When Newspaper Accounts Said an Apparition, Levitation or Teleportation Was Seen by More Than One

 Let us look at some old newspaper accounts describing an apparition seen by multiple witnesses. The first dates from 1910. We hear of two seeing the ghost of a miner who died, with them reporting that the ghost vanished into a wall:

You can read the account here:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn88085947/1910-03-27/ed-1/seq-12/

The newspaper account below tells one of the most startling ghost accounts you will ever hear. We read of a justice of the peace (one often marrying couples) who reports encountering a pair of spirits who requested to be married, with the justice's wife seeing the same pair. 

You can read the full account by using the link below:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn99021999/1887-12-30/ed-1/seq-6/

The 1860 account below is one of very many accounts describing great paranormal wonders occurring in the presence of the medium Daniel Dunglas Home, who was investigated at length by the leading physicist Sir William Crookes, who asserted in print that several dramatic types of paranormal occurrences really did occur around Home (as discussed here).  We have an account of multiple witnesses seeing an apparition of a hand, one that reportedly picked up a pen and signed the name "Napoleon." The emperor mentioned was Napoleon III. 

The world-class physicist William Crookes stated in writing that he had seen levitations of the medium Daniel Dunglas Home. The newspaper account below summarizes part of a paper Crookes published with a title of "Human Levitation."

You can read the full article below, which cites many additional reports of human levitation:

https://cdnc.ucr.edu/?a=d&d=SCR18600714.2.3&srpos=355&e=-------en--20--1--txt-txIN--------

The article above is summarizing the paper "Human Levitation" by William Crookes, which can be read here:

https://archive.org/details/per_the-quarterly-journal-of-science_the-quarterly-journal-of-science_1875-01_5/page/31/mode/1up

On the page here of the 1875 paper, Crookes speaks of recent reports of levitations and teleportation:

"As Newton is held to have proved that gravitation and inertia in every mass are proportional, we might expect that whatever overbears the former would be equally capable of neutralising the latter; and, in fact, the elder records hardly speak of visible suspensions like those of Mr. Home, but mainly of sudden unseen transfers of the person to a distance; like that alleged of Dr. Monck last year, from his own residence at Bristol to the garden of his friend, Mr. Young, at Swindon ; or the earlier but better attested one of Mrs. Guppy, from her house at Holloway to a circle of her friends assembled at No. 61, Lamb’s Conduit Street; or, a few months ago, that of Mr. Henderson, a well-known photographer of London, for a smaller distance, but attested by eighteen persons besides himself—the nine assembled with him at Mr. Guppy’s, and the whole Stokes family, at Highbury, where he was unexpectedly found."

On one page of the paper, Crookes this list of forty saints who were supposedly levitated:

The references are to volumes and pages of the Acta Sanctorum series of volumes, which can be found on www.archive.org.  Referring to the people in the list above, we read this in the article by Crookes:

"Many were levitated only in these unconscious states; others, as Joseph of Cupertino (the greatest aerobat in all history), both in the trance and ordinary state, and (like Mr. Home) most frequently in the latter; while a very few, as Theresa, seem to have been always conscious when in the air. Several were, in certain states, fire 

handlers, like Mr. Home. The Princess Margaret was so  from the age of ten. ..The great majority of them, though often seen suspended, were at heights from the ground described only as ‘a palm’ half a cubit, a cubit, and thence up to five or six cubits, of,  in a few cases, ells. But the Princess Agnes and the Abbess Coleta were, like Elijah, carried out of sight, or into the clouds ; and Peter of Alcantara and Joseph of Cupertino others were watched off the ground often exceeded an hour; and the Archbishop of Valencia (1555) was suspended in trance twelve hours, so that not only all the inmates of his palace, and clergy, but 'innumerable' lay citizens, went to see the marvel."

On another page, referring to accounts of teleportation by saints, Crookes states this:  "Of invisible transfers to a distance, the only subjects seem to have been Columba of Rieti, said to have been carried from her mother’s house in that town to the nunnery that afterwards received her, at Spoleto, twenty miles distant; and the river transits of Peter of Alcantara." 

Crookes refers in his article above to claims in his own time that Mrs. Elizabeth Guppy was teleported. The original source of such claims is the June 15, 1871 edition of The Spiritualist, a weekly newspaper. On page 170, we have a report by numerous witnesses claiming to have seen a case of human teleportation.  Here is the original account, signed by a series of witnesses, along with the witnesses who attested to have seen this marvel on June 3, 1871:

