Part~2
Pasteur or Bechamp? Pleomorphic Organisms
Part~1
Introduction by Ivor Hughes
The article which follows is an indictment of a blinkered Scientific
Community. Shades of the phlogiston
theory ! We need another
Lavoiser, but this time to sanitize (pasteurize) biology
and it's offspring.
The implications of the article are such, that it is highly unlikely that
any kind of debate will take place. If Bechamp and those that followed up on
his research, are correct, then one of the greatest medical disasters
of all time will stand revealed.
I refer of course to the Vaccination policy which is in place around the
globe. If Pleomorphic organisms are a reality, and not the figment of a
fevered imagination. We have an explanation, as to why millions of people
have immune deficiency symptoms. It will also explain, why an annually
increasing number of our children are being born with genetic and allergy
problems. It will also explain the great tide of disease which is flooding
the Western system of medicine.
When human beings are born with, or acquire an allergy to their environment,
then that is unnatural. I refer of course to such substances as pollen,
dander and animal hair, etc. It will also be understood that our food chain
is also heavily contaminated with man made noxious chemicals, all of which
place an intolerable strain upon our already overworked immune systems
Many of those people that work in the life sciences are aware that we have a
serious problem. But they like most of us have families to raise and
mortgages to pay. To raise their voice in protest is to commit
economic Hara-kiri, it is difficult to eat ones principles, although I
suspect, they may be more nourishing than our chemically produced food.
The response of powerful vested interest, in the form of the
Pharmaceutical/Chemical industry and the institutionalized organs of the
medical profession, has been to pour millions of dollars into political
lobby groups and to suborn the media with fat advertising budgets. The
thrust of that subversion has been to blame the victims, in order to justify
the next money making wheeze. One may clearly see that they make billions of
dollars by providing the fix to fix the fix that went wrong. We need our
heritage in the form of our medicinal herbs to start us back on the slow
road to holistic health.
TO BE OR
NOT TO BE?
150 Years of Hidden Knowledge
by Christopher Bird 1991
Nexus Magazine April 1992
THE
MYSTERY OF PLEOMORPHIC MICROBIAL ORGANISMS
"At the heart of science lies discovery which
involves a change in worldview. Discovery in science is possible only in
societies which accord their citizens the freedom to pursue the truth where
it may lead and which therefore have respect for different paths to that
truth,"
John Polanyi, Canadian Nobel Laureate (Chemistry); commencement address,
McGill University, Montreal, Canada, June 1990
What
follows is an attempt to provide a brief overview of astounding findings
made by a band of intrepid and heretical searchers in a field of knowledge
that deals with the very smallest forms of life.
Hard as it is to believe, these findings, made over more than a century ago,
have been consistently ignored, censored by silence, or suppressed
throughout all of that time by ruling "opinion-makers", orthodox (R1)
thinkers in mainstream microbiology.
Instead of being welcomed with excitement and open arms, as one would a
friend or lover, the amazing discoveries have been received with a hostility
unusually only meted out to trespassers or imposters.
To try to present the vastness of a multi-dimensional panorama, is a little
like trying to inscribe the contents of thick manuscript onto a postage
stamp, or reduce the production of an hour-long drama into a few minutes of
stage time.
Involved on the one hand is not only the sheer volume of material, but with
books on the subject being hard to obtain, it is also not easily accessible
and is sparsely referenced in ordinary bibliographical sources.
On the other hand, the protagonists in what amounts to a gripping saga were,
more often than not, completely isolated from one another in space, time or
both. They, and their parallel work and research, were consequently often
unknown to their potential colleagues and natural allies. It was as if they
were adventurers who, thinking themselves to be the sole explorers in virgin
territory, were actually all opening up various parts of the same
terra incognita.
Furthermore, as we have already said, the reports of the discovery of a
whole "New World" by these many "Columbus's" were unwelcome, "Old World"
cartographers had already made their maps and were satisfied with them.
Therefore, since maps of this territory are sketchy at best, or nonexistent
at worst, outsiders seeking to penetrate it should remember the Buddhist
saying: "The only trails are those that are made by walking" And the ones
upon which they set foot will be not so much selected by intention as
stumbled upon by chance.
It is for such reasons that, when I thought about how I might approach this
subject today, I decided to eschew the formality of any academic approach in
favour of telling the tale of my own foray into the little known land of Pleomorphic
organisms as it actually unfolded. Unlike other speakers at this
symposium, I am neither a scientist, an academic or a health professional,
but a writer who, for some 20 years, has roved the "frontiers" of science.
I am certain that if any of you have been propelled by some similarly
strange twist of fate to go on the same quest, you have taken a different
trail from mine. Yet, as they say, "all roads finally lead to Rome."
