Searching human genome reveals Biblical text
Friday, May 6 Posted: 10:58 AM EDT (1458 GMT)
Manhattan, New York (CNN) -- I met up with Alex Keller in a street fair a block away from Columbia University’s Washington Heights campus. He introduced me to a pushcart merchant with the ability to hand print words on a single grain of rice.
I challenged her to fit the first line of the Bible onto my piece.
Sure enough, using nothing more than a jeweler’s eye loupe, a fine writing instrument and a steady hand, the familiar words, In the beginning created God the heavens and the earth, slowly emerged. It was a souvenir of a notable skill, but as you will hear below, Alex has remarkable talents of his own that lead him to discovering those very same words on a much smaller scale.
Each character on the grain of rice is perhaps 1/10th of a millimeter. Very small indeed, but I found those words more than a million times smaller.
What Alex is referring to is a discovery with profound scientific and religious implications that might change the way we view our place in the universe.
Shortly after obtaining degrees in genetics, developmental microbiology and computer science, Alex Keller continued his studies at the Columbia Genome Center (CGC) contributing to the Human Genome Project (HGP).
With the collective assistance of labs around the world, we have already identified the approximately 25,000 genes in human DNA, but the genomic informatics work has really just begun.
The primary goal of the HGP was to sequence the more than 3 billion chemical base pairs that make up human DNA, essentially to store the blueprint of life into a computer database. Researchers like Alex work in the new field of informatics, searching the database for clues on how the mechanics of cells work on a molecular level in pursuit of developing new drugs for curing disease.
I helped to develop a lot of the software that our lab uses to crunch the database. There is so much information that data compression is essential. One day I noticed a particular sequence compressed very well--a lot higher than I usually see. This suggested that there was a lot of redundancy in the sequence, so I decided to inspect it by hand.
The spiral ladder of a DNA molecule encodes information in a four-letter alphabet consisting of A, C, G and T, which represents the chemicals Adenine, Cytosine, Guanine and Thymine respectively. The sequence of those letters describes everything needed to make and control every cell within the human body.
The redundancy in the sequence turned out to contain long sequences of A’s always separated by the same series of 18 of the other three characters. I noticed that the number of A’s increased as the sequence continued. When I started counting them, I got 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13 and so on up to 5791. They were all prime numbers.
Alex’s prime number series was located in a DNA sequence between genes known as an intron.
Many people call introns ‘garbage DNA.’ We know that the cell effectively ignores intron information when referencing DNA to generate proteins.
This find was important because natural sources of prime numbers are extremely rare.
I didn’t think it was that unusual when I initially found it. Nature sometimes produces some amazing mathematical wonders. A spiraling snail shell contains the golden ratio for example.
The primes were always separated by the 18 letter sequence: TGGGTGGCGCTGCCCCCT.
After a while, I started wondering if the separator sequences had any mathematical meaning. I felt that the primes were a sort of beacon, an easy to find section made to get our attention and that maybe the repeated separators were telling us where to look to find more information. I remember commenting this to one of my colleagues and she thought I was totally crazy.
Alex became obsessed with trying to interpret the separator.
It eventually dawned on me how to encode genetic locus and chromosome number by size into 18 letters. When I examined where it directed me, I found another intron, but this one had no primes. It was just a random jumble of letters and I felt totally lost for a while.
Almost six months later, when Alex was about to give up, he received an email from Angela Wolgemuth, a Columbia University professor of Gematria. Just as the Romans produced numerals using sequences of letters, each letter in Hebrew possesses a numeric value and Gematria is the study of understanding those numbers in context.
It was a message in the oldest form of Hebrew. The same kind of Hebrew you find in Old Testament poems like the ‘Song of Deborah’ in Judges.
The message translated to, When God began to create heaven and earth, and the earth then was welter and waste and darkness over the deep and God’s breath hovering over the waters, God said, ‘Let there be light’. And there was light.
My initial reaction was laughter. I was immediately skeptical. It sounded completely ridiculous, but Angela carefully showed me step-by-step, how the numbers directly mapped to Hebrew and I looked up many of the words in her translation to see for myself. I decided the message was there, but somebody must have deliberately inserted it into the database. I was concerned because it meant that some of the labs may have been falsifying the DNA sequences they were turning in.
Based on what he found, Alex convinced his colleagues that the regions needed to be re-sequenced. Two weeks later, the database was updated.
It did not change! I have to admit I was a little bit shocked at that point, but I decided that since the DNA sequence is so long, that under the right interpretation, we could probably find any short message somewhere in the sequence if we looked hard enough. I had the computer search for lines in Shakespeare as a test, and it found them without a problem. At that point I brushed the discovery off as coincidence and wishful thinking.
At a lunch a few weeks later, Prof. Wolgemuth commented about the section beyond the message that she could not translate.
She brought my attention back to the DNA sequence itself, not the translation. There it was at the end--another 18 letter sequence. When I got back to the lab, I used it to locate another intron and sent it to her. She came back a few days later with part of Exodus. I was awestruck.
Over the next several days, they followed the entire chain of messages.
What we discovered were short biblical segments--significant sentences--from across the Bible, though not in the exact order seen in a modern day Bible. One that I found particularly interesting matched up against text in the Book of Revelation, but our message suggests that 616 is the number of the beast instead of 666.
Alex decided to keep his findings secret in a field that requires you to publish as much as possible and as often as possible.
I felt if I published this, it would be career ending and if I did not publish something soon, it would also be career ending. Many of my colleagues dropped my name from their paper’s reference list after they heard of my findings. It was depressing at times.
Alex could not go public until he had more proof.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. I decided to examine nematode DNA. One of the first achievements of the Human Genome Project was fully sequencing the DNA of the nematode worm. It was already well known that humans share a surprisingly large number of genes with simple organisms like nematodes, but few had looked at introns since it is considered garbage DNA.
Alex found exactly the same sequence of primes linked to the same series of biblical messages.
As far as we can tell, the same messages are in the DNA of all living things. This discovery finally gives the Intelligence Design guys something to investigate.
The theory of Intelligent Design (ID) holds that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause rather than an undirected process such as natural selection. Followers have been highly criticized for preaching science class curriculum changes without performing any kind of scientific research to back up their claims. This discovery may change all that.
As for Alex himself, he does not view the theory of evolution as contrary to this finding or religion.
Evolution is a fact, not a theory. ‘Scientific theory’ is commonly confused with the colloquial meaning of ‘theory.’ I believe that the messages prove that God created life, but he created it with the ability to adapt to a changing world through evolution. If God did not build life with the power to evolve, anytime the environment changed, either rapidly or over time, survival would be at stake. Natural selection enables a life to flourish anywhere and to work in seamless relationships. God certainly put the whole thing in motion, but he did not have to work out each and every detail that we see today. It’s possible that he influenced the direction evolution took, perhaps to help direct evolution to the human form.
Archbishop Michael Louis Fitzgerald, head of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue at that Vatican, told CNN, It is too early to comment on the words of God in our living cells. Many are already speaking of the ramifications; however, it is important that these claims are substantiated in labs around the world before we come to any conclusions.
Alex certainly agrees.
I remember reading about Galileo defending his discovering during the time of the Inquisition. He often told his skeptics to point telescopes up to the heavens and make similar observations. The proof that the Earth is not the center of the universe is available every night. Now, any lab with genetic sequencing equipment or access to the HGP database can read the messages themselves.
As a souvenir, Alex presented me with an ordinary grain of rice.
There is no need to write on this one. It already carries the message and many more billions of times over.
Alex Keller’s discovery will be described in detail in an upcoming issue of the journal Nature.
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