" On Saturday evening, June 3rd, at 61, Lamb’s Conduit-street, High Holborn, London, W.C., a séance was held in the rooms of Messrs. Herne and Williams, mediums. Before the séance began, the doors communicating with the passage outside were locked. The proceedings began, at the request of the mediums, with prayer. Then spirit lights, like small stars, were seen moving about, after which a conversation between the spirits John King and Katie King, was heard. John said, 'Katie, you can’t do it.’ Katie replied, ‘ I will, I tell you I will.’ John said, ‘ I tell you you can’t.’ She answered, 'I will.’ Mr. Harrison then said, ‘ Can you bring Mrs. Guppy ? ’ There was no reply, but a member of the circle urged that the attempt should not be made. Within three minutes after Katie had said, ‘ I will,’ a single heavy sound was heard for an instant on the centre of the table. Mr. Edwards put out his hand and said, ‘ There is a dress here.’ A light was instantly struck, and Mrs. Guppy was found standing motionless on the centre of the table, trembling all over ; she had a pen and an account-book in her hands. Her right hand, with the pen in it, was over her eyes. She was spoken to by those present, but did not seem to hear ; the light was then placed in another room, and the door was closed for an instant ; John King then said, ‘ She’ll be all right presently.’ After the lapse of about four minutes after her arrival, she moved for the first time, and began to cry. The time of her arrival was ten minutes past eight. Mrs. Edmiston, Mr. Edwards, and Mr. Harrison went at once to one of the doors, and found it still locked; the other door could not be opened during the séance, because the back of the chair of one of the sitters was against it. There was no cupboard, article of furniture, or anything else in the rooms, in which it was possible for anybody to conceal themselves, and, if there had been, we, the undersigned witnesses, are all certain that by no natural means could Mrs. Guppy have placed herself instantaneously on the centre of a table round which we were all sitting shoulder to shoulder." 

"Mrs. Guppy said that the last thing she remembered before she found herself on the table, was that she was sitting at home at Highbury, talking to Miss Neyland, and entering some household accounts in her book. The ink in the pen was wet when she arrived in our midst ; the last word of the writing in the book was incomplete, and was wet and smeared. She complained that she was not dressed in visiting costume, and had no shoes on, as she had been sitting at the fire without them. As she stated this to Mr. Morris, and Mr. and Mrs. Edwards, a pair of slippers dropped on the floor from above, one of them grazing Mr. Morris’s head ; this was after the séance, and in the light. We all went into the dark room for a few minutes afterwards, and four flower-pots with flowers in them, which Mrs. Guppy declared to be from her home, were placed on the table at once. "

“After tea a second séance was held. Within a minute or two after the light was put out, there was a cry for a light, and Mr. Herne was seen by four persons falling from above, on to his chair. There were bundles of clothes belonging to Mr. Guppy, Mrs. Guppy, and Miss Neyland on the table, and Mr. Herne declared he had just seen Miss Neyland in Mrs. Guppy’s house ; that she had pushed the clothes into his arms, and told him to ' go to the devil.'  The light was again put out, and when it was struck once more, Mr. Williams was missing. He was found in the next room, lying in an insensible state on some clothes belonging to Mr. Guppy. He said on awaking that he had been to Mr. Guppy’s house, and saw Miss Neyland, who was sitting at a table, and seemed to he praying."

N. Haqger, 46, Moorgate-street.

Caroline Edmiston, Beckenham. 

C. E. Edwards, Kilburn-square, Kilburn. 

Henry Morris, Mount Trafford, Eccles, near Manchester.

 Elizabeth Guppy, 1, Morland Villas, Highbury Hill Park, N. 

 Ernest Edwards, Kilburn-square, Kilburn. 

Henry Clifford Smith, 38, Ennis-road, Stroudgreen. 

H. B. Husk, 26, Sandwich-street, 

W.C. Charles E. Williams, 61, Lamb’s Conduitstreet, W.C.

 E. Herne, Gl, Lamb’s Conduit-street, W.C. 

W. H. Harrison, Wilmin Villa, Chaucer - road, S.E.”

We have here an astonishing report of a seance in a dark room with locked doors. The witnesses claim that a woman living quite a distance away was inexplicably deposited on the round table that they surrounded. There is no way to explain this report by imagining some kind of trickery by one or two people.  The only halfway-credible hypothesis a skeptic might use to dismiss the report is to claim that the report is all a big lie, and that nothing of the sort happened.  Here the skeptic is forced into becoming a conspiracy theorist, imagining some conspiracy by witnesses who falsely claimed to have seen something they never saw.

Crookes also refers in his paper to a report of a teleportation of a Mr. Henderson.  The account first appeared in the December 5, 1873 edition of the publication Medium and Daybreak, which you can read using the link below:

http://iapsop.com/archive/materials/medium_and_daybreak/medium_and_daybreak_v4_n192_dec_5_1873.pdf

Below is an image from the front page of that publication.

We read this:

"To the Editor of the Daily Telegraph. Nov. 14th, 1873,—

The object of this communication in to place on record an event of most remarkable character which occurred on the 2nd inst., when a gentleman-making one of our party at a seance - was transferred, instantaneously as he alleges, from within a sitting-room duly locked and with windows closed and shutters bolted, to a distance of one mile and a half under the circumstances herein detailed and testified to by the writers of this letter...."

