Did Royal Raymond Rife find a cure for cancer?

This reeks of Urban Legend, but I couldn’t find anything in Snopes or even here on the SDMB. (I e-mailed Snopes but got an automatic reply - hope they find time to look into this and verify or debunk it).

Someone sent me an e-mail about a character called Royal Raymond Rife who amongst other things (allegedly) invented a microscope that can view living viruses, as well as a cure for cancer. But (as usual in this type of story) “The System” persecuted him and his discoveries remain unpublished.

Here is a link to a book about him.

So what’s the straight dope - did he really invent a cure for cancer, or is he just another snake-oil merchant?

A Google search turns up plenty of hits on his name but a distinct lack of hard facts.

Reading some of the web-sites devoted to this gave me the distinct feeling that we’re dealing with snake-oil. Similar to the Miss Cleo disclaimer, “For entertainment only”, several sites promoting Rife devices include “I am not an oncologist, but a homeopathic practitioner”, etc.

While a respected journal’s silence on the subject could be the sign of a giant conspiracy, it could also just be that they find it too laughable to address.

The NCAHF does have this to say about it.

Ah, radionics.

I think that’s a definite “no”, Darren. :smiley:

Thanks for the link, DDG. I had a feeling this was more Art Bell fodder than Cecil Adams fodder.

One thing that surprised me about this was, there is so much written about this guy on the Internet, but very little debunking on Snopes or anywhere else (even tried skepdic.com)

As a long time fringe-watcher I’d have to say that Rife
stuff is not related to “radionics.” The latter is
connected with dowsing and “weird energy”, while Rife’s
invention falls under a different area of taboo science:
Bioelectromagnetism. Rife’s research causes the same
kind of controversy as modern claims that 60Hz power
lines cause leukemia, or that magnets relieve lower
back pain, or that cellphones cause brain cancer.

As far as I know, Rife’s claims have never undergone
real testing by openminded researchers. Instead, the
claims are dismissed on theoretical grounds. To
detect a crackpot, just check and see whether their
claims must violate well-verified theories. As another
poster here mentioned, low-frequency fields IN THEORY cannot
affect bacteria (you need frequencies above Terahertz
in order to break chemical bonds.) So if you apply
low-freq fields to bacterial cultures and this kills
them, it means that you’ve done the experiment wrong.
(Just as when you add two plus two and you get five,
it mean’s you’ve made a mistake.) Maybe you used
metal electrodes that injected corrosion products that
killed the bacteria. Maybe bacteria were dying all
the time at random, and you managed to talk yourself
into believing that a certain frequency setting on
your AC generator was doing it. Or, it means that
the theory is wrong, and low frequency fields CAN
have large effects on bacteria.

Which is right? Does the theory tell us which set
of evidence is faulty, or does physical evidence
reveal flaws in the theory? Both! This conundrum is
called “The Experimenter’s Regress,” and it can only
be solved through wide replication of an experiment.
That’s what replication and scientific concensus is
for. Science isn’t as simple as grade school textbooks
would have us believe. Theories are NOT based on evidence,
since evidence can be flawed, and if weak evidence goes
up against a widely-believed theory, the theory wins.

Only if lots of scientists tried the Rife experiments
for themselves would the situation ever change. Yet
nobody is going to try verifying the claims of someone
who has already been designated a crackpot. So
it’s a catch-22 situation.

As the history of science repeatedly illustrates,
it’s also the revolutionaries who find evidence which
goes against the theories of the day. For every
revolutionary with a paradigm-busting discovery, there
are thousands of crackpots who think they’ve discovered
something new, but are only fooling themselves. So,
to avoid wasting time, we refuse to check out all the
crackpot claims, and at the same time suppress many
revolutionary discoveries. Lack of replication means
the Experimenter’s Regress remains in effect, and the
untested research remains in limbo, either forgotten
or designated “crackpot” without proper testing.

Which class does Rife fall into? Revolutionary or crackpot?
Only the voice of the evidence can tell us. But nobody
with a reputation to defend will dare to mess with this
type of stuff, because you have to take it seriously
in order to actually test it, and taking crackpots
seriously is a good way to ruin your standing as a skeptical
scientist. Rife’s discovery could be the rare genuine
article, the “diamond in the sewage,” or more likely it
could be just one more example of the vast amount of
sewage. But without legit testing, there’s no way to
judge.

(Heh. That’s where the amateurs can step in! A bunch
of well-done amateur tests of Rife’s claims could do some
good.)

Rife is called “crackpot” because…
In the 1950s he built a light microscope and claimed
50,000x magnification. Maybe true, but lots of
professionals disbelieved.

