Life & the Sea: Sea Solids in
Agriculture
When Dr. Maynard Murray’s groundbreaking Sea Energy Agriculture, the culmination of many years of research and experimentation, was published in 1976, the good doctor traveled to Kansas City, Missouri. In his presentation, simply entitled “Sea Solids,” Murray explains the philosophy behind his work and makes the case for his method. The following is an edited transcript of this historical speech.
by Maynard Murray, M.D.
There are
about 380,000 people studying life and making a living thereby in the U.S., but
no one really knows what life is. So physicians use biologists, and so forth. We
still don’t know what life really is all about. We do know some essential
characteristics of life, however. Life is, of course, electrical. There can be
no life without a transfer of electrical energy. In other words, each cell is a
little battery that puts out a current. If a cell is unable to put out a
current, it is dead and can never return to living tissue. Anything living
alters its environment for its benefit in order that it may live and reproduce.
This is the difference between living and non-living
tissue. Life is always contained in a cell. In other words, it’s surrounded into
a definite volume, not like inorganic things — it is always in a cell.
Cells,
of course, vary in size. The largest cell on earth is an ostrich egg. The
smallest cell is a tiny bacteria. In warm-blooded animals, the reproductive
cells are the largest and the smallest — in other words, the sperm cell is the
smallest cell in the body of a human or any other mammal, and the egg cell is
the largest.
These cells are able to carry on the processes
of life alone. They do not need anything except food from the outside. They can
manufacture many of their food products. They can break down complex compounds
and synthesize their own body tissues.
A virus, which is
much smaller than the smallest bacteria, cannot do this, and they have to live
within the cell. A cell, a living tissue, has to get its food by either
concentrating or diluting its environment or altering it some way in order to
make its environment part of its tissue.
All of life is parasitic, with few
exceptions. In fact, one living thing lives on another and so on all the way up
and down the scale. The exception to this rule is plants. Plant life contains
chlorophyll or some chlorophyll-like pigment. There are three different pigments
by which plant cells can synthesize their own tissue out of simple inorganic
things: chlorophyll, the pigment in blue-green algae, and the pigment in the
retina of our eye. If that is contained by certain cells, it is with the aid of
light able to synthesize food and proteins, etc., out of simple inorganic
materials.
Green plants, in other words, will not use
organic materials. I think the organic farmer and gardener has one of the best
things going for them except the name. They’re doing exactly the right thing,
but they’re using the wrong name! I wish they hadn’t done that, because you’re
not really feeding a plant “organic” material — it has to be broken down into
inorganic material before the plant, the green plant, can use it. So if we’d
just started with a little different name, it would have been more accurate, and
people might have understood it better. Nevertheless, the idea of keeping all
the organic tissue on the soil and let it be broken down by bacteria and fungi
in the inorganic form for the plant is a commendable practice and very
good.
Now, I say that plants can’t use organic elements or
tied-up elements, and animals can’t use inorganic, or shouldn’t. Salts, ordinary
table salt, for example, are the only real inorganic compounds we take in. We
know as doctors that salt for the most part is a toxic material, sodium
chloride. It produces swelling in tissues, and your doctor will take you off of
it if you have any swelling, heart disease, pregnancy, etc. He does this not
knowing why, except for his awareness that salt produces swelling. The reason it
produces swelling is because it’s tied-up in an inorganic form, and you, being
an animal, can’t utilize it. If you take carrot juice, or many different
vegetables, they contain sodium and chlorine that you can tolerate without any
harmful effects whatsoever, if it’s tied-up right, in an organic
form.
Take iodine, for instance. We do take some inorganic
iodine and form a potassium iodide in salt. Here too, the iodine shows an
opposite effect to that produced when it’s tied-up organically. If you eat
organically tied-up iodine, it steps up your metabolism. If you take potassium
iodide, salt, it’s the compound we use to step down the metabolism. We do know,
however, that inorganic iodine prevents you from having a certain type of toxic
goiter. This of course, is probably due to the fact that iodine is indeed
hooked-up organically in small doses in plant life in your intestine. In the
same way we know that ruminant animals can tolerate large doses of inorganic
salts, because the protozoa and bacteria in the stomachs of the ruminant animal
can tie these things up.
We do the same thing with iron. If
we take ferric chloride, which is an inorganic iron, we do not get the benefit
of the iron as such. It has to be absorbed by the bacteria of the intestine,
then released as an organic tie-up before we can utilize it. In other words, the
idea that animals have to have organically tied-up elements is still true. We
can prove that anytime that an animal is benefitted by the ingestion of an
inorganic substance. It is indeed because it is made organic by the action of
either the fermentative juices or bacterial life in the
intestine.
Now, life on Earth started in the sea. In fact,
your own blood, the plasma of your blood, is about one-fourth seawater. If you
look at the trace elements in your blood plasma, it’s almost the same chemical
analysis as quarter-strength seawater.