The preserved version of the next page of the edition (page 562) is rather hard to read in some spots, but we get the main details about the seance, when it was held, its location (Mr. Guppy's house) and who were the witnesses:

The persons at the dark seance expressed various wishes, and Mrs. Guppy expressed the wish that someone might be carried out of the room. The table was reported to have made dramatic movements. After several minutes, it was found that the Mr. Blank (a pseudonym for a person who did not wish to give his name) had mysteriously vanished from the ring of attendees holding the hands of each other in the dark seance room.  Reportedly a message was given that Mr. Blank had been carried away and would not be seen that evening. Apparently the physical arrangement of the room meant that no one could have left without an opening of a door which would have caused light to pour into the dark room, light that no one observed. 

The vanished Mr. Blank gave a report that he found himself in a disoriented state, far away from the seance he had been in at Mr. Guppy's house. He reported that he found himself at the presence of Mr. and Mrs. Stokes, giving their address of 29 Kingsdown Road, and that he was "wholly unconscious of how he had got into their premises." He stated that he had no memory of how he had got from the seance room at Mr. Guppy's house to the location of  29 Kingsdown Road, about two miles away. Hearing this strange account from Mr. Blank, some of the members of the seance at Mr. Guppy's house went and interviewed Mr. and Mrs. Stokes, getting an account that was consistent with Mr. Blank's account. 

The Mr. Blank of the account (a pseudonym of someone who did not wish to give his name) was apparently the Mr. Henderson referred to in the paper by Crookes. 

The account has on page 562 with nine named witnesses agreeing to the testimony supplied. On the next page we have these named witnesses agreeing to the supplied account:

As evidence of a teleportation, the account here is weaker than the account of the teleportation of Mrs. Guppy, largely because of the refusal of the supposedly teleported person to give his real name. Accounts which hinge on the testimony of anonymous witnesses must be ranked as second-class evidence rather than first-class evidence. But the account of teleportation of Mrs. Guppy (to the ire of materialists) has the hallmarks of first-class observational evidence.  

Press accounts of apparitions seen by more than one

Naked-Eye Sightings of Mysterious Orbs (Part 9)

Below are some posts I have published about people reporting they saw mysterious orbs with the naked eye:

Naked-Eye Sightings of Mysterious Orbs (Part 1 of 4)

Naked-Eye Sightings of Mysterious Orbs (Part 2 of 4)

Naked-Eye Sightings of Mysterious Orbs (Part 3 of 4)

Naked-Eye Sightings of Mysterious Orbs (Part 4 of 4)

Naked Eye Sightings of Mysterious Orbs (Part 5)

Naked Eye Sightings of Mysterious Orbs (Part 6)

Naked Eye Sightings of Mysterious Orbs (Part 7)

Naked-Eye Sightings of Mysterious Orbs (Part 8)

Let us look at some more cases of this type, which you will never hear about when addressing questions to your latest-and-greatest AI chatbot query tool.  

Below is a startling news report from the November 1, 1899 edition of the Washburn Times:

You can read the report on its original page using the link below:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn85040437/1899-11-01/ed-1/seq-2/

In an article entitled "A Memoir Offers an Insider’s Perspective Into the Pentagon’s U.F.O. Hunt," the New York Times reports that Luis Elizondo, who "ran highly classified programs for both the White House and the National Security Council," says that he saw mysterious green orbs flying around in his house. We read this: 

"Elizondo also wrote in the memoir of personal encounters with U.A.P., describing green-glowing orbs about the size of a basketball that invaded his home on and off for over seven years. The objects were able to pass through walls, and behaved as if they were under intelligent control, he wrote.

The orbs were also witnessed by his wife, two daughters and their neighbors, he wrote."

We have four police witnesses of a spooky orb that moves from a road into the woods, and then changes color from yellow to red before disappearing. 

The account below is one of the most spectacular orb reports ever. We read of a man (Stuart Blue Harary, with a preferred name of Blue Harary)  who had an out-of-body experience in which he reports his soul visiting friends. Harary claims that two of his friends reported seeing a ball of light at the same time as these "soul visits" occurred. 

You can read the full story using the line below:

https://digitalcollections.lib.umanitoba.ca/islandora/object/uofm%3A2964354?solr%5Bquery%

I had discussed the same person and his out-of-body experiences in my post here. Scott Rogo's research work with Blue Harary (Stuart Blue Harary) is described in Chapter 8 of his book Mind Beyond the Body: The Mystery of ESP Projection, which can be read here. 

The account in the image above is imperfect from an evidence standpoint, as it lacks the names of the corroborating witnesses. If you ever witness what you think is the paranormal, try to get the names of any corroborating witnesses, and ideally try and publish their names. If the witnesses do not want to have their names published, you can state in your report that you have the name of a corroborating witness, and can supply it upon request to a serious researcher such as an author, journalist. scientist or long-time scholar of related topics. 

