Adam - Slave made to order20:33 Aug 19 2007
Times Read: 611
8 - THE ADAM: A SLAVE MADE TO ORDER
The biblical tale of Man’s creation is, of course, the crux of the debate—at times bitter—between Creationists and Evolutionists and of the ongoing confrontation between them—at times in courts, always on school boards. As previously stated, both sides had better read the Bible again (and in its Hebrew original); the conflict would evaporate once Evolutionists recognized the scientific basis of Genesis and Creationists realized what its text really says.
Apart from the naive assertion by some that in the account of Creation the “days” of the Book of Genesis are literally twenty-four-hour periods and not eras or phases, the sequence in the Bible is, as previous chapters should have made clear, a description of Evolution that is in accord with modern science. The insurmountable problem arises when Creationists insist that we. Mankind, Homo sapiens sapiens, were created instantaneously and without evolutionary predecessors by “God.”
“And the Lord God formed Man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and Man became a living soul.”
This is the tale of Man’s creation as told in chapter 2, verse 7 of the Book of Genesis—according to the King James English version; and this is what the Creationist zealots firmly believe.
Were they to learn the Hebrew text—which is, after all, the original—they would discover that, first of all, the creative act is attributed to certain Elohim—a plural term that at the least should be translated as “gods,” not “God.” And second, they would become aware that the quoted verse also explains why “The Adam” was created: “For there was no Adam to till the land.” These are two important—and unsettling—hints to who had created Man and why.
Then, of course, there exists the other problem, that of another (and prior) version of the creation of Man, in Genesis 1:26-27. First, according to the King James version,
“God said, Let us make men in our image, after our likeness”; then the suggestion was carried out:
“And God created man in his own image, in the image of God created He him; male and female created He them.”
The biblical account is further complicated by the ensuing tale in Chapter 2, according to which “The Adam” was alone until God provided him with a female counterpart, created of Adam’s rib.
While Creationists might be hard put to decide which particular version is the sine qua non tenet, there exists the problem of pluralism. The suggestion for Man’s creation comes from a plural entity who addresses a plural audience, saying,
“ Let us make an Adam in our image and after our likeness.”
What, those who believe in the Bible must ask, is going on here? As both Orientalists and Bible scholars now know, what went on was the editing and summarizing by the compilers of the Book of Genesis of much earlier and considerably more detailed texts first written down in Sumer.
Those texts, reviewed and extensively quoted in The 12th Planet with all sources listed, relegate the creation of Man to the Anunnaki. It happened, we learn from such long texts as Atra Hasis, when the rank-and-file astronauts who had come to Earth for its gold mutinied. The backbreaking work in the gold mines, in southeast Africa, had become unbearable. Enlil, their commander in-chief, summoned the ruler of Nibiru, his father Anu, to an Assembly of the Great Anunnaki and demanded harsh punishment of his rebellious crew. But Anu was more understanding. “What are we accusing them of?” he asked as he heard the complaints of the mutineers. “Their work was heavy, their distress was much!” Was there no other way to obtain the gold, he wondered out loud.
Yes, said his other son Enki (Enlil’s half brother and rival), the brilliant chief scientist of the Anunnaki. It is possible to relieve the Anunnaki of the unbearable toil by having someone else take over the difficult work: Let a Primitive Worker be created!
The idea appealed to the assembled Anunnaki. The more they discussed it, the more clear their clamor grew for such a Primitive Worker, an Adamu, to take over the work load. But, they wondered, how can you create a being intelligent enough to use tools and to follow orders? How was the creation or “bringing forth,” of the Primitive Worker to be achieved? Was it, indeed, a feasible undertaking?
A Sumerian text has immortalized the answer given by Enki to the incredulous assembled Anunnaki, who saw in the creation of an Adamu the solution to their unbearable toil:
The creature whose name you uttered—
IT EXISTS!
All you have to do, he added, is to
Bind upon it the image of the gods.
In these words lies the key to the puzzle of Man’s creation, the magical wand that removes the conflict between Evolution and Creationism. The Anunnaki, the Elohim of the biblical verses, did not create Man from nothing. The being was already there, on Earth, the product of evolution. All that was needed to upgrade it to the required level of ability and intelligence was to “bind upon it the image of the gods,” the image of the Elohim themselves.
For the sake of simplicity let us call the “creature” that already existed then Apeman/Apewoman. The process envisioned by Enki was to “bind” upon the existing creature the “image”—the inner, genetic makeup—of the Anunnaki; in other words, to upgrade the existing Apeman/Apewoman through genetic manipulation and, by thus jumping the gun on evolution, bring “Man”—Homo sapiens—into being. The term Adamu, which is clearly the inspiration for the biblical name “Adam,” and the use of the term “image” in the Sumerian text, which is repeated intact in the biblical text, are not the only clues to the Sumerian/Mesopotamian origin of the Genesis creation of Man story.
The biblical use of the plural pronoun and the depiction of a group of Elohim reaching a consensus and following it up with the necessary action also lose their enigmatic aspects when the Mesopotamian sources are taken into account.
