All Episodes
Previous Next
Sept. 24, 1999 - Art Bell
02:40:11
Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell - Nanotechnology - Charles Ostman
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Welcome to Art Bell, somewhere in time.
Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from September 4th, 1999.
From the high desert in the great American Southwest, I bid you all good evening, good morning, as the case may be across all these many prolific time zones covering so much territory from the Tahitian Hawaiian Islands out west eastward to the Caribbean and the U.S.
Virgin Islands and maybe a little further, actually, South into South America, North all the way to the Pole, and worldwide on the Internet.
Thanks to Broadcast.com and the Intel Corporation.
And several people have sent me their little sound logo, which I use.
So I'm going to have that imprinted on something that I can play soon.
This is Coast to Coast AM, and I'm Art Bell, and coming up shortly, our nation's only UFO Lobbyist, registered lobbyist in Washington, Stephen Bassett, along with Dr. Stephen Greer, see SETI's Stephen Greer, to tell us what in the world is going on.
There's a big flap out there.
Ex-Director Woolsey, CIA Director Woolsey, has written a letter, in some ways, rebuking, that might not be the right word, changing the characterization of the meeting Uh, the very famous meeting that most of you know about with Dr. Stephen Greer.
The one in which, you'll recall, uh, Dr. Greer said that, uh, Director Woolsey had his head in his hands.
Just astounded at the information, you'll recall.
Well, there has been comment now from Woolsey, and, uh, this is going to be a news-making, uh, interview you're about to hear.
So, I suggest you all get ready, because probably some A slightly subdued sparks are going to fly.
We're going to do something fairly dramatic tonight in that it's a controversy.
And I would imagine it's going to generate, as I said, some news.
With us, Stephen Bassett.
Still, the only lobbyist in the U.S.
registered to represent UFO-ET research activist organizations, founder of Paradigm Research Group, executive director of XPAC, the Extraterrestrial Phenomena Political Action Committee, the first PAC in history targeting the politics of UFO-ET phenomena, author of the Paradigm Clock website, and of course, Dr. Stephen Greer.
He's off on a camping trip at a remote location.
He is an emergency room physician, international director of C-SETI, of course, the Center for Study of Extraterrestrial Intelligence.
We did a four-hour show here recently, but something has happened since.
And, oh, by the way, he's also author of the newly published Extraterrestrial Intelligence, The Evidence and Implications.
That book.
Brand new.
Gentlemen, welcome to the program.
Hi Art.
Hi, nice to be here.
Glad to have you, and Doctor, always glad to have you back.
We are here tonight for a number of reasons, but I'd like to do it right off the bat, because Doctor Greer, you have come on this program in the past and described a really incredible and dramatic meeting with the now ex-director of the CIA, Woolsey, and one in which he finally ended up with his head in his hands I think you described just astounded at what you were laying out for him.
And there's been a letter written by Woolsey which suggests that the meeting was not what you say it was.
That's right, and actually it's a letter that was addressed to me from Woolsey and some of the other people at this meeting which is attempting to, in my opinion, distort and minimize the nature and significance of the meeting And the specific things which went on at the meeting.
And for example, the person who set up the meeting, John Peterson, had set it up as a dinner party so it could be a cover for this briefing.
And his wife did not even know the CIA director was coming until the morning of the event.
And the letter they wrote me is questioning my characterization of it as a briefing that had a cover story of a dinner party and this sort of thing.
It's interesting because what they're referring to is the introduction of my new book, which people can see on the Internet at www.DrGreer.com.
The book isn't in stores, but you can order it from the website.
What's interesting is that it's a very simple, brief portrayal of this meeting.
They wrote me this letter, which I would have never disclosed publicly, except that one of the signatories passed it on to CNI News and asked that they publish it and they asked me
to respond.
So I have had to issue a response.
And my concern about this, deep concern, is that there appears to be an attempt to not
only distort what took place, but distort the entire history in sort of a revisionist
way of the significance of what was happening and the purpose of these kinds of meetings.
And this was not the only meeting in question.
There were other meetings with other figures besides the CIA director.
Can you give me any specifics about what was mischaracterized from your account with regard to his account?
What did he mischaracterize about it?
In other words, what are his attack points?
What's he saying?
Well, the main point is that they're saying that the way that I described the meeting was not accurate and the only specific thing, of course, is that they're questioning the issue of the dinner party being anything other than a dinner party and that it was not actually a briefing and that the dinner party was a cover for that.
In other words, they're trying to make it sound like this was some casual event when it was a couple of weeks in the planning and the person who set it up, and I have this in writing from him, FedEx he sent me ten days before the meeting, where he states repeatedly how significant the meeting is.
The audience needs to know that this was a very well-planned and significant event, and our concern is, of course, their attempt to spin it, as Washington people like to do, in some other direction.
The other thing that they question is the assertion that Wolfie and his wife had actually a UFO sighting.
Which of course had been related to me by John Peterson prior to the meeting, and I had mentioned at the meeting, and which had been confirmed, and now they're trying to backpedal from that.
So it's a very strange thing that's going on, and of course this happened subsequent to the release a couple weeks ago of this new book, Extraterrestrial Contact, the Evidence and Implications.
So it was a forward to that that got him going, got him to respond, and you're saying basically Baloney, it happened as I said.
It happened exactly.
In fact, one of the things that I point out is that my account of this meeting is so incredibly understated because it went on for over two and a half hours.
Well, would you like to state now, if it's understated, then go ahead and state it the way it really occurred.
Well, to give you an idea of the significance of it, I want a quote from a letter from the person who set it up, who heads up a national security think tank.
All right, go right ahead.
And Peterson wrote to me, and I quote, I talked to Woolsey this morning and he, underlined, suggested getting together over dinner.
He was not aware of your organization or that anyone was planning an announcement regarding UFOs.
This almost certainly means that, one, There is an active attempt being made at lower levels of government to sabotage Project Starlight, the Seasteady Disclosure effort.
And number two, this group almost certainly has tapped your phones and is aware of most of the details of your plan.
Oh, really?
Now listen, it's getting better.
If we do have dinner with Woolsey, we will have moved this whole thing to a much, much higher plane, and in doing so, raised significant red flags for those who don't want to see this succeed.
Operation Starlight will become a serious, underlined, serious threat to the status quo.
You must understand that great principalities and powers will oppose your plans.
Then in bold, the whole sentence is in bold.
Remember, the most powerful people in the world will have a deep, compelling interest in our activities and will use everything in our talents at their disposal to effect their objectives.
Now, does this sound like a casual dinner party to you?
No.
Well, see, this is my concern, is this revisionist spin that's coming out where they're trying to portray me as inaccurate or somehow devious or distorting the nature of this meeting.
Okay, well, it sounds to me like it was characterized to you exactly as you just read.
Now, that was the characterization of the meeting.
Do you think that was, in fact, A characterization that, at the time of that writing, Woolsey agreed with.
Well, certainly the meeting took on that nature.
I mean, you don't... For example, my wife, who I never get involved with these sort of things, is issuing a letter to reaffirm the fact that from the minute the CIA director walked in the door, until they left, two and a half or three hours later, The entire time was focused on the UFO issue, the extraterrestrial issue, secret government issues, issues related to the implications of disclosing this spectacular issue, the fact that he had no access to these issues and to the subject as the CIA director.
On and on and on.
This was talked about for over two and a half hours.
It can be characterized in no other way, and what I'm astonished at, because I went to this meeting in good faith as a director of C-City, but as a physician who took time away from his medical career, got a nanny for the children, and my wife and I flew to Washington exclusively for this meeting.
This is not a casual get-together, and it was certainly not set up that way.
And here they're going to issue, through this news service, CNI News, a very, in my opinion, spin attempt, because now it is in print in this book.
And again, this whole introduction I wrote can be read on the Internet at www.drgrier.com, and so people can go and see.
I think a deeper issue is at play here, and that is, I can't guess at the motives for why they would issue a letter like this and then deliberately leak this letter to me to a news service.
Too bad I was about to ask you that.
I think it's the most bizarre thing.
It's bizarre.
But I will say this.
I think it's time that we the people begin to say to folks who have been on our payroll
as elected and appointed representatives of our government at very high levels, whom we
have briefed and who have been given documents and evidence and top secret witness testimony,
we need to ask them, rather than them trying to spin these things in some direction, we
need to say, why haven't you fixed this? Why haven't you allowed this subject to go through
a hearing process? Why hasn't this been disclosed? Now this is nearly six years after the fact
and we're still waiting.
And the world, meanwhile, has an ecosystem collapsing because these top-secret projects are withholding from the public technologies which could literally reverse the fortunes of the world's environment in a very short time.
So there are big things at stake here.
Yeah, you know what you're doing is dangerous.
I mean, if what you're saying is true, then what you're doing is dangerous.
Well, I don't care about that.
I've run the gauntlet on this stuff, and I've had plenty of threats aimed my way.
But what I don't like is an ex-public official who I provided a pro bono, unpaid briefing for.
In other words, this was not something we were doing under contract.
And we have done this with many officials.
And I don't appreciate it coming back where a letter is written to me, and then it's leaked Do you have any bad manners?
with this man, Mr. Woolsey, to a news service.
Yes.
Of course, I would never have approached this.
One of the things that they accuse me of in this letter is bad manners.
Anyone who has ever worked with me knows that that is the last thing.
Do you have any bad manners?
Yes.
It uses the word, let me use the word, that my conduct in writing this introduction to
my book contravenes accuracy and simple manners.
Alright, I've got to stop you.
Listen.
I guess I've got to ask you again about the meeting itself.
Simple manners.
That means nothing.
We could be talking about dinner manners.
Or, or, doctor, was there a moment during which the XCIA director solicited your A confidentiality in the meeting.
In other words, don't go talk about this.
Never.
But let me comment on that.
Let me comment on that.
I was on Larry King, which had one of the highest live shows he's ever had in history, on October 1st of 1994.
This meeting with the CIA director happened on December 13th, 1993.
So now, over nine months later, I'm on Larry King, I do not mention the meeting because Woolsey is still in office.
Believe me, I have been every bit restrained, incredibly restrained, and every bit the gentleman in these matters.
Once he left office, I thought it was fair to discuss it and discuss who in the Clinton administration has been briefed and the extent to which the executive branch has been told about these matters and yet has done.
So again, at no time were you solicited to be silent?
No, and if anyone ever asked me of that, I wouldn't do it for this kind of thing.
Now, there are top secret witnesses who ask for my confidentiality, their confidentiality, until they can be appropriately uh... subpoenaed or given testimony before congress or in
some other very suitable venue
but that's different this is this is a meeting i would never
uh... asked by the cia director not to talk about it i chose
we decided within my group not to discuss these kind of meetings
uh... while there were still negotiations going on and while the
sort of people were still in position because they were very sensitive
But my God, I mean, you know, this book has come out in the last couple of weeks.
Well, then what form of bad manners are you being accused of?
By writing in this introduction an account of the meeting.
They think that that is, uh, somehow terrible.
I think what's terrible... They don't deny it?
Oh, no.
In fact, this letter confirms that the meeting took place.
That's the other significant thing about the letter.
But here's the rub, Art.
There is an attempt, I think, to spin this in some direction that tries to take credibility away from what happened, yet I just read to the audience these astonishing comments that were made and a FedEx sent to me.
Ten days before the meeting happened, as we were setting up the meeting, about how significant it was, what an orbit this thing was moved into, that this was going to be a very important meeting.
It was not just a dinner party in Arlington.
And the fact that they're trying to distort it and spin it that way is very disturbing, because what I think is that it's time for C-City and its supporters, and all your listeners who care about this issue, to start hounding the government and saying, It is high time that someone act on this matter and get this issue resolved.
I am in no way going to be put in a defensive posture because I believe the people who have been negligent and in some respects have not upheld their responsibilities to defend the Constitution are these public officials who have been told about the problem, who have acknowledged there is a problem, And yet have done nothing tangible.
Do you now include in that group Director Woolsey?
I do indeed, and I think this is one of the issues.
My portrayal of him up until now, of course, has been an open-minded person who wanted to see this thing resolved, but apparently couldn't.
But the fact that there is this sort of counter-spin, which of course the spin-meisters in Washington are very good at coming out.
Makes me question now to what extent he really wanted to see the secrecy resolved.
And I certainly think that rather than nitpicking over this sort of thing and trying to put a distorted view on this kind of a meeting, that what he really should be addressing and what we, the people, should be demanding that he and the President and others address is why the subject has not been taken up At a presidential commission level and at a congressional hearing level, yes.
Alright, well that would enter the ballpark of Stephen Bassett by other guests.
We're at the bottom of the hour and when we come back we will indeed be talking with Stephen Bassett about that wish and that hope and that, I guess, almost demand that it's time that something be done.
I'm Art Bell and with me, of course, Dr. Stephen Greer of CSETI and Stephen Bassett Our only representative in Washington for ufology.
You're listening to Art Bell, somewhere in time on Premier Radio Networks.
Tonight, an encore presentation of Coast to Coast AM, from September 24th, 1999.
Love your love, oh baby.
Don't leave me this way, no.
Don't leave me this way, no I can't exist
I'll surely miss your tender kiss Don't leave me this way
Your tender kiss, don't leave me this way Baby, my heart is full of love at this time for you
Baby, my heart is full of love I desire for you Now come down and do what you gotta do
Now come on down and do what you gotta do You started this fire down in my soul
Cause there's fire down in my soul Now can't you see it's burning out of control
Now can't you see it's burning out of control You started this fire down in my soul
Now can't you see it's burning out of control Now can't you see it's burning out of control
Fire You're listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time
Tonight featuring a replay of Coast to Coast AM from September 24th, 1999.
Well, my guests are Stephen Bassett, our only UFO-registered lobbyist in America, and also one-of-a-kind, Dr. Stephen Greer, who is the international director of C-SETI at issue is What Happened with Woolsey, the ex-CIA director.
Was there a meeting?
Was there only a party?
You're hearing Dr. Greer actually respond to something that is actually not yet quite out from ex-director Woolsey.
and i've got a comment about that too all right back now to of my two guests
Gentlemen, you're both back on.
One quick comment before we go to Stephen Bassett, that is for you, Dr. Greer.
Somebody faxes the following.
With respect to what I've heard so far, yup, I'm only surprised it took so long.
By the way, there is no such thing as an ex-CIA director.
This is why I think this is so significant, and why we should hold these people to the highest standard of public accountability.
Because we do pay their salaries, and their pensions, and their perks.
But you're never next, are you?
Yeah, I think that's quite true.
Yeah, sure it is.
Alright, well, toward your other goals, Stephen Bassett is here.
