Does This Mean We'll Be Able to Fire Beams out of our Eyes? Everett Collection
By day, Seok-Hyun Yun and Malte Gather are physicists at Massachusetts General Hospital. But at night, for the past four years, they worked on making a human cell behave like a laser. They built their human laser out of the same three components found in all lasers: a pump source, which provides the initial light energy; an optical cavity, which concentrates the light from the pump source into a beam; and a gain medium, a substance in which electrons are excited until they reach a higher-energy state and simultaneously release that energy as a beam of photons—laser light.
Awesome!
Yun and Gather modified a human kidney cell to produce green fluorescent protein (GFP), which makes jellyfish bioluminescent. This was their gain medium. They cultured these modified cells and placed one between two mirrors, creating the optical cavity—“a cell sandwich,” Yun says. They then sent pulses of blue light from a miniature laser (the pump source) through the cell, bouncing between the mirrors. The cell glowed green, and light shot out. Through a microscope, the physicists saw a grayish mass (the cell) with luminescent spots (the laser).
Light Pinball: Physicists created a laser by placing mirrors on either side of a human cell and sending pulses of blue light through it. The light bounced back and forth until a laser beam shot out in one direction. Courtesy Malte Gather
Now What?
A living laser could be used to activate cancer-treating drugs using photodynamic therapy. Doctors could inject light-sensitive compounds into a patient’s bloodstream to seek out tumors and diseased cells. Usually, such compounds are activated externally, but treatment would be more precise if both the drugs and the light were internal. For now, though, Yun is primarily interested in using his human laser to detect slight changes in cells. The intracavity light passes through the cells thousands or millions of times before exiting as a laser beam. Yun says that scientists could use the ricocheting light to monitor cell behavior with unprecedented sensitivity, similar to an intracellular high-speed camera. And yes, he says, his process could one day allow people to shoot laser beams from their eyes, though it would be more flashlight than death ray. “If a light source was implanted in the eye, it might be possible to control it with brain signals.”
“The original source of knowledge is the Vedas. There are no branches of knowledge, either mundane or transcendental, which do not belong to the original text of the Vedas. They have simply been developed into different branches, They were originally rendered by great, respectable and learned professors.” (Shrila Prabhupada, Shrimad Bhagavatam, 1.4.23 Purport)
With respect to the Vedas, the authority is firmly established after following the foremost recommendations. The fear we may have of falling victim to a bogus system of religion is ameliorated by the stock of great leaders and pious men who have followed the original scriptures of India, whose most concise and complete treatise is known as the Bhagavad-gita. This sacred text starts off with an issue that every man must address at some point: death. Immediately, the speaker of the Gita, Shri Krishna, states that the soul is the essence of identity and that the body is temporary. The soul does not cease to exist after death nor did it come into existence at the time of birth. The soul is always there, regardless of whether we can see it or not.
Based on the modes adopted, a living being develops a certain kind of faith. In the lower species, the faith relates strictly to sense pleasures. The animals don’t know anything beyond eating, sleeping, mating and defending because their bodies are made up almost entirely of the mode of ignorance. In the human form of body, there is variety in engagement. Though the original Veda, which was passed on by the same Shri Krishna at the beginning of time, was meant primarily for those in pure goodness, this doesn’t mean that other living beings are left out.
Isn’t saying that we come from Krishna a dogmatic principle? The fact that there is an entity superior to us has no bearing on sects or traditions. We already know that death is superior to us because it forces us to exit a body when we don’t want to. The irrepressible forces of nature also influence our behavior. If we were superior to nature we wouldn’t have to wait for the sun to come up in the morning or be forced to go to sleep at night. At the same time, we know that we are dominant over dull matter, as we can tell our body where to move and how to act.
The same loss has occurred with the original set of information passed on by Krishna. Bhagavata-dharma is complete information because it helps the soul cope with a land where material nature has a dominating influence. With information on how to stop the influence of the senses, one can find the bliss that they are searching after. That being said, if one is given towards associating with one of the three modes of nature, they can grab ancillary information from the Vedas and use that to form their own system of maintenance. Hence you get different branches of knowledge.
Whoever connects directly with Krishna and accepts all of His instructions will learn that the soul’s only business is to connect with God and that through that established yoga one can acquire the knowledge necessary for dealing with life’s other issues. Arjuna, the recipient of the Gita on that famous day on the battlefield of Kurukshetra, used the sublime wisdom imparted to him to fight on without attachment in a difficult war. But more importantly he retained that information so that he could stay connected with Krishna. He who has the reservoir of pleasure at the forefront of their consciousness automatically stays in contact with the original source of supreme wisdom and thus has no reason to fear not knowing which path to take in life.