In them we read that the assembled Anunnaki resolved lo proceed with the project, and on Enki’s suggestion assigned the task to Ninti, their chief medical officer:
They summoned and asked the goddess, the midwife of the gods, the wise birth giver, [saying:]
“To a creature give life, create workers!
Create a Primitive Worker,
that he may bear the yoke!
Let him bear the yoke assigned by Enlil,
Let The Worker carry the toil of the gods!”
One cannot say for certain whether it was from the Atra Hasis text, from which the above lines are quoted, or from much earlier Sumerian texts that the editors of Genesis got their abbreviated version. But we have here the background of events that led to the need for a Primitive Worker, the assembly of the gods and the suggestion and decision to go ahead and have one created. Only by realizing what the biblical sources were can we understand the biblical tale of the Elohim—the Lofty Ones, the “gods”—saying:
“Let us make the Adam in our image, after our likeness,” so as to remedy the situation that “there was no Adam to till the land.”
In The 12th Planet it was stressed that until the Bible begins to relate the genealogy and history of Adam, a specific person, the Book of Genesis refers to the newly created being as “The Adam,” a generic term. Not a person called Adam, but, literally, “the Earthling,” for that is what “Adam” means, coming as it does from the same root as Adamah, “Earth.” But the term is also a play on words, specifically dam, which means “blood ” and reflects, as we shall soon see, the manner in which The Adam was “manufactured.”
The Sumerian term that means “Man” is LU. But its root meaning is not “human being”; it is rather “worker, servant,” and as a component of animal names implied “domesticated.” The Akkadian language in which the Atra Hasis text was written (and from which all Semitic languages have stemmed) applied to the newly created being the term lulu, which means, as in the Sumerian, “Man” but which conveys the notion of mixing.
The word lulu in a more profound sense thus meant “the mixed one.” This also reflected the manner in which The Adam—“Earthling” as well as “He of the blood”—was created. Numerous texts in varying states of preservation or fragmentation have been found inscribed on Mesopotamian clay tablets. In sequels to The 12th Planet the creation “myths” of other peoples, from both the Old and New Worlds, have been reviewed; they all record a process involving the mixing of a godly element with an earthly one. As often as not, the godly element is described as an “essence” derived from a god’s blood, and the earthly element as “clay” or “mud.”
There can be no doubt that they all attempt to tell the same tale, for they all speak of a First Couple. There is no doubt that their origin is Sumerian, in whose texts we find the most elaborate descriptions and the greatest amount of detail concerning the wonderful deed: the mixing of the “divine” genes of the Anunnaki with the “earthly” genes of Apeman by fertilizing the egg of an Apewoman.
It was fertilization in vitro—in glass tubes, as depicted in this rendering on a cylinder seal (Fig. 51). And, as I have been saying since modern science and medicine achieved the feat of in vitro fertilization, Adam was the first test-tube baby...
Figure 51
There is reason to believe that when Enki made the surprising suggestion to create a Primitive Worker through genetic manipulation, he had already concluded that the feat was possible. His suggestion to call in Ninti for the task was also not a spur of-the-moment idea.
Laying the groundwork for ensuing events, the Atra Hasis text begins the story of Man on Earth with the assignment of tasks among the leading Anunnaki. When the rivalry between the two half brothers. Enlil and Enki, reached dangerous levels, Anu made them draw lots. As a result, Enlil was given mastery over the old settlements and operations in the E.DIN (the biblical Eden) and Enki was sent to Africa, to supervise the AB. ZU, the land of mines. Great scientist that he was, Enki was bound to have spent some of his time studying the flora and fauna of his surroundings as well as the fossils that, some 300,000 years later, the Leakeys and other paleontologists have been uncovering in southeastern Africa.
As scientists do today, Enki, too, must have contemplated the course of evolution on Earth. As reflected in the Sumerian texts, he came to the conclusion that the same “seed of life” that Nibiru had brought with it from its previous celestial abode had given rise to life on both planets; much earlier on Nibiru, and later on Earth, once the latter had been seeded by the collision. The being that surely fascinated him most was Apeman—a step above the the other primates, a hominid already walking erect and using sharpened stones as tools, a proto-Man—but not yet a fully evolved human. And Enki must have toyed with the intriguing challenge of “playing God” and conducting experiments in genetic manipulation.
To aid his experiments he asked Ninti to come to Africa and be by his side. The official reason was plausible. She was the chief medical officer; her name meant “Lady Life” (later on she was nicknamed Mammi, the source of the universal Mamma/Mother). There was certainly a need for medical services, considering the harsh conditions under which the miners toiled. But there was more to it: from the very beginning, Enlil and Enki vied for her sexual favors, for both needed a male heir by a half sister, which she was.
