somehow entered a dead-end evolutionary path and they were due for another little nudge to get them back on course. Once more, a space vehicle emerged from hyper-space a couple of planetary diameters out from bluish colored world the Earth had become. Once again instruments measured and probed and eventually the vessel entered a landing orbit and came to earth somewhere in an area that would one day be called Africa. This space vessel was unmanned, as was its predecessor of a couple of billion years but unlike the seeding mothership, this one had a crew. Manufactured, but still a crew. Robotic in nature and controlled by the ships main computers. They were very, very efficient. Within hours of landing, specialized scout probes designed for extended operations in atmosphere were already in the air and at work. A perimeter surrounding the ship was established and protected with a heavy duty force-field (local life forms were generally large and for the most part both unpredictable and bad tempered!). The scout probes were very fast and very effective. Within a few days, an extended family group of Neanderthals was located, anasthetisised and collected. Five adult females, four adult males and seven young ones. All of the adults were capable of breeding. The unconscious Neanderthals were taken to the protected compound, by now resembling a field hospital, which indeed it was. Tissue samples were taken from each of them, analyzed, and the gametes chromosomes of each individual were mapped via the ships computers, pinpointing each and every gene in the DNA double helix. Once the gene structure was known, incredibly tiny instruments were employed by the robotic equivalent of a genetic engineer to effect some needed reconstruction work. Snip! Snip! - - the genes responsible for the overhanging brow ridges and the massive, projecting jaws (along the oversized teeth they contained) were gone. Snip! Snip! - - from now on, the distinctive Neanderthal 'bun' (an extension at the rear of the skull whose function was to provide an anchorage for the oversized musculature requited to work the massive jaw, as well as a sort of counterbalance to distribute the head more evenly upon its support point at the top of the spine) was a thing of the past. Yet another microscopic cutting operation and two lengths of DNA filament were cut out and replaced in part further along the banister of the double helix. Henceforth, future offspring would have a differently shaped skull which, together with the improved pharynx (the highly arched rear portion of the palate which enables speech). It would allow a tremendous increase in both the quality and speed of speech and a consequent improvement in overall communication. So it went, a couple of induced mutations here, some tightly focused radiation therapy there, which when combined with a couple of other incredibly complex sub-cellular manipulations, would alter the genetic blueprint of the race forever. Once this biological tailoring was complete and the chromosomes returned to their place in the cell, the cell itself was cultured and carefully tended until the normal process of reproduction by fission resulted in a workable quantity of cells, each of them replicating exactly the altered chromosome. The final stage of the process, whereby the altered cells were re-introduced into their respective (if unknowing) donor, was completed without incident. Eventually, the subjects were allowed to regain consciousness and leave the area as and when they wished. What had this physical incursion accomplished? In our species, the average adult is composed of some 60,000 billion cells, each of which contains its quota of DNA. As cells die, so they are replaced through fission or mitosis. The newly engineered chromosomes had the proverbial edge given to them during the recent involuntary remodeling they had undergone. They were now just a little bit tougher, a little more viable than they had been prior to the genetic engineers manipulations and in genetics, as elsewhere, a little edge of any kind is a wonderful thing! A year later, the surviving members of the original group were only Neanderthal externally. Complete cellular replacement in the human body takes place about once every twelve months. Internally, the Neanderthals were something quite, quite different now. As they continued with what to them was a normal life-style, their children (providing only that both mother and father were members of the original group) were quite different from their parents. They were more erect in their stance and had a little better co-ordination. Gone was the distinctive Neanderthal bun and brow ridges, along with the abnormally heavy jaw and massive teeth. They were more garrulous, communicated faster and easier with one another and in short, they were the next most expensive model up! These first few offspring were only the beginning. The total changeover from Neanderthal to what was to become known as Cro-Magnon, or modern man (Homo Sapiens) was not particularly quick, but then it didn't really have to be. It was slow, but it couldn't be stopped. A normal human cell has forty six chromosomes. The nucleus of the gametes, or sex cells, each have twenty three chromosomes. The uniting of the male sperm and female egg (which also contains twenty three chromosomes) brings the total back to forty six, twenty three from each parent. Obviously, two mating members of the original group, both equipped with tailored genes, would each pass on twenty three chromosomes, giving their offspring forty six chromosomes with reconstructed genes. When this took place, a Cro-Magnon child resulted. When one of the original group mated outside the unit, the resulting child would only be fifty percent Cro-Magnon