Stephen, welcome to the program.
Yes, sir.
The stage, as they say, is yours.
Well, let's draw the bigger picture.
The bigger picture is this.
On January the 5th, 1998, we had a very significant program.
In which the meeting with Woolsey was really brought public for the first time.
That's right.
We discussed the executive briefings at the White House of Lindsey and Lake and Gibbon.
The briefing in 1995 of Clinton by Rockefeller, Lawrence Rockefeller.
Also Albert Gore, I believe, was briefed.
Also Hillary Clinton was there at the ranch.
Edgar Mitchell discussed his Very firm belief that there's a UFO cover-up.
Colonel Corso was still alive.
That was discussed.
That's right.
This was a major show.
And we tied this package up.
This is a significant program.
Very quickly after that show, what was supposed to happen is the press should have been camped out on Edgar Mitchell's front lawn.
This is an American hero.
This is an American legend.
An MIT Ph.D.
and Apollo astronaut was trained to go to the moon and did so.
Did they do that?
No.
They should have been camped out on Corso's front lawn.
They should have been, after Greer, they should have been interviewing Woolsey.
They should have been asking the President.
That should have happened.
But we had Monica Lewinsky.
Eight days later, the Monica Lewinsky scandal breaks, and we go into a two-year whatever we went through.
I don't know what it was, but I'm glad it's over.
Okay, fine.
But the issue, guess what, didn't go away, right?
Because we got a real situation here.
It's still there.
And what's happened is that whether it's, for whatever reason, Admiral Woolsey, who I know, and I've watched his activities in Washington.
He seems to be a very good man, an honest man.
He's been helping the Iranian individuals who are trying to be deported by the INF.
He's a man that's more than happy to take on the government.
For whatever reason, he suddenly thrusts this whole thing back in the arena in a way that we could go after it, and we intend to, alright?
Because the fact is that the that edgar mitchell is still here and they need to be
interviewing him now kirk or so it died tragically but his family is alive to co-author
of his book the day after rosswell is is available with additional
records that have not been made public additional videos of course so that have
not been made public he should be interviewed to death about every word
in that book you know i i i should be replaying those interviews on the
radio to that i did with him
well hopefully i i I sent some links to Keith, including a link to that archive show, and hopefully Keith can get around and get those links up on the front page of the site.
But they will be at the Paradigm Clock site, they will be at the XPAC, x-ppac.org site, and they're going to be up at CCETI as well.
All of this stuff is going to be on these sites, so any one of those three people can go and get up to speed on this.
They didn't do that.
Well, they're going to have to do it, because the issue is still here.
They need to be talking to Anthony Lake.
Did you get briefed, Gibbon?
Did you get briefed?
They need to be talking to the President.
Or they need to be talking to Joe Lockhart, and say, Mr. Lockhart, was the President briefed by Lawrence Rockefeller?
And why not just have the press, Stephen, go to Admiral Woolsey and say, look, Did this meeting occur or did it not?
The letter states that it happened.
He's going to have to say yes.
You see, the thing is, in Washington, it's the art of the spin.
And this is the concern.
We cannot let these public officials off the hook.
And Wolfie's not the only one.
I mean, before the President had his vacation at the Rockefeller Ranch, Mr. Rockefeller asked me to put together the briefing materials for him to present to the President and First Lady.
I haven't talked about this in detail on your show.
It's in the book I just wrote.
There's a letter that's reproduced in the book where I'm going back and forth with Mr. Rockefeller about these materials and about the briefing that's going to be happening at the J.Y.
Ranch where the President is staying at Mr. Rockefeller's ranch.
You know, the question is, with all these materials that have been given, there's only three things you can conclude.
Either these officials are inept at interpreting data and comprehending the immensity of this thing, or they're negligent In protecting the Constitution, which they have sworn an oath to uphold and protect and defend.
Well, you said negligence.
Well, they're part of the cover-up.
Those are the three choices, because they haven't done anything in six years.
I know.
I think it's time for the people to come forward and say, we demand action, and we demand it now.
Now, Steve Bassett has some information he wants to give people about what they can do about this to bring this to a head.
All right, you said negligence earlier, though.
Yes, I think there has been negligence.
All right, thank you.
Yeah, what's happened is the scandal's gone away, and what do they find out?
Well, they've got a UFO ballot initiative coming at them in possibly 16 states, they've got petitions still being signed, they've got Edgar Mitchell still talking out publicly, Gordon Cooper still talking out, more witnesses are coming to us, more leakage.
They realize this thing is just not going away and they're acting strangely but what they're doing that's most offensive is they're doing the same thing that occurred in New York in a very famous case up there where a woman was stabbed to death 30, 40, 50 times on a street between two apartment buildings and hundreds of people were in those buildings and heard this woman screaming for hours and they didn't do anything.
They didn't even call the police.
And most of them wouldn't even open their blinds to see, because if they did, it would have made it tough for them to sit there and do nothing.
That's right.
Well, we've been doing nothing on this thing now for 50 years.
Whatever the reasons were prior to 1990, they're gone, alright?
And it's eroding the trust of the American people to see an issue of this magnitude being ignored in this way and treated in this grotesque and adolescent fashion.
It's time to put an end to it.
How can you do it?
Here's a way.
Here's the White House message.
Answering message service.
It's got a huge capacity.
It can hold tens of thousands.
Alright?
202-456-1111.
That's 202-456-1111.
It's open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
It takes voice messages.
Voice messages.
And if they should manage to fill it up, they'll eventually empty it and fill it up again.
Start calling tomorrow.
Start calling tonight.
Your listeners need to put a message in that says, Mr. President, and by the way, Mr. Aspiring President, Gore, who wants to be the President of the United States, as do a lot of other people running for office, as you know, this year.
The biggest issue in history, the biggest story of all time is going on right now, and all of these people want to be President, but they don't want to talk about this.
They're not being asked questions about this.
So call that number 202-456-1111 and say, Mr. President, Mr. Gore, we want congressional hearings on the UFO ET cover-up and we want them now!
We do not want any more... And if I can interject here, we also want executive action and follow-up on materials that have been provided to the President and his staff I see SETI and others over the last five or six years, and that it needs to fight this.
One of the key points here is it's like in all these issues, what do they know and when do they know it?
We have a paper trail of what they know and when they know it.
I'm here telling all your listeners, whether they are five million or ten million, I don't
know how many are listening, that if they will get on the horn and call and then also
follow up with a letter to the White House and say, we know that you've received these
materials, we know that you have looked into this, we want action on it now.
They need to also do that with certain key members of Congress, specifically people that
we have spent significant amounts of time with briefing them.
For example, Congressman Dan Burton of Indiana, he is chairman of the House Government Reform
and Oversight Committee.
He was at the CCETI briefings in 1997, about a year and a half ago.
He was Uh, very much involved.
About two years ago, he was very interested.
He could single-handedly marshal hearings where all these top secret witnesses could come forward.
People need to write to Congressman Dan Burton and recommend that he follow up on that offer he made to look into this issue seriously in 1997.
They need to also write the very powerful Republican Congressman Christopher Cox, whom I have also personally briefed.
Who wrote the very important summary of the Los Alamos Chinese spy, nuclear spy scandal.
And who has been in the media a great deal.
He and I have also had a discussion on this.
He has a full complement of briefing materials.
He is also someone who needs to arise to his constitutional duty and hold an inquiry.
And the third person is Senator Richard Bryan of Nevada.
senator on the intelligence committee of our senate whom i have personally met
with on this issue and he has deep concerns about excessive secrecy
these people need to be specifically uh... addressed and if you're at those of you listening i'm
begging those of you who are listening
to write the president and write these congressmen and senators
that i just mentioned and let it If they're going to call up there and they're going to be asking the White House, damn it, we know what you've got.
want them to hold the hearings are you are going to be a little bit of an
example if they're going to call up there and they're going to be asking the
white house uh... we know what you've got
give us an example of what they have that we should be demanding
be brought forth well they have a a a very expanded briefing document that
we have put together
hundreds of pages of top secret government document They have the videotaped footage of over a dozen top secret witnesses giving detailed information of these projects.
When they gave testimony we made duplicates of it and have sent it to them.
They also have undeniable case evidence and an overview of the subject
which establishes its bonafides and its validity beyond any question of a doubt.
They have this material.
They have the very best electronic, photographic, radar cases, videotape footage that has ever
been assembled.
We have put together and it's in their hands and has been in their hands in some cases for four and five and six years.
So it's time for the public to say, look, folks, this is what he said he has done.
This is what we know you have.
Now, what are you going to do about it?
You're supposed to be protecting and upholding and defending the constitution, which is being subverted by top secret projects.
and this has got to stop.
And I think the people, you know what I have been told by more than one member of Congress
Art is that they are tempted to do something about this, but they're not going to do it
until the public speaks.
Until they hear from the media and from the public, they are not going to do anything about it.
And I have been told that by chiefs of staff, I've been told that by senior aides, and by congressmen themselves.
So the people there who are listening need to know that it's time for an activist moment here.
That we really need to do this in order to move this forward and make any progress.
What the government has got What the government has got is something even more significant.
It has esteemed members of the military, such as Gordon Cooper, Edgar Mitchell, and Philip Corso, publicly stating, in books, in forums, and even overseas, there was a UFO cover-up of an extraterrestrial presence.
You can't have people of that caliber say things like that and do nothing.
It's an insult to the American people's intelligence.
It's an insult to the government itself, which has to deal with other governments around the world.
They're not stupid and see something like this going on and wonder, what is the matter with these people?
You either have to prove that these individuals, for whatever reason, have concocted a cock and bull story, or you have to deal with it.
And the other thing that I want to insert here is that it really is negligent not to do anything.
It's as if, you know, in my emergency department, If I was as negligent with my patients as these people have been with the Constitution and looking out for what we, the people, need to have done, my God, I don't think any of my patients would survive.
It is gross negligence, in fact.
It's an aptitude and negligence, or they're part of some cover-up.
None of it is attractive.
The only way in my mind that they can change this is to show that they are adults, that
they are going to take on this issue even though it is extremely difficult and may even
be dangerous.
It is something that needs to be taken on and we need a few adults in Washington who
are not going to try to backpedal like what has happened with this letter that I got from
CI Director Woolsey.
They're going to stand up and say, yes, this is a problem.
I'm going to vote with my seat and do something about it.
We need some adults in our society.
I'm almost pleading with people to hold our officials to some accountability and to demand that they begin to behave as adults and to uphold the oath which they took to protect and defend the Constitution.
Told you have bad manners is very mild indeed compared to being told that you have been grossly negligent.
Well look, I'm not the president, the CIA director.
I'm a civilian who has done the best that I can do to get materials to these people to give advisories and how this should be taken forward.
And we've done this patiently over many, many, many years now.
All I'm saying is that At some point, the people have a right to demand, because they are our representatives, that action be taken.
And if the people listening will actually pick up the phone, write a letter, and do this, you'll be surprised how this thing will begin to move forward.
Because I have had so many people in Washington tell me that it is not until the public picks up an issue, and then the media picks it up, that anything is ever done about it.
And it's a sad commentary.
But in a way, perhaps that's how it's supposed to work.
Alright, Mr. Bassett, now that Monica is history, more or less, what makes you think a flood of calls to the White House will get action from the President when we've not had it today?
The political press is primed.
Since 1998, that show, one of the things that's happened is we have bugged them, they have then shoved this material They have it, Nightline has it, 20-20 has it, ABC, NBC, they all have this, but they're sitting there trying to decide, what do we want to do?
They are primed and ready to go, and there's nothing to distract them.
Let me give you an idea of some of the things in play.
What XPAC is doing, right, and again, all this stuff is at the XPAC, you can find all this at the XPAC website, x-ppac.org.
A concerted effort is being put together right now, has been for about 30 days, to hold a press conference, a major press conference, in the main ballroom of the National Press Club in downtown Washington, in which five PhDs, three American astronauts, a former high-level official in NASA, are going to completely lay out the witness issue, the congressional hearing demands, as well as all of the political initiatives in play, in front of what will, I guarantee, be a packed ballroom of press.
And make it absolutely impossible for them to dodge that issue.
What are the both of you think of the idea of, say, having Dr. Greer and ex-director Woolsey on, oh, I don't know, Nightline, Larry King here, wherever, together?
I'm sure that Dr. Greer will be happy to attend.
Sure.
I mean, if that is ever presented, I'd be happy to do it.
And one of the issues that also happens in Washington that I want to point out is that I'm a country doctor from North Carolina.
We've done the best that we can.
I am not a public official.
I cannot hold a hearing on my own.
This has to be done by a representative.
But there is this tendency in Washington to divert the substance of the issue and begin to try to either attack people or to try to attack their credibility or to engage in name-calling.
That's right.
And that's basically what this letter from Woolsey was trying to do.
And I think it's time for the American people to say, enough of this nonsense.
We want this issue, after 50 years of being lied to, we want this issue resolved.
All right, folks.
The show is ending.
The White House numbers area code 202.
4, 5, 6, 1, 1, 1, 1.
Final words, very quickly, Stephen Bassett.
Yeah, I do not believe we've ever had a better time if the American people make their move and make their interests known.
I think the press is prepared to respond.
I think we have a whole range of public officials that can be approached tomorrow from Edgar Mitchell on up through the President himself.
And I think American people will say, hey, we want these people talked to.
We want this thing outed.
I think it will happen.
All right, gentlemen, that's it.
We're out of time.
Thank you both.
I can't wait to see what's going to happen as a result of this.
Good night all.
Alright, there you have it folks.
Stephen Greer, Stephen Bassett, I'm Art Bell.
This is Coast to Coast AM.
You're listening to Art Bell's Somewhere in Time.
Tonight featuring a replay of Coast to Coast AM from September 24th, 1999.
Well I think it's time to get ready To realize just what I have found
I have been only half of what I am It's all clear to me now
But when I am, it's all clear to me now My heart is on fire
My heart is on fire My soul's like a wheel that's turning
My soul's like a wheel that's turning My love is alive
My love is alive My love is alive
My love is alive, yeah, yeah Lonely days, lonely nights
Where would I be without my woman?
Lonely days, lonely nights Where would I be without my woman?
Lonely days, lonely nights Where would I be without my woman?
Good night You brighten up my day.
Mr. Sunshine, you brighten up my day.
Come sit beside me in your way.
Come sit beside me in your way.
Tonight's program originally aired September 24th, 1999.
Good morning, everybody.
Coming up in a moment.
We're gonna dive into a whole new world.
Charles Osman is here, and he's gonna talk to you about nanotechnology.