The three of them were children of Anu, the ruler of Nibiru, but not of the same mother; and according to the succession rules of the Anunnaki (later adopted by the Sumerians and reflected in the biblical tales of the Patriarchs), it was not necessarily the Firstborn son but a son born by a half sister from the same royal line who became the Legal Heir. Sumerian texts describe torrid lovemaking between Enki and Ninti (with unsuccessful results, though: the offspring were all females); there was thus more than an interest in science that led to Enki’s suggestion to call in Ninti and assign the task to her.
Knowing all this, we should not be surprised to read in the creation texts that, first, Ninti said she could not do it alone, that she had to have the advice and help of Enki; and second, that she had to attempt the task in the Abzu, where the right materials and facilities were available. Indeed, the two must have conducted experiments together there long before the suggestion was made at the assembly of the Anunnaki to “let us make an Adamu in our image.”
Some ancient depictions show “Bull-Men” accompanied by naked Ape-men (Fig. 52) or Bird-Men (Fig. 53). Sphinxes (bulls or lions with human heads) that adorned many ancient temples may have been more than imaginary representations; and when Berossus, the Babylonian priest, wrote down Sumerian cosmogony and tales of creation for the Greeks, he described a prehuman period when “men appeared with two wings,” or “one body and two heads,” or with mixed male and female organs, or “some with the legs and horns of goats” or other hominid-animal mixtures.
Figure 52
Figure 53
That these creatures were not freaks of nature but the result of deliberate experiments by Enki and Ninti is obvious from the Sumerian texts. The texts describe how the two came up with a being who had neither male nor female organs, a man who could not hold back his urine, a woman incapable of bearing children, and creatures with numerous other defects. Finally, with a touch of mischief in her challenging announcement, Ninti is recorded to have said:
How good or bad is man’s body?
As my heart prompts me,
I can make its fate good or bad.
Having reached this stage, where genetic manipulation was sufficiently perfected to enable the determination of the resulting body’s good or bad aspects, the two felt they could master the final challenge: to mix the genes of hominids. Apemen, not with those of other Earth creatures but with the genes of the Anunnaki themselves. Using all the knowledge they had amassed, the two Elohim set out to manipulate and speed up the process of Evolution. Modern Man would have undoubtedly eventually evolved on Earth in any case, just as he had done on Nibiru, both having come from the same “seed of life.”
But there was still a long way and a long time to go from the stage hominids were at 300,000 years ago to the level of development the Anunnaki had reached at that time. If, in the course of 4 billion years, the evolutionary process had been earlier on Nibiru just 1 percent of that time, Evolution would have been forty million years ahead on Nibiru compared with the course of evolution on Earth.
Did the Anunnaki jump the gun on evolution on our planet by a million or two million years? No one can say for sure how long it would have taken Homo sapiens to evolve naturally on Earth from the earlier hominids, but surely forty million years would have been more than enough time.
Called upon to perform the task of “fashioning servants for the gods”—“to bring to pass a great work of wisdom.” in the words of the ancient texts—Enki gave Ninti the following instructions:
Mix to a core the clay
from the Basement of the Earth,
just above the Abzu,
and shape it into the form of a core.
I shall provide good, knowing young Anunnaki
who will bring the clay to the right condition.
In The 12th Planet, I analyzed the etymology of the Sumerian and Akkadian terms that are usually translated “clay” or “mud” and showed that they evolved from the Sumerian TI.IT, literally, “that which is with life,” and then assumed the derivative meanings of “clay” and “mud,” as well as “egg.” The earthly element in the procedure for “binding upon” a being who already existed “the image of the gods” was thus to be the female egg of that being—of an Apewoman. All the texts dealing with this event make it clear that Ninti relied on Enki to provide the earthly element, this egg of a female Apewoman, from the Abzu, from southeast Africa.
Indeed, the specific location is given in the above quote: not exactly the same site as the mines (an area identified in The 12th Planet as Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe) but a place “above” it, farther north. This area was, indeed, as recent finds have shown, where Homo sapiens emerged... The task of obtaining the “divine” elements was Ninti’s. Two extracts were needed from one of the Anunnaki, and a young “god” was carefully selected for the purpose. Enki’s instructions to Ninti were to obtain the god’s blood and shiru, and through immersions in a “purifying bath” obtain their “essences.”
What had to be obtained from the blood was termed TE.E.MA, at best translated “personality,” a term that expresses the sense of the word: that which makes a person what he is and different from any other person. But the translation “personality” does not convey the scientific precision of the term, which in the original Sumerian meant “That which houses that which binds the memory.” Nowadays we call it a “gene.”
The other element for which the young Anunnaki was selected, shiru, is commonly translated “flesh.” In time, the word did acquire the meaning “flesh” among its various connotations. But in the earlier Sumerian it referred to the sex or reproductive organs; its root had the basic meaning “to bind,” “that which binds.” The extract from the shiru was referred to in other texts dealing with non-Anunnaki offspring of the “gods” as kisru; coming from the male’s member, it meant “semen,” the male’s sperm.
These two divine extracts were to be mixed well by Ninti in a purifying bath, and it is certain that the epithet lulu (“The mixed one”) for the resulting Primitive Worker stemmed from this mixing process. In modern terms we would call him a hybrid.