FIRST
STEPS ON THE TRAIL: WILHELM REICH AND THE BIONS
My first exposure to the world of Pleomorphic organisms - though I did not recognise it at the time - came in 1969 when,
after returning to the United States from a stint as a foreign
correspondent, I was asked by Peter Tompkins, an established author, to help
him research a biography on the life and work of a "maverick" scientist, the
late Wilhelm Reich M.D.
If "maverickness" is a quality attributable to innovators unafraid of
developing new ideas and inventions - and often unscorched by the brand of
any formal education into the subjects of their research - then that term
suits Reich to a "T'.
After first making his mark in psychoanalysis as Freud's prot�g� and leading
collaborator, he abruptly broke with the International Psychoanalytic
Movement to take up an independent career in an aspect of what today has
come to be called biophysics. When he bolted the Freudian "herd" in the
mid-1930's, most of his colleagues became his bitter enemies.
Exiled from central Europe to Norway, he began working with an unusual
microscope equipped with special lenses that could magnify living organisms
to 2 - 3000X their normal size, well over twice the magnification achievable
with the ordinary microscopes of his day.
Among his extraordinary discoveries were "vesicles," minuscule fluid
containing bladder-like sacs, that appeared in infusions of hay and other
substances such as animal tissue, earth and coal.
After much experimentation during which he noted a marked increase in the
number of vesicles that could be cultured when the preparations containing
them were boiled, he concluded that the strange forms he had discovered were
"transitional" one lying midway between the realms of the animate and the
inert.
To these heretofore unrecognized elementary stages of life, he gave the
name: Bions.(1)
Most microbiologists, not to speak of other life-scientists, undoubtedly
looked upon Reich's new creatures as if they had come straight out of Walt
Disney's old film, Fantasia. If so, they were in for an even ruder shock.
For when Reich poured some of his boiled preparations onto nutrient culture
media, the cultures began to generate peculiar looking bacteria and amoebae,
creating, as it were, well-known life-forms, at least forms akin to them.
There was, of course, the possibility that the newly generated "animacules"
- as Leuwenhock, inventor of the microscope called them when he first viewed
them - could have invaded the cultures from the ambient atmosphere or that
they could have appeared because the culture media had been improperly
sterilized. To rule these out, Reich superheated his bion cultures to find
that the ostensibly "dead" mixtures still gave rise to the higher microbic
forms.
This led to the further conclusion that bions, as preliminary stages of
life, were embodiments of an indestructible life force that defied death.
This life energy he called "Orgone."
So apparently outlandish a discovery as that of a new "life energy" could
not but rile biologists who had long sought to dispose of "vitalistic
theories" such as those of the French philosopher, Henri Bergson, who
postulated an elan vital, or the German biologist, Hans Driesch, who,
borrowing the term from Aristotle, referred to entelechy. Biology was coming
increasingly under the cold sway of a physics which adamantly rejected any
"mystical" notions such as those of a "primal creator" or a "force of life",
and therefore dutifully took its cue from the branch of science considered
"first among peers."
Were all his disclosures not already so heretical as to alarm orthodox, or
"correct opinion-making" science, to them Reich next added that microbial
bion structures could also be detected in, and cultured from human blood,
which, then as now, was and is considered to be sterile, an unchanging
doctrine still taught in medical schools.
This, in turn, next led him to examine blood samples taken from persons
suffering from cancer in which he saw extremely tiny bacterial forms that he
connected to that lethal disease process. He therefore labelled them T
- bacilli, the T standing for
Tod which in Reich's
native German means "death."
It seemed to Reich that there was something unaccountable going on in the
bodies of the cancer-afflicted, a degeneration causing healthy
life-promoting bions to develop into a death-dealing T-bacilli. Since he had
also found these "death bacteria" in the excreta of healthy people, he
assumed that they were able to dispose of cancer causing particles, and that
disposition to cancer was determined by a level of biological resistance to
putrefaction.
It is at this juncture that I shall ask a leading question that only came
into my mind many years after I had, via Reich, begun to delve into Pleomorphic
bacteriology and its connection with cancer and other
degenerative diseases. I ask it because I later found that researchers
working in this pioneering field who discovered microbes associated with
cancerous states - to which each gave his or her own special nomenclature,
thus creating a kind of "Tower of Babel" - instead of looking upon the
appearance of the alien forms as an "alarm signs" or "warning light", that
is an indicator of an incipient disease
state, held them to be the cause of the disease.
The question, a central one in this discussion, therefore is: "Could germs
appearing in the body be the result rather than the cause of afflictions, if
not always, at least often?" It may be that they are both.