Even today, 85
percent of the life on our planet is in the sea. If we’re allowed to live
without artificially killing ourselves off with atomic bombs and so forth, then
we must know that in the future life on Earth will also end in the sea. Why is
this so? The answer is simple. Number one: the sea receives all of the elements
washed off the land. This is a tremendous amount of nutrition, leaving the land
and going into the sea. Because the sea is around neutral or a little bit on the
alkaline side, there are two elements that will not stay in solution —
phosphorous and iron. Certain research and tests suggest that phosphorous will
be the limiting element to life. In other words, life is dying at a tremendous
rate. We don’t realize it, but it is leaving the land at a tremendous rate,
because of the lack of phosphorous.
Phosphorous forms salts
very easily with iron and other things and if in an alkaline solution or even
neutral solution, it will go out of solution and form a very, very insoluble
salt. Now this is taking place in the sea. We’re losing phosphorous in
tremendous amounts. And the only way the phosphorous is brought back to the soil
is by bird droppings, which amounts only to about 1 to 3 percent of what is lost
in the sea.
Phosphorous is one of the elements that is
absolutely essential for all life, both plant and animal. So until we do learn
to recover this lost element, we can look forward to the time when all life on
Earth will quit and not go on. Simply because one of the 92 elements has become
insoluble, unusable for living processes. So if you want to make money, invest
in phosphorous, I would think, because the future is there — it has to
be.
Because of all of these things, life started and is
still more abundant in the sea, and life will end in the sea. Of course, I chose
many, many years ago — more than I like to admit — to begin using sea solids for
fertilizer.
People turn up their eyebrows when they hear
this, because I do not take out the sodium chloride. We use everything — all of
the traces of 92 elements found in the universe actually are in our ocean. We
use them all. We spread them on the soil. We use from 250 pounds to as high as
2,200 pounds of total sea solids per acre. We also grow many things in
hydroponic solution using seawater. We have to add of course some NPK to the
seawater, because land animals and plants have become acclimated to higher
concentrations of NPK than is in the sea.
We’ve discussed
phosphorous, but now let’s consider nitrogen — the sea is a place that does fix
the nitrogen. We talk about our plants fixing nitrogen out here by electrolysis
— that’s nothing compared to what nature does through bacteria! Lightning and
other phenomena fix nitrogen too, but the bacteria in the sea are the main
sources of the fixation of nitrogen. Their food source is the sea. So if you use
the sea solids on the soil, you gradually build up nitrogen in your soil year
after year, because these bacteria will actually live in your soil then. You’ll
get to the place where you don’t need nitrogen supplements at all on your soil,
because the bacteria will do it for you, just as it does in the
sea.
Remember, 72 percent of the Earth’s surface is sea.
You never heard of a sea mammal having diabetes, arthritis, cancer or
malnutrition, did you? I never did. It just doesn’t happen. There are no
hospitals in 72 percent of the Earth, you see. It sounds logical that maybe
there’s something in the sea that mean something health-wise, doesn’t it? Many
years ago we started to work out the amount of sea solids that could be used
both in hydroponic solution or spread on the soil. After many years of trial and
error, we did work it out, and now we’ve been able to grow any crop that we’ve
ever tried on soil or solution containing total sea solids — sodium chloride and
all.
My interest in this thing was to find out if I could
grow a plant that was healthier and better to feed to animals — in other words,
fertilization that would make the plants healthier. I think it was 1970 when the
corn blight swept our country here. We could see in the fields with sea solids
amendment right to the row where the corn was absolutely immune to the blight.
Now we do the same thing with corn smut, a fungus of corn. You can see right up
to the row where you put the sea solids. This works not only with corn, but also
with many other crops.
We’ve worked with viral diseases —
for example Tobacco Mosaic Virus, Tomato Mosaic Virus, Peachtree “curly leaf” —
and find that we can produce a plant that is immune to them. We’ve had some nice
results. We have also built up resistance very nicely to crown rusts, corn smut,
etc.
How about bacterial infections? Center rot in turnips
is a good thing to experiment with, because it’s caused by staph infections —
same kind of a bug that produces boils and staph pneumonia. We can indeed build
up significant immunity to staph infections, viral and fungal infections in
plants.
This is all very nice, but what happens when we
feed these plants to animals? When we grow corn, wheat, oats, etc., and feed
them to animals experimentally, we do see some changes that are very
interesting, and we think are quite all right. We are at the present time and
have in the past experimented with animals with cancer.
You
have to be very careful before you publish anything on cancer prevention or
cure, because, as we know, in science there can be a lot of flukes. One thing
can happen one time, but the next time it won’t happen quite that way. A common
experimental animal is the C3H mouse, which spontaneously gets from 97 to 100
percent cancer of the breast. By feeding C3H mice food grown with sea solids, we
have been able to cut down cancer in the first generation from 97 to 55 percent.
That’s a significant drop. We seem to be able to do that almost invariably.
Sometimes it’ll be a little more that 55 percent. Now we are running more
generations, and we are finding that with each generation we are building up
more and more resistance to this one kind of cancer in
mice.