All these procedures had to be performed under strict sanitary conditions. One text even mentions how Ninti first washed her hands before she touched the “clay.”
The place where these procedures were carried out was a special structure called in Akkadian Bit Shimti, which, coming from the Sumerian SHI.IM.TI literally meant “house where the wind of life is breathed in”—the source, no doubt, of the biblical assertion that after having fashioned the Adam from the clay, Elohim “blew in his nostrils the breath of life.”
The biblical term, sometimes translated “soul ” rather than “breath of life,” is Nephesh. The identical term appears in the Akkadian account of what took place in the “house where the wind of life is breathed in” after the purifying and extracting procedures were completed:
The god who purifies the napishtu, Enki,
spoke up.
Seated before her [Ninti] he was prompting her.
After she had recited her incantation,
she put her hand to the clay.
A depiction on a cylinder seal (Fig. 54) may well have illustrated the ancient text. It shows Enki seated, “prompting” Ninti (who is identified by her symbol, the umbilical cord), with the “test-tube” flasks behind her.
The mixing of the “clay” with all the component extracts and “essences” was not yet the end of the procedure. The egg of the Apewoman, fertilized in the “purifying baths” with the sperm and genes of the young Anunnaki “god,” was then deposited in a “mold,” where the “binding” was to be completed. Since this part of the process is described again later in connection with the determining of the sex of the engineered being, one may surmise that was the purpose of the "binding” phase.
The length of time the fertilized egg thus processed stayed in the “mold” is not stated, but what was to be done with it was quite clear.
Figure 54
The fertilized and “molded” egg was to be reimplanted in a female womb—but not in that of its original Apewoman. Rather, it was to be implanted in the womb of a “goddess,” an Anunnaki female! Only thus, it becomes clear, was the end result achievable.
Could the experimenters, Enki and Ninti, now be sure that, after all their trial-and-error attempts to create hybrids, they would then obtain a perfect lulu by implanting the fertilized and processed egg in one of their own females—that what she would give birth to would not be a monster and that her own life would not be at risk?
Evidently they could not be absolutely sure; and as often happens with scientists who use themselves as guinea pigs for a dangerous first experiment calling for a human volunteer, Enki announced to the gathered Anunnaki that his own spouse, Ninki (“Lady of the Earth”) had volunteered for the task. “Ninki, my goddess-spouse,” he announced, “will be the one for labor”; she was to be the one to determine the fate of the new being:
The newborn’s fate thou shalt pronounce;
Ninki would fix upon it the image of the gods;
And what it will be is “Man.”
The female Anunnaki chosen to serve as Birth Goddesses if the experiment succeeded, Enki said, should stay and observe what was happening. It was not, the texts reveal, a simple and smooth birth-giving process:
The birth goddesses were kept together.
Ninti sat, counting the months.
The fateful tenth month was approaching,
The tenth month arrived—
the period of opening the womb had elapsed.
The drama of Man’s creation, it appears, was compounded by a late birth; medical intervention was called for. Realizing what had to be done, Ninti “covered her head” and, with an instrument whose description was damaged on the clay tablet, “made an opening.” This done, “that which was in the womb came forth.” Grabbing the newborn baby, she was overcome with joy. Lifting it up for all to see (as depicted in Fig. 51), she shouted triumphantly:
Figure 51
I have created!
My hands have made it!
The first Adam was brought forth.
The successful birth of The Adam—by himself, as the first biblical version states—confirmed the validity of the process and opened the way for the continuation of the endeavor. Now, enough “mixed clay” was prepared to start pregnancies in fourteen birth goddesses at a time:
Ninti nipped off fourteen pieces of clay,
Seven she deposited on the right,
Seven she deposited on the left;
Between them she placed the mold.
Now the procedures were genetically engineered to come
up with seven males and seven females at a time. We read on
another tablet that Enki and Ninti,
The wise and learned,
Double-seven birth-goddesses had assembled.
Seven brought forth males,
Seven brought forth females;
The birth-goddesses brought forth
the Wind of the Breath of Life.
There is thus no conflict among the Bible’s various versions of Man’s creation. First, The Adam was created by himself; but then, in the next phase, the Elohim indeed created the first humans “male and female.”
How many times the “mass production” of Primitive Workers was repeated is not stated in the creation texts. We read elsewhere that the Anunnaki kept clamoring for more, and that eventually Anunnaki from the Edin—Mesopotamia—came to the Abzu in Africa and forcefully captured a large number of Primitive Workers to take over the manual work back in Mesopotamia. We also learn that in time, tiring of the constant need for Birth Goddesses, Enki engaged in a second genetic manipulation to enable the hybrid people to procreate on their own; but the story of that development belongs in the next chapter.
Bearing in mind that these ancient texts come to us across a bridge of time extending back for millennia, one must admire the ancient scribes who recorded, copied, and translated the earliest texts—as often as not, probably, without really knowing what this or that expression or technical term originally meant but always adhering tenaciously to the traditions that required a most meticulous and precise rendition of the copied texts.