Below from 2013 are two reports of people seeing mysterious orbs in the sky:

You can read the full account here:

https://nyshistoricnewspapers.org/?a=d&d=she20130912-01.1.15&srpos=34&e=-------en-20--1--txt-txIN----------

 Below is a 2008 story appearing in the publication Psychic News (click on the image to read it more clearly):

You can read the full account using the link below:

https://digitalcollections.lib.umanitoba.ca/islandora/object/uofm%3A2980456?solr%5Bquery%

On the page here, we read this:

"Fort Ontario has acquired a number of ghost stories. There is a nameless ghost in blue who wanders around the parade ground, and a luminous ball of light that is said to be seen near the guard posts at late night."

The story below appeared in an 1873 newspaper story  (click on the image to read it more clearly). We read of an apparition that sometimes takes a circular shape:

The story first appeared on the newspaper page shown below:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn85033255/1873-12-12/ed-1/seq-1/

Below is a report from the Niagra, New York "Journal Register" of November 4, 1983.

"What is the explanation for the strange phenomenon which has been taking place over the steeple of a Protestant church in West Germany, in the town of Wanfried? Ever since early July, a mysterious ball of red light has been appearing nightly over the church. Thousands have seen it. Is it a hoax? An optical illusion? The result of mass hysteria? Or is it - as many who have seen it maintain - a supernatural occurrence?

Stray reports of visions are not that rare. But for an apparition to reappear regularly over a period of more than three months is extraordinary - even [if] there is some good explanation for it. So far, though, nobody has come up with an explanation. The possibility has been mentioned that the brilliant light of the apparition is 'St. Elmo's fire,' a flaming phenomenon sometimes seen in stormy weather at prominent points on a plane or ship or at the tops of church steeples. It a charge of electricity, which is reddish when positive (the ball of light over the German church has been described as red), and bluish when negative. But St, Elmo's fire is not known to appear in fair weather as is the case with the apparition in Germany. "

You can read the report below, on the top left corner of a page  (page 17) which also describes another case that may be even harder to explain: the Zeitoun apparition case. 

https://nyshistoricnewspapers.org/?a=d&d=jnr19831104-01.1.17&srpos=5&e=-------en-20--1--txt-txIN-%22mysterious+ball%22---------

At the link below, we read of two police officers who chased a "ball of light" UFO in the sky, reporting that the speed of the object seemed to match the speed of their vehicle:

https://nyshistoricnewspapers.org/?a=d&d=crp19741024-01.1.15&srpos=26&e=-------en-20--21--txt-txIN-%22ball+of+light%22------

A similar report (involving a "big ball of light") is found here:

https://nyshistoricnewspapers.org/?a=d&d=sacn19671221-01.1.12&srpos=32&e=-------en-20--21--txt-txIN-%22ball+of+light%22---------

Similarly, in the 2013 story here we read of someone seeing an orange ball of light in the sky for 30 minutes, and someone else reporting four red balls of light flying over his home, including a "very bright red ball." 

https://nyshistoricnewspapers.org/?a=d&d=she20130912-01.1.15&srpos=34&e=-------en-20--21--txt-txIN-%22ball+of+light%22---------

The 1911 report below discusses a "ball of fire" lingering in the sky between 30 seconds and six minutes (according to different witness accounts):

You can read the report on the page here:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn85058397/1911-08-12/ed-1/seq-8/

The old newspaper account below can be read at the link here:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn94050088/1931-11-06/ed-1/seq-1/

We read of a thousand gathering to see what look like luminous lights rising from a grave:

The report below appeared in a 1924 newspaper account you can read here:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn84026749/1924-08-05/ed-1/seq-2/

We read of "a blazing ball about the size of a cannon ball hanging low over the summit of South Mountain." Since we read that this puzzled scientists, we may presume that it could not be explained as the moon 

Dark Matter Guys Avoid Plain English When Announcing Their Latest Failures

Behold the great spectacle of scientists who waste gigantic sums of money constructing  very fancy devices that find utterly nothing. Two of the worst examples are the observation failures of the dark matter cosmologists and the cosmic inflation cosmologists (believers in the unprovable idea that the universe underwent a momentary burst of exponential expansion during a fraction of its first second). Their efforts are schematically depicted in the visual below:

The cosmic inflation cosmologists have been using fancy equipment to try to find something called primordial b-modes. They have found no such thing. The dark matter cosmologists are trying to find the first proof that dark matter exists. They have found no such thing. 

But you might not realize that from reading the latest press account of the failure of those searching for dark matter. We do not get an honest headline saying something like this:

"The Latest Result of the Dark Matter Search: Still Nothing Found"

Instead we get this headline used by the press release announcing the failure to observe any dark matter:

"The LZ experiment's first science run sets new constraints on dark matter interactions"

Such is the rule for scientists running grand projects that find nothing. They seem to never candidly confess that they found nothing, and act like the guy imagined below:

A search on the Cornell Physics paper pre-print server for titles containing the phrase "new constraints" gives 442 results, indicating that physicists are very massively using the term "new constraints" to describe their failures to observe something. A search for the phrase "finds nothing" on the same server gives zero matches, even though a large fraction of the papers returned by the first query should have used the phrase "finds nothing" rather then "new constraints." A search for the phrase "found nothing" on the same server returns only three papers.

