THE CASE OF THE GENETICALLY MODIFIED PRIMATE

"Ninharsag and her crew are closer to being vindicated as time passes, and soon your theories will no longer be theories!"

So wrote to me a fan (Jack Byrd in Virginia) in a congratulatory letter accompanying a newspaper clipping headlined "Genetically modified primate is world's first."  It was the report about the successful birth of ANDi ('inserted DNA' spelled backward), a baby  rhesus monkey "created" by a group of researchers at the Oregon Regional Primate Center, whose genetic makeup was modified to include the genes from a jellyfish that make it glow in the dark.

Mice have been previously genetically modified for medical research.  But because the rhesus monkey is roughly 95 percent akin to humans genetically, "I think we are at an extraordinary moment in the history of humans, " said the chief researcher Dr. Gerald Schatten.  

I was of course pleased to be congratulated.  Yet, I wrote back to my fan with thanks coupled with an admonition.  "While it is nice to get such reassuring compliments," I wrote to him, "I am trying to get my fans to write about it to others, and first and foremost to the newspapers that carried the reports.  In this case, the Associated Press report stresses that it is the world's FIRST genetically modified primate; what a Letter to the Editor should point out is that according to Sumerian texts reported by Zecharia Sitchin in his books The 12th Planet and Genesis Revisited, ADAM was the first genetically modified primate, some 300,000 years ago!"

The news about the genetically modified rhesus monkey was just one item in an avalanche of reports on human genetics, cloning etc. in which the names of Enki and Ninharsag could well replace the names of Dr. Schatten, Dr. Phyllis Leppert (and their other modern colleagues).  So please -- TELL IT TO THE NEWSPAPERS!

February 2001                                                                                                                  Z. Sitchin