Fortunately, as we enter the last decade of the twentieth century of the Common Era, we have the benefit of modern science on our side. The “mechanics” of cell replication and human reproduction, the function and code of the genes, the cause of many inherited defects and illnesses—all these and so many more biological processes are now understood; perhaps not yet completely but enough to allow us to evaluate the ancient tale and its data.
With all this modern knowledge at our disposal, what is the verdict on that ancient information? Is it an impossible fantasy, or are the procedures and processes, described with such attention to terminology, corroborated by modern science? The answer is yes, it is all the way we would do it today—the way we have been following, indeed, in recent years. We know today that to have someone or something ‘ ‘brought forth” in the “image” and “after the likeness” of an existing being (be it a tree, a mouse, a man) the new being must have the genes of its creator; otherwise, a totally different being would emerge.
Until a few decades ago all that science was aware of was that there are sets of chromosomes lurking within every living cell that impart both the physical and mental/ emotional characteristics to offspring. But now we know that the chromosomes are just stems on which long strands of DNA are positioned. With only four nucleotides at its disposal, the DNA can be sequenced in endless combinations, in short or long stretches interspersed with chemical signals that can mean “stop” or “go” instructions (or, it seems, to do nothing at all anymore).
Enzymes are produced and act as chemical busybodies, launching chemical processes, sending off RNAs to do their job, creating proteins to build body and muscles, produce the myriad differentiated cells of a living creature, trigger the immune system, and, of course, help the being procreate by bringing forth offspring in its own image and after its likeness.
The beginnings of genetics are now credited to Gregor Johann Mendel, an Austrian monk who, experimenting with plant hybridization, described the hereditary traits of common peas in a study published in 1866. A kind of genetic engineering has of course been practiced in horticulture (the cultivation of flowers, vegetables, and fruits) through the procedure called grafting, where the part of the plant whose qualities are desired to be added to those of another plant is added via an incision to the recipient plant. Grafting has also been tried in recent years in the animal kingdom, but with limited success between donor and recipient due to rejection by the recipient’s immune system.
The next advance, which for a while received great publicity, was the procedure called Cloning. Because each cell—let us say a human cell—contains all the genetic data necessary to reproduce that human, it has the potential forgiving rise, within a female egg, to the birth of a being identical to its parent. In theory, cloning offers a way to produce an endless number of Einsteins or, heaven help us, Hitlers.
Experimentally the possibilities of cloning began to be tested with plants, as an advanced method to replace grafting. Indeed, the term cloning comes from the Greek klon which means “twig.” The procedure began with the notion of implanting just one desired cell from the donor plant in the recipient plant. The technique then advanced to the stage where no recipient plant was needed at all; all that had to be done was to nourish the desired cell in a solution of nutrients until it began to grow, divide, and eventually form the whole plant. In the 1970s one of the hopes pinned on this process was that whole forests of trees identical to a desired species will be created in test tubes, then shipped in a parcel to the desired location to be planted and grow.
Adapting this technique from plants to animals proved more tricky. First, cloning involves asexual reproduction. In animals that reproduce by fertilizing an egg with a sperm, the reproductive cells (egg and sperm) differ from all other cells in that they do not contain all the pairs of chromosomes (which carry the genes as on stems) but only one set each. Thus, in a fertilized human egg (“ovum”) the forty-six chromosomes that constitute the required twenty-three pairs are provided half by the mother (through the ovum) and half by the father (in the sperm).
To achieve cloning, the chromosomes in the ovum must be removed surgically and a complete set of pairs inserted instead, not from a male sperm but from any other human cell. If all succeeds and the egg, nestled in the womb, becomes first an embryo, then a fetus and then a baby—the baby will be identical to the person from whose single cell it has grown. There were other problems inherent in the process, too technical to detail here, but they were slowly overcome with the aid of experimentation, improved instruments, and progress in understanding genetics. One intriguing finding that aided the experiments was that the younger the source of the transplanted nucleus the better the chances of success. In 1975 British scientists succeeded in cloning frogs from tadpole cells; the procedure required the removal of a frog egg’s nucleus and its replacement with a tadpole cell’s nucleus.
This was achieved by microsurgery, possible because the cells in question are considerably larger than, say, human cells. In 1980 and 1981 Chinese and American scientists claimed to have cloned fish with similar techniques; flies were also experimented on. When the experiments shifted to mammals, mice and rabbits were chosen because of their short reproductive cycles. The problem with mammals was not only the complexity of their cells and cell nuclei but also the need to nestle the fertilized egg in a womb. Better results were obtained when the egg’s nucleus was not removed surgically but was inactivated by radiation; even better results followed when this nucleus was “evicted” chemically and the new nucleus also introduced chemically; the procedure, developed through experiments on rabbit eggs by J. Derek Bromhall of Oxford University, became known as Chemical Fusion.