When I search using Google Scholar for the latest results of the fruitless search for the primordial b-modes sought by the cosmic inflation theorists, I don't get any candid "nothing found" paper titles. Instead at the top of my results are two papers talking about finding nothing, but using the word "constraint":

Diving into the press release announcing the failed LZ experiment, we get almost no mention of the "nothing found" result. We get euphemistic text like this:

"The LUX ZEPLIN (LZ) Dark Matter experiment is a large research effort involving over 200 scientists and engineers at 40 institutions worldwide...The LZ Collaboration recently released the results of the first experimental run of the LZ dark matter experiment. These results, published in Physical Review Letters, set new constraints on the interactions between dark matter and other particles, which could inform future searches for weakly-interacting dark matter candidates."

In the midst of all of the long jargon-heavy gobbledygook and euphemisms, there is a confession that only extremely careful readers will be able to notice. Below I underline and boldface that confession:

" 'Though our first search resulted in no dark matter signals, it has constrained properties of dark matter, which in turn allows for dark matter theories to be refined,'  said Williams. 'Many of the signals we searched for in this work had not been searched for before.' "

No trace of any plain speaking can be found in the abstract or title of the scientific paper announcing these results. We hear no mention of the observational failure that occurred, at least no mention using any language that even 1% of the population could understand.  The closest the paper comes to confessing the total failure that occurred is when it says, "No significant evidence of an excess is found in either the isoscalar or isovector bases," a statement that virtually no one but a dark matter scientist will recognize as a statement of observation failure.

In the January press release Williams referred to the failure of "our first search." But an August article referred to gathering "280 days of data" using the same LZ detector.  That article's headline was "LZ Experiment Sets New Record in Search for Dark Matter," which sounds like some kind of success, even though it actually was a failure to observe any dark matter. The article never told us what this record  was. We merely had the claim that a "record-setting experiment" had occurred. 

Peering into the article, I get this quote: "The results analyze 280 days’ worth of data: a new set of 220 days (collected between March 2023 and April 2024) combined with 60 earlier days from LZ’s first run." Referring to the failure of "our first search," Williams has given us a quote with a "we've only just begun" sound to it, but the truth is that the LZ experiment has been running for 280 days without success. Each of those days can be considered a search. Instead of referring to the failure of "our first search," Williams should have referred to the failure of the first 280 searches. 

Recently there was published the paper "Search for continuous gravitational waves from known pulsars in the first part of the fourth LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA observing run." I have never seen a paper that listed so many authors. Below is a screen shot of the first page, and there are three other author pages listing  as many authors as the first of these pages.

The paper has something like 1000 different listed authors. What is announced is an observational failure, and the Universe Today site summarizes the results with a headline of "LIGO Fails to Find Continuous Gravitational Waves From Pulsars." But why didn't the title of the paper tell you about the failure? Was it maybe that the 1000 different authors didn't want you to easily find out about their involvement in so massive an unsuccessful search?

You just have to shake your head here, and ask: does it really take that many people to find nothing?

Another boondoggle scientist project is what I call Dirty DUNE. It is the DUNE project, DUNE standing for Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment. Involving gigantic amounts of digging with a large chance of groundwater contamination, the project may well turn out to be an environmental nightmare, for reasons I describe in my post here. The project advocates have made unfounded and misleading attempts to try to insinuate that the project has some relevance to the matter/antimatter asymmetry problem. Studying neutrinos will shed no light on that problem. 

In the latest attempt to gin up some rationale for this misguided and environmentally reckless project, some scientists have resorted to generating fake data and appealing to never-observed extra dimensions. We read this:

" 'We simulated several years of neutrino data from the DUNE experiment using computational models,'  Masud said. 'By analyzing both the low-energy and high-energy effects of large extra dimensions on neutrino oscillation probabilities, we statistically assessed DUNE's ability to constrain the potential size of these extra dimensions, assuming they exist in nature.' "

Get the idea? They didn't use real data gathered by the DUNE experiment, but instead used fake data that was merely "simulated." It was kind of like some football coach that justifies his expensive million-dollar player salaries by using a computer program that generates fake football statistics for the years 2026 and 2027.  And how about that appeal to "these extra dimensions, assuming they exist in nature"?  That part is like having your fake football statistics for future years include lots of touchdowns scored by the cheerleaders, and lots of 100-yard field goals kicked by the referees.  

I discussed how the physicists and cosmologists use language the average person won't understand when they write up papers describing their observation failures. But at least they write up some kind of paper. It's different when neuroscientists find nothing after long eager searching. Neuroscientists have been using more and more powerful microscopes, examining endless samples of brain tissue, looking for any trace of human learned knowledge stored in brain tissue. They have found nothing of the sort. They found not a single word stored in brain tissue, and not even a single letter of the alphabet.  They found not a single image of something someone saw in the past, and not even a single pixel of such an image. They found not a single remembered sentence, and not a single syllable of such a sentence.

