Suppressed Inventions and Other Discoveries (39 page)

Hensel pointed out that animal manure and chemical fertilizers produce a forced, unnaturally rapid growth of large-sized produce which fail to acquire the minerals normally secured during a slower, longer development. The result is the production of demineralized, unbalanced plants,

*Editor'sNote:Rock phosphatefromsomesourcescontainsahighlevelofthetoxicmineral cadmium.It'swisetopurchaserockphosphatefrom asupplierwho'sabletoprovideananalysis. which are weak and unhealthy, falling prey to disease and insect pests. This explains why, coincident with the increased use of chemical fertilizers, during the past century, insect pests steadily increased. So did cancerous conditions among plants, animals and humans, as shown by Keens, an English soil chemist, who presents statistics to show that the increased use of chemical fertilizers is a major cause of the greater incidence of cancer during that last hundred years.

The modern Organic Farming movement has accepted and propagated one of Hensel's theories—his opposition to chemical fertilizers and recommendation of powdered rocks in their place—but has failed to appreciate his other main doctrine—his opposition to the use of animal excrements as plant foods. In this respect, Hensel, though he lived in the last century, [was] far ahead of the Organic Movement and more modern than the most modern agricultural reformer.

Hensel had a great admirer and disciple in England, one Sampson Morgan, who founded his "Clean Culture" doctrine on Hensel's philosophy of soil and biological regeneration by the avoidance of chemical or animal fertilizers. While Hensel was more of a theorist, Morgan was a practical farmer and agricultural experimenter, who proved the truth of Hensel's theories by winning the first prize at all agricultural exhibits at which his super-sized, super-quality, fertilized fruits and vegetables were Clean Culture, Morgan's views are presented. In reality they are Hensel's doctrines transplanted to English soil. The reading of Morgan's book will be a valuable supplement to [the reading] of this, to give one a thorough understanding of the subject of Natural Agriculture (i.e., a system of soil culture definitely in advance of Organic Gardening by the compost method).

Practical experience with Hensel's Stone Meal and his non-animal method of soil regeneration, has proven the following:

disease- and blight-free rock-dust displayed. In Sampson Morgan's

1. That Stone Meal creates healthier, tastier, more vitaminized and mineralized foods.

2. That Stone Meal creates immunity to insect infestation, worms, fungi and plant diseases of all kinds.

3. That Stone Meal improves the keeping and shipping quality of foods, so that they keep a long time, in contrast to the rapid deterioration of foods given abundant animal manure.

4. That Stone Meal helps plants to resist drought and frost, enabling them to survive when those fed on manure and chemicals perish.
5. That Stone Meal produces larger crops which are more profitable because the farmer is saved the expense of buying chemical fertilizers which are rapidly leached from the soil by rainfall, whereas Stone Meal, being less soluble, is gradually released during the course of years and remain in the soil, being the most economical of fertilizers.

6. That foods raised with Stone Meal are better for human health and the prevention of disease than those grown with chemicals or animal manure.

7. That use of Stone Meal, in place of chemical or animal fertilizers, helps to end the spraying menace (by removing its cause) is proven by the fact that plants and trees grown with Stone Meal are immune to pests and so require no spraying.

Scientist With
an Attitude:
Wilhelm Reich

Jeane Manning

Federal employees worked with a vengeance when instructed to destroy the work of scientist Wilhelm Reich, M.D., at his laboratory in the state of Maine. Their 1956 court injunction said that construction materials in Reich's boxlike "orgone accumulator" could be salvaged, but the workers slashed the Celotex panels into useless junk.

Down the coast in New York, Reich's associates Dr. Michael Silvert and Dr. Victor Sobey were forced to load the literature in the Orgone Institute stock room into a large truck. The freight truck dumped the papers at a Lower Manhattan incinerator, for an FDA-ordered book burning.