He's currently a senior fellow at the Institute for Global Futures, a strategic technologies think tank and research group which engages in advanced technology development, trend analysis, that sort of thing, with a particular focus on examining the synergistic relationships between various emergent technologies, there are a lot of those, and socio-economic environments in which they may be fostered.
He is also a senior associate of the Foresight Institute, a nanotechnology focus and development support group, and an active participant with a number of technology-related institutes and publications, has served as an advisory member of various technology-related development organizations and privately held companies.
He has authored, he is very prolific in authoring, I'm not going to read you all of this, A technical papers of all sorts.
He has 25 years experience in the fields of electronics, physics, materials sciences, and computers, including eight years at, well you've heard of this, the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley.
Previous professional experience covers a diverse range of technical development projects at facilities including GDE, Uh, Litten, Litten Industries, no kidding, Lucasfilms, Phoenix Laser Systems, Omni Scientific Instruments, and a variety of other technology related companies and institutions.
You're in for a real treat tonight.
We're going to be talking about two different areas of nanotechnology.
The physical little tiny machines that, well he'll tell you how small, And also, biological nanotechnology.
Now, that could have a direct impact on you.
A big one!
Just wait till you hear, and you will be hearing in a moment.
By the way, Charles Osman has also presented papers on things like artificial intelligence.
And that's something, there are so many things That I want to talk about.
Yeah, that's true.
I see my website does say replay.
And so you see, it's just a dumb computer.
It thinks I'm in replay tonight, even though I'm here live.
No, even though that's what it says, folks.
We're here live.
And you know what?
Before we even talk about nanotechnology... Hi, Charles.
Hello.
Glad to have you back on the program again.
Thank you very much.
Well, I want to ask you about something probably totally unrelated and something you don't want to probably comment on at all, or maybe you do, I don't know.
You're welcome to try anything you wish.
Okay, good.
A lot of people out there are really concerned about Y2K.
I actually spoke on a committee last November.
Cool.
It was a closed committee.
It was at the TechTrends 2000 quarterly conference.
A closed committee?
Yes, RCP only.
It was from 7.30 in the morning until about 9 o'clock at night.
Members of Congress, there were quite a variety of people from various major companies, probably some of which I shouldn't name.
You don't have to name them, but I would like to know, in essence, what you told them.
Can you tell me that?
Yeah, sure.
I felt very privileged.
Why they would pick me out of a hat, I honestly don't know.
I mean, I'm on the board of several different institutes, and I guess I get fetched up for various reasons.
The one thing I spend a tremendous amount of time on, as I do, as you had said in the introduction, A lot of effort to look at not one or three, maybe 20 or more different technology vectors simultaneously, and then try to compare that to constantly changing economic trends as well as social.
Right, right.
So how does that impact Y2K?
So this is why Y2K is relevant.
It's not so much that everything is going to turn off precisely at January 1.
In fact, roughly about 6% of the expected failures will actually be occurring right then at that moment.
Right.
What is interesting though, and I actually sat on the international He said it was too conservative?
board and in fact I sat right next to Dr. John Forgy who is actually a senior board
member of the World Bank.
So the eyes of scrutiny were upon me and after I gave my presentation it was quite interesting
to have him look at me and say, well Charles that was very interesting and I think most
of what you said was about right on the mark except it was too conservative.
So here was a senior board member of the World Bank telling me it was a little bit too conservative.
He said it was too conservative?
Correct.
And so here's what, and I won't get too complex, but here's what the majority of the talks
were on and my talk as well.
Not so much technology itself precisely because that's kind of a known thing.
What is unknown are the economic and sort of what I call the social cohesion indices, which could go any number of different ways, depending upon which particular set of nodes in an option matrix you want to say are going to be amplified.
Well, how did the man from the World Bank think that it was going to come down?
Well, he and I agreed on the following things.
That first of all, U.S., Japan, much of Europe, etc., ...are very highly symbiotically attached, you might say, to what's commonly called a GIT, or just-in-time technology-based economy.
That is, most of our infrastructure, certainly all of our manufacturing, the vast majority of it, are relied upon highly automated, highly distribution-dependent systems, where you have these large value chains scattered throughout the world.
The whole idea is to minimize the amount of material you have in the pipeline at any given point in time, No, please don't.
Just give me an overview of what you think will happen, what you agreed on.
or distribute precisely as needed.
For every 1% of JIT capacity, you can approach, you get from like 8 or 9% profit margin increase,
but you also increase your risk exposure, and risk analysis in and of itself is a very
complex science, and we're going to go into it right now.
No, please don't.
Just give me an overview of what you think will happen, what you agreed on.
What I think will happen is in some parts of the world, certainly parts of South America
and Mexico, without question, a lot of the former Soviet bloc, parts of the Pacific Rim,
surprisingly, will have very, very severe failures.
That will mean a lot of shutdown of factories, transportation systems, and so on, which means that our value chain systems, which are highly granularized and depend upon most parts of the world for materials or what are called secondary components, will have substantial delays.
Three, four, or five months out from that, that means that our workers here in this country, our retail chains and so on, will start to have Lack of material to keep their workers employed or their own businesses operating.
So are you suggesting there is going to be a slow, but actually fairly rapid by comparison to the way it would normally happen, a recession or even depression?
I would say that for all the folks who have been looking at economic system substrates and how they operate, and already noting that we're operating as a debt-leveraged economy, which again is a whole other subject, but it's very precarious as we speak, This is just the kind of catalyst that could sort of shake the tables, if it were, and help the cards would fall down.
You've been watching the market lately?
I don't try... I do not trade at all.
I wouldn't go near the stock market with a ten-foot pole.
No, I didn't ask that.
I said, have you been watching?
I certainly have.
And my sense of it is as follows.
That what we see right now is a combination of psychology, if I can put it in those terms, and a combination of Systems that are operating on top of systems that are operating on top of systems, all of which are supplanted by what I call a virtual commodity asset-based system.
That is, we are ever more extended into debt, leveraged upon other debt, which is really leveraged upon not physical material or manufactured goods, but the promise of implied worth.
And that's been going on for some time.
And this has been scaling ever upward.
A correction is due anyway, no matter what happens.
Well, we're actually already in the middle of a crash.
I mean, we're down 10% now.
Well, I think we're at the front edge of one, and lots of arguments ensue about the shape of the curve.
Well, a lot of the economists think, look, it's 10% already, it might be 15%, worst case 20%, and then it's going to come back.
All right, that's that second part I'm not too much in agreement about.
In the coming back part.
Right.
And the reason is, we're going to be more like a reverberation of what's called resonance.
And what I think is going to happen, in my just personal opinion, and others apparently as well, Is that because of this extended delay in available materials, delay in manufacturing capacity, a reorientation in some of the manufacturing and production epicenters throughout the world?
I also foresee that from a strategic perspective, and this was the other half of the conference that dealt more with military issues, actually, will there be a lot of unrest, civil strife, a lot of very teetering and precarious government organizations that are already very marginal to begin with?
Will they be completely thrown into chaos?
This could certainly be the case.
You mix that all together and what you end up with is not only a delay in our JIT systems, but a secondary delay in our export capacity to many of these countries which are sort of stuck in the middle of this.
All right, all this said, what does this mean to the average Joe, say, living down near Anaheim somewhere?
Sure.
Living in an apartment, working every day.
What does it mean to him?
It means that life may get a little more tricky, credit will be harder to get, cost of goods will start to go up.
The free-flowing economy that looks, you know, has that appearance of a rosy tint to it right now will not be nearly as rosy.
And people should expect to be tightening their belts.
Should he worry about losing his job?
Quite possibly so, depending upon the nature of his work.
Should he worry about electricity going off?
Depends on what part of the country you're on.
And I don't mean to be cryptic.
I'm just saying that there are certain pockets, I think, like in some areas that are less developed, perhaps some areas like in the Appalachian areas, perhaps in some of the Southwest, strangely enough.
And there's other areas where I think because of the lack of cohesive standards across different state boundaries, or even within jurisdictions within the state, there's kind of a hodgepodge, I'm sure you can imagine.
And the real problem is just trying to get a set of protocols or standards that everybody will agree are the standards.
And this is what, especially in the embedded controllers world, that's when it kind of gets very scary indeed, because at least in enterprise, I divided my model into like three layers, the physical, the intermediate, and what I call the virtual layer.
At the virtual layer, you have these very large sort of metascale systems, what's called enterprise computing.
This is insurance companies, banks, major government institutions, and so on.
Sure, there'll be some minor pockets of failure, but in those kinds of integrated systems, at least everything's connected together.
That's a simple way of putting it.
But it's at least possible to back propagate some sort of a calculated, which I might call an error or a series of errors, so that you can see where the failures are.
Contain the errors, and contain the different failure components, and isolate the system from any system like that.
Do you think there'll be enough failure and disruption, social, economic, whatever you want to look at, as to cause our friend Joe and Anaheim to be concerned for safety, because people will begin to misbehave?
You know what I think is really going to happen, just between you and I having a chat in the fence?
South of the border, in Mexico, you're going to have a horrendous failure.
I mean, it's going to be Very, very different for what goes on there compared to what goes on here.
Mexico City, for instance, I wouldn't even dream of being near it.
And what I visualize are a lot of people fleeing from Mexico and elsewhere south of the border trying to come here.
Good luck getting back.
Good luck getting back.
I really think it's not such a good time to travel abroad.
I would think this would be a terrible time to travel, and I have quite a few friends scattered throughout the world, actually, and we communicate all the time.
And as this moment in time approaches, with a very pleasant but somewhat firm kind of thing, please just reconsider your travel plans for the next few months.
Put up a lot of these folks who are on business trips and so on.
And I think that the potential for chaos and political unrest, wherever it might be, it would be prudent not to be somewhere else, at least for a month or two after that point passes.
So whatever the risk is here, it's much greater elsewhere.
Absolutely so.
And I think for us as humans here in this country, The kind of economic pain you'll feel might be, say, nine to twelve months out.
Then it might get pretty severe indeed.
Our computers right now aren't all that bright.
I'm considering my own website right now, which has great servers, but you know, despite the fact that they're pendium, gazillion, whatever it is, they don't know that I'm live tonight.
It says repeat up there, right?
I'm not even looking at the website, but I'll trust you on that.
Trust me on this, unless Keith got to it already.
He's probably listening.
When will there be a computer that'll be a little bit brighter, a little smarter, maybe even beginning to think for itself?
I've seen ads recently on television for some companies that are beginning to say or toy with the concept in advertising, regard a computer game, a gaming machine, it's thinking.
Well, these are buzzwords, but let me see if I can back in.
He's not thinking yet.
Well, it actually depends on the definition.
I'm not trying to be Clinton-esque here, but let me see if I can give you some insight.
In the world that I spend a lot of my time is in the world of so-called evolvable systems.
But I have to emphasize the word system, and here's where the rub might be.
For instance, I go to this conference every year called Hot Ships.
It's held here in Stanford.
It's kind of a... That's not chips.
I'm not kidding.
I just wanted to get the pronunciation correct.
Chips.
Chips, as in computer chips.
Thank you.
And all the major vendors show up and kind of show their wares.
And it's a fun event.
It's a very academic, but also a kind of a show routine for all the industry folks to blather on about Moore's Law and the next fastest chip and so on.
But quite honestly, I kind of look at that with a jaundiced eye, because that suggests that computing, as a definable term, is going to stay confined specifically and only to A particular range of functionalities which are digital and serial by process and designed to operate the same kind of commands that we're normally used to.
Right.
What I'm trying to suggest is that in fact from the material perspective, and this is where the nanotech part comes in, actually the thinkers that are going along the lines that I am look more at a system architecture, much like organisms in nature, where you have specialized organelle components Some of which are analog, some of which are digital, some of which are photonic, some of which are electronic, some of which even actually operate in what I call biological metaphors.
And in that context, with this sort of wider range of tools to work with, the concept of creating systems which themselves are evolvable, xenomorphic by nature, is an entirely different approach to the so-called problem of AI.
As opposed to what it was 30 or 40 years ago when you had a bunch of folks at MIT and elsewhere who were writing code with Lisp or Prolog or some language like this to build what looked like behavior engines, but they were nothing more really than just clever logical systems to mimic behavior as a process.
All right, so cut down here.
They're not really thinking as we think of sentient thinking yet.
Well, let me see if I can throw in some more variables.
For instance, in the world of genetic programming, Evolutionary computing and artificial life, all of which are thriving very well.
I'm sorry for the pun.
Machines that think.
Yes or no?
Yes.
Yes.
All right.
Well, then hold on.
Hold on.
We're at the bottom of the hour.
That's a yes.
Machines that think now.
So maybe the advertising that says It's thinking, and if maybe that's true, we'll be right back.
You're listening to Art Bell, somewhere in time on Premier Radio Networks.
Tonight, an encore presentation of Coast to Coast AM from September 24th, 1999.
The Coast to Coast AM concert, which was held on September 24th, 1999, was held at the San Francisco International
Airport in San Francisco.
The concert was held in a hotel in San Francisco, California.
The concert was held at the San Francisco International Airport in San Francisco, California.
Don't say that you love me Where are those happy days they seem so hard to find
The concert was held at the San Francisco International Don't say that you love me
I tried to reach for you but you have lost your mind Whatever happened to our love
I wish I understood It used to be so nice, it used to be so good
So when you're near me darling can't you hear me SOS The love you gave me nothing else can save me SOS
When you're gone how can I even try to go on When you're gone though I try how can I carry on
You seem so far away, thought you were sending me You make me feel alive but sometimes I feel
I really tried to make it up I wish I understood
What happened to our love that used to be so good So when you're near me darling can't you hear me SOS
to Art Bell somewhere in time on Premier Radio Networks.
Tonight, an encore presentation of Coast to Coast AM, from September 24th, 1999.
Girl harmony, you gotta love it!
Girls, you gotta love them, right?
Well, especially blondes, and I know that I have sworn off blonde jokes.
Now, by the way, and I have no idea what this really means, but this blonde joke comes from Hawaii, and it says, whatever that is.
and it says, hakajiki mo shahami ligi toru.
Whatever that is.
He says it means, get to mainland scum, but leave your money.
I don't know if that's what it means.
Anyway, he sends the following.
A state trooper pulls a car over on a lonely back road and approaches the blonde lady driver.
Ma'am.
Ma'am, is there some reason you're weaving all over the road?
Typical, right?
Woman says, oh officer, thank goodness you're here.
I almost had an accident!
I looked up, officer, and there was a tree right in front of me.
I swerved to the left.
There was another tree right in front of me.
I swerved to the right and there was another tree right in front of me.
reaching through the side window to the rear view mirror the officer replied
ma'am that's your air freshener
now we're going to practice having charles ostman say a slow sentence
uh...