Reich's life ended tragically. For his pains, he was submitted anew to
viciously virulent attacks for questioning sacred dogmas of medical science
in general and cancerology in particular. The story of this towering, often
cantankerous, scientist ended when he was brought to trial and sentenced to
a term in a U.S. Federal penitentiary where, in 1964, he died.
The government of our American free republic also ordered that all of
Reich's publication on which they could lay their hands - including a
privately printed journal, Journal of Orgonomy - be destroyed
in a New York City incinerator. That order was carried out less than 20
years after the Nani government in Germany had ordered all of Reich's then
existing publications burned on an enormous pyre in downtown Berlin.(R3)
SECOND STEPS
ON THE TRAIL: ROYAL RAYMOND RIFE AND THE "UNIVERSAL" MICROSCOPE
For many reasons, our biography was never written (R4). Yet the two years
spent researching it was hardly wasted, because it was through the
opportunity given to delve into Reich's fascinating research that I first
fell, like Alice down the hole or through the looking glass, into a
wonderland of scientific "no-no's."
In many ways it was a thrilling, yet troubling experience. Disturbing
because, as one long trained to accept things as they supposedly "were", I
was brought face to face with an investigative world in which those same
things actually "were not". As I went along my trail, I also found that
there were many other "were note" and "are nots" that
were and
are!
One question was especially rankling: What was preventing new discoveries
from being recognised for what they were? Was this because "established"
researchers, comfortable with orthodox scientific thinking, or "received
knowledge", could not change their mind-sets, in Dr. John Polanyi's words,
their "worldview" to accommodate innovative thinking, or "vanguard
knowledge?"
How was it that, in the precincts ruled by the "arbiters of knowledge", the
evidencing of "unknown" things, instead of being viewed with excitement, was
often castigated as "illusory" or tabooed as "fantasy"?
In 1965, I came across an article that more than just attracted my writer's
attention in that, in 1944, it was published in, not just one, but two
prestigious journals, that of the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C.
and that of the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia.
One third of its contents was devoted to the new electron microscope just
put on the market by the Radio Corporation of America, the other two thirds,
the lion's share, to a "Universal Microscope" that had been designed and
developed in the 1920's by a Californian autodidact, Royal Raymond Rife.
The electron microscope, I knew, while capable of attaining magnifications
surpassing 500,000X at excellent resolution, was incapable of examining
living things because its radiation killed them.
But, as dearly stated in the article, Rife's instrument was able to view
living matter at unheard of magnifications reaching at least 60,000X, also
at excellent resolution (R5).
With this extraordinary device, Rife could easily view a family of microbes
in the blood of sick people which seemingly miraculously transformed, under
various conditions, one into the other, like so many caterpillars
metamorphising into so many butterflies. Sixteen stages in all, the same
number in Gaston Naessens' somatid cycle.
As a result, he came to the independent conclusion - to which as we shall
see, others had come independently both before and after him -that,
depending on its inner state, germs arose within the the body itself that,
in Rife's opinion, were not the cause but the result of disease
states.
That single conclusion completely overturned everything I had learned about
bacteriology and disease during a four year course at general biology at
Harvard.
Barely able to believe what I had read, and recalling what I had learned
during my studies of Reich's bion research, I dropped a book (R6) I was
working on to spend two months at the National Library of Medicine trying to
track down everything I could on Rife and his superscope. Not only was there
precious little printed on the subject but the microscope itself seemed to
have vanished from the surface of the earth.
The story of my fruitless search has been told elsewhere (3), so here, I
will simply say that my library research showed that for several decades up
to 1930, a now all but forgotten, if not entirely lost, school of
microliologists had maintained that, far from holding everlastingly to one
shape, bacteria could be caused, under the right conditions of culture, to
metamorphose into forms small enough to pass through filters capable of
blocking any microbe smaller than a virus.
Because of their sharp disagreement with a camp of orthodox bacteriologists
known as non-filtrationists", these rebels were known as "filtrationists".
One of the earliest members of this school was a Swedish Ernst Bernhard
Almquist, who, because he was also an Arctic explorer had islands off the
north Siberian coast named after him.
Almquist made hundreds of observations of pleomorphic bacteria in his
laboratory as did researchers in France, Italy, Germany, Russia and the
United States and probably other countries. In 1922, after two long decades
of work, Almquist came to the conclusion that "nobody can presume to know
the complete life cycle and all the varieties of even a single bacterial
species. It would be an assumption to think so."
The furor unleashed in the microbiological world microscopic discoveries, as
well as by his subsequent electromagnetically-based cure for cancer and
other diseases, being put, like Reich, to trial by U.S. medical authorities.
