YES….. Ancient civilisations knew more about stem cells than modern humans. Many Hindus would be intimately aware of a ritual that would be performed after childbirth for precisely as a prudent step.

“After delivery, the midwife would take the umbilical cord of the new born child and place a small portion of it in an airtight copper capsule, and this capsule known as a Taviju Raksha would be tied below the waist of the child until he grew up. The remainder of the umbilical cord would be placed in an earthen jar and buried underground. Doesn’t it surprise you that modern civilisation has only just recently figured out that preserving stem cells from a child’s umbilical cord using cryo-freezing is a prudent step?”

The ancients knew far more about medicine than we’re willing believe. Vedic surgeons wrote about plastic surgery, extraction of cataracts, dental surgery, caesarean sections and bone-setting. Surgery known as Shastrakarma in the Vedas was pioneered in the Shushruta Samahita. Shushruta’s path-breaking treatise describes rhinoplasty in which a mutilated nose can be reconstructed through plastic surgery!

The Charaka Samhita authored by Charaka discusses the physiology, etiology, embryology, digestion, metabolism, immunity and even genetics. For example, Charaka knew the factors that determined the sex of a child.

Why it is impossible to believe that the ancients knew of genetic cloning? Think carefully… When Lord Rama fought with Ravana, was he fighting one demon with ten heads or was he actually fighting ten people who had been genetically cloned from Ravana? Visualize Ravana battling Lord Rama, with the latter lopping off the former’s head repeatedly, only to see it replaced by yet another. The genetics wasn’t entirely wrong. It could indeed have been possible that Ravana had succeeded in cloning himself so that the any enemy would have to fight not just one but ten Ravanas.

Even according to the eight chapter of Devi Mahatmya from the Markandeya Puran, there lived a demon by the name of Raktabija. Raktabija means blood seed. The story about Raktabija was that each time a drop of his blood fell to the earth, a new duplicate of himself would emerge. He was eventually killed by Durga. She succeeded in killing him by preventing his blood from reaching the ground. Isn’t this yet another example of our ancient myths telling us about deeper scientific advances?

Our mythology tells us that Brahama took birth from the umbilicus of Vishnu. Was this just imagination or was it indicative of the fact that Vedic people knew of the presence and significance of stem cells in the umbilical cord?

We know that Krishna’s elder brother Balarama was transferred from Devaki’s womb to that of Rohini. How would that have been possible without knowledge of in vitro fertilisation?

In Vishnu Purana it is said that Hari in the form of Brahama was the instrumental cause of creation. It was said that matter was imperceptible and invisible but had been infused with and intrinsic ability to transform, mutate, combine, recombine and permutate into visible substances. There were pluripotential stem cells in the bone marrow and the blood in the umbilical cord and that these stem cells were the ones that were capable of the human body. When Vishnu Purana spoke of ‘Akaasa‘ it was simply referring to the universe’s pluripotential stem substance.