Kauravas were test tube babies and ancient Indians knew stem cell technology thousands of years before Dolly the sheep was born, claims G Nageswara Rao, Vice-Chancellor of Andhra University, at the Indian Science Congress.
 
“How come Gandhari gave birth to 100 children! Is it humanly possible?
 
Can any woman give birth to 100 children in her lifetime? Mahabharat says 100 fetal eggs were put in 100 earthen pots. Is it not test tube babies? It’s making of test tube babies,” Rao said at a Meet the Scientist session on Friday at the ongoing 106th session of the science congress here.
 
“Stem cell research was done in this country thousands of years ago. Today we speak about stem cell research… When we say stem cell, many people don’t understand what it is. But thousands of years ago we had this technology. We had 100 Kauravas from one mother because of stem cell and test tube baby technologies,” he said.
 
The bizarre claim from the Vice-Chancellor of one of India’s prestigious universities is in the same league as the astounding claims made by Union Science Minister Harsh Vardhan at the last year’s Science Congress at Imphal.
 
Vardhan claimed that Hawking had stated on record that Vedas might have a theory superior to the famous energy-mass formula (E=MC2).
 
“Clonal propagation is possible in current technology. Dolly is the example. However, every scientific claim is based on evidence,” Samir K Brahmachari, one of India’s foremost biologists and a former director general of Council of Scientific and Industrial Research told DH.
 
In the 2015 edition of science congress in Mumbai, a former pilot was allowed to speak at a session on the yet another astounding claim of an Indian sage Maharishi Bhardwaj knowing the art of flying almost 6,000 years ago and an Indian made a plane using that knowledge and flew in it two decades before the Wright brothers’ success in 1903, but nobody documented it.
 
He was permitted to speak nearly 40 years after five Indian Institute of Science scientists proved that the Maharishi Bhardwaj claims were completely false.
 
Rao also claimed that Dashavtar, (ten reincarnations of Lord Vishnu) is actually a tale of evolution that predated Charles Darwin’s Theory of Evolution.
 
Moreover, the use of ‘Astras’ and ‘Shastras’ (weapons) by Lord Rama in the Ramayana and Vishnu’s Sudarshan Chakra that chased targets and returned after hitting it, suggested that guided missiles were also known to Indians thousands of years ago, he added.