Robert Todd Carroll
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cellular memory
"The idea that transplanting organs transfers the coding of life experiences is unimaginable."
--Dr. John Schroeder, Stanford Medical Center
Cellular memory is the speculative notion that human body cells contain clues to our personalities, tastes and histories, independently of either genetic codes or brain cells. Perhaps the idea for this nonsense began with films such as Brian's Song. In that film, the 26-year old Piccolo (played by James Caan) is dying of cancer when Gayle Sayers (played by Billy Dee Williams), his friend and Chicago Bears teammate, visits him in the hospital. Piccolo had been given a transfusion and he asks Sayers if he had donated any blood. When Sayers says yes, Piccolo remarks that that explains his craving for chitlins.
Or perhaps the idea originated with L. Ron Hubbard. In Dianetics, he speculated that cellular memory might explain how engrams work.
Maybe the idea came from Les Mains d'Orlac by Maurice Renard (1875-1939), a story of a concert pianist who loses his hands in an accident and is given the hands of a murderer in a transplant operation. Suddenly, the pianist has an urge to kill. Several variations of Renard's story have made it into film, including Orlacs Hände, a 1935 silent Austrian film, Mad Love (1935), Les Mains D'Orlac (1960), and Hands of a Stranger (1962). A similar story is told by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac (authors of Vertigo) in et mon tout est un homme (1965), which was made into the film Body Parts in 1991. A prison psychiatrist loses an arm in an accident and is given the arm of an executed psycho-killer. The arm then develops a mind of its own.
More recently, Claire Sylvia, a heart-lung transplant recipient, explained her sudden craving for beer by noting that her donor was an 18-year old male who died in a motorcycle accident. She's even written a book about it, which will soon be made into a movie starring Sally Field. Paul Pearsall, a psychologist and author of The Pleasure Principle, also casts his vote for the theory of cellular memory and transfer. Pearsall goes much further in his speculations, however, claiming that "the heart has a coded subtle knowledge connecting us to everything and everyone around us. That aggregate knowledge is our spirit and soul. . . .The heart is a sentient, thinking, feeling, communicating organ." How he knows this is anybody's guess. It may have been channeled to him from aliens or wise persons from the East. Or perhaps he has been reading the fiction of Edna Buchanan, who asks: "What if the soul is contained in DNA? What if DNA is contained in the soul?"
Sylvia Browne teaches a course for an alternative education program in Sacramento entitled Healing Your Body, Mind & Soul. In one two-hour session Ms. Browne will teach anyone "how to directly access the genetic code within each cell, manipulate that code and reprogram the body to a state of normalcy." Despite the preposterous nature of her claims, the course sold out.
And what if you eat too much chicken? Might you grow a beak, start clucking uncontrollably, and develop a craving for seeds? Are those squealing and mooing sounds you hear in the night your diabetic neighbors who are using porcine and bovine insulin? Pity the poor child who received a baboon's heart.
See also sympathetic
magic.
And then there are those who disagree.....
Robert Todd Carroll
Celestine Prophecy