Suppressed Inventions and Other Discoveries (26 page)

microbiologists. On 10 August 1989, as prestigious scientific journal, Nature (United "High Abundance of Viruses Found in Aquatic Bergh and colleagues at the University of Bergen, it natural unpolluted waters, hitherto considered to have

Naessens, would be the difference between them and viruses, a long debate about the animate or inanimate nature of which has been going on for years? There was something, was there not, about the somatid that related to its nonreliance and nondependence upon any surrounding milieu needed by the virus, if it were to thrive.

"Yes," agreed Francoise, "to continue its existence, the virus needs a supportive milieu, say, an artificially created test-tube culture, or something natural, like an egg. If the virus needs this kind of support for growth, either in vivo or in vitro—a 'helping hand,' as it were—the somatid is able to live autonomously, either in a 'living body,' or 'glassenclosed.' This has something to do with the fact that, while the virus is a particle of DNA, a piece of it, the somatid, as we've already said, is a 'precursor' of DNA, something that leads to its creation."

To try to get to the bottom of this seemingly revolutionary pronouncement, I later asked Francoise to set down on paper some further exposition of it. She wrote:

We have come to the conclusion that the somatid is no less than what could be termed a "concretization of energy." One could say that this particle, one that is process, possesses isms, animal or vegetal. Underlying that conclusion is our finding that, in the absence of the normal three-stage cycle, no cellular division can occur! Why not? Because it is the normal cycle that produces a special growth hormone that permits such division. We believe that hormone to be closely related, if not identical, to the one discovered years ago by the French Nobel Laureate Alexis Carrel, who called it a trephone. "initially differentiated," or materialized in the life genetic properties transmissible to living organ

The best experimental proof backing up this astounding disclosure, Francoise went on, begins with a cube of fresh meat no different from those impaled on shish kebab skewers. After being injected with somatids taken from an in vitro culture, the meat cube is placed in a sealed vessel in which a vacuum is created. With the cube now protected from any contamination from the ambient atmosphere, and anything that atmosphere might contain that could act to putrefy the meat, the vessel is subsequently exposed during the day to natural light by setting it, for instance, next to a window.

Harbouring the living, indestructible somatids as it does, the meat cube in the vessel will, thenceforth, not rot, as it surely would have rotted had it not received the injection. Retaining its healthy-looking colour, it not only remains as fresh as when inserted into the vessel, but progressively increases in size, that is, it continues to grow, just as if it were part of a living organism.

Could a meat cube, animated by somatids, if somehow also electrical ly stimulated, keep on growing to revive the steer or hog from which it had been cut out? The thought flashed inanely through my mind. Maybe there was something electrical about the somatid? Before I could ask that question of her, Francoise seemed to have already anticipated it.

"The 'tiny bodies' discovered by Naessens," she went on, "are fundamentally electrical in nature. In a liquid milieu, such as blood plasma, one can observe their electrical charge and its effects. For the nuclei of these particles are positively charged, while the membranes, coating their exteriors, are negatively charged. Thus, when they come near one another, they are automatically mutually repulsed just as if they were the negative poles of two bar magnets that resist any manual attempt to hold them together."

"Well," I asked, "isn't that the same as for cells, whose nuclei and membranes are, respectively, considered to have plus, and minus, electrical charges?"

"Certainly," she replied, "with the difference that, in the case of the somatids, the energetic release is very much larger. Somatids are actually tiny living condensers of energy, the smallest ever found."

I was thunderstruck. What, I mused, would the great Hungarian scientist Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, winner of the Nobel prize for his discovery of ascorbic acid (vitamin C) and many other awards, have had to say had he, before his recent death, been aware of Naessens's discoveries? For it was Szent-Gyorgyi who, abandoning early attempts to get at the "secret of life" at the level of the molecule, had predicted, prior to World War II, when still living and working in Hungary, that such a secret would eventually be discovered at the level of the electron, or other electrically related atomic particles!*

Probing further into the world of the somatid and its link to life's basis and hereditary characteristics, I asked Francoise if Naessens had done any experiments to show how somatids might produce genetic effects on living organisms.

