Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness Are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe Read Online Free PDF Page A

teenager, which resulted in me being taken under the wing of Stephen Kuffler, a renowned neurobiologist at Harvard.
    My road to Kuffler began, appropriately enough, with science fairs, which for me were an antidote against those who looked down on me because of my family’s circumstances. Once, after my sister was suspended from school, the principal told my mother she was not fit to be a parent. By trying earnestly, I thought I could improve my situation. I had a vision of accepting an award someday in front of all those teachers and classmates who laughed when I said I was going to enter the science fair. I applied myself to a new project,
an ambitious attempt to alter the genetic makeup of white chickens and make them black. My biology teacher told me it was impossible, and my parents thought I was just trying to hatch chicken eggs and refused to drive me to the farm to get them.
    I persuaded myself to make a journey by bus and trolley car from my house in Stoughton to Harvard Medical School, one of the world’s most prestigious institutions of medical science. I mounted the stairs that led up to the front doors; the huge granite slabs were worn by past generations. Once inside, I hoped the men of science would receive me kindly and aid in my efforts. This was science, wasn’t it, and shouldn’t that have been enough? As it turned out, I never got past the guard.
    I felt like Dorothy at Emerald City when the palace guard said, “Go away!” I found some breathing space at the back of the building to figure out my next move. The doors were all locked. I stood by the dumpster for perhaps half an hour. Then I saw a man approaching me, no taller than I was, clad in a T-shirt and khaki work pants—the janitor, I supposed, coming in the back door and all. Thinking that, I realized for the first time how I was going to get inside.
    In another moment, we were standing face to face inside. “He doesn’t know or care that I’m here,” I thought. “He just cleans the floors.”
    “Can I help you?” he said.
    “No,” I said. “I have to ask a Harvard professor a question.”
    “Are you looking for any professor in particular?”
    “Well, actually, no—it’s about DNA and nucleoprotein. I’m trying to induce melanin synthesis in albino chickens,” I said. My words met with a stare of surprise. Seeing the impact they were having, I went on, though I was certain he didn’t know what DNA was. “You see, albinism is an autosomal recessive disease . . .”
    As we got to talking, I told him how I worked in the school cafeteria myself, and how I was good friends with Mr. Chapman, the janitor who lived up the street. He asked me if my father was a
doctor. I laughed. “No, he’s a professional gambler. He plays poker.” It was at that moment, I think, we became friends. After all, we were both, I assumed, from the same underprivileged class.
    Of course, what I didn’t know was that he was Dr. Stephen Kuffler, the world-famous neurobiologist who had been nominated for the Nobel Prize. Had he told me so, I would have rushed off. At the time, however, I felt like a schoolmaster lecturing to a pupil. I told him about the experiment I had performed in my basement—how I altered the genetic makeup of a white chicken to make it black.
    “Your parents must be proud of you,” he said.
    “They don’t know what I do,” I said. “I stay out of their way. They just think I’m trying to hatch chicken eggs.”
    “They didn’t drive you here?”
    “No, they’d kill me if they knew where I was. They think I’m playing out in my treehouse.”
    He insisted upon introducing me to a “Harvard doctor.” I hesitated. After all, he was just the janitor, and I didn’t want him to get into trouble.
    “Don’t worry about me,” he said with a little grin.
    He took me into a room crammed with sophisticated equipment. A “doctor” looking through an instrument with strange, manipulative probes was about to insert an electrode