Nexus - 0207 - New Times Magazine-pages

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questions." But, as clearly 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* 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. 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 ] 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." 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, Enk Enby M.D. 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. That single conclusion completely overturned everything I had learned about bacteriology and disease during a four year course in 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** 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 seerned to have vanished from the surface of the earth. The story of my fruitless search has been told elsewhere,’ so here, | will simply say that my library research showed that for several decades up to 1930, a now all but forgotten, if not entirely lost, schoo] of microbiologists 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 physician, Emst 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. lt would be an assumption to think so." The furor unleashed in the microbiological world by Rife's microscopic discoveries, as well as by his subsequent electromagnetically-based cure for cancer and other diseases, led to his 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.” 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 bio- sciences 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 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 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”.*° All this and more, raises the question as to whether Naessens, in addition to everything else he has done, including the development of a NEXUS#33 APRIL-MAY 1992 THIRD STEPS ON THE TRAIL: GASTON NAESSENS AND THE SOMATID