The trial proved so traumatic to the highly sensitive inventor that it led,
first to a total nervous breakdown, then to alcoholism (R7).
The opposite fates of two microscopes, the electron and the "Universal",
have ever since continued to plague my mind, incessantly pricking it with a
philosophical question: How was it that the first, able to see only inert,
inanimate matter was universally adopted in the world's laboratories while
the second, able to view animate organism as they lived and breathed, went
into universal limbo?
What did the triumphant success of the one, and the sad demise of the other,
have to say about the basic 20th century outlook in the biosciences
supposedly dealing with life?
While asking that question, let us add a few more. What is it about the
"politics of science" that led two scientific titans - or three, if, by
anticipation, we include our host, Gaston Naessens - men who were
self-trained experts in microscopy, and cancerology, to be brought to trial?
How is it that the discoveries of all three have been put on an "Index" as
bogus and worthless? What explains their being denounced, all three of them,
as deceivers and charlatans in the United States, France and many other
countries?
It would take a moment of silence to contemplate the answer to these
questions." (R8)
THIRD STEPS
ON THE TRAIL: GASTON NAESSENS AND THE SOMATID
From where it had first led to Reich, thence to Rife, my trail next took me,
surprisingly enough, to Rock Forest, a small village in that portion of
Quebec, just north of Vermont, that is called
L'Estrie in French, and The Eastern Townships in
English.
I was tipped off to the existence of Gaston Naessens by Eva Reich M.D.,
Wilhelm Reich's daughter. Since part of the story of my initial meeting, and
12-year association, with him has been told in the first chapter of my book,
I shall not repeat it here.
What I can, and should say, is that if my studies of Reich's research had
opened a narrow vista onto the world of pleomorphic microbiology, and those
of Reich's work had greatly widened it, then what I came to learn as result
of my encounters with Naessens began to afford me a view of the whole
horizon beyond it.
My first visit to see Gaston Naessens was in 1979, ten years after a
footlocker of Reich's writings had been handed to me by Peter Tompkins for
study. During the next half decade I was to learn, through my own
experience, the help of friends and particularly through hundreds of hours
spent with Gaston Naessens and his wife, a great deal more about what he has
discovered in his fascinating research life than is reported in my book. And
to learn about the many vicissitudes he has gone through as a result.
As time went by, one of the main things that became most shockingly clear to
me was the unwillingness, or the inability of many scientifically trained
people to accept or believe what they were seeing through Naessens'
microscope.
Instead of heralding the somatidic forms as excitingly brand new, they
simply wrote them off as artifact, something not naturally present but
introduced in error." (R9).
A whole essay could be written about how such beliefs spring, within
seconds, into the minds of so called "competent" observers the most
authoritarian of whom pass along as "certainties" to their followers. All
such observers - and they are the vast majority - have, if they have ever
heard it, forgotten Reich's dictum for scientific work: "Do not
automatically believe in anything , especially what you are told. Convince
yourself of something by observing it with your own eyes. And, after having
perceived a new fact, do not loose site of it again until it is
fully explained" (emphasis added)
If, in this connection, it appears that the aphorism, "seeing is believing",
does not necessarily hold true, one may add that the same is the case for
the reverse: "believing is seeing".
During one trip to Europe with the Naessens' in the mid 1980s, we were
privileged to meet a Swedish physician, Erik Enby MD. who had experience
working with what I learned was one of the earliest, and most talented,
pioneers in the field of pleomorphic microbial research.
This was a German zoologist of whom we shall say more of in a few moments.
It was because of the language barrier - Enby's spoken English was halting
and Enderlein's publications were in German, a language I neither speak nor
read - that I could not subsequently penetrate that part of the
terra incognita where the German scientist had laboured, at least
not until 1990.
The peaks in a mountain chain of discoveries made by Naessens have been
reviewed in part one of my book. In retrospect, given the whole "patchwork
quilt" or other discoveries in this field made by a small platoon of
researches, I would say that his crowning find was to have
traced the whole cycle back to its origin, the tiny form he calls the
somatid and to show how that form not only is all but
indestructible, but through experimentation, how it acts something like a
"DNA precursor" (R10).
All this and more, raises the question as to whether Naessens, in addition
to everything else he has done, including the development of a promising
approach for the alleviation of degenerative disease, has not come as close
as anyone to unravelling the skein within which lies hidden the very mystery
of the origins of life that has for so long continued to confound science,
as it still continues to confound it. I use the qualification "as close as"
because the next twist in my trail was to confront me with the realization
that another French scientist of rare genius might have been unravelling the
same skein a century before Naessens began to take up the task.