with the remaining fifty percent characteristic of the other non- group parent. The new gene structure was dominant, so even small percentages would be passed on and produce mutations from the Neanderthal norm. This factor, along with a couple of thousand others, slowed down the spread of the new genetic material, but only relatively! Some sixty thousand years after the alien spaceship lifted of for deep space there were no more Neanderthals. Just Cro- Magnon. The intervention had been (by someones or somethings criteria) highly successful! - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - You don't care for the spaceship theory? O.K., I'm not really sold on it myself. I should point out though that the first scenario, the life-form seeding of a younger still barren planet by an extra-terrestrial civilization was advanced by Dr. Francis Crick in his book 'Life Itself - - Its Origin and Nature.' Dr. Crick used the space scenario to describe a variant of the Panspermia Theory (living spores from space as a naturally occurring life-form seeding mechanism) as one possible method used to seed the earth with the progenitors of our current life-forms. He argued that the Prokaryote bacteria would have done the job satisfactorily. He was also one of the three scientists who received the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (together with James Watson and Maurice Wilkins) for their discovery of the molecular structure of DNA. The second scenario (the alteration of the Neanderthal chromosome to produce Cro-Magnon) is my own and whether I am right or wrong is immaterial. I must point out however that although it may have lost something in the compression required to fit it into this book, it does coincide with all the known facts regarding the transmutation of Neanderthal into Cro-Magnon. To continue: Since the genetic code holds the secret of immortality, perhaps we can look at it a little more closely. I'm not going into genetics in any great depth for the very good reason that there are at least a couple of hundred text books readily available if you are interested. Our main interest here is only in how the genetic code affects the acquisition of immortality. The DNA molecule is shaped something like a double spiral, a double helix in fact. Imagine two strands of heavy wire loosely twisted about each other. If they were separated without losing their configuration and slightly apart one from the other, you would have a pretty good representation of the double helix. Between these two pieces of DNA, or banisters, lie something like one hundred thousand genes clustered together like grapes between the two banisters. I believe we have identified something like a dozen or so at the time of writing. If the threadlike DNA (of which the banisters are composed) contained in a single human cell could be stretched out, it would be almost fifteen inches in length. It would also contain, in the form of genes, the exact genetic information, repeated many times over, that is needed to construct each one of us! DNA also possess the unique property of being able to replicate itself. At mitosis, or fission, the helix divides down the middle and from the free units in suspension in the cell, each part picks up another unit complementary to itself and a new double helix is formed. This mitosis can take place in as little as twelve minutes. After the cell divides, each or the two new cells formed contain an exact duplicate of the original DNA double helix, complete with its clustered cargo of genes. In order to mechanically manipulate a gene, its location must be pinpointed with absolute accuracy and precision. This is slow work at best! It is being accomplished though and from time to time, if you keep abreast of current events, the medical news releases quite frequently mention that this or that particular gene has been identified. Currently, there are several projects underway to map the location of every gene in the human chromosome. It is anticipated that this work will be completed sometime early in the next century. In the meantime, we cannot even make a reasonable guess as to the precise location of the gene or genes responsible for the aging process. Before we go on the the aging gene or genes and their relationship to immortality, there is one more aspect of the DNA strip that we must examine to appreciate how immortality is achieved as a result of purely mental pressure. That relationship is genetic mutation. Most mutations take place due to the voluntary or involuntary transfer of fragments of DNA and their attached genes that contain instructions for a specific biological function. These fragments have the capacity of fusing with other sections of DNA and this fusion may result in the origin of a completely new biological capability. This leads in part to the 'Jumping Gene' theory that genes have a certain degree of mobility. That mobility may be, on occasion, controlled by the sub-conscious mind. This means that the genetic code as represented by a chromosome is not necessarily a constant. It can be a variable factor and it can be self-induced at one level of consciousness or another. This is part of the secret of immortality. A final point, which although it is dealt with in greater depth elsewhere in this book, is sufficiently important to warrant repetition. The human mind is capable of causing certain physical actions and reactions within the human body. When such actions are consciously decided upon, it is not necessary to specify the required result in the minute and meticulous detail required, for example, by the geneticists. It is sufficient to give the sub-conscious mind general instructions and allow it to make its own arrangements to bring about the desired effect.