Now, Charles, you said yes to artificial intelligence.
Without going really nuts on the subject, let's first define what artificial intelligence is, the broad definition.
What is it?
Yeah, well, and this is a very difficult question to answer.
I'm not being cryptic.
I'm just saying that in comparison to maybe previous times, there was a fairly narrow Well, what about self-awareness?
That's kind of where I draw the dividing line myself.
that could reason or in some way demonstrate autonomous behavior or even just mimic the
appearance of autonomous behavior.
Well, what about self-awareness?
That's kind of where I draw the dividing line myself.
I call it synthetic sentience as a process.
And there are an amazingly wide and very diverse range of approaches to capture some portion
of this process.
Dan, let me see if I can just give you a few highlights.
We don't have self-aware machines yet, do we?
You would be surprised what I've seen.
Well, surprise me.
Okay.
I was at the ISI, which is the Information Sciences Institute in Southern California.
A lot of their work, by the way, is financed by DARPA and things of this ilk.
And there's been a very, very strong push to create various types of what I might call sensing engines, really to enhance decision rendering processes under duress, most notably Things like battlefield simulations where you might have
the equivalent of several thousand entities called autonomous agents.
The agents move around the field.
They act as if they were living things, people.
They participate.
They strategize.
They negotiate.
They resolve complex problems with human interaction as if you were actually in the battlefield.
That's like one layer.
The next layer says... But do they worry about their strategies and their planning killing people, that is to say, artificial people on the battlefield?
Oh yes.
As a matter of fact, much of the research goes specifically into behavioral processes and what you might call emergent behaviors.
Precisely for that very reason.
So they have emergence.
In today's complex military scenarios where you have Mixed services, often with mixed cultures, and now of course with mixed genders.
Yeah, but do they really have a conscience about this?
Or are they simply calculating odds and losses and that sort of thing in a very cold fashion?
This is just in the world of autonomous agents in a synthetic environment for the purpose of assuming what kinds of emergent behaviors would occur under duress.
But what I want to go into next, of course, are independent sentience engines, which are designed, really, to adapt and evolve their knowledge base according to input stimuli.
And this is where it gets a little closer to the point.
In other words, it learns.
Yes, precisely so.
In fact, at UCLA, there's actually a Department of Evolutionary Intelligence, and I'm fairly familiar with the folks there.
I visit there sometimes.
But what I'm hoping to get to you now is that It's not just a matter of taking a bunch of Pentiums and hooking them together, making a giant supercomputer, and then can it think?
That's not the way it is at all, really.
What is happening, though, is that, as I was trying to allude to before the break, it's a systems approach.
And part of what makes a systems approach possible, and I promise I won't get too complicated here... Well, you already are.
I don't know what you mean by a systems approach.
Well, I think because if one utilizes different kinds of computational elements that really almost behave like organs.
For instance, let me give you an example.
There is a person by the name of Stephan Grand, one of the real practitioners of artificial
life as a business, as a deliverable.
He actually produced a product called Creatures.
Now, it's kind of a fun thing for kids to have fun with, but it's actually much more
sophisticated than what the average person might realize.
In what way?
Because what you actually do is you build the physiologies of the entities who then
are born.
They live in these family-like situations.
They evolve behaviors.
evolve psychodynamics they really do become individuals.
And so almost any outcome is possible, right?
In a sense, yes.
But this is a very simple one.
The stuff that they have not released, that I've been privy to, and which unfortunately I'm not supposed to talk about, is much more sophisticated and goes right into the very heart of things like... Well, talk about it.
Well, smart vehicles, smart weapons, obviously.
Smart weapons first, probably.
Well, that's obviously.
But what I'm trying to get across to you is that there is a concept about different forms of machine intelligence that does not rely only upon traditional computing-type chips.
Let's talk about weapons, alright?
The United States talks a lot and brags a lot about smart weapons.
Now, to them, that means a weapon that is guided so precisely that it's going right down somebody's chimney.
Or into their bunker, or whatever.
What would a really smart weapon do?
A smart weapon would seek a target of opportunity autonomously, decide on its own that this particular target had more value than some other collection of targets, and then strategize on its own how to dispense with that target.
That is the very nature of what's being currently researched.
Could there be a weapon that would seek out Saddam Hussein?
And though there are doubles running all over Iraq, it would say, that's not Saddam, Oh, that one over there is!
Here I go!
Actually, the weapon that would do that would not be a bomb or a gadget, but probably more molecular by nature.
Molecular?
Yes.
Describe to me what might do that.
Okay.
Well, I guess we're going to hop right into nanotech.
Sure.
I mean, I'm sorry, we're kind of darting around here, but... That's fine.
Let me see if I can explain very, very plainly what nanotechnology actually is, at least from my understanding.
And this is one of the most unfortunately misused words in the common language of the day.
A lot of people see pictures of little machines and think that's magic.
Well, not exactly.
You and I and all living things actually are nanofoundries.
That is, living cells, via the mitochondria and the ribosomes and other elements within the nucleus of the cell, are given an instruction set via this quadratic numbering system called DNA, how to assemble a bunch of molecules and reproduce and do different things.
All we're doing is sort of, how would you say, tinkering with this process a little bit.
The DNA is like a blueprint or something.
It's precisely like a blueprint, and that's why companies like Afrometrix, Hisix, Symmetry, and a whole bunch of other companies who have gone from zero to truly gigantic, very aggressive economic status levels overnight, what they do is they literally put snippets, little genomes, if you will, of DNA samples on the surface of a chip, an actual chip, Thousands and thousands, as a matter of fact.
They're doing that now?
Today, as we speak.
They're actually taking DNA and putting it on a chip?
I see this every day.
Where are they doing this?
Well, here in California, the handful of companies I just named are doing it as a business.
Let me give you an example.
Randy Scott, who is the founder of Insight.
I actually went to this conference.
You'll love this.
This was the Seizing Opportunities in Emerging Biochip Technologies Scientific Breakthroughs and Commercial Applications Conference.
This was just last year here in San Francisco.
And I've attended about maybe 30 or so of these events just this year alone.
I do so partly because I'm in the industry, partly because I do a lot of financial analysis.
Is this human DNA?
In some cases, yes.
And let me explain.
The Affymetrix is probably the most aggressive of all.
The what?
Affymetrix is the name of a company.
Okay, thank you.
And Affymetrix has pushed the envelope probably to the extreme, to the extent that they can now fit the equivalent of the human genome onto four single chips.
Good God.
Something that could fit easily in the palm of your hand.
Now, when you say putting DNA on a chip, you're talking about an integration between the DNA blueprint for the human being and a computer chip.
That is precisely right.
Let me explain the background of that if I may.
There's a long story behind this, but I'll make it short if I can.
Back in the late 80s, there were a couple of companies, one called BFI in particular, that patented the first demonstrable sort of manufacturing process that allowed biomolecules, that is things like peptides and proteins and enzymes and things of that ilk, to be bonded to the surface of your choice.
It could be anything, glass, metal, even Teflon for that matter.
And how that is done, and again, I promise I'll get to elaborate here, But somewhat in the same way that a computer chip is made.
That is, you take what's called a root tile of silicon, you grow these big rods of silicon, you slice into these thin wafers, onto the surface of the wafer is then coated a photosensitive resin of sorts, a pattern that represents the wiring connection of that circuit is then cast onto it, exposed to a hardening agent, kind of like a photograph in a way, then you wash it through a special bath that takes off the excess Then you run it through what's called a chemical mill.
The chemical mill eats away, literally dissolves, the surface where the exposure points are, and then you actually sputter on more silicon of a different type, and you run it through another repeat of the same process, and so on and so on, and then eventually make a computer chip.
Well, somewhat in the same way, with the same submicron scale precision, one can also create attach patterns.
And that says that with a special kind of, again, phototropically driven polymer in this case, Where the light is exposed at a very specific frequency and amplitude, these nanoscale tethers will form, the bottom end of which swamps on like a tree root, really, to the surface of choice.
The upper end can be designed very specifically to be chemically receptive to the biomolecule of your choice.
Now, that was over ten years ago.
Since that time, the technology has become rote, and maybe in the last three and a half, four years, The biochip industry, and I use that word carefully, the biochip industry has gone from a small handful of little labs and mostly academic sites to a major, very transformative, this is going to affect everything from diagnostics to telediagnostic systems, automated lab procedures, up to and including implantable biochips that are prosthetic designed for things like neurological interfaces and so on.
And at the same time, the precise same technology can be used What is the goal of attaching human DNA to silicon chips?
Money.
Why?
Unbelievably a huge amount of money.
And I'll tell you why.
I don't mean to be cryptic, but I'll give you one small example out of a plethora.
And this really is like the very heart of where I live in these days.
Let me give you an example.
In the world of what's called recombinant proteinomics, and I'm sorry, that's the actual term, that allows the designer to literally fetch up the theoretical design of a protein and say, aha, if we only had a protein that did this, we could solve X physiological anomaly.
Fine, this is a lovely way to manufacture those proteins, but that's only the beginning edge.
For instance, if you want to look at market share, trillion dollars plus, the minute this happens is as follows.
There were literally thousands of drugs throughout the world, the majority of which come from here in this country, which have been taken off the shelf by the FDA.
The reason being that if you have a contraindicatory aspect, that is a negative reaction to a drug, and especially in today's world we have so many combined drug regimens, many people that probably wouldn't have responded badly to a drug a number of years ago, but are now in some kind of complex regimen, All kinds of strange things suddenly pop up that literally force the drug to be taken off the market.
Yes.
Well, if you could take a sample of your DNA, or mine or anyone's, run it through a diagnostics of what's called immunoassay, and find out precisely what is in only your physiological makeup, we could get a direct roadmap to say you will respond positively or negatively to the following compounds.
So in other words, it's really a sort of a You think of it as a serum, a nanotechnological serum.
Well, that's not exactly the word I would use, but to use the parlance of the moment, it's a way to get an extremely precise lock on exactly the jigsaw puzzle, if you will, that's you.
Well, let's say that you had cancer on your liver.
Sure.
Could you take my DNA, attach it to a chip, create something that would go in there, Basically instructed to kill that damn cancer.
Well, actually, you're very close, but we're jumping ahead, so please forgive me.
I'm trying to make this a logical progression if I may.
Well, I'm trying to understand why you would want to attach DNA to a chip.
Okay, so the first question is, by attaching the DNA to a chip, I can now, what's called hybridization, I can hybridize other components of DNA in whatever sample I wash across that chip's surface, which immediately tells me Any kind of biological exposure that you have in your blood, any kind of physiological anomaly I'm searching for, any presence of drugs or anything else that might be interesting, I can find out right away precisely about you and only you.
Yeah, but you know what I see wrong with this whole thing?
I'm not saying it's right or wrong, but let me just continue.
Okay, so once you have that criteria established, the following things become possible.
Using drugs that have been taken off the market and put them back on the market.
Gotcha.
That is a trillion dollar plus in this country.
Of course.
Overnight.
Of course.
Because the cost of putting a drug out here in this country alone.
Right.
Compliance requirements, eight years.
Oh, I know.
You understand what's going on.
I know.
But the second one, the one that I think is going to get your audience a little interested, and perhaps this is to answer your question.
In 1993, I wrote a paper, just a brief preface.
On the concept of what I call a quasi-viral component, in fact, they even put a picture of it on my website.
Quasi-viral component?
Yes, a quasi-viral component is the following kind of thing.
It's a molecular machine, and this is probably where the nano aspect comes in.
Think of it like this.
A virus, and nature is replete with lots of examples of this, viruses come in all different flavors and shapes and sizes.
There's something called a bacillovirus, which I'll mention in just a minute.
These viruses are all designed to do one particular thing.
They have an outer protein sheath, which is kind of like a road map, in a sense.
It has a bumpy surface, it has a topographical feature set, as well as a binding site arrangement that says it will match to only a protein that's designed to fit with it.
That's right.
Each specific kind of cell, whether it's a liver cell or a lung cell, or from a different plant or animal, they're all very unique and they have like a fingerprint, in a sense, so that when the right virus hits the right cell, like a handbook letter goes, the entering by mccash and the world's greatest but a
pleasant targets the nuclear self-finding the right of them
at the ok mister i don't know my have you know it go on from the right of them
forces the right of them to manufacture more of the viral component at the expense
of the house felt that's all for obvious reasons that secondary process
is rather negative but the first part of process spectacular
because you now have the ultimate targeting system folks also in other words for another way uh... let's see
when this is accomplished
You will.
Well then, why have we not cured AIDS?
If we have what you're talking about right now, we shouldn't have AIDS.
Let me tell you, and you're right.
Your logic is 100% sound, but let me explain the history so it makes more sense, because again, in so many other fields of endeavor, and Nanotech is probably the extreme example thereof, it's not what is possible or what can be done in a lab, but it has a lot to do with policy, financial systems, Uh, the implied value of something, how it's produced, and what concept.
Somebody dying of AIDS doesn't want to hear that crap.
Well, I'm only telling you, you know, you can shoot the messenger, but I'm just saying this is what is currently the state of affairs.
Somebody dying of liver cancer doesn't want to hear that crap.
I understand completely.
Bart, I'm with you 100%.
You're saying it's possible now.
Well, here's what's happened so far.
In 1996, a company called Onyx Pharmaceutical declared publicly for the first time, although I can tell you privately if it were, that there are other people doing the same thing, that they had isolated and synthetically modified a type of what's called a bacillavirus, a particular kind of virus that has a certain crystalline-like formation.
And the bacillaviruses are interesting because they actually can lay dormant for endless years in a row, They close up almost like a flower in a way.
When they're catalyzed under the right conditions, they pop open and out springs the virus in question.
It happens to thrive in a certain species of wasp, of all things.
And if you can take this particular flavor of bacillavirus and modify it a little bit, it's actually a very, very effective device for doing just this.
That is, targeting a given kind of cell inside of this device.
You can then implant the proteomic compounds that are relevant and go into the cell and turn it off.
Alright, you're going to have to hold it right there.
P53 is where we will pick up.
My guest is Charles Osman, subject to mainly nanotechnology.
This is Coast to Coast AM.
P53 is a type of protein.
In fact, I met the woman who was his co-inventor over here at Stanford.
All right, you're going to have to hold it right there.
P53 is where we will pick up.
My guest is Charles Osman, subject to mainly nanotechnology.
This is Coast to Coast AM.
You're listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time, tonight featuring a replay of Coast
to Coast AM from September 24th, 1999.
P53.
Welcome.
Thank you.
