Germs: Cause of Disease?

By William Miller

Summary: In this 1955 article from Health Culture magazine, Miller revives the Pasteur–Bechamp debate, or, as he calls it, “one of the greatest though little known controversies in the history of science.” In the late 1800s, Louis Pasteur proposed that specific “bad” microbes, or germs, cause infectious disease. His colleague biochemist Pierre Bechamp thought “infection” had more to do with the environment within the host organism than with specific microorganisms. Miller says that Bechamp might have been right after all, citing observations made using Royal Rife’s famous Universal Microscope, which appeared to show species of microbes  morphing into other species depending on the chemical nature of their environment. (For more on Rife and his work, see “The Rife Microscope, or ‘Facts and Their Fate’.”) From Health Culture, 1955. Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research reprint 77.

The Rife Microscope, or “Facts and Their Fate”

By Dr. Royal Lee and by R.E. Seidel, MD, and M. Elizabeth Winter

Summary: The Rife Microscope is one of the most fascinating and tragic stories in the history of science. Royal Raymond Rife was a genius of optics who in the 1930s invented a revolutionary microscope that identified microorganisms based on a characteristic wavelength of light emitted by each. (Rife discovered these “signature emissions” through use of his scope.) Even more incredibly, Rife observed something that challenges the very basis of medicine’s “germ theory”: Microbes such as viruses, bacteria, and fungi are able to morph into each other depending on the conditions of their environment (which, in turn, are determined in humans largely by nutritional status.) So, instead of the tens of thousands of species of microorganisms considered distinct by conventional science, Rife said, there are really only about ten fundamental forms of microbes, each able to morph into countless numbers of others. Rife not only collaborated with noted bacteriologist Dr. Arthur Kendall of Northwestern University Medical School to demonstrate such transformations, but the two investigators showed they were able to destroy pathogenic forms by radiating them with wavelengths of light in resonance with their signature emission.

When Rife began to publish his findings, he was predictably branded a quack by the medical establishment, which brought its full efforts to discredit and destroy his work. All references and studies involving his microscope were actively barred from medical journals, and any doctor using his microscope was ostracized from the medical community. Yet one article, published in 1944 in the non-medically-controlled journal of the Franklin Institute—one of America’s oldest and most prestigious centers of science—survived. In 1950, the Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research re-published the lengthy article, which details the technology behind both the electron microscope and Rife’s Universal Microscope (skip to pages 124–127 for information specifically on Rife’s research), along with several concluding pages of Lee’s own commentary poignantly summarizing Rife’s discoveries. If nothing else, read these final two pages of the document. The implications of Lee’s words, as well as the potential applications Rife’s long lost microscope, are beyond profound. Reprint 47, 1944.

The Progressing Totalitarian Takeover in the USA (in the Area of the Healing Arts)

By Dr. Royal Lee

Summary: “We shall here confine our discussion to the loss of liberty in connection with the choice of our doctor, and his loss of liberty in the choice of a method of treatment of our ills.” Dr. Royal Lee defends alternatives to medicine and reveals the sinister methods used by organized medicine to entreat the government to squash any competing approaches to health. Dr. Lee wrote this courageous piece after more than 30 years of fighting the corrupt system of the medical/pharmaceutical monopoly, condoned and enforced by governmental agencies. With medicine still enjoying a near monopoly in the minds of the public as the only “legitimate” healing art, this article shows for the historical record how the medical industry unscrupulously secured its place in our society and then entrenched its own definition and self-serving standards of what is science and what is quackery. 1962.