Do our neuroscientists write up papers describing such failures, so relevant to the topic of whether brains store memories? No, neuroscientists just avoid doing that, and hope very much you won't ever notice the observation failure. If memories were actually stored in human brains, they would have been discovered by microscopic examination around the year 1960, shortly after the genetic code was discovered. For a full post about this topic, read my January 16th post at https://headtruth.blogspot.com/ .

Two 2024 Nobel Prize Press Releases Misinformed Us Badly

In a previous post entitled "Misleading Statements in a Recent Nobel Prize Announcement" I analyzed quite a few misleading statements in the press release (and a supplementary document of that release) issued by a  Nobel Prize committee announcing the year 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. The press release I discussed was not the only misleading press release issued in 2024 by a Nobel Prize committee. There were also bad errors in the press release announcing the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. 

In its second sentence that press release contained this piece of fiction: "The information stored within our chromosomes can be likened to an instruction manual for all cells in our body."  The information referred to is DNA, also called the genome. DNA consists mainly of genes. But neither DNA nor its genes contain any such thing as an instruction manual for cells. DNA has no specification of how to build a cell or any of its organelles, or how to maintain or correctly position any cells.  DNA does not even specify how to construct the protein complexes that make up organelles. 

The level of organization in the body is as follows: a body consists mainly of organ systems and a skeletal system; organ systems are built mainly from organs; organs are built from tissues; tissues are built from cells; cells are built from many types of organelles; organelles are built mainly from proteins complexes; protein complexes are built from proteins; and proteins are built from amino acids. The chromosome and its DNA does not have any specification of how to construct any of these levels higher than protein molecules. So it is a huge falsehood to claim that "the information stored within our chromosomes can be likened to an instruction manual for all cells in our body."  DNA does not tell how to make a cell or any of the main components of a cell; and DNA does not tell cells how to act or where they should go in the body. 

The Nobel Prize press release contained the following paragraph. I will put the false statements in boldface underline:

"The information stored within our chromosomes can be likened to an instruction manual for all cells in our body. Every cell contains the same chromosomes, so every cell contains exactly the same set of genes and exactly the same set of instructions. Yet, different cell types, such as muscle and nerve cells, have very distinct characteristics. How do these differences arise? The answer lies in gene regulation, which allows each cell to select only the relevant instructions. This ensures that only the correct set of genes is active in each cell type."

No, gene regulation does not constitute even a half-explanation of why we end up with different cell types.  Gene regulation refers to a cell's use or non-use of certain types of proteins. But that does not even half-explain why the human body has 200 different types of cells, with so many different functions, structures and characteristics. Similarly, if there were some person traveling to different construction sites, and merely saying things such as "use copper pipes" and "don't use cinder blocks" and "use steel beams" and "don't use wood 2 by 4's," that would never explain how one construction site might produce a stone church and another construction site might produce a mansion and another construction site might produce a shopping mall. Nowhere in chromosomes or DNA are there any instructions for building a cell or any of its organelle components, and neither chromosomes nor DNA nor its genes has any instructions on how to maintain, position or reproduce a cell. 

The press release in question announced the awarding of a Nobel Prize for the discovery of a microRNA  by Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun. A microRNA is a very tiny chemical unit that is only 18 to 25 nucleotides. About 1000 microRNA molecules have been discovered.  Molecules so small with so little information are utterly incapable of explaining the vast mystery of why there arises so many different types of enormously complex cells specialized for different biological purposes. 

The Nobel Prize press release I am discussing gives us the extremely misleading visual below:

The diagram above misleads us badly in three different ways. First, it omits two different layers of organization, and gives us the profoundly misleading idea that cells are directly made from proteins. The truth is that cells are made from extremely complex components called organelles, which are built from extremely complex protein complexes, which are built from protein molecules.  Second, the diagram misleads us badly by giving us a visual suggesting  that cells are very simple. We see a cell that has only a few organelles.  The truth is that human cells typically contain very many thousands of organelles. Third, the diagram makes proteins look like very simple things with only a few parts. Human proteins have an average of about 450 amino acids each, which must be very specially arranged for them to perform their functions. 