I can see you lying back in your satin dress In a room where you do what you don't confess Something down, you'd better take care If I find you been creeping round my backstage Something down, you'd better take care If I find you been creeping round my backstage You're listening to Art Bell's Somewhere in Time.
Tonight featuring a replay of Coast to Coast AM from September 24th, 1999.
Sometimes I think it's a shame that I ain't feeling better when I'm...
You're listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
Tonight featuring a replay of Coast to Coast AM from September 24th, 1999.
You know this is Gordon Whitefoot, right?
You know he's gonna be on the program next week.
I can picture every move that a man...
You didn't know that, huh?
Well, yes.
He sent me a fax.
Gordon Lightfoot sent me a fax.
He said, uh, thanks for playing my music.
You didn't need to thank me.
I play it because I love it.
And he said, I'd like to be on the show sometime.
So I called and said, okay, how about next week?
One day next week, Gordon Lightfoot's gonna be here.
You know what scares the hell out of me?
The fact that I can't even come to terms with my stupid computer.
What scares the hell out of me really is that this nanotechnology, biological nanotechnology, is already doing things that we just thought were science fiction.
Every time I say something like, well there's not really artificial intelligence, well yes there is.
Well, they're not really attaching DNA to chips, are they?
Well, yes, they are.
This is all going on right now.
My guest is Charles Ostman.
He was talking about something called P53.
What's that?
Yes, P53.
And I'm not a biophysics... I'm not a practitioning person in the biophysics world, and there are other people who are much more specialized in this area, but just in general, There's a whole catalog of different protein types.
It's kind of like a phone book, if you will, a directory to say of all the different potential proteomic compounds.
Here's a selection list of the ones that have been identified, here's some potential ones that could exist, and so on.
Yeah, so this is P53.
So there's these different ways of labeling them.
This particular one's called P53.
And what it is, it's a switch.
That is, it will actually shut down the... it's like a light switch.
It'll turn off the physiological mechanisms that keep a cell Functioning, it will simply slow down and go into stasis.
For cancer, this is particularly interesting.
Cancer is an out-of-control growth of cells.
Yes, which has lost its genetic identity from the host cells from which it emanates.
As you're telling me, the p53 could be vectored in to tell the cells, stop it!
That is exactly what I'm getting at.
Stop multiplying!
Okay, but here's where I need to kind of correct the path that's being seen right now.
How far or how long it'll be before Let's say the folks from Onyx Pharmaceutical who have in fact proven or they've shown viable examples of their particular hybrid version of a bacillavirus as a targeting system versus are they allowed, if I can say that, or will be, you know, sort of focused in the direction of a combined of a p53 to target a specific kind of cancer cell.
Theoretically, this is probably within range.
However, I should point out that since 1996, which is when they got started, and they're only one of a number of companies, by the way, They were primarily being financed by Lawrence Livermore and Sandia Laboratories for projects which I'm sure you can probably imagine.
But I have to stop here for just a moment, if I may, because I personally have visited a number of sites that really are secure and cannot be mentioned on there.
But one that's known about publicly is Dugway.
That's in Utah.
And this is probably one of the major sort of biological testing grounds that we are allowed to talk about in the public airwaves.
The point being, That I actually had a long chat with Ken Illebeck.
He was the one that wrote that book called Biohazard, and he was the highest ranking Soviet officer in charge of all biological weapons development before he defected.
That's right.
And so I had a long talk with him.
That book.
He and I kind of spoke the same language, so we didn't have to spend a lot of time on small talk.
We sort of cut right through the chase.
And after migrating around a variety of topics, I kind of brushed the topic off and said, Given all the current circumstance, the unrest in the Soviet bloc, the fact that Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan were where most things were being done, and the labs even then were in kind of shaky condition, you know, what's happening now, is there a real potential for some kind of hazard, even just by accident, let alone by smuggling and so on?
And of course, I mean, this is not even a question mark.
So what's really been happening, I think, in many parts of the world, especially in the U.S., there's been a very, very strong, aggressive push, and I support this, by the way, To discover ways to identify newly emergent pathogens, B, to isolate them, and C, to find some kind of way of neutralizing them.
Charles?
Charles?
Yes?
If there could be a P53 that would go in and slow down the out-of-control growth of cancer cells, then couldn't there be a P54 which would be like a virus, but trouble is, when you caught it, It began to grow out of control cancer cells, in other words... This is exactly why... ...in other words, Charles, a cancer virus.
You have answered the question quite well, because when you mentioned in the previous part of the program about could we target, I don't know if I'm saying with a smart weapon, and you were thinking in terms of a bomb or a robotic device.
No, a molecule would do just fine.
Yeah, but see, here's what I'm worried about.
Suppose we have DNA and a chip and we've got P54 It's going to only go, and it's going to target Saddam Hussein, and it's going to sort of enter his system, however we get it there, and when it gets in there, Saddam Hussein is going to have tumors all over his body, and he's going to drop dead in short order, right?
Well, it wouldn't even be tumors, it would be something a little more... Whatever!
Whatever, you know, whatever.
But, see, I imagine that somehow the virus that we create, this nanotechnological virus, Somehow, after it's done with Saddam, modify itself.
I agree a thousand percent.
Do you, and then go after everybody, and before you know it, in just a matter of a month or two, every human being on the face of the planet could be dead, belly up.
Art, please let me say, I agree with you.
This is why I'm willing to even go on there and talk about it in the first place.
I have the same trepidations.
People talk about the Y2K of the computer world having all these problems, Yes, it'll be painful economically.
There will probably be some local pockets of unrest.
There might even be some political, military actions and so on.
But that's a drop in the bucket.
That is a bump in the road compared to a biological Y2K, which is kind of what you just described.
And I think that we're way, way, way short of really under... Biology is a very complex system.
It is something which we're still only beginning to really get a grasp on.
And I've talked to some of the best in the business.
I've seen their labs, I've read their papers, I've talked to other people who are vastly more qualified than myself who specialize in these arenas, and they will tell you privately that, well, we're still researching them, we're still doing models, and there's a lot to be learned from this.
That's why, when you asked earlier, why can't we use a bacillovirus to treat AIDS, this is why.
I would be very, very hesitant to start spewing these things out en masse.
Until we have plenty of time to really isolate and neutralize the potential for a mutagen being accidentally spawned.
Now let me give you an alternative, if I may.
There's another way to approach this problem.
We're only talking about one extremely tiny, sorry for the pun, aspect of nanobiology.
First of all, I coined the term nanobiology myself in one of my articles years ago, just because I had no better way to describe the process as a mechanical way to invent new proteomic systems.
Then I went to this conference in San Diego about two and a half years ago.
This was the Molecular Nanotechnology Novel and Biological Approaches Conference.
And there, I met Dr. Stephen Lee, who's the director of Monsanto Chemicals' Nanobiological Systems Development Group.
They have a group like that, huh?
So I figured if they were willing to use the word in that context, fine.
I guess I can get away with it.
But here's what I found out after having a bit of a chat with Dr. Lee, who is a very nice fellow and extremely pleasant and easy to explain.
Sure is, yes.
But let me explain what they're doing.
They also were using live viral devices, for better choice of words, which were mechanically sort of taken apart and reassembled to deliver proteomic compounds to treat various diseases.
They were using these in monkeys.
And the monkeys, of course, the disease was cured, but the monkey was also killed.
They thought this might not be such a great way to go.
So, wisely, and I think this is really a good decision on their part, they decided to stop the viral device process, but they went into a different path, which says, we can now use pseudoproteins.
That is, there's a type of pseudopolymer-like substance called dendrimers, which, when they're handled correctly, form into helices and other patterns which look very much like DNA.
People don't understand what you're saying.
Okay, it's a way to create a synthetic version of protein that is not really a protein.
And why that's interesting is because now you can create little molecular-scale gadgets, if you will, designed to deliver something to the cell of your choice, but they will not multiply, they will not mutate, they will not do anything.
They're totally inert.
They're just delivery vessels.
The only problem though is that unlike the bacillus virus solution, these things will not spread.
They have to be injected all over the body or into the organ you're dealing with in mass.
And you hope that the distribution pattern will be wide enough to actually communicate physically
with the cells in question.
Unlike the bacillus viruses, which on their own will in fact propagate and spread around.
So there's these different sets of trade-offs and this is like the brass ring.
You can almost see this like glowing gem on the horizon saying if we could just sort of get our hands around this or something positive, but I agree with you a thousand percent that one small bump, one small error could be very disastrous indeed.
Well, when we look at, you know, how much of this is going on that you can't talk about?
A lot.
A lot.
See, I was afraid of that.
Now, see, what I'm thinking is that In labs around this country, no doubt, around Russia certainly, China absolutely, whoever's got the ability to be doing this.
Correct.
They're now working on these things and they're not working on curing cancer or AIDS.
No, they're not.
Absolutely.
They're working on some kind of ultimate weapon.
Yes, I know this.
And I can tell you from personal knowledge that it's not correct.
Weapons that might even target ethnic groups.
Yes, it is correct.
Ethnic cleansing, this has been the thing that has driven the horrors of the world forever.
Ethnic cleansing, get rid of a whole group.
Well now, you might have to even take out the machetes to eliminate them.
Just release a little bit of this, and goodbye Charlie Brown.
I understand this, and let me see if I can articulate in a more precise fashion where this is really at.
Or Charlie Black, or Charlie Yellow.
Yes, I understand completely.
Okay, so here we go.
The Human Genome Project, which was really started by NIH, National Institutes of Health, was very much an academic project.
It was a bunch of mainstream universities, Carnegie Mellon and all the other major schools that do this kind of thing.
And it was really seen as not just a wonderful solution for lots of different diseases and medical problems, but also a huge gravy tramp, if I can use that set of words, for funding and perpetuity for all these medical groups.
And I understand how this works.
I live in that world.
It's a well-understood mechanism that this is how these things are funded and kept alive.
Well, suddenly the reality of how commercially interesting this adventure would be was recognized by other companies, Perkin Elmer being the most notable, who at a certain point in time said, you know, NIH and their university friends, this is great, but we have a different agenda in mind.
We can capture a trillion dollar plus drug recapture market, we can put diagnostic systems out in the hospitals that will I totally automate most of these lab procedures.
I'm only explaining what has happened.
I already know where you're going with this, and I agree with you.
Just let me explain the history so you get a better sense of what reality really is.
So these folks, with a very aggressive track, and I believe you, instead of going to all these conferences, I follow the behind-the-scenes market strategies quite well, so I understand why they've gotten to where they've gotten.
They've pushed the agenda to say that now we're actually within a year.
of literally unraveling the entire human genome.
The licensing fees alone for what that intellectual property resource represents is almost off
the chart.
It's beyond priceless, because at that moment in time, you could literally name any price
you can imagine.
I don't care if you're Amersham Pharmaceuticals, GlaxoWellcome, you name any of the big players
in that arena, believe me, whatever it is, they'll pay the price, because they know right
now at this nanosecond, they can put into practice pharmacological remedies and a whole
series of regimens which will essentially invert the entire medical process.
Okay, I believe... Okay, okay, but you are right.
At the exact same nanosecond that occurs, could one define physiological, even psychological markers, that is behavioral nuances, which can be genetically identified and target those?
Answer, yes.
And as a matter of fact, over three years ago, NIH had launched quietly, mind you, A program at the University of Maryland to look for certain psychological or behavioral anomalies that could be genetically identified.
But where's all the black budget money going?
It's going into the other areas now.
They can't expose that, give that, or let that leak out to the private sector, how advanced they are, without giving away what they've got.
That's exactly right.
And so, I've been writing a book myself, not exactly like your Quickening book, which, by the way, I very much expect, and I think it's a very excellent piece of work, I look at something a little bit different but with the
same rate and velocity and scale of change, transition, evolutionary thresholds, and that's
what part of my website is about actually, and this is one of those increments.
I.e., very much imagine this, in the 2001 Space Odyssey film, there's a great scene
where you have the ape people, whichever you want to call them, the hominids, the first
one was learning how to use a bone to crush in the head of its enemy.
I remember that.
Okay, so it throws the bone up in the air and it's spinning around a little bit and
suddenly it morphs into this spaceship in orbit.
We are at that point now.
We've just thrown the bone up in the air and we're about that point where we see the spaceship.
I.e., that's the level of transition we're about to step through.
If we as a society, as a system, as a species system can learn to understand these tools
and use them in some positive, proactive way, hopefully, we actually can really transgress
ourselves past the point we are now with all the physical limitations, food, disease, avarice,
etc., and go to a different kind of dimension.
However, if we don't, the flip side of that coin could be very dark indeed.
Where I personally have my trepidations.
If you had to plot two lines in a graph, it says here's technical prowess, here's technical
acceleration almost as a vertical line, but if you look at what I might call the spiritual
health or the cultural health index of the population base, it's at large, it's almost
a flat line at the bottom.
Trying to figure out how to converge those two lines, that is the challenge we're facing.
I agree with you.
My biggest concern is not from China or the former Soviet bloc, although that's a scary
one to do.
It really concerns me with some little tiny, not even a country, not even an autonomous
nation state, just some bunch of lunatics with a couple of scientists they can hire
from one of these former Soviet labs and with the right sort of religious focus or whatever
drives them to do these things, could with a surprisingly small amount of equipment and
material, actually do it.
Actually create one of these strange anomalous critters that are a mutation of some existing thing.
That's what's concerning me.
All right, there's the music.
It says you've got to pause.
You know, I'm sorry, but I see the bone in the air.
I don't see the pan of the spaceship.
What I see is a crushed skull.
But that's me.
We'll be right back.
You're listening to Art Bell's Somewhere in Time on Premier Radio Networks.
Tonight, an encore presentation of Coast to Coast AM from September 24th, 1999.
This is a presentation of the Coast to Coast concerto.
Tonight's program originally aired September 24th, 1999.
You know, there are countries that have been about, uh, just about being invaded.
Things that have, uh, just about to happen that we have known about because we have... We have an eye in the sky, eyes in the sky, like... You can only dream about it.
I mean, we have the ability The capability to see everything that goes on on the ground, inside buildings and out.
But do we use it?
No.
Not publicly.
Why?
It's because to use it would be to expose the development of the technology.
Now why do I bring this up?
Well...
Because I know damn well all this black budget money has developed lots of things, just like Charles is talking about, that could translate into cancer cures and AIDS cures and change the color of your eyes and give you bigger biceps or whatever you want.
Maybe even live forever.
But will they get out?
Will these technologies get out?
For the good?
I don't think so.
The best advertising is word of mouth.
One moment, please.
Not supposed to do that until we do this.
So let's do it properly.