The American Civil Liberties Union stepped in when it was too late, with a press release saying that the court order was a violation of free speech because only one of the torched books could be considered [an aid] to promote or explain the controversial orgone accumulator. (Orgone is the name Reich gave to a life force which he discovered to be within and around all living organisms, including the earth.) The civil liberties press release said, in part, "It is a serious challenge to freedom of the press, principles of free thought on which our democratic government is based, for an agency of government to take advantage of such a dragnet injunction to thwart the dissemination of knowledge, however eccentric or unpopular that knowledge may be."

MEDIA LOOKED THE OTHER WAY

No major newspaper used the press release. Furthermore, six scientists and educators sent all major papers in England a letter of protest about the book burning and Reich's sentencing. All the papers remained silent on the topic.

What was the suppression of Reich's scientific work really about? It was apparently about more than j ust (he FDA's responsibility to protect supposedly gullible consumers from spending money on devices which

233

the FDA decreed were useless. Granted, Wilhelm Reich was brought to court because another physician transported Reich's orgone accumulators across state lines in defiance of a federal FDA order. Reich believed the courts had no mandate to judge basic scientific research nor to order him to destroy his life's work, so he returned to his laboratory and continued his writings. As a result of his attitude, he was fined heavily for contempt of court, sentenced to two years and four months, jailed despite his heart condition, and later died in prison just before he was eligible for parole.

So far, the story is comprehensible even though it is tragic. But why do writers even today deflect attention from Reich's most important discoveries related to a cosmic life force—weather control, and the Oranur demonstration of the dangerous effects of atomic radiation? Even academics who present themselves as researchers publish distortions of Reich's ideas. Reich's biographers, W. Edward Mann and Edward Hoffman, point to a 1980 textbook which has sixteen factual errors in two pages on Reich. "Most of them are vicious distortions . . . feeding the notion that Reich was either a quack or a nut."

Other writers, aiming for popular publications, look for ridiculous if not lewd material. Out of the remains of forty years of published opinions, personal correspondence and spontaneous statements from a prolific, courageous freethinker, it is not hard for a skeptic to find a few items which can be presented as amusing. A continual barrage of such ridicule put Reich down in popular history mainly as a psychiatrist and "sex doctor."

The labels do not do justice to Reich. His well-known studies of orgasmic potential (measurements of bio-electric charge correlated with emotions reported by patients) were only a part of the evolution of his work. Each step of his career—from being Sigmund Freud's most promising disciple who worked out how neuroses show up in the human body, to uncovering the pathology of fascism, to discovering entities under the microscope which he claimed were links between the non-living and the living—led him toward wide-ranging findings about the primordial substratum that he called orgone. He found it moving in living organisms and everywhere, saw it pulsating in "bions" under the microscope and glowing in the dark of an orgone accumulator. In the unpolluted oceans and atmosphere the energy could be seen in the blue colour and lively sparkle. It is attracted to water but recoils from certain manmade factors. His later discoveries about the pre-atomic atmospheric substratum, and their implications for health and the environment, dwarfed any of his earlier work which led up to them.

In addition to the question of why detractors still try to diminish Reich, another nagging question remains: Why did the United States government burn his soft cover books and papers wholesale? The fires destroyed piles of copies of twenty books and journals. Crate after crate of his life's work was rounded up wherever it could be found, and hauled away into the furnaces. Decades of scientific journals and publications on politics, psychiatry, education, sociology, sexology, microbiology, meteorology and other disciplines were reduced to ashes.

WHO FELT THREATENED?

Some observers wonder if his free-energy invention played a part in the squashing of his scientific writings and the obliteration of his reputation. Reich claimed that he could power an electric motor with concentrated atmospheric energy. Did economic interests want to crush that possibility?

Or was he correct in seeing the opposition to be more psychological— a gut-level reaction by what he called anti-life "armoured" people who are in denial of his life-affirming discoveries? Did mechanistic-minded people, in positions of power, fear being shown that they and the earth itself and the universe are filled with streamings of a vibrant, pulsating unpredictable life force? Reich's experiments indicated that this living force could actually be measured in terms such as heat or movement, and that it is present in varying degrees depending on sickness or health of the organism. And that this life-giving substratum is bothered by high-voltage power grids and is in effect irritated into a frenzy by unnatural levels of nuclear radioactivity.

