Syamasundara: I’ll read you some of their predictions. They’re very frightening. They say by 1980 — that’s eight years from now — that they will be able to create synthetic life in the form of artificial viruses which will be used to cure some forms of genetic diseases. Artificial life. In eight years they say they will have artificial life.

Prabhupada: And that artificial life?

Syamasundara: Small viruses or living organisms, very small. But by the year 2000 they say they will be able to keep…

Prabhupada: 2000!

Syamasundara: Yes. That’s twenty-eight years from now. They say that they will be able to deep-freeze embryos, that means unborn babies, as insurance against nuclear holocaust and for interplanetary colonization. In other words, they can send these unborn babies in frozen form to other planets and have an arrangement for them to be born and grow in the spaceship and then go out.

Prabhupada: Don’t waste your time with these rascals.

Syamasundara: They’ll have an artificial and mechanical baby factory, effective control of most human defects. Single-celled life will be created from chemicals off the shelf. They can make intelligent animals to do menial work. And then in seventy-eight [eighty?] years they say that they will be able to regenerate…

Prabhupada: Just like there was Pan American, they were selling tickets for
going to Candraloka. Reservation.

Atreya Rsi: Prabhupada, is it possible that man could ever make even a one-celled living being?

Prabhupada: Even if he makes, what is credit there? Cells are already there. What is the question of making?

Syamasundara: All they’re doing is creating the conditions for the jiva to enter, actually I think. Isn’t it?

Prabhupada: Whatever their proposing, these things are already there. So even they can create something, Xerox copy, what is the credit?

Syamasundara: But then they’ll have control over it. That’s their…

Prabhupada: No, no control, because you are beginning from something on which you have no control. So where is your control?

Syamasundara: “From now on I am the master. I can create more Einsteins. I can create many Einsteins.”

Prabhupada: But first of all keep Einstein living. Why he is dying?

Syamasundara: That’s on their program too.

Prabhupada: That’s on their program — that is is another foolish thing.

Syamasundara: Postponement of death by at least fifty years…

Prabhupada: So what is the profit? After fifty years he has to die. Stop, stop death, then that is credit.

Syamasundara: They say they will be able to take out someone like Einstein’s brain when his body dies and keep it alive, a disembodied brain, and use it like a computer.

Prabhupada: All right. Whatever. [sounding disgusted] No. All rascals, fools. As if in the brain there is the thing. What is this brain? It is a material substance, what is there, lump of matter.

Syamasundara: They haven’t even come near to these things yet.

Prabhupada: They’ll never come.

Svarupa Damodara: Mostly scientists are digging up, trying to find out something when they get some very basic preliminary ideas, they speculate so much [indistinct] this, so on. “In such-and-such time I’ll be able to make such and such things.” Every scientist does like that. Ultimately it is all…, it is always…

Prabhupada: Failure.

From a 1972 discussion of Charles Darwin