The Lawsman is here and we're talking about nano stuff, little tiny stuff, the little things.
I've got an article in front of me from the Electronic Telegraph, the British Electronic Telegraph.
The headline of it is, Genetic Science Could Be Used for Ethnic Cleansing.
Rapid advances in genetics soon will transform biological weapons into potent tools of ethnic cleansing and terrorism.
According to doctors, the British Medical Association actually, said that weapons that could distinguish between ethnic groups by exploiting little tiny genetic or cellular differences between them could be a reality within the decade.
Or, If you think like I do, they may be a reality right now.
Now I ask you, if a Mideast terrorist thought that they could release a little something from a test tube that would kill Israelis and not Palestinians, what do you think they would do with it?
We're talking about people who attach bombs to themselves and climb inside Israeli buses and blow the hell out of everybody, right?
These are the people we're talking about.
So, Charles, when you're considering the advocacy of these things for peace and saying they're for peace and hoping they're for peace, that's fine, but what does a Palestinian do with the little I'm 100% with you on this.
That's why I was willing to bring it up in the first place, because I am equally concerned, if not more so.
The analogy I might draw, just to give some personal reference, quite some years ago, I actually did work in some of these so-called Star Wars programs, and I might suggest to you that the people I worked with were probably the most sensitive Ecologically focused and very, very keenly aware of just how fragile our planet was, and that's why they were motivated to design the systems they were at the time.
Stay close to the phone.
Because they wanted to really, hopefully, find technical solutions to solve otherwise impossible diplomatic problems.
Right.
That was many years ago.
Today, we have a somewhat different arena to be faced with.
A lot of the people who I come in contact with from this sort of biological, nanobiology world are equally as concerned. They totally understand this, not
that they're devoid of this knowledge, quite the opposite. And my concern is as follows. If you go
into any of the major western nations, let's say, there the standards are very high, the work is
very precise, it's a pristine environment, very, very substantial peer pressure and quality review,
even in those budgets, as you call them.
There's a certain level of standards of quality that's always to be maintained.
That's true, but whereas in China... Hold on, hold on, Charles.
Whereas in China, they shoot people when they get an order for a liver.
That's right, and that's why I agree with you, Art, because in other parts of the world, where our Western standards of When they call it decorum or modicum civility, that would be considered normal, is very different than how it is there.
Their reference point for what they've judged to have value or not value is almost the inverse in some cases of how we see it to be here.
So could the same set of tools be used for very ill-gotten means there or somewhere?
Yes.
And furthermore, as I said just before the break, unlike say nuclear, which requires an enormous amount of investment, Absolutely.
infrastructure and very, very large scale and highly complex systems to be dealt with
just to even get the material, let alone build the bombs themselves.
In the bio world, it's very, very different.
You'd be surprised at how small, how minimal, and I certainly won't go into any details,
but let's just say it could be done a lot easier with people that are a lot smaller
budgetary limitations and so on.
So here's kind of where I have my particular personal focus.
The same tools that can invent these rather awful things can also neutralize them.
And this is why I was trying to suggest that we are, in a sense, facing an evolutionary trauma source.
And let me see if I can clarify this.
In time, Charles?
In other words, let's say something got released in Beijing.
Something horrible.
Something that was going to give everybody cancer.
It was just an accident.
Yeah, it was an accident.
It got released.
Are you telling me that before it could spread around the world and kill everybody, somebody in Moscow or somebody in Washington or somebody in Berkeley would figure out something else to stop it?
Here's the current state of the art that I'm allowed to discuss.
I'll put it that way.
The art form of creating synthetic cells is already done.
i.e.
a cell can be essentially constructed as a physical device.
And this is different than back in the old days Where when you had to modify little bits of protein, a segment at a time, so many base pairs of DNA could be cut and snipped, and then you'd sort of modify the organism.
Things are very different now.
There's actually a company called Cellular Robotics, for instance, in New Mexico.
They can, using laser light, they can dissect a cell at the molecular level and sort of rebuild it, just to suit the interesting question.
So the point is, at that level, cells can be fetched up and created to become sensorous.
The cells respond in a very, very specific kind of way.
to a pathogen that's exposed to, and the response that it can be very precisely monitored.
So that's one little piece of a large puzzle.
Another part of a large puzzle says that once you've identified a given type of pathogen, the timeline between discovery, identification, isolation, and then designer response is very short compared to what it used to be.
And again, I won't go into the particulars.
But we also have some other things.
You know the particulars, though.
I have seen the evidence firsthand.
But let me just suggest one other thing.
In terms of long-distance scanning abilities, for instance, laser light can be used to test the sky to see if there is some kind of unfriendly pathogens many miles away.
And I won't say how many miles or in what context.
Let's just say we can use laser light to probe in proximity area of, say, so many miles of confluence by looking at absorption lines.
Aha!
There is an unidentified protein.
Let's go have a look.
You send a probe out.
You capture the organism or the bioparticle in question.
Analyze it within time X, and I won't say the time.
Something could be designed to kind of neutralize whatever that thing is.
So what we have right now is something of a foot race, where the number of newly emergent pathogens, just those that are being discovered naturally, let alone anything that's synthetically contrived, has sort of pushed the pace, you might say.
And a lot of this sort of bioengineering, nanobiology stuff, which I think does have spectacular medical applications, I think Justly Show should remain somewhat in this realm because of the defensive potential of how it could be used to guard against some stupid, idiotic little group somewhere, like you just mentioned, hatching a bunch of nonsense.
It gets out of hand.
We need to have these tools to respond to these things effectively, and that's why I hold the views that I held.
Now, just to summarize, when I had my chat with With Ken Albeck, you know, like I said, he gave me a very interesting insight to his world, far more so than what he published in his book, which is telling enough as it is, it gives a pretty good picture of how far things have gotten.
In the Soviet bloc, of course, their approach was a little bit different than ours.
As is all other systems that we've worked on in the past, whether it be aerospace, rockets, satellites, beam weapons, whatever it is, the Soviet approach in general is build big and lots of it.
Our approaches tend to be very precise, surgical, you know, highly technology-oriented.
So in their world, they just produced naturally occurring pathogens, you know, hybridized them so they'd be particularly effective, but then made huge amounts of it.
So there, in their particular stations, they had thousands of tons, and I do mean tons,
of anthrax of all different flavors, smallpox, bubonic plague, you name it, and they could
fetch it up in mass.
We have a somewhat different approach.
We take a particular molecule, shave it here, add it there, and then say, aha, we can deliver this molecule with this particular kind of X virus or whatever it is.
And there's, of course, this whole other range of things called hybrids, and I won't even go into that.
But let's just say that anything that can multiply or attach or in some way connect to the physiology of the living system At this point, it's like building blocks.
You look at the proteins in question, you figure out a structure that works in that
context and you sort of build within the suit.
However, what I'm trying to get at is until we have an effective way, and you actually
hit the nail very carefully in the head, you said we cannot really reveal how well this
can be done because it would, in a sense, expose us to even more aggressive bio-threats
in the future.
It's a kind of a strange argument, and I'm not saying I like it, I'm just saying this is the way I see it.
It's reality.
It is reality.
But let me go back to the evolutionary path.
Alright, before we get back to the evolutionary path, here's the difference.
Do you remember back in the Carter days, you old enough to remember Jimmy Carter?
Oh yeah, no, I remember Jimmy Carter.
You remember when we were having all our people kidnapped in Tehran?
Oh, yeah.
We whined and cried and we had a useless, horrendous operation trying to get around it.
Very much so.
And Ronald Reagan had to get in office and say, look, release them or we're going to kick you and your friends into next Sunday.
And they got cut loose on election night.
Remember that?
Yeah, I sure do.
All right.
Well, see, the Soviets, they had some people kidnapped too.
And what Soviets did is they went to the The relatives of the kidnappers and they cut their body parts into little pieces and they mailed them off to the kidnappers and said, okay, we'll play on your field.
We'll do this.
So here's a nose and here's an ear and here's a kneecap.
The Soviets have a way of getting right up in your face and saying, here's who we are and if you don't like it, get some more of this.
We don't.
We come with a different set of rules.
I know this.
And it has hurt us in a certain way.
I totally think it is.
Now, here's the only exception.
In terms of warfare being a profitable enterprise, and this is where a lot of my economic studies in the past goes, because it used to be up until maybe the turn of the century, and I think World War II was like the last cutoff point, really, it was seen that a way to effectively Magnify one's prowess in the global marketplace, for better choice of words.
Your worth, your valuation, your currency, your presence in the world, your ability to establish worth and sort of yield to other entities' acquiescence to their powers, as it were, was really dictated by physical commodities.
You had land, you had a population base, you had raw materials, you had shipping, and all that kind of thing to sort of say, here's our presence, here's what we're worth.
In today's world, it's obviously very different.
It's much more virtual.
It's much more interconnected.
It has a lot more to do with telecommunications than physical things.
But aside from all that, there's a certain cutoff point where, in times past, you could stage a war, invent some kind of a cause, wrap around some kind of ideology, whatever, sell to the population base, and turn it into some kind of cause salubri, which would then justify the war in question.
The end result being that we get together a bunch of new stuff and make our economy more robust.
That just doesn't work anymore.
It just does not pay off.
And especially when you bring nuclear into the picture, it's a complete write-off.
Now, when the neutron bomb came around the corner, A lot of people felt very threatened by this because I thought this would reopen the Pandora's box.
Buildings okay, but people dead.
But you know, actually, I support the neutron bomb in a very, very narrow way.
Why?
Well, because of the following thing.
It suggests that this is an extremely precise way to, kind of like the Soviets getting in your face, but with a more precise kind of a way of application.
One can say, look, We can now use nuclear weapons.
We're not going to blow the whole earth up.
We're not going to eradicate a bunch of territory and make it unusable.
We can use nuclear weapons in a way that's surgically precise, and therefore we will use them.
And that is an understandable threat to those entities who otherwise would not respond.
Okay, well if you support the neutron bomb, then do you support an organism that would be created that would kill only Absolutely not.
Why not?
What's the difference?
No, it's very, very different indeed.
Why?
If anything, you could be more precise with nanotechnology and the biological arena.
I know what you're getting at, and I respect your rhetorical argument, but let me see if I can explain more carefully.
First of all, I don't really support the neutron bomb as a general philosophy.
I'm just saying, in the context of when it was created, in the situation, and the people who were responsible for creating it, it made sense at that moment in time.
In no way am I supporting any kind of nuclear war of any kind at all now.
I'm just saying, back then, it was contextually understood.
In today's world, though, we have something very, very different indeed.
And also, I need to, if you'll allow me the opportunity, to sort of expand upon a much larger agenda, which has to do with bioterraforming the sort of bioengineering of entire ecological systems.
Oh, hold this thought.
Bioterraform.
Correct.
Would that mean, for example, translation Uh, you send a probe to Mars.
Oh no, not to Mars, here on Earth.
Let me explain.
Well, okay, I was just expanding a little bit.
In other words, what don't you have on Mars that you need?
You don't have water on the surface, you don't have a lot of atmosphere, temperature, a lot of raw material, a lot of oxygen, all that stuff.
But here on Earth, what we have is an already viable biosphere, lots of raw material to work with, Nanotechnology, maybe we should explain just so the audience feels that they're up to the thread that's going on.
Nanotechnology, in its simplest possible explanation, is nothing more, really, it's very simple, is the mechanical manipulation of molecules to perform some kind of specific task.
Well, that's not simple.
Well, it's actually surprisingly powerful, because think about it in this way.
Up until fairly recently, even by legal definition, it was confined to so-called acts of God, quote-unquote, Translation, we are going to be playing God.
Very much so.
or died, or how it grew, what its life consisted of, etc.
This was left to the mysterious ethos of the spiritual world.
Not that I'm discrediting it.
I mean, I'm very spiritual myself.
I'm just saying that the boundary, or the bar has been raised to a different level.
We are now tapping into an arena that strictly was in the mysterious world of the spirit,
as it were.
Translation, we are going to be playing God.
Very much so.
This is God on demand.
God on demand.
I'm not saying it's good or bad, I'm just saying this is what it is.
I'm only here to inform, I'm not here to defend, or support, or negate.
There are lots of companies out there that have billions and billions, as the saying
would go, of dollars riding on the ability to transform, if you will.
A specific geographical region to maximize the biomass field of a particular, not one plant or animal, but a whole collection of crops.
I'm sorry, the what fields?
In the agribusiness world, as it were.
Yes, yes.
It used to be that the target was to change a particular species, like a type of corn or a wheat.
Yes, yes, yes.
To be more prolific or resistant, whatever.
But now there's a systems approach, as with everything else, Well, wait a minute.
If we're going to look at an entire region of land, an entire geographic region, as I'm sure you all know, many of the small farms are being bought.
I don't like this, by the way.
I'm not saying this is a good thing.
This is what it is.
The corporate conglomerate system, many of which are not even from this country, has kind of come in like a commodity and decided, okay, if we can now control X amount of contiguous land, what can we really do with it?
This segment is ending now.
That's right.
Hold it right there.
I know exactly where you're going.
I don't know about all this.
We're going to open the phone lines and let you ask questions.
What do you think?
He keeps saying, I don't like where it's going, but his tone is where it's going.
You're listening to Art Bell's Somewhere in Time.
Tonight featuring a replay of Coast to Coast AM from September 24th, 1999.
This is a recording of the concert.
you You've blown it all sky high
By telling me a lie Without a reason why
You've blown it all sky high Falling in love was the last thing I had on my mind
Holding you is a warmth that I thought I could never find Just trying to decide
I'll stay by your side I know I could cry
I just can't find the answers to the questions that keep going through my mind
Baby, is there a time?
Is there a time? Is there a time to wait?
Falling in love could be your mistake Is there a time?
Is there a time? Is there a time to wait?
Falling in love could be your mistake Falling in love
Thank you for watching!
I've seen visions of someone like you in my life A love that's strong, reaching out, holding me through the
darkest night You're listening to Art Bell, somewhere in time on Premier
Radio Networks.
Tonight, an encore presentation of Coast to Coast AM from September 24th, 1999.
Charles Ostman is my guest and we're talking about nanotechnology.
the G's.
Biological nanotechnology.
Wild stuff, no doubt.
Well, Steve Massett made a big mistake.
He just sent me an urgent fax and he says, hey Art, turns out the number I gave you for all the people to call out there At the White House, which is listed, he says, in the federal pages as the Presidential Inquiries and Comments line, and is open 24-7, routes all your callers into a Medicaid area.
Which is ridiculous and not good, since we have people calling to screech and yell about releasing Information and calling for congressional inquiries into what the White House knows about what's flying in our skies.
