"There is now convincing evidence to challenge the current theory that consciousness can only exist inside the brain - and if you can have consciousness without associated brain function, that is enormously important for our understanding of the mind," he said.

For his latest research, 60 patients at Southampton General Hospital’s coronary care unit were interviewed after heart attacks had left them temporarily brain-dead. Seven reported near-death experiences - defined by characteristic features such as a feeling of leaving your body, going through a tunnel and entering an area of "love, bliss and consciousness".

Dr Peter Fenwick on Near Death Experience (NDE) - YouTube

▶ 17:28

www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4PmjKn1zPE

Feb 11, 2012 - Uploaded by More Talk

Dr Peter Fenwick, renowned neuro-psychiatrist, will discuss his research on the near-death experience.D


Dr Fenwick said: "If the mind and brain can be independent, then that raises questions about the continuation of consciousness after death. It also raises the question about a spiritual component to humans and about a meaningful universe with a purpose rather than a random universe

."We cannot keep the life we have on the Earth realm, not our possessions or attachments or relationships. What we can keep is our memories and our feelings of what we have integrated into our heart of hearts from the experience of being here, plus the love we have shared with others." - P.M.H. Atwater

The expansion of mind in NDEs have happened to many people

The following NDE descriptions of consciousness expansion supports the theory of consciousness described above by Stanislav Grof. It theorizes that the brain acts as a reducing valve of cosmic input to produce consciousness. At death, this reducing-valve function ceases and consciousness is then free to expand. The following NDEs support this: a.  "I realized that, as the stream was expanding, my own consciousness was also expanding to take in everything in the Universe!" (Mellen-Thomas Benedict) b.  "My mind felt like a sponge, growing and expanding in size with each addition ... I could feel my mind expanding and absorbing and each new piece of information somehow seemed to belong." (Virginia Rivers) c.  "In your life review you'll be the universe." (Thomas Sawyer) d.  "This white light began to infiltrate my consciousness. It came into me..It seemed I went out into it. I expanded into it as it came into my field off consciousness." (Jayne Smith) e.  "My presence fills the room. And now I feel my presence in every room in the hospital. Even the tiniest space in the hospital is filled with this presence that is me. I sense myself beyond the hospital, above the city, even encompassing Earth. I am melting into the universe. I am everywhere at once." (Josiane Antonette) f.  "I felt myself expanding and expanding until I thought, "I'm going to burst!" The moment I thought, "I'm going to burst!", I suddenly found myself alone, back where this being had met me, and he had gone." (Margaret Tweddelll) g.  Susan had an out-of-body experience where she left her body and grew very big, as big as a planet at first, and then she filled the solar system and finally she became as large as the universe. (Susan Blackmore)

Scientists create 'genetic firewall' for new forms of life

Reuters | Jan 23, 2015, 04.42 AM IST

Comments

More

A

A

READ MORE scientists|New forms|major obstacle|Genetically Modified Organisms|genetic firewall

If the technique succeeds, it could be used in microbes engineered for uses from the mundane to the exotic, such as producing yogurt and cheese, synthesizing industrial chemicals and biofuels, cleaning up toxic waste, and manufacturing drugs. (Getty Images)

RELATED

• Scientists decipher 'cow speak'
• Scientists cure deafness in mice
• Bengaluru fuels India's nano strides: Scientists
• Scientists make gelatine from tannery waste
• Govt increases scholarship for scientists by 50%

NEW YORK: A year after creating organisms that use a genetic code different from every other living thing, two teams of scientists have achieved another "synthetic biology" milestone — they created bacteria that cannot survive without a specific manmade chemical, potentially overcoming a major obstacle to wider use of genetically modified organisms (GMOs).

The advance, reported on Wednesday in Nature, offers what one scientist calls a "genetic firewall" to achieve biocontainment, a means of insuring that GMOs cannot live outside a lab or other confined environment.

Although the two labs accomplished this in bacteria, "there is no fundamental barrier" to applying the technique to plants and animals, Harvard Medical School biologist George Church, who led one of the studies, told reporters. "I think we are moving in (that) direction."

If the technique succeeds, it could be used in microbes engineered for uses from the mundane to the exotic, such as producing yogurt and cheese, synthesizing industrial chemicals and biofuels, cleaning up toxic waste, and manufacturing drugs.

Microbes are already used for those applications. In some cases they contain genes from an unrelated organism, making them "genetically engineered" or "genetically modified" to, say, gobble up oil spills or produce insulin. But widespread use of such GMOs has been constrained by concerns they could escape into the wild and do damage.

In 2013, Church's team announced they had leaped beyond genetic engineering to create "genomically recoded" organisms. Recoding means that one bit of their DNA codes for an amino acid (a building-block of proteins) different from what the identical DNA codes for in every other living thing. The biologists had rewritten the genetic spelling book.

In the new studies, teams led by Church and a former colleague, Farren Isaacs, created strains of E. coli bacteria that both contain DNA for a manmade amino acid and require synthetic amino acids to survive.

Because the amino acids do not exist in nature, said Isaacs, now at Yale University, the resulting "firewall" means any GMOs that escaped a lab, manufacturing facility, or agricultural field would die.

Church's team made 49 genetic changes to E. coli to make them dependent on the synthetic amino acid. The odds of a microbe undoing all the changes are astronomically high, he calculated.

By pairing genomic recoding with this firewall, biologists could create escape-proof microbes which, by incorporating novel amino acids, could produce entirely new types of drugs and polymers, Church said.

Robotic Snakes

• Tesla Is Working On Robotic Snakes That Emerge From