Schematic diagrams of cells are constantly misleading us by depicting cells with only a few organelles. Specifically:

• A cell diagram will typically depict a cell as having only one or a few mitochondria, but human cells typically have many thousands of mitochondria, as many as a million.
• A cell diagram will typically depict a cell as having only only one or a few lysosomes, but human cells typically have hundreds of lysosomes.
• A cell diagram will typically depict a cell as having only a few ribosomes, but a human cell may have up to 10 million ribosomes.
• A cell diagram will typically depict one or a few stacks of a Golgi apparatus, each with only a few cisternae. But a cell will typically have between 10 and 20 stacks, each having as many as 60 cisternae.
• A cell diagram will rarely even depict a microtubule, although according to the paper here "cells can contain from just a few to many hundreds of microtubules (Aikawa, 1971; Osborn & Weber, 1976)." 
• The membranes of cells are extremely complicated structures, consisting of four layers, with each layer being populated by many types of proteins each consisting of hundreds of well-arranged parts.  Some of this complexity could easily be shown by a "closeup circle" in a cell diagram, showing a closeup of part of the membrane.  But we rarely see any such depiction of the complexity of the cell membrane,  and cell diagrams almost always have cell membranes depicted as featureless things looking as simple as the surface of a balloon. 
• The cytosol of a cell is typically depicted as if it were a simple fluid like water. But the cytosol is actually loaded with many types of complex protein molecules needed for cell function. 

There is no excuse for the continuation of misleading cell diagrams in the literature of biology. For the past twenty years it has been easy to use computer graphics to make very sophisticated high-resolution diagrams capable of properly representing the complexity of cells. But almost no one is creating such diagrams, and we continue to see most cell diagrams looking like something hand-painted in the 1950's.  

The type of cell diagrams we usually see in biology literature are misrepresentations as absurd as trying to depict gigantic skyscrapers like the Empire State Building or the 828-meter-tall Burj Khalifa tower  by using ridiculously simplistic diagrams like this:

We get more very misleading talk later in the Nobel Prize press release with this statement:

"Gene regulation by microRNA, first revealed by Ambros and Ruvkun, has been at work for hundreds of millions of years. This mechanism has enabled the evolution of increasingly complex organisms."

The word "enable" means "give (someone or something) the authority or means to do something." The biological and chemical requirements for complex organisms are endless and ubiquitous, and most involve things vastly more complex than microRNA molecules, which are very small molecules. So to claim that mere microRNAs  "enabled the evolution of increasingly complex organisms" is to misspeak badly.  A correct statement would be that microRNAs are some of the least complex of the enormously high number of things needed for the appearance of organisms as complex as humans. 

The diagram below correctly describes the levels of organization in the human body, and tells us what is not specified by DNA. 

We have in this Nobel Prize press release and its diagram a repetition of one of the most misleading claims of biologists between 1975 and 2024: the groundless claim that genes contain programs for development. DNA is not a program, and the genes that make up DNA are not any program that forms organisms. DNA does not have any of the control structures (such as if/then statements) found in computer programs. DNA does not specify the growth of an organism, and does not know or state anything about organisms or their cells. 

Professor Massimo Pigliucci (mainstream author of numerous scientific papers on evolution) has stated  that "old-fashioned metaphors like genetic blueprint and genetic programme are not only woefully inadequate but positively misleading." In the book Mind in Life by Evan Thompson (published by the Belknap Press of Harvard University Press) we read the following on page 180: "The plain truth is that DNA is not a program for building organisms, as several authors have shown in detail (Keller 2000, Lewontin 1993, Moss 2003)."  Developmental biologist C/H. Waddington stated, "The DNA is not a program or sequentially accessed control over the behavior of the cell." On the web site of the well-known biologist Denis Noble, we read that "the whole idea that genes contain the recipe or the program of life is absurd, according to Noble," and that we should understand DNA "not so much as a recipe or a program, but rather as a database that is used by the tissues and organs in order to make the proteins which they need." A paper by cell biologist Stuart A. Newman states,  "It would be unfortunate if we find ourselves having emerged from a period of misconceived genetic program metaphors only to land in a brave new world captivated by equally misguided ones about self-organization."

Part of the press release helps reveal the utter inadequacy of anything discovered by the awarded scientists to explain the mountain-sized mystery of cell differentiation. We read this: "Ambros and Ruvkun performed further experiments showing that the lin-4 microRNA turns off lin-14 by binding to the complementary sequences in its mRNA, blocking the production of lin-14 protein."  These guys merely found 

an off-switch for a particular protein. That cannot be more than just the tiniest piece in a gigantic puzzle with thousands of missing pieces, since cells use 20,000+ proteins, and since off-switches can't explain 200 very diverse types of enormous organization as we see in cells. And since tiny little microRNAs don't even have as much information as found on a single sentence of this post, it's pretty laughable to be elevating them to be things explaining the variety of human cells, things far more complex than any blog post I've ever written. 

The false claim made by the Nobel Prize press release (that gene regulation or gene expression explains why we have 200 different types of cells with vastly different sizes, structures, locations and functions) has been stated by many sources. False information about genes and DNA is super-abundant in the literature of biology, where groundless fictions about DNA have been steadily told for 75 years. The main reason such misinformation has been passed around in my post here. The same post quotes dozens of scientists and doctors who told us the truth about such matters, telling us that DNA is no blueprint, recipe or program for building a body or any of its cells. 