"I'll tell you, now, about one experiment we have repeated many times," she answered, "whose results are hard for any orthodox biologist to swallow. Before describing it, let me add that it is our belief—as it was also Antoine Bechamp's—that each of our bodily organs possesses somatids of varying, as yet indescribable, natures that are specific to it alone. But the whole ensemble, the 'family' of these varying forms, collectively circulates, either in the circulatory or the lymph system. On the basis of this experiment, we hold that, as a group, they contain the hereditary characteristics of each and every individual being."

* For mora recent discoveries relating to the electrical basis for life, readers are also referred to
two fascinating books by Dr. Robert O0. Secker, The Body Electric (New York: Quill, W i l l i a m Morrow, 1985) and Cross Currents (Los Angeles: J.P. Tarcher, 1990).

As described by Francoise, the experiment begins by extracting somatids from the blood of a rabbit with white fur. A solution containing them is then injected, at a dose of one cubic centimetre per day, into the bloodstream of a rabbit with black fur, for a period of two weeks running. Within approximately one month, the fur of the black rabbit begins to turn a grayish color, half of the hairs of which it is composed having turned white. In a reverse process, the fur of a white rabbit, injected with somatids from a black one, also begins to turn gray.

Astonishing as this result, with its "genetic engineering" implications, might be, the effect of such "somatid transfer" from one organism to another also, said Francoise, produces another result offering great insight into the role played by the somatid in the immunological system. "When a patch of skin," she continued, "is cut from the white rabbit and grafted onto the empty space left after cutting a patch of similar size from the black rabbit, the graft shows none of the signs of rejection that normally take place in the absence of somatid transfer." What this might bode for the whole technique of organ transplant, attempts at which have been bedeviled by the "rejection syndrome," we shall let readers—especially medically trained readers—ponder.

GASTON NAESSENS: LIFE AND WORK

Is it not living in a continual mistake to look upon diseases, as we do now, as separate entities, which must exist, like cats and dogs, instead of looking at them as conditions, like a dirty and a clean condition, and just as much under our control; or rather as the reactions of a kindly nature, against the conditions in which we have placed ourselves?
Florence Nightingale, 1860
(seventeen years before Pasteur announced his germ theory), cited in Pasteur: The Germ Theory Exploded by R. B. Pearson

Even a single discovery as striking as those made by Naessens in five interlinked areas could, by itself, justifiably be held remarkable. That Naessens was able to make all five discoveries, each in what can be termed its own discipline, might seem to be a feat taken from the annals of science fiction.

And that is exactly the point of view adopted by the medical authorities of the province of Quebec. Worse still, those same authorities have branded Naessens an out-and-out charlatan, calling his camphor-derived 714-X product fraudulent and the whole of his theory about the origin of degenerative disease and the practice of its treatment, not to add the rest of his "New Biology," no more th a n "quackery."

Spearheading the attack was Augustin Roy, a doctor of medicine, but one who—like Morris Fishbein, M.D., for many years "Tsar" of the American Medical Association—actually practiced medicine for only a brief period of his life.

How did a researcher such as Gaston Naessens, endowed with genius, come to land in so dire a situation? Let us briefly review some of the story of his life and work, about which, during repeated trips to Quebec from the United States, I came to learn more and more.

Gaston Naessens was born 16 March 1924, in Roubaix, in northern France, near the provincial capital of Lille, the youngest child of a banker who died when his son was only eleven years old. In very early childhood, Gaston was already showing precocity as an inventor. At the age of five, he built a little moving automobile-type vehicle out of a "Mechano" set and powered it with a spring from an old alarm clock.

Continuing to exhibit unusual manual dexterity, a few years later Gaston constructed his own home-built motorcycle, then went on to fashion a mini airplane large enough to carry him aloft. It never flew, for his mother, worried he would come to grief, secretly burned it on the eve of its destined takeoff.