When the Medicaid people get there Monday morning, I bet they're going to be really, really put off a little bit.
You people better release that information now, dammit!
We want an inquiry!
We want to know what's flying around in our skies!
They're going to try to figure out how that applies to Medicaid, so I've got to give you the new number.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha!
Ah, the new number, Monday through Friday, is area code 2.
I'm still imagining these Medicaid folks coming in on Monday.
imagining these uh... medicaid folks coming in on monday uh...
two oh two four five six one four one four is the correct number that's
money through friday
communicate people are going to try to figure out what they've done wrong
So again, that's the real number to call, not the other one.
202-456-1414, Monday through Friday.
This radio business.
And I've got a very, very interesting facts about Charles Osman.
and you know if you've been listening to him carefully some of you are going to
agree with this fact we are talking with charles osmond about nuclear technology
Charles Osman is a scary guy, if you've been listening carefully.
And this act reflects that, and I want to read it because it kind of brings things back down to ground for some people out there.
It reads, uh, Art, this guy, meaning Charles, really worries me a lot.
If you have ever heard any of Robert Oppenheimer's testimony on the effects of the atomic bomb before Congress in the early fifties, well, this guy sounds very much like him.
I'm always scared hitless, he leaves out the S, that's hitless, folks, with an H, by anyone that uses the word trepidation instead of the word scared hitless.
I only have a tested IQ of 130.
I hope they don't make one of these little critters that targets people with IQ tests of less than, say, 140, and causes us dummies to crave a great big drink of glycol antifreeze.
On the optimistic side, maybe I could marry a fat, ugly poor chick, buy a bottle of these little critters, and turn her into a beautiful, blonde, financial genius nymphomaniac.
What do you think, Charles?
Now, aside from the little ending here, which was humorous, although it does fire the imagination, aside from that, though, I mean, he's right.
In a way, you sound like Oppenheimer did.
Well, I mean, I see a lot of things, and I've had a rather interesting life for the past 30-plus years.
I've seen a lot of technologies, which would only sound like fiction to the general world.
That's why I feel so compelled to explain carefully what I think is the truth as best as I possibly can so that folks can, in their own
minds, decide where things might want to go if they had more interaction with these
processes.
But I want to point one thing out.
On one of your ads, you had a commercial for a product, if you don't recall, for age reversal
or age suspension, you might say.
HDH.
Yes.
Well, thank you.
The reality is that I have some personal acquaintances who are working on this precisely, but not
to do with HDH, but really to go right into the cell and rearrange its physiology.
You're talking about the telomeres?
The telomeres is one, and there's some others which I won't go into, but let's just say this.
I would say within five to seven years, roughly, you'll see human trials somewhere, probably not in the U.S., but somewhere.
As you well know, people can now, at their options, fly to the Bahamas, Mexico, other parts of the world, and get all kinds of treatments that aren't allowed here.
This is what I was trying to come across in the last section, was that The world has become a singularity.
Many of these gigantic pharmacology companies who really have, like I said, billions of dollars at stake, if the FDA compliancy situation isn't to their liking because of market share, timeline to produce, and so on, it'll simply spring up somewhere else.
And it may or may not even be a U.S.-based company that does it.
So would some other solution for arresting the aging process suddenly become a deliverable, at least to those who wish to purchase it?
Probably so.
Would this be dispensed to the general population?
Probably not.
This represents an extraordinarily complex ethical issue, which I couldn't even begin to try to answer myself, but I do know that the tools that make that possible are very much within reach.
In fact, there's a conference coming up, which one of my friends will be at, which I won't name, but about a month from now you're going to have a bunch of biophysicists from around the world talking specifically about What part of the cell, what particular physiology, etc., and what proteomic compounds might suspend or in some way change the pathology of aging?
And this is seen as a science like any other science.
To me, what this represents, as I was saying earlier, is an evolutionary threshold.
We are being challenged, and I tend to view evolution as a trauma-induced process.
What I mean by that is, if one were to devise a series of models, And this has been done, by the way.
A lot of the folks in the artificial life community do this now at very large-scale computer simulations.
They'll take two different ecosystems, model them, and say, okay, here's one system where there's not that much challenge.
It's a very nice, pleasant environment.
The organism, the system in general, tends to atrophy.
It stays the same.
It doesn't really do much except do the same thing over and over.
In a different situation, however, if trauma is introduced and the trauma cycles over a certain periodicity and amplitude to not really kill the organism but simply to challenge It will, as an operational xenomorph, reorganize itself to become more robust and therefore continue to evolve into a more substantial form.
Alright, well look, you're the Ying, I'm the Yang.
I know the work they're doing on stopping aging, even reversing it, I know about that.
But you know what?
There are a lot of world leaders who have openly suggested that the six billion people on the planet right now should be reduced to about two billion.
Oh, listen, I'm very familiar with the Paul Ehrlichman mindset.
I understand this very, very well.
I'm a person who is particularly focused on ecological concerns, and I've been in Brazil several times.
I've seen firsthand how things can go when they're not managed correctly.
That's right.
Yes, I do understand this, and this is just the kind of philosophical and spiritual paradigms that we're yet to try to I just wanted to say that I think Charles is getting a bad rap because he's said already a few times he's just the messenger of this nanotechnology.
you're talking about would serve either purpose. Correctly so. Alright look I want to let the audience ask some
questions all right that'll keep us on the ground here. Wildcard Line
you're on the air. I just wanted to say that I think Charles getting a bad rap because he's said already a few
times. He's just the messenger of this I agree. Nanotechnology is not really trying to promote it.
He's just letting us know about it.
But as the Satcher pointed out, isn't that what Oppenheimer said when he was testifying there?
I'm not really sure, but maybe he did.
I just wanted to ask Charles if I was right in assuming by reading, I read some of this technology in a book, and I had never really thought of it before until I read this book, and I can't even remember the author's name right now, but what I was going to say is Well, some of the other things that you haven't mentioned is, um, okay, like, remember on Star Trek, on all the Star Treks, they have, like, this machine, and it can make food and drink.
Yes, a replicator, of course.
Right.
And this is what nanotechnology can do, too, right?
Oh, this is a very... It is the ultimate extension of, to carry this a tad further, there is a company called Vivex, it's the first commercial company to actually announce that they are attempting to build a molecular replicator as a business model.
Now, how far they've gotten and to what extent, I probably shouldn't go into, but let's just say the following thing.
That there comes a certain threshold point, and I could argue the number of years, 3, 5, 7, whatever, it depends on money and who's involved, but there comes a certain point where the ability to break apart and reassemble molecules to either replicate an existing thing, or to create materials which could not possibly exist any other way.
That is the real essence of what nanotechnology in its ultimate inception would represent.
Are you telling me we are three, five, or seven years away from a replicator?
It depends on whose version of a replicator you want to believe.
The one he was talking about.
Let me explain this further.
In that context, you then have the extreme ultimate inception of a virtual commodity asset-based economic system.
What I mean by that is, Even today, even though it's all debt leveraged and the currency is totally floating on these theoretical values and so on, there's still the mimic of something connected to a physical commodity system that says, we have tangible goods, the goods are manufactured by standard manufacturing techniques, there is a material pipeline, we can trace out value.
In this nano world, you have a system where the material goods have essentially no value, and the process of inception has essentially all the value.
Now, could the world economy... This is an impossible world!
Well, this is what I'm trying to get up to.
In other words, it's one thing to have an isolated example of an ability to create things at the molecular scale.
In other words, if I can take something like a microwave oven, Charles, and say, all right, I'm entering the following code, doo-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo, like you do in the microwave, and then punch start, and open it up, and have a Sony Walkman, Then I'm not going down to Circuit City to buy one.
That's a simple way of looking at it, but yes, and let me take it even a step further.
A lot of people have asked me about things like elements, atomic elements, and let me explain this.
Back in the mid-70s, here at Lawrence Laboratory, we actually turned lead into gold.
I'm not kidding.
How it was done, though, is by falling away.
We used a linear accelerator called a line-ac and then pumped that into a cyclotron, The point is, with enough energy, we could break apart and reassemble the nuclei of lead and eventually turn into gold.
However, however, let me explain.
The cost of the energy at that time was so high that it came out to something like $30,000 a gram or something.
so it was a good idea to go over under three hundred dollars right what what
please hold on yet nanotechnology were applied here's what you would get
Okay.
Superconductive materials.
That is, materials which can conduct electricity with virtually no resistance.
Right.
And this is done now.
I know what it is.
The whole point is to create a more friendly version that can operate at room temperature.
Right.
It's mass-producible, etc., etc., etc.
Right, right, right.
Now, there's a lot of authority going on.
Is it hidden away?
Yes.
There's a lot of military applications, which are fairly obvious, if you think about it.
But the point is, At that threshold, one could then have a linear accelerator, which would require almost no energy to run, or very little.
Then all of a sudden, you could, in fact, turn lead into gold and do so very easily.
So you could dig a piece of lead, put it in the machine, punch the buttons, and out comes a bar of gold?
Well, some substance that represents X amount of gold from the source material you started with.
What I'm trying to lead up to is a paradigm that says, at a certain threshold, molecules as they're assembled becomes doable and at that
point also breaking apart atoms and reassembling them
also becomes doable but is there an economic model that could actually
support this process in some kind of mass production fashion? Not that I can imagine at the moment.
Well there are theoretical models I've been working on one myself
I mean you can put a meter on it I suppose. Well the thing is
we are headed towards a virtual commodity asset driven system as we speak
It's kind of like a training session in a way.
The general population base was very shortly going to be introduced into a world of e-cash.
That is, instead of having coins and currency, you'll be having a card, essentially.
You could take coal and turn it into diamonds.
Actually, that's already being done.
I understand that, but do you have any idea how unhappy De Beers would be?
Well, De Beers is already unhappy, and I'll tell you why.
Why?
Because if all the diamonds were dumped into the marketplace today, they'd be worth beach sand.
Well, that's right, and so De Beers keeps control of the marketplace.
Well, I sure do.
Yeah, that's right.
So if we've got our little coal-in-the-diamond machine, oh, De Beers is just going to hate that.
Well, let me give you, and that was a great question by the way.
Thank you for the person who asked the question.
Michael, I believe his name was.
Here's a little vision of that philosophy.
Back in the late 50s there was a great film of it called The Forbidden Planet.
You might know about it.
Of course I know about it.
I've seen it a hundred times.
It's one of my favorite movies.
Why?
It was this first version of Nanotech introduced to the public.
What really happened there on this mythical planet?
There was a civilization called the Krell.
The Krell had gone millions of years past us in terms of their evolutionary event stream and so on.
Fine.
So they built this gigantic machine, 20 cubic miles, that had a fusion reaction system, I guess.
I can't really specify.
The whole point was they had a mind-machine interface system where the Krell could put on this device, think of a thought, it would materialize almost instantly.
The point being that this would free them from want, from material greed, from avarice, all the things that are associated with Yeah, but the crow killed themselves.
That's right.
Yeah, I know.
Killed the crow.
also was also the one of monsters from the is that's a classic life i'd either own
inner subconscious that should have been hidden demon from within all of them
i know and that himself killed in her own
could we take the paper also killed the humans well at we are looking at a test
kind of like that but not as grandiose but the beginning progenitors of that
first step yet through staring into that can you know And can it be solved?
Possibly, but this is by far... Yeah, but look at the state of human evolution.
I mean, here's the guy who's going to marry a fat Ugly, poor chick, bottle of the critters, turn her into a beautiful, blonde, financial genius, nymphomaniac.
Bart, this is a quickening.
You wrote the book yourself, and what I'm trying to extrapolate now is to say that aside from changes in weather and societal systems and all the things that you so eloquently specify in your book, where I kind of pick up, and perhaps where you left off with this, say that yes, we're looking at an evolutionary event stream, which is almost going into a vertical line as we speak.
We're about to have a set of tools presented to us collectively that dwarfs all of collected history up to this point in time.
And I think, furthermore, this is a common model.
Now, for those folks that disbelieve that life does not exist elsewhere, I'm sorry, but I tend to believe that life is pretty common.
In fact, I think it's as common as beach sand.
So, are there many other worlds out there who have gone through a similar kind of test?
Probably so.
Have the majority of them failed?
Probably so.
But the few that succeeded and negotiated this next series of trauma have themselves evolved to a different state of being, partly due to their own manipulation of their physical, as well as what you might call their spiritual or other components of their existence, in a way that however clumsily or whatever bumps in the road they had to encounter, they somehow figured out a way to get beyond those challenges to a different form of existence.
If one were to take that even further, and I'm not going to go the Joe Frommage route per se, but I'm just saying, if we are being visited and they're sending probes in to have a look, this would be the time to send those probes in.
Why?
Because as an evolutionary model, we are right at that very threshold where we would be dangerous enough to cause harm to our nearby neighbors if we got that far, and certainly do we have the No, not yet.
Not even close.
Alright, hold on.
We'll be right back.
Personally, I think at this point in our evolution or development, spiritual or otherwise, we're nowhere near ready.
And if we let all this unfold, It's going to be our Waterloo.
You're listening to Art Bell, somewhere in time on Premier Radio Networks.
Tonight, an encore presentation of Coast to Coast AM, from September 24th, 1999.
Waterloo, couldn't escape if I wanted to.
I want you, couldn't escape if I wanted you. I want you, knowing my fate is to meet you. Oh, oh, oh, I want you, I'm
finally facing my goal. I'm trying to hold you, let you go.
I walk away like a movie star.
You're listening to Art Bell's Somewhere in Time.
Tonight featuring a replay of Coast to Coast AM from September 24th, 1999.
Indeed, middle of the high desert, Charles Osman is my guest.
We're talking about nanotechnology, and we'll do another segment here with Charles, coming up in just a moment.
And again, Gordon Lightfoot.
Send me a fax and we'll talk.
He's going to be here next week.
One day next week.
We haven't pinned it down yet, but he will be here.
Boy, I love his music.
absolute no the charles osmond has a website we've got a link to it
i presume that is uh... working okay right now
He began to get thousands of hits the minute we put it up and his bandwidth was exceeded Almost immediately, so it's going to get real hard tonight.
Is your website up, Charles?
Actually, I'm looking at it as we speak.
It looks like it's functioning as far as I can tell, but it is true.
The day we put it up there, it blew the doors off the server, and I must offer credit to your spectacular, rather phenomenological way to attract I have two questions.
entities to your site you are the living example by the way studies of the
emergent behaviors that a bunch of of including myself theorized about five to seven years ago
virgin behavior correct itself
all right uh... let's stay close to the phones if we can't care uh... is the
rockies you're on the road travels on-site well my idea you're on the air yes you know that's not what
i got a little bit about two questions i want to go way back
to the beginning of charles's presentation
yes i want to talk about bonding molecules to silicon chips
okay uh... after you butter something on a silicon chip what is actually
measured in the laboratory Are you just measuring the voltage across the chip?
