Narendra Modi wants to send Indians to space by 2022 but Hindu nationalists have bizarre ideas about science
- From prehistoric plastic surgery to the dismissal of evolution, all sorts of unscientific claims have been made in an effort to evoke cultural pride
Isaac Newton did not understand gravity. Albert Einstein misled the world. And India pioneered the science behind test-tube babies thousands of years ago.
These were some of the wilder theories on offer at a major Indian science conference held at the weekend and inaugurated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. To open the Indian Science Congress, Modi spoke of India’s ambition to send three people to space by 2022.
But the lecture that made the most headlines was an attempt to link ancient Indian mythology to present-day science, the latest incident in which Hindu nationalists have cited age-old religious texts as proof of prior scientific advances.
Gollapalli Nageswara Rao, vice chancellor of Andhra University, delivered an address in which he referred to a tale in the Sanskrit epic the Mahabharata in which one woman bears 100 children.
This was possible thanks to stem cell technology and in vitro fertilisation, Rao said. “Even today, many people don’t understand what stem cell is,” he said. “But thousands of years ago we had this technology.”