We have also experimented with leukosis in chickens,
what we call leukemia in people. There we get a significant drop just by
feeding. The only variable is the fact that one part of the field has the sea
solids on it, the other has ordinary fertilizer. The crops are harvested the
same day, everything is ground the same day to prevent the loss of vitamins, and
so forth. In other words, the only variable that we know of is this sea solid.
In leukosis or leukemia in chickens, we have again shown a nice response, a nice
resistance built up in the chicken to this kind of cancer, cancer of the white
blood cells.
Sarcoma in chickens is another kind of cancer
that kills very rapidly. If you inject the chicken with sarcoma, it will kill
them in five days. We have not achieved any results at all using so-called Rous
sarcoma chickens. I don’t know why. We’ve fed our chickens two weeks before we
gave them the sarcoma, give them the sarcoma, and they’d all be dead within five
days. We feed them the regular food, give them the sarcoma, and they’d all be
dead within five days. We haven’t done one thing for them that we know of, but
we still want to carry on, of course. And we will continue with this type of
experimentation.
We have experimented with arthritis in
rats. Now you probably know rheumatoid arthritis — I’m not saying that we can do
this in human beings yet because we haven’t but I can say that arthritis in rats
can be cured. We can not only cure the animal if he’s got some of his tissue
left in the joint, but we can also prevent arthritis in rats that are bred to
get the disease. Just by feeding. Just by feeding. So you see what a tremendous
thing proper nutrition is. I just think the farmers are the greatest. They are
really the beginning of preventive medicine. The farm soil — that’s where it
starts; that’s what it’s all about.
We have fed
other animals — pigs, cattle, etc. — food grown on sea solids. Let me tell you
about a cow. I can’t understand it, but if you grow green corn — with the sea
solids and without — and cut it and toss it over the field for the cow to eat,
they can nuzzle through a whole bunch of corn and invariably pick out the one
that’s grown on the sea solids. Why? I don’t know. But they do the same if you
grow grass or anything like that. They always choose the one that’s grown on the
sea solids, with the sea solid fertilizer. I don’t know what sense they use, but
they know how to get it. And they always
do.
You may have heard that a gray horse
always dies of a cancer but a black one never does. Interesting. But no one
really knows why this is. In addition, the grayer the horse is, the faster he
dies — the younger he dies of cancer, a certain kind, called melanotic melanoma.
It’s a pigment producing cancer that can arise in a human being from a birthmark
or a mole. That’s the kind of a cancer a gray horse gets, but a black one never
does.
In analyzing their blood, you do indeed find that
there are minute, very minute differences in the amount of manganese that the
gray and the black horse have, which could explain this business of why one gets
cancer and the other doesn’t at all.
We do know that when
we get gray hair, it’s not because our hair turns to silver. It’s because it
loses silver. Gray hair has less silver and less manganese in it than “normal”
colored hair. We know that aging does produce chemical changes in our body, and
that brings me to what really interests us in our overall
experiment.
We’ve got some experiments going using 8,000
acres of land. Hopefully we’re going to increase that to around 25,000 acres
using sea solids. If we do, we’re going to divide a children’s home containing
1,000 kids. We’re going to start feeding half of them sea solid foods and half
regular and run a longitudinal study on these kids to see what change we can
produce — number of colds, weight gain, IQ, etc. We have done some superficial
experiments with animals in which we’ve seen a small increase in intelligence.
You may know that by injecting DNA, this chemical in the nucleus of an animal,
you can educate an animal. You can also extract this education and give it by
injection to another animal. We’re just starting that kind of
work.
Now as you probably know, if I take a piece of my
tissue and put it in tissue culture, I can grow it, and it will divide 50 times.
In other words, one cell will produce two, two will produce four, etc.
Regardless of what we’ve tried, we have not been able to cause more than 50
reproductions of cells. The number of reproductions varies with different kinds
of animals: a mouse, 17; a rat, 23; human being, 50; and so forth. It seems
strange that this happens on land but doesn’t happen in the sea. You take a
sperm whale that’s 60 to 100 years of age, but this whale’s cells will keep
right on multiplying. Seals, all warm-blooded animals in the sea will do this.
All cold-blooded animals that we’ve tested in the sea do
so.
Take a sea trout, for instance, which never gets
cancer. If you take his tissue and put it in tissue culture, it just keeps
dividing and dividing. On the other hand, with freshwater trout in Minnesota,
Wisconsin, etc. — as many as 60 percent of them have cancer of the liver — in
tissue culture medium, their tissue stops dividing at 23 to 27 times. His first
cousin in the sea never stops. So far we’ve found that the tissues of sea
animals, both warm- and cold-blooded, never stop multiplying in tissue culture.
No cancer has ever been found in the sea — yet.
Their
relatives on land, of course, have cancer very often. This is true of all
so-called infectious diseases by virus, bacteria and fungi. It is for that
reason that we have carried on this research. We’re continuing to do so.