Other experiments relating to the cloning of mice seemed to indicate that for a mammal’s egg to be fertilized, to start dividing, and, even more important, to begin the process of differentiation (into the specialized cells that become the different parts of the body), more than the donor’s set of chromosomes is needed. Experimenting at Yale, Clement L. Markert concluded that there was something in the male sperm that promoted these processes, something beside the chromosomes; that “the sperm might also be contributing some unidentified spur that stimulates development of the egg.”
In order to prevent the sperm’s male chromosomes from merging with the egg’s female chromosomes (which would have resulted in a normal fertilization rather than in cloning), one set had to be removed surgically just before the merger began and the remaining set “excited” by physical or chemical means to double itself. If the sperm’s chromosomes were chosen for the latter role, the embryo might become either male or female; if the egg’s set were chosen and duplicated, the embryo could only be female.
While Markert was continuing his experiments on such methods of nuclear transfer, two other scientists (Peter C. Hoppe and Karl Illmensee) announced in 1977 the successful birth, at the Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine, of seven “single-parent mice.” The process, however, was more accurately designated parthenogenesis, “virgin birth,” than cloning; since what the experimenters did was to cause the chromosomes in the egg of a female mouse to double, keep the egg with the full set of chromosomes in certain solutions, and then, after the cell had divided several times, introduce the self-fertilized cell into the womb of a female mouse.
Significantly, the recipient mouse had to be a different female, not the mouse whose own egg had been used. Quite a stir was caused early in 1978 by the publication of a book that purported to relate how an eccentric American millionaire, obsessed by the prospect of death, sought immortality by arranging to be cloned. The book claimed that the nucleus of a cell taken from the millionaire was inserted into a female egg, which was carried through pregnancy to a successful birth by a female volunteer; the boy, fit and healthy in all respects, was reported at the time of publication to have been fourteen months old. Though written as a factual report, the tale was received with disbelief.
The scientific community’s skepticism stemmed not from the impossibility of the feat—indeed, that it would one day be possible almost all concerned agreed—but from doubts whether the feat could have been achieved by an unknown group in the Caribbean when the best researchers had only, at that time, achieved the virgin birth of mice. There was also doubt about the successful cloning of a male adult, when all the experiments had indicated that the older the donor’s cell, the lower the chances of success.
With the memory of the horrors inflicted on Mankind by Nazi Germany in the name of a “master race” still fresh, even the possibility of cloning selected humans for evil purposes (a theme of Ira Levin’s best-selling novel The Boys from Brazil) was reason enough to dampen interest in this avenue of genetic manipulation. One alternative, which substituted the “Should man play God?” outcry with what one might call the “Can science play husband?” idea, was the process that led to the phenomenon of “Test-tube babies.”
Research conducted at Texas A & M University in 1976 showed that it was possible to remove an embryo from a mammal (a baboon, in that instance) within five days of ovulation and reimplant it in the uterus of another female baboon in a transfer that led to a successful pregnancy and birth. Other researchers found ways to extract the eggs of small mammals and fertilize them in test tubes. The two processes, that of Embryo Transfer and In vitro Fertilization, were employed in an event that made medical history in July, 1978, when Louise Brown was born at the Oldham and District General Hospital in northwest England.
The first of many other test-tube babies, she was conceived in a test tube, not by her parents but by techniques employed by Doctors Patrick Steptoe and Robert Edwards. Nine months earlier they had used a device with a light at its end to suck out a mature egg from Mrs. Brown’s ovary. Bathed in a dish containing life-support nutrients, the extracted egg was “mixed”—the word was used by Dr. Edwards—with the husband’s sperm.
Once a sperm succeeded in fertilizing the egg, the egg was transferred to a dish containing other nutrients, where it began to divide. After fifty hours it had reached an eight-celled division; at that point, the egg was re-implanted in Mrs. Brown’s womb. With care and special treatment, the embryo developed properly; a caesarean delivery completed the feat, and a couple who before this could not have a child because of the wife’s defective fallopian tubes now had a normal daughter.
“We have a girl and she’s perfect!” the gynecologist who performed the caesarean delivery shouted as he held up the baby.
“I have created, my hands have made it!” Ninti cried out as she delivered the Adam by caesarean section, an eon earlier....
Also reminiscent of the ancient reports of the long road of trial and error taken by Enki and Ninti was the fact that the Baby Louise “breakthrough” about which the media went wild (Fig. 55) came after twelve years of trial and error, in the course of which fetuses and even babies turned out defective.
Undoubtedly unbeknown to the doctors and researchers was the fact that, in discovering also that the addition of blood serum to the mixture of nutrients and sperm was essential to success, they were following (he very same procedures that Enki and Ninti had employed...
Figure 55
Although the feat gave new hope to barren women (it also opened the way to surrogate motherhood, embryo freezing, semen banks, and new legal entanglements), it was just a distant cousin of the feat accomplished by Enki and Ninti. Yet it had to employ the techniques of which we have read in the ancient texts—just as the scientists engaged in nucleus transfers have found that the male donor must be young, as the Sumerian texts have stressed.
