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To these heretofore unrecognized elementary stages of life, he gave the name: Bions.' 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." resistance to putrefaction. It is at this juncture that I shall ask a leading question thal only came to my mind many years after I had, via Reich, begun to delve into pleomorphic bacteriology and its connection with cancer and other degenerative diseases. | 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 signal” 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 ina New York City incinerator. That order was carried out less than 20 years after the Nazi government in Germany had ordered all of Reich's then existing publications burned on an enormous pyre in downtown Berlin.” MICROSCOPE For many reasons, our biography was never written.“ 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. 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 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 | went along my trail, | also found that there were many other “were nots" 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 mini-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. Sanh APRIL-MAY 1992 32¢NEXUS SECOND STEPS ON THE TRAIL: ROYAL RAYMOND RIFE AND THE "UNIVERSAL"