A phrase such as "gene expression" or "gene regulation" is vacuous as an explanation for why cells have different structures and different locations and why they use different proteins. Gene expression refers to what proteins a cell uses and how often they are used. Rather than being an explanation for why different cells are different, the phrase "gene expression" is one aspect of how they are different.  Appealing to "gene expression" as an explanation for why two cells are different is as vacuous as answering a question of "how come a computer is arranged differently from a refrigerator" by saying "because they have different parts in different places." Similarly the term "gene regulation" refers to a large variety of different complicated factors that differ when different cells end up with different concentrations of proteins.  But as an explanation for why two cells are different, the phrase "gene regulation" is as vacuous as trying to answer the question of "how come a computer is arranged differently from a refrigerator" by using a phrase such as "part placement differences." Having within it no concept or specification of a cell, DNA has no "gene regulator" controlling how many proteins of different types go into particular cells. Instead of referring to one discrete thing, the term "gene regulation" refers to dozens of scattered little things that differ when different types of cells arise.  Appealing to "gene regulation" as an explanation is as vacuous as trying to explain why a cathedral looks different from a factory by appealing to "assembly differences"  or "construction methodology." When used as an attempted explanation, the obscure phrase "gene regulation" is an example of hand-waving. Different gene regulation in different cells is one aspect of different cells being different, not an explanation of why they are different. 

As shown by this post and a previous post of mine, the year 2024 has proven that we should have no great confidence in the claims made by press releases announcing Nobel Prize awards. Nobel Prize press releases should be treated with the same suspicion and critical scrutiny we should have for university press releases announcing science research. Such press releases are very often guilty of very bad groundless boasting and misleading claims. 

Earlier in this century a biologist spoke truthfully about how little biologists understand cells, stating this:

"Cell biology is a mystery for many reasons one

of which is the lack of basic knowledge. This may

be the fault of scientists or simply a failure in basic

information at the level of common contemporary

knowledge. The well known sentence of Socrates:

'I know that I know nothing' is as true in cell

biology as in other scientific fields. This sentence

was modified by Lloyd in 1986 who claimed: 'The

closer we look, the less we see'. I would like to

modify this sentence yet again as a cell biologist and

microscopist: 'The closer we look, the less we know

about.' ... Everyone involved in cell

biology, is surprised how limited is our knowledge

about the various cell compartments....It should now be mentioned that our knowledge even of basic cell organelles, including their various functions, is very limited....We know something about cell organelles, including various nuclear compartments, but most of their functions are waiting for further and better clarification....Depending on conditions, selected genes may be repressed or derepressed and activated giving to rise to the particular cell lineage with characteristic cell structures and functions. On the other hand, such transformations, including the homing of the transformed cells are also very mysterious although both these processes are empirically used in clinical medicine."

A year 2022 statement by Intel claims that some analysis technique is "beginning to unravel the mystery of cell differentiation." In general when scientists say that they are merely "beginning to unravel" some great mystery, it is a confession that the mystery is still very much not understood by them. Humans don't understand how different cell types arise in the human body, contrary to the boast of the Nobel Prize committee that this is explained by "gene regulation." In 2019 two scientists confessed, "We have little understanding of the processes that allow cells to become different"  (link).

In the Nobel Prize press release I have criticized, there is a link to some speech given describing the 2024 award for the Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology.  The speech gives us a very clumsy analogy in which the construction of a cell is compared to the performance of some symphony, and individual genes are compared to instrument players. The analogy is inappropriate because musicians work with a musical score exactly specifying how a symphony should sound, but DNA and its genes are nothing like a specification of any cell or any organ or any adult body. We read this:

"MicroRNAs are conductors with a special ability. Instead of passionately making gestures to either amplify or dampen music intensity, microRNAs tell musicians only when to quiet down or take a break. ‘You there, play softer! You, take a break!’ "

It's obvious from this analogy that individual MicroRNAs are mere "bit players" or minor cogs in the gigantically complicated process by which enormously organized cells are originated and vastly organized organism bodies are constructed. The awarded discovery merely involves finding one piece in a gigantic jigsaw puzzle which has almost all of its pieces still undiscovered, as illustrated in the visual below. 

 

In many of these cases that are hailed as progress in understanding things, there may be no real progress at all, but just some explanatory "robbing Peter to pay Paul." For example, let us suppose that there is some gene which has its rate of expression slowed down at some particular point in some type of cell. Let us suppose that someone postulates that this occurred because some microRNA sent a message at some point telling the gene  to slow down.  That's just a mere speck of explanatory progress. We've simply gone from "how did the gene know to slow down at this particular time in this particular cell?" to the equally great mystery of "how did the microRNA know that it should signal the gene to slow down at this particular time in this particular cell?"  The problem is that DNA has no actual specification of cells or the organelles that make up cells. So from a mechanistic or reductionist standpoint, none of these chemicals should know anything about what it should be doing at a particular time to help achieve some grand result such as the construction of a particular type of vastly organized cell, or its placement in the correct position in a human body.