PREFACE

This book is written for biologists, biochemists, biophysicists and physicists, but we hope it will be of interest to all educated people. It challenges current scientific paradigms, suggesting ways to develop a new physics that would include Life and Mind.

At the beginning of the 20th century, Alexander Bogdanov wrote in his “Tecktology — The General Science of Organizations” that the world is made of organizations of things, beings and ideas, and all organizations have mechanisms of self-protection and self-stabilization. Scientific communities currently are important and powerful organizations — they receive and distribute tremendous amounts of money that governments invest in security (military potentials), new energy sources, agriculture, medical care, etc. They must be stable to fulfill their function; however, the pursuit of stability is always associated with the suppression of freedom, freedom to introduce new and often controversial ideas.

During the transition period of the 1990s the Russian Academy of Sciences almost lost its function of funds distribution as there was a shortage of funds available to the government; consequently, the Academy lost control over the scientific community to some degree. Thanks to this development we have the opportunity to publish in this book the results of some very interesting experimental works such as: paradoxical effects of super-low concentrations of biologically active substances (by the Institute of Biochemical Physics, RAN); biological nuclear synthesis in growing bacterial cultures (by a group from Moscow State University and University of Kiev, Ukraine); and physical processes associated with telekinesis (in N. Sotina’s article) by different scientific groups. Nothing similar would be possible in the United States. Pioneering works such as Louis Kervran’s biological nuclear reactions, J. Benveniste’s memory of water, E. Macovschi’s biostructure, etc, — all of these subjects are “nonexistent” in the current peer-reviewed scientific literature. It seems that nobody even attempted to falsify these works because positive results would not be published in any “respectable” scientific journal and authors daring to publish them would lose government funding.

None of the American co-authors of this book were funded by the United States Government. But let us remember that many of the greatest contributions to human culture were made by aristocrats who were not concerned with making a living. This effect of Russian “freedom” should be a valuable lesson for all governments and academies.

Contemporary biomedical science does not seem to have any concept of, and ignores the need for an understanding of the organism’s general control system. Society pays for this by human lives and by the growing economic burden of the healthcare system. But biologists and biochemists who try to reduce the control function to local chemical (electrical) interactions are not to blame — the root of the problem is the inadequacy of contemporary physics.

Contemporary physics does not have any meaningful explanation for how life emerged (on the Earth or elsewhere) and how it maintains itself, or what is the physical carrier of the fundamental programs of life — development, maintenance, reproduction, and death — on which the information is re-encoded from the genome, the chemical carrier. Currently known physical forces cannot explain how the mother’s body or, for that matter, a beehive, controls embryogenesis, or what controls collective behavior of an ant colony. Chemical signals found in many biological processes — from cellular physiology, to bacterial colonies regulation, to animals’ sexual behavior (pheromones) — are no more than signals of the most complex programs that control life.

Scientists, and many other thoughtful people, know that our knowledge about the Universe can be compared to a harbor in an ocean of the unknown, especially as related to the phenomenon of life. This book is not intended to consider the entire mysterious ocean of the unknown. Yet, it will show that the problem of the general control system of the organism is at least “touchable,” and the accumulated experimental and theoretical work presented here can serve as a guide for further development of science.

Almost all co-authors, especially Drs. Bockris, Tiller and Sotina, participated in discussing contents of other articles presented in this book. Also, great assistance came from Dr. Jim Clegg, Professor of cellular biology at the University of California, Davis, and Dr. Garret Yount and Kanny Rachlin of the California Pacific Medical Center Research Institute, who helped in editing biological articles. We greatly appreciate the technical editing of the material by Felix Heidrick, a master of creating camera-ready electronic formats.

All co-authors hope that this book will sooner or later catch the attention of the scientific community and will stimulate further progress in science.

—Savely Savva, Editor