A third possibility is that the unprecedented opposition came from the orthodox medical community. The orgone accumulator, central to Reich's legal troubles, was a simple medical-treatment box which concentrated the previously-unknown energy by a certain layering of absorbent organic and reflective inorganic materials. Experiments showed an anomalous rise in temperature inside the box, and even Albert Einstein had experienced this phenomenon under Reich's tutoring. Although Reich himself never claimed that the accumulator cured cancer, patients of a number of physicians reported that they were helped with various conditions by sitting in an accumulator or being treated with a smaller accumulator called a shooter.

The FDA had worked for years on the case before sheriff's officers finally led Reich in handcuffs to a small courthouse in Maine. At his trial for contempt of court, he defended himself but was not allowed to bring testimony about the medical effectiveness of the orgone accumulator nor even to explain "orgone." Myron R. Sharif, Ph.D., later wrote about the trial and said the moment when fundamental issues stood out searingly was when FDA agent Joseph Maguire scornfully referred to Reich's discovery of a primal energy:

They talk about pre-atomic energy! What's that? We've moved way beyond that—we've got A-energy and now we are getting H-energy [the H-bomb].

Sharif and others knew that when atomic bombs were being tested, Reich's orgone experiments would become disturbed. Measurements inside the accumulators would swing strangely, which he said showed a seething reaction in the life-field of the earth after atomic testing.

Apparently sick at heart over what he saw as its tragic outcome, Sharif reported that the trial discussed meaningless secondary issues while it avoided Reich's scientific evidence. Probably the judge and jury were not capable of grasping a radically different world view—new understanding of a universal force—during the short span of time of a court battle.

Reich had plenty of time afterward to reflect on how his life reached such a distressing low point.

REICH IN DANGER

Born in the Ukrainian part of Austria, Reich's interest in biology began on his father's farm, where he lived until the First World War drew him into the Austrian army for three years. He began his formal education by studying law, switching to medicine and then specialising in psychoanalysis. He was one of Sigmund Freud's inner circle in Vienna in the 1920s, seen as Freud's most brilliant pupil and perhaps successor. About the time he became a political activist, he edged away from traditional Freudian methods of psychoanalysis. Revealing the independence of thinking that he kept all his life, he began to develop his own systems of therapy.

He worked in Berlin in the early 1930s. Still resisting Fascism, he had joined the German Communist Party and was a member of a cell block of brave writers and artists. They met in secret while Nazi storm troopers marched the streets. As the decade went on and the Nazis took over Germany, Reich was in increasing danger from Hitler's officers. He had been born of Jewish parents, was a psychiatrist and a Communist—three identities which Hitler hated.

At the same time Reich was studying Fascism and concluding that worsening social situations did not make people swing to the left politically. Instead, he noticed that fear of freedom led people to cling to authority figures who promised a better life.

The same year that Hitler came to power in Germany, 1933, Reich courageously published The Mass Psychology of Fascism. In February a student organization invited him to Copenhagen, Denmark, to lecture on Sexual Reform and Social Crisis. When he returned to Berlin on February 28, a conflagration broke out and was followed the next morning by arrest of more than a thousand left-wing intellectuals. Reich's friends either went underground, or were arrested or shot. Disguised as a tourist on a ski holiday to Austria, Reich escaped to Austria.

The psycho-analytic society there was hostile to Reich's views, however, and after two months he emigrated to Denmark. Later that year he was excluded from the Danish Communist party, which he had never joined. One reason for the exclusion was that an article of Reich's on sex education caused a furore. Then he had argued with party officials who were supposed to help immigrants and who turned away a suicidal young immigrant who lacked the proper papers, and Reich made a scene in his protest against the inhumane episode. A third strike against Reich was that he had started a publishing house without the permission of the Communist Party. Fourthly, his book The Mass Psychology of Fascism was considered counter-revolutionary.