THE CASE OF THE GENETICALLY MODIFIED
PRIMATE
"Ninharsag and her crew are closer to being vindicated as time passes,
and soon your theories will no longer be theories!"
So wrote to me a fan (Jack Byrd in Virginia) in a congratulatory letter
accompanying a newspaper clipping headlined "Genetically modified primate
is world's first." It was the report about the successful birth of
ANDi ('inserted DNA' spelled backward), a baby rhesus monkey "created"
by a group of researchers at the Oregon Regional Primate Center, whose genetic
makeup was modified to include the genes from a jellyfish that make it glow
in the dark.
Mice have been previously genetically modified for medical research.
But because the rhesus monkey is roughly 95 percent akin to humans genetically,
"I think we are at an extraordinary moment in the history of humans, " said
the chief researcher Dr. Gerald Schatten.
I was of course pleased to be congratulated. Yet, I wrote back to
my fan with thanks coupled with an admonition. "While it is nice to
get such reassuring compliments," I wrote to him, "I am trying to get my
fans to write about it to others, and first and foremost to the newspapers
that carried the reports. In this case, the Associated Press report
stresses that it is the world's FIRST genetically modified primate; what
a Letter to the Editor should point out is that according to Sumerian texts
reported by Zecharia Sitchin in his books The 12th Planet and Genesis Revisited,
ADAM was the first genetically modified primate, some 300,000 years ago!"
The news about the genetically modified rhesus monkey was just one item
in an avalanche of reports on human genetics, cloning etc. in which the names
of Enki and Ninharsag could well replace the names of Dr. Schatten, Dr. Phyllis
Leppert (and their other modern colleagues). So please -- TELL IT TO
THE NEWSPAPERS!
February
2001
Z. Sitchin
The report of the Public Consortium is in
Nature, Feb 15, 2001 and of
Celera Genomics in Science of Feb 16th, 2001.