After graduation from the College Universitaire de Marcen Baroeul, a leading prep school, Gaston began an intensive course in physics, chemistry, and biology at the University of Lille. When France was attacked and occupied by Nazi forces during World War II, young Gaston, together with other fellow students, was evacuated to southern France. In exile near Nice, he had the highly unusual opportunity to receive the equivalent of a full university education at the hands of professors also displaced from Lille.

By the war's end, Naessens had been awarded a rare diploma from the Union Nationale Scientifique Francaise, the quasi-official institution under whose roof the displaced students pursued their intensive curriculum. Unfortunately, in an oversight that has cost him dearly over the years, Naessens did not bother to seek an "equivalence" from the new republican government set up by General Charles de Gaulle. He thus, ever since, has been accused of never having received an academic diploma of any kind.

Inspired by his teachers, and of singular innovative bent, Gaston, eschewing further formal education—"bagage universitaire" [academic baggage] as he calls it—set forth on his own to develop his microscope and begin his research into the nature of disease. In this determination, he was blessed by having what in French is called a jeunesse doree, or gilded childhood—"born with a silver spoon in his mouth," as the English equivalent has it. His mother afforded him all that was needed to equip his own postwar laboratory at the parental home.

His disillusion in working in an ordinary laboratory for blood analysis spurred Gaston into deciding to go freelance as a researcher. Even his mother was worried about Gaston's unorthodox leanings. She clearly understood that her son was unhappy with all he had read and been taught. As he was to put it: "She told me what any mother would tell her son: 'It's not you who will make any earth-shaking discoveries, for there have been many, many researchers working along the same lines for decades.' But she never discouraged me, never prevented me from following my own course, and she helped me generously, financially speaking."

Gaston Naessens knew that there was something in the blood that eluded definition. It had been described in the literature as crasse sanguine (dross [waste products] in the blood) and Naessens had been able to descry it, if only in a blurry way, in the microscopic instruments up to then available to him. What was needed was a brand new microscope, one that could see "farther." He thought he knew how to build one and, at twentyone, he determined to set about doing so.

In the design of the instrument that would open a vista onto a new biological world, Naessens was able to enjoin the technical assistance of German artisans in the village of Wetzlar, in Germany, where the wellknown German optical company Leitz had been located before the war. The artisans were particularly helpful in checking Naessens's original ideas on the arrangement of lenses and mirrors. The electronic manipulation of the light source itself, however, was entirely of Gaston's own private devising. When all aspects of the problem seemed to have been solved, Naessens was able to get the body of his new instrument constructed by Barbier-Bernard et Turenne, technical specialists and military contractors near Paris.

Readers may fairly ask why Naessens's "Twenty-first-century" instrument, which has been called a "somatoscope" due to its ability to reveal the somatid, has never been patented and manufactured for wide use. To understand the difficulty, we should "fast forward" to 1964, the year Naessens arrived in Canada. Hardly having found his footing on Canadian soil, he received a handwritten letter, dated 3 May, from one of the province's most distinguished physicists, Antoine Aumont, who worked in the Division for Industrial Hygiene of the Quebec Ministry of Health.

Aumont, who had read about Naessens's special microscope in the press, had taken the initiative of visiting Naessens in his small apartment in Duvernay, near Montreal, to see, and see through, the instrument with his own eyes. Aumont wrote:

Many thanks for having accorded me an interview that impressed me far more than I can possibly describe.

I have explained to you why my personal opinions must not be considered as official declarations. But, after thinking over all that you showed, and told me, during my recent visit, I have come to unequivocal conclusions on the physical value of the instrumentation you are using to pursue your research.

As I told you, if my knowledge of physics and mathematics can be of service to you, I would be very glad to put them at your disposition.

It can be deduced that Aumont's enthusiasm for what he had seen caused a stir in the Quebec Ministry of Health, for on 17 July, Naessens received an official letter from that office stating that the minister was eager to have his microscope "officially examined" if its inventor would "furnish in writing details concerning this apparatus, including all its optical, and other, particularities, as well as its powers of magnification, so that experts to be named by the minister can evaluate its unique properties."