That's a very good question, and I'll try to keep it fairly straightforward.
It's actually a fairly complex technology, but it comes in several different ways.
A company called Nanogen, for instance, they've created a, in fact patented really, a whole series of electrically programmable protein chips.
And what I mean by this is that you have little tiny electrodes, these are a few microns across, which can be charged with a voltage pattern that will attract proteins which have been, they have ions embedded in them, so they have a certain charge status.
When this occurs, the chip can be programmed on the fly to become a sensor, to become a hybridization unit, to perform a whole variety of tasks.
Okay, but let me explain further.
When a hybridization event occurs, the way to measure the event could be one of several ways.
Either a voltage potential changes, there's a company called Molecular Microdevices in Southern California, they actually specialize in producing A type of device, they actually bond rhodium atoms into a sort of a synthetic DNA-like molecule that when a hybridization event occurs, that molecule also binds with the process as it hybridizes, and a voltage potential at the pad site where the bonding changes, so that can be measured.
That's one way.
Another way is to use fluorescing dyes.
The dyes will change color when the hybridization of a particular kind occurs.
And this is how companies like Afrometrix, Hisix, Symmetry, and a whole bunch of other companies, like Spring-O-Like Mushrooms, really, can now scan for thousands of genomic hybridization events at the same time.
How to know the mating has occurred.
Exactly.
And the precision and the ability to map color versus protein chemistry, as it were, is very, very precise.
Okay, so there you go, sir.
Voltage changes, chemical changes, whatever.
Okay.
Next question.
The next question was, I was a little bit concerned how easily Charles has fucked off well, how scientists more or less make weapons.
I'm wondering if you can make a list of scientists who really just stopped working in order not to make weapons.
Let me see if I can rephrase it.
I completely identify with what you're saying.
I hold the same concern, more than you can imagine.
So many of the scientists who I've known personally over the years, their focus is very specifically to solve medical problems.
They're looking for cures for diseases, prosthetic implants, what I call cellular cybernetics.
There's an unbelievably wide range of that kind of work going on.
However, it would be ignoring the obvious to suggest the same precise technologies could be applied as a weaponry system.
Here in this country, what I have personally seen has been defensive.
That is, detectors, devices that can neutralize bad microbes.
Would that really be what you've personally seen or what you can personally talk about?
That's what I have seen.
Now, that's not to say that elsewhere in the world the same procedures can be used to brew up and create Very, very nasty pathogens.
I have no doubt.
Are you tight enough with what's really going on, Black Project-wise, in this country to say that safely?
I can only talk about what I have seen, and the only things I have personally seen are on the defensive side.
No, no, no, I understand, but I'm asking again, are you close enough, do you believe, this is a general question, to the Black Ops stuff that's going on to be able to safely say what you're saying?
I think so, but that's just an opinion.
I don't want to make it a stated fact.
I do have one comment to offer, though.
I know there's been a lot of concern about contrails.
I, myself, saw them.
I'm so glad that you have said this, because here's somebody sent me a fax, and they have this wonderful question, very technical, but at the bottom they say, hey Art, please don't ask this, but what is his, this of course is what I'm going to ask, what is his position on contrails and possible Well, he used the right set of words.
I think he's on to something.
So let me see if I can clarify this.
Going back 20 years or more, back when both the Soviets and the U.S.
and the French and British and a bunch of other folks were in Africa and perhaps elsewhere, experimenting with all kinds of strange... These were mildly modified, to put it politely, currently existing microbes.
The world of synthetic microbes didn't exist then.
So they were playing around with traditional sort of viruses, but also a bunch of new ones that were being discovered because of the peculiarities of these various environments.
In fact, Laurie Garrett, who wrote a book called The Coming Plague, which actually is a very good book.
It's very factual, packed with lots of very technical information.
She herself is a bit of an interesting character.
You have to sort of understand her before you can talk with her, but her book is very good, and I actually talked with her personally.
She refused to come on the air.
I understand this, and she has a particular way of being, but nonetheless, As an epidemiological trend, what has been going on around the world has been extraordinarily rapid changes in environments, the eradication of various species and whole species systems, etc., which would amplify or catalyze various microbes to either mutate to a different form, or to find a new food source for better choice of words, or to in some way
Rapidly change their existence patterns in an otherwise stable environment.
So suddenly you have all these strange, like, 100 viruses popping up out of nowhere.
You combine that with rapidly changing sociological migration patterns.
In other words, never before in history have so many humans been moving around all at once in such huge numbers.
Correct.
All these things, including water table changes, changes in soil, I mentioned earlier the huge sort of agribusiness conglomerates that terraform an entire area of land, that completely change the ecology, etc.
Okay, fine.
So all these things added together create this unusual phenomenon that has never happened before in history that we know about.
So, of course, a lot of new microbes are going to suddenly pop up.
But that was then.
What we have now is the ability to take that a lot further, if one were to choose, to synthetically sort of just invent the microbes to suit the purpose in question.
So the answer to this question goes as follows.
It is my belief that if we were to prepare for the potential of a biological attack, and this is why I go back 20 years ago, back then the bio-warfare devices that were being brewed up were essentially either artillery shells or airborne bombs.
They were designed to stay in air for a certain length of time.
They would use parachutes or fins and so forth to delay their trajectories.
Sure.
So they could have a certain cone of radiance, have a dispersal pattern over X area for X time and so on.
Yep.
Well, obviously, the next step up from that is to put something at higher altitude with a very high persistence dispersant of some sort, some kind of oily-like substance that could contain these microbes in question over X amount of temperature, Wind and so on, to cover a certain area.
Okay, so, if it were the case, and having seen what I have seen in terms of defensive systems, detectors, and things I won't go into, would it be at least possible that we would try, in some hopefully neutral way, to use an aerosol dispersion test to see what the response would be?
That is in the one narrow area that I might understand how contrails would be used.
And I personally, twice, once in Los Angeles, saw these circles in the air.
And I used to fly myself, and I go to the air races, and I have friends who fly.
So I've seen a lot of airplanes.
I know what they look like.
I'm very familiar with all this stuff.
These were not your garden variety kind of trails.
These were very different.
These were perfect circles, like somebody had drawn them in the sky with a pen, and they were staying in the air for a long time.
I was really quite surprised.
Oh, I know.
Oh, I know.
And then later, this was just a few months ago, I was driving through the Central Valley, Sure enough, there are these cross patterns in the sky.
And my friend, who was an ex-pilot, looked up and said, Charles, what the hell is that stuff up there?
And I said, beats me, but nothing I've ever seen looked like this.
And we both actually pulled over and just got out of the car and looked for a while.
So I would suspect, just as an opinion, that as an accelerated defensive testing scenario, this could be what that is.
Just testing.
Exactly.
Oily testing.
Well, and would there be biological agents immersed in it?
Well, of course, but it would be a way to find out how to respond to an enemy attack.
And they would say harmless so that we can respond.
Well, this is just my opinion, and it's the only thing I can figure out that makes any sense to me personally.
Gotcha.
All right.
Wild Card Line, you're on the air with Charles Osmond.
Hi.
Thank you, R. for having me on.
Sure.
Yeah, and Dr. Osmond, I think you're a genius as well.
Dr. Smollett Rice, and I was just listening to your comment on the microtubules, the carbon microtubules that could be aerosol vectors.
Well, the microtubules, that's a whole separate world.
Dr. Rice, I'm sorry, Dr. Smollett Rice University, who should be credited with having invented really a whole kind of manufacturing system to mass produce what are called fullerenes, this is a wonderful invention and should not be in any way That's not the case at all.
What the carbon fullerenes are, they're a device, they're a molecular scale device, either spherical or tubular, and there's a whole bunch of configurations now, that can contain atoms or molecules of other materials.
Why is this relevant?
Because this is a real breakthrough in order to be able to build matrices of materials that could not otherwise form, including, by the way, superconductive materials, using rare earth materials that could be assembled In a very specifically repeatable pattern from which things like electric motors for cars or solar cells or in my particular flavor of interest biometric devices and or sensors that be very very sensitive to extremely minute voltage fluctuations in the brain i.e.
a pathway for my machine interface.
There's a whole plethora of things that come out of the fullerene world which I think will have a very positive effect on near-term products.
Yeah, I do, too.
You're talking about the 60 and 80 carbon.
Well, actually, yeah, and it goes far beyond.
There's a whole flavor of these, and just for the audience, the numbers relate to the number of carbon atoms that are geometrically arranged in these various patterns.
Yeah, but that's not really my question.
I'm sorry.
That's all right.
I appreciate you being here.
But, yeah, my question is really, you know, you've talked about the PP, would you call it 53?
Yes, the protein 53, exactly.
Yeah, to me that sounds like a Messenger ribose nucleic acid.
That is exactly what it is.
That's precisely what it is.
And the science of messenger proteins is a very big field.
It's exploding, to put it mildly.
Yeah, and the problem is, you know, the polymerase that actually separates that and translates that, if you do get it smaller than human polymerase, You could encode any genetic, even the creation of nanobots, to control humans.
That is exactly where this could be going, and in fact, well I'm glad you brought it up, because the whole, there's a subcategory of what are called ultra-small proteins, and I just came from a conference, by the way, and that was the whole conference was about this.
So the enterprise of recombinant proteomics, which is the ability to break apart and reassemble proteins in whatever configuration you can dream up, and part of this, by the way, and maybe I should clarify this for the audience, If you look at any of the major biotech labs, their primary resource isn't so much the chemistry or the equipment and so forth, it's the computing, i.e.
the ability to have very massively scalable computing systems that can use biological algorithms like genetic programming, evolutionary computing, and so on, to look for, model, or in some way physiologically mimic the performance of different protein systems and then use that as a kind of a tool from which then to extrapolate these new proteomic compounds.
That's exactly what the industry is.
And there are companies like Pangea, for instance, who have no chemistry at all.
All they do is sell the service as a virtual commodity asset, by the way, to the other pharma houses who then use their proprietary computing resources to maximize their throughput efficiency for inventing and creating new types of proteomic compounds.
So you have two different, like a fork, if you will.
One side of the fork says, I can create ever smaller, more precise proteins and arrange them in some kind of interesting pattern or way.
Number two is I can deliver them in some kind of very precise fashion.
And both are being very aggressively pursued.
Yeah, well, that's pretty good because I guess in biochemistry now we're able to actually do that with just in solution now we can do that by... I'll give you the example.
When Randy Scott, who's the president of Insight, I was at this Emerging Opportunities in Biochips conference, and I met him several times, a very, very bright guy.
He spent, you know, a number of years in his post-doctoral work synthesizing one protein.
One.
And it was a big, big deal.
I mean, it was a major breakthrough.
Now, his company spews out thousands of proteins a week.
They run biochip arrays, they would say 24-7, married to these enormously powerful computing systems.
They hybridize, they throw away 99% of what they invent, but the 1% they do get is very
interesting indeed.
Then they can sell those as subunits to other pharmacological houses that will then turn
them into drugs.
That's exactly what the business model is right now.
That's very amazing because now we even have subcellular computers and the gates.
I'm sorry, I couldn't quite hear the last part.
We have sub-cellular computers.
That is true.
There's a whole number.
The world that I'm really particularly enamored of myself is biological computing, which I haven't even talked about yet, but thanks for bringing it up.
Because the ability to marry biological components, including DNA, to some kind of a structured lattice or a scaffold or a chip surface, and then be able to manipulate their behaviors in some way, or use them as a kind of a computational device, that is exactly where things are going.
And just to kind of Toss in a little anecdotal reference.
At Carnegie Mellon, about a year and a half ago, there was an experiment.
There were a couple of grad students, actually.
Dr. Adelman, who's one of the founders of DNA Computing as a general science, had been away on sabbatical or something, and his two grad students decided to hack the NSA code for the, what was then, I think, 58-bit code.
It was supposed to be the most secure code for all the NSA-approved encryption systems and so on.
Supposedly, according to NSA-owned published literature, it would be 10,000 years of 1,000 teraflops of contiguous computing to break the code, etc., etc.
They broke it in 17 weeks.
Using DNA.
Now, to put it very mildly, the guys in black, as they're called, showed up, and they weren't really nasty about it, but they just said, we're very interested, we'd like to see more of how this is done.
Now, there's actually an institute funded by the NSA, with those very two grad students and a whole bunch of other folks, We're now creating DNA systems for encryption.
Wow.
Hey, Charles, do you have a book out?
Actually, I was in the midst of getting a book published, but believe it or not, I was approached by some film people, and I'm under unbelievably robust limitations.
I cannot talk about it, except to say that if this all happens, you'll see this next year, maybe.
And I was actually about to really release this book, because it was sort of like a companion to your book, in a way.
It talks about convergence, Talk about technologies, societal systems, economics, somewhat in a very loose way, in a way that James Burke back-annotates his five centuries of history through his connection series, and he does a wonderful job.
I would not want to compare myself to James Burke.
He's a master of the art form.
So in other words, your book is being co-opted into a movie, maybe?
A film of sorts, and it's not like a film with actors and plot.
It's more like something you would look at and say, oh, how interesting.
And if it gets produced, you'll see it in about a year.
About a year.
So that's what we can look for.
So in other words, you don't really have anything you're selling?
No, I publish a lot of articles.
The one commercial plug, and I thank you for the opportunity, as a senior fellow for the Global Futures, we do provide strategic research, we publish newsletters, we publish reports.
Somewhat in the same way that maybe Gardner Group or Anderson Consulting and people like that do what they do, we do what we do.
And it was actually found by Dr. James Canton, who in fact served on one of President Carter's Science Advisory Boards.
Okay, can they find their way to this through your website?
Yeah, there actually is a link in there.
Now, I have to apologize, because of the Biota server crash, a bunch of the pages got sort of scrambled, and we, at the last nanosecond of the work, sort of put all the pages back up on different servers, so there might be a couple of gaps in there.
But there should be a reference for these two for Global Futures here in San Francisco.
There's a phone number, there's a website, and you're very welcome to... All right, that's all on the website.
It's linked on my website.
Just go to my website, www.artbell.com, look for the name Charles Ostman, and click, and you're on your way.
Charles, it has been such a pleasure having you on the show.
Thank you so very much.
An absolute pleasure, and as always, we will, until next time, we do it.
Okay.
Thanks so much, man.
Good night, my friend.
See you later.
▲
Export Selection