The most obvious difference between the test-tube baby variants and what the ancient texts describe is that in the former the natural process of procreation is emulated: human male sperm fertilize a human female egg that then develops in the womb. In the case of the creation of The Adam, the genetic material of two different (even if not dissimilar) species was mixed to create a new being, positioned somewhere between the two “parents.”
In recent years modern science has made substantial advances in such genetic manipulation. With the aid of increasingly sophisticated equipment, computers, and evermore minute instruments, scientists have been able to “read” the genetic code of living organisms, up to and including that of Man. Not only has it become possible to read the A-G-CT of DNA and the A-G-C-U “letters” of the genetic “alphabet,” but we can now also recognize the three-letter “words” of the genetic code (like AGG, AAT, GCC, GGG— and so on in myriad combinations) as well as the segments of the DNA strands that form genes, each with its specific task— for example, to determine the color of the eyes, to direct growth, or to transmit a hereditary disease.
Scientists have also found that some of the code’s “words” simply act to instruct the replication process where to start and when to stop. Gradually, scientists have become able to transcribe the genetic code to a computer screen and to recognize in the printouts (Fig. 56) the “stop” and “go” signs. The next step was to tediously find out the function of each segment, or gene—of which the simple E. coli bacterium has about 4,000 and human beings well over 100,000.
Plans are now afoot to “map” the complete human genetic makeup (“Genome”); the enormity of the task, and the extent of the knowledge already gained, can be appreciated by the fact that if the DNA in all human cells were extracted and put in a box, the box need be no bigger than an ice cube; but if the twisting strands of DNA were stretched out, the string would extend 47 million miles...
Figure 56
In spite of these complexities, it has become possible, with the aid of enzymes, to cut DNA strands at desired places, remove a “sentence” that makes up a gene, and even insert into the DNA a foreign gene; through these techniques an undesired trait (such as one that causes disease) can be removed or a desired one (such as a growth-hormone gene) added.
The advances in understanding and manipulating this fundamental chemistry of life were recognized in 1980 with the award of the Nobel prize in chemistry to Walter Gilbert of Harvard and Frederick Sanger of Cambridge University for the development of rapid methods for reading large segments of DNA, and to Paul Berg of Stanford University for pioneering work in “gene splicing.”
Another term used for the procedures is “Recombinant DNA technology,” because after the splicing, the DNA is recombined with newly introduced segments of DNA. These capabilities have made possible gene therapy, the removal from or correction within human cells of genes causing inherited sicknesses and defects. It has also made possible Biogenetics: inducing, through genetic manipulation, bacteria or mice to manufacture a needed chemical (such as insulin) for medical treatment. Such feats of recombinant technology are possible because all the DNA in all living organisms on Earth is of the same makeup, so that a strand of bacteria DNA will accept (“recombine” with) a segment of human DNA.
(Indeed, American and Swiss researchers reported in July 1984 the discovery of a DNA segment that was common to human beings, flies, earthworms, chickens, and frogs—further corroboration of the single genetic origin of all life on Earth.)
Hybrids such as a mule, which is the progeny of a donkey and a horse, can be born from the mating of the two because they have similar chromosomes (hybrids, however, cannot procreate). A sheep and a goat, though not too distant relatives, cannot naturally mate; however, because of their genetic kinship, experiments have brought them together to form (in 1983) a “geep” (Fig. 57)—a sheep with its woolly coat but with a goat’s horns.
Such mixed, or “mosaic,” creatures are called chimeras, after the monster in Greek mythology that had the forepart of a lion, the middle of a goat, and the tail of a dragon (Fig. 58). The feat was attained by “Cell Fusion,” the fusing together of a sheep embryo and a goat embryo at the stage of their early divisions into four cells each, then incubating the mixture in a test tube with nutrients until it was time to transfer the mixed embryo to the womb of a sheep that acted as a surrogate mother.
Figure 57
Figure 58
In such cell fusions, the outcome (even if a viable offspring is born) cannot be predicted; it is totally a matter of chance which genes will end up where on the chromosomes, and what traits—“images” and “likenesses”—will be picked up from which cell donor. There is little doubt that the monsters of Greek mythology, including the famous Minotaur (half bull, half man) of Crete, were recollections of the tales transmitted to the Greeks by Berossus, the Babylonian priest, and that his sources were the Sumerian texts concerning the trial-and-error experiments of Enki and Ninti which produced all kinds of chimeras.
The advances in genetics have provided biotechnology with other routes than the unpredictable chimera route; it is evident that in doing so, modern science has followed the alternate (though more difficult) course of action undertaken by Enki and Ninti. By cutting out and adding on pieces of the genetic strands, or Recombinant Technology, the traits to be omitted, added, or exchanged can be specified and targeted.
