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THE PERSECUTION AND RESISTANCE OF Loic LE RIBAULT THE PERSECUTION AND RESISTANCE Loic RIBAULT French geologist and forensic scientist Loic Le Ribault developed an organic silica treatment for arthritis and many other illnesses but fell out with the medical orthodoxy, the justice system and the pharmaceutical corporations in the process. I shall continue my actions of distributing OSS despite all the opposition. I do it for all those patients for whom I have the opportunity and honour of car - ing, those who were abandoned by modern medicine which was unable to offer them a cure or who found the orthodox treatments offered worse than the illness itself: _ I ain la Dihauilt — Loic Le Ribault oic Le Ribault, France's most renowned forensic scientist’ and specialist in the study of silica, holds court in the dingy surroundings of the Flying Fish pub on the harbour in St Helier, Jersey. With a Gallic shrug and in faltering English, he explains how the pub has become his home and his office. He knows almost everyone in the bar, as he knows the bus drivers, the local shopkeep- ers and many of the harbour's boat owners. He knows them because he has "treated them, for this illness and that illness". "Many of them I have cured with OS5," he says. Sitting in the Flying Fish, drinking bitter and smoking the occasional Gauloise, Le Ribault does not seem like a man who has been hounded out of France because he discov- ered and distributed a treatment for arthritis and a number of other common ailments. In 1985, while working as an independent forensic scientist for the French judiciary, Le Ribault joined forces with a highly acclaimed research chemist, Professor Norbert Duffaut from the University of Bordeaux. Between them, they hoped to develop their common work on organic silica, a substance which they believed to have a wide range of therapeu- tic uses. But after 12 years of work together, Duffaut was dead, poisoned in suspicious circumstances perhaps as a consequence of their work on the new therapy, and Le Ribault himself had suffered two months' solitary confinement in a French prison. Today, Le Ribault is on his own, forced to ground in Jersey, a stateless alien on the run from the French police, his life turned into a desperate adventure. He is paying the price for falling out with the scientific orthodoxy, medical professionals and the French establishment. Loic Le Ribault appears quintessentially French. He is phlegmatic, and when he is not laughing gently and self-deprecatingly his rubbery face deflates with the world-weary sad- ness of a circus clown. His well-worn casual clothes, his white wings of cotton wool hair floating around the bald dome of his head and his lack of fluent English, for which he constantly apologises, make Le Ribault appear wise but forgetful. Listening to him, you have to keep reminding yourself that over the last five years he has lost everything but his mind. EARLY PROMISE IN A GRAIN OF SAND Thirty years ago, still in his twenties, Loic Le Ribault was a precocious young academic, having groundbreaking papers published by the French Academy of Sciences. At twenty-four, in 1971, he discovered a new function for the electron scanning microscope (ESM) which enabled him to discern the history of grains of sand. Previously the electron scanning microscope, capable at that time of 30,000x magnifi- cation, had been used in biology and medicine and no one had imagined that it might be used for looking at rocks. Under the ESM, Le Ribault found that he could discern the entire history of a grain of sand: where and when it had originated, how it had been formed, where and how it had been transported, where it had next lodged, how long it had stayed in that place. by Martin J. Walker © 2004 Posted 24 November 2004 at http://www.communicationagents.com/ emma_holister/2004/1 1/24/ loic_le_ribaults_resistance.htm APRIL — MAY 2005 NEXUS = 19 by Martin J. Walker © 2004 www.nexusmagazine.com