If modern man is still grabbling with Dolly, our ancestors did even the 'reverse DNA' centuries earlier

From sci-fi to Dolly, DNA has travelled a long way, but 'native science' knew this and more for centuries, says N Sathiya Moorthy.

Ratnakar would be a sad man if he were alive today. So would be his descendants and legal heirs, if only they could be traced. For an illiterate hunter, he covered a long way even in his times. Sure, it is not a joke to attain sainthood, and write an epic of great proportions and greater values, which our man did. And it is not before everyone's eyes that history unfolds itself even when it happens.

Vyasa and Sanjaya, both from the days of the Mahabharata, were two others, but Ratnakar had that vision ahead of them both. In mythological terms, his time coincided with that of Lord Rama, if you please.

Blame it on his simplicity or generosity, Ratnakar did not seem to have realised that he had made a scientific breakthrough. At least he did not make any great bones about it, nor has his successors in this land of ours. He would not have known that a great controversy would rage centuries later, when greater mortals in milk white over-coats working in an air-conditioned labs, talking non-stop about DNA and bio-engineering, came any way close to duplicating his invention. Nor did the GATT-WTO regime exist for Ratnakar to patent his finding, for his future generations to collect billions of trillions in royalties alone.

For all this, however, Ratnakar had a mission, not a vision, if you could call baby-sitting one. He had been asked to take care of a young boy when his mother was taking a bath. But he was so busy communicating with his Maker that he forgot all about the child until the mother's footsteps could be heard. There was no child, of course. He pulled out a reed of grass, and there he was, the child he had lost, before you could have breathed in a fresh whiff of air. That the original boy too appeared on the scene is another matter.

For the uninitiated, Ratnakar is better known by his saintly name of Valmiki. And it was he who 'created' -- if that's the word -- Kush, out of kusa grass when Sita left her only son Lav to the old man's care. That was in the epic Ramayana, long before Britain itself had come to be known and British scientists had cloned Dolly, the lamb, from the DNA cells of another adult lamb.

From sci-fi to Dolly, DNA has travelled a long way, but 'native science', if you can call it that, has known this and more for centuries.

So what if Archimedes shouted Eureka from the bath-tub. Like Kush, the first cloned human, greater things in science were discovered in ancient India, not when the scientist was taking a bath, but when the subject's mother was doing so. The first organ transplant involved Lord Shiva fixing an elephant's head on his son's body, again when the child's mother was away, taking a ritual bath -- that's one version of the event. And the subject of that organ-transplant, Lord Ganesha, has survived, finding time to get into controversies like Lord Rama, every other year.

Incidentally, Ganesha himself was a product of bio-engineering, godess Parvathi having made him out of sandal paste, in the first place.

It does not stop there. If you ask me, who the world's first test-tube baby was, I won't be looking into the pages of the Guinness Book of World Records or a medical encyclopaedia. The answer is simple and straight -- Duryodhyana. What's more, when doctors in the West are doing it one at a time, with no sure chance of a success every time, you had one hundred Kaurava brothers and a lone sister, born that way generations earlier.

If modern man is still grabbling with Dolly, our ancestors did even the 'reverse DNA' centuries earlier. What else do you make out of Lord Karthikeya's birth? First, you had six identical children born out of the flames of Lord Shiva's third eye. The cloning process in its advanced stage, did you say? Then again you had the very same Lord Shiva merging the six children to form one, or cloning in the reverse. Any questions?

But then, it's not in medical sciences alone that we have enough and more to teach the West -- though here too, I sulkingly admit to our inability to cure King Pandu of his anaemia, or his brother Dhitharashtra of his blindness from birth.

In astronomy and astrology, with no help from giant telescopes, rockets and computers, we had done most of it, sitting under a tree with only a bunch of palm leaves in hand. But the accuracy is as yet astounding. And if we did not bother conquering the moon, it was only because the moon, along with the sun, was at the beck and call of Krishna as the Mahabharat would tell you. Did not Krishna create an amavasya a day ahead of schedule to help the Pandavas launch the war on an auspicious day?

That way, the poor Wright brothers needn't have slogged their wits out. Nor was there any need for any number of scientists to lose their lives trying to fly as the birds do. All they needed to do was flip through our ancient books. Maybe, there was something in them that those learned men would have understood -- and applied to their flying machines.

If pushpak vimanas were not aircraft of those days, what were they? And if Brahmastra and Nagastra were not powerful missiles of the ICBM-IRBM variety, what were they? They killed, they maimed, they devastated, all that the Americans did in Iraq.

It's not without reason that modern science has flourished only in regions where the local religion is cofidied and stratified. Where religion encouraged internal thinking and external experimentation, covering both philosophy and theology, physical science has only been an extension of either. Only where religion frowned upon those thinking parallel, or independent of the existing set-up, were better thoughts diverted to things away from religion.

Thus, you cannot blame Darwin if he was late at theorising about evolution. Long before him, we knew about the ten avatars of Lord Vishnu, precisely in terms that Darwin expounded it much, much later. From the water-borne fish to the amphibian tortoise, to the land-borne pig, it was all there. So was the first half-man-half-animal Narasimha, with a body of a man and the face of a lion, and the first complete man, a dwarf at that, in Vamana. If Parasurama was the jungle-hunter, Rama was the more civilised man with civilised codes to enforce. Balarama was the farmer, and Krishna, the early human being, like you and me.

If you thought that it has ended there, no, there is more to it. Take a single avatar, that of Rama, and you will know more about human evolution, if you please. Did not Darwin say that man came from the ape, and does the Ramayana not talk about monkeys with a sixth sense helping the Lord in more ways than one? And if you thought Ravana was a raksha, will it make more sense if I say he was from among a less evolved species of homo sapiens.

If you say it's sacrilege to speak of gods in such human terms, did they not take the human form themselves to deliver their message?

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