Some of the landmarks along this progress in genetic engineering were the transfer of bacterial genes to plants to make the latter resistant to certain diseases and, later (in 1980), of specific bacteria genes into mice. In 1982 growth genes of a rat were spliced into the genetic code of a mouse (by teams headed by Ralph L. Brinster of the University of Pennsylvania and Richard D. Palmiter of Howard Hughes Medical Institute), resulting in the birth of a “Mighty Mouse” twice the size of a normal mouse. In 1985 it was reported in Nature (June 27) that experimenters at various scientific centers had succeeded in inserting functioning human growth genes into rabbits, pigs, and sheep; and in 1987 (New Scientist, September 17) Swedish scientists likewise created a Super-Salmon.
By now, genes carrying other traits have been used in such “trans-genic” recombinations between bacteria, plants, and mammals. Techniques have even progressed to the artificial manufacture of compounds that perfectly emulate specific functions of a given gene, mainly with a view to treating diseases. In mammals, the altered fertilized female egg ultimately must be implanted in the womb of a surrogate mother—the function that was assigned, according to the Sumerian tales, to the “Birth Goddesses.” But before that stage, a way had to be found to introduce the desired genetic traits from the male donor into the egg of the female participant.
The most common method is micro-injection, by which a female egg, already fertilized, is extracted and injected with the desired added genetic trait; after a short incubation in a glass dish, the egg is reimplanted in a female womb (mice, pigs, and other mammals have been tried). The procedure is difficult, has many hurdles, and results in only a small percentage of successes—but it works. Another technique has been the use of viruses, which naturally attack cells and fuse with their genetic cores: the new genetic trait to be transferred into a cell is attached by complex ways to a virus, which then acts as the carrier; the problem here is that the choice of the site on the chromosome stem to which the gene is to be attached is uncontrollable, and in most cases chimeras have resulted.
In June 1989 a report in Cell by a team of Italian scientists headed by Corrado Spadafora of the Institute of Biomedical Technology in Rome announced success in using sperm to act as the carriers of the new gene. They reported procedures whereby sperm were induced to let down their natural resistance to foreign genes; then, after being soaked in solutions containing the new genetic material, the sperm incorporated the genetic material into their cores. The altered sperm were then used to impregnate female mice; the offspring contained the new gene in their chromosomes (in this case a certain bacterial enzyme).
The use of the most natural medium—sperm—to carry genetic material into a female egg astounded the scientific community in its simplicity and made front-page news even in The New York Times. A follow-up study in Science of August 11, 1989, reported mixed successes by other scientists in duplicating the Italian technique. But all the scientists involved in recombinant technologies concurred that, with some modifications and improvements, a new technique—and the most simple and natural one—has been developed. Some have pointed out that the ability of sperm to take up foreign DNA was suggested by researchers as early as 1971, after experiments with rabbit sperm.
Little is it realized that the technique had been reported even earlier, in Sumerian texts describing the creation of The Adam by Enki and Ninti, who had mixed the Apewoman’s egg in a test tube with the sperm of a young Anunnaki in a solution also containing blood serum. In 1987 the dean of anthropology at the University of Florence, Italy, raised a storm of protests by clergymen and humanists when he revealed that ongoing experiments could lead to the “creation of a new breed of slave, an anthropoid with a chimpanzee mother and a human father.” One of my fans sent me the clipping of the story with the comment, “Well, Enki, here we go again!”
This seems to best sum up the achievements of modern microbiology.
WASPS, MONKEYS, AND BIBLICAL PATRIARCHS
Much of what has happened on Earth, and especially its earliest wars, stemmed from the Succession Code of the Anunnaki that deprived the firstborn son of the succession if another son was born to the ruler by a half sister. The same succession rules, adopted by the Sumerians, are reflected in the tales of the Hebrew Patriarchs. The Bible relates that Abraham (who came from the Sumerian capital city of Ur) asked his wife Sarah (a name that meant “Princess”) to identify herself, when meeting foreign kings, as his sister rather than as his wife.
Though not the whole truth it was not a lie, as explained in Genesis 20:12:
“Indeed she is my sister, the daughter of my father but not the daughter of my mother, and she became my wife.”
Abraham’s successor was not the firstborn Ishmael, whose mother was the handmaiden Hagar, but Isaac, the son of the half sister Sarah, though he was born much later. The strict adherence to these succession rules in antiquity in all royal courts, whether in Egypt of the Old World or in the Inca empire in the New World, suggest some “bloodline,” or genetic, assumption that appears odd and contrary to the belief that mating with close relatives is undesirable. But did the Anunnaki know something modern science has yet to discover?
In 1980 a group led by Hannah Wu at Washington University found that, given a choice, female monkeys preferred to mate with half brothers.
“The exciting thing about this experiment,” the report stated, “is that although the preferred half brothers shared the same father, they had different mothers.”
Discover magazine (December 1988) reported studies showing that “male wasps ordinarily mate with their sisters.” Since one male wasp fertilizes many females, the preferential mating was found to be with half sisters: same father but different mother.
It appears thus that there was more than whim to the succession code of the Anunnaki.
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