He claimed to see things in cell cultures which others had
missed. Sounds sensible, if you have equipment that nobody
else has. But if you want to turn a group of experts
against you quick, just do something that makes them look
bad.

He decided that the tiny organisms he discovered were the
true cause of cancer. Since hundreds of other researchers
were NOT using his super-microscope (and probably thought
is was a fake to begin with), then this claim of discovering
the cause for cancer is assumed to be crackpot.

He started messing with electric current and biology,
and found that microorganisms changed behavior at
certain frequencies of current. But the medical
establishment in the 50s connects bioelectrical research
with Quack Electrical Healing devices from the turn of
the century. If Rife was a famous researcher with a
spotless reputation, messing with electric currents
could destroy his career. But he was already on the
list of “possibly crackpot,” so it was hopeless.

He found that if he applied electric currents of certain
precise frequencies to human bodies, he could apparently
cure diseases. Now he’s fully into “Quack Electrical
Healing” devices. It couldn’t be worse if he discovered
that snake oil really does cure rhumatism and remove
warts! There’s no way that legitimate medical researchers
would see Rife as anything but a quack. His discoveries
were such an embarassment that it didn’t matter if they
were real. Rife was a quack, period.

He found that if he drove a gas discharge tube (neon
sign) with those special frequencies, and let people
stand near it, it would cure diseases. But this tube
doesn’t make any electromagnetic fields that penetrate
the body! If researchers though he was a crackpot
before, now it’s ten times worse.

If you stand next to Rife’s magical healing tube, it
will cure your cancer? If true, there’s no way in
hell that the medical establishment would ever
accept it. Come back in a hundred years or so, and
maybe the hostility will have died down.

Look how mainstream science reacted to the discovery
of the scanning-tunneling microscope:

http://www.sciencenews.org/sn_arc98/10_24_98/Bob2.htm

…and that was an easily tested claim which required
no rewriting of physics textbooks.

bbeaty - interesting point - but didn’t lots of other scientists try to replicate the ‘cold fusion’ experiments, even though the ‘inventors’ had already been branded as crackpots?

Yep, and a few labs successfully replicated the Cold
Fusion claims (some before the concensus turned against
it, some afterwards.) Reporters who state that no
researchers duplicated the claims of Pons and Fleichman
just didn’t do their homework.

Cold fusion is another example of “Experimenter’s
regress”: if your lab fails to make the Pons/Fleichman
experiment work, could this be because you didn’t know all
the necessary tricks? Or was it because “CF” was bogus to
begin with? If ten labs say CF is real, while several
hundred say that it is not, do we declare that it has been
replicated? Or do we say that truth in science is
determined by VOTING? Sometimes voting works, as with
the infamous “N-rays” incident, where Blondlot’s team
kept working for many years after their discovery was
proved to be bogus. Sometimes voting about the truth
is the very opposite of science. After losing the big
vote, Galileo is said to have murmured: “and yet it moves.”
We could turn the “experimenter’s regress” around:
if we know that cold fusion cannot occur, then any
lab which finds positive CF evidence cannot shift the
overall concensus one bit. Instead they’ve just proved
that they are incompetent crackpots rather than
professionals, because prior beliefs about CF determine
how any new evidence will be viewed.

Contrary to what most people think, “CF” research never
stopped. The long-running effort by EPRI gave a partially
favorable conclusion: not enough neutrons for CF to be any known
type of fusion, but signficant production of heat and helium
which cannot be explained by any chemical reaction. Also, the
NRL apparantly figured out how to reproduce the CF effect
at will. A lab at Los Alamos measured significant tritium
production in a plasma-based CF experiment. Several
labs saw elements appearing which had not been there
before (ghasp! Alchemy!) They don’t call it CF anymore,
today it’s LENR or CANR (low energy nuclear reactions,
chemically-assisted nuclear reactions.) At the same
time, hundreds of other labs saw nothing, and they assume
that their fellows with the positive results have gone off
the deep end and are doing pathological science. Major
journals refuse to publish papers about CF as a matter of
policy. If CF is bogus then the journal editors are wise,
but if CF is real, then they are practicing suppression
(and helping to maintain the widespread idea that ongoing CF
research does not exist.)
Here are some pro-CF links:

Review of the “CF” effect, Dr. E. Storms
http://www.scientificexploration.org/jse/articles/storms/toc.html

Los Alamos finds tritium in CF reactor
http://www.nde.lanl.gov/cf/cf.htm

Book: Excess heat, why CF research prevailed
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0967854814/

Wired magazine: what if CF is real?
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/6.11/coldfusion_pr.html

San Francisco Chronicle: the war against CF
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/technology/archive/1999/05/17/coldfusion2.dtl&type=printable

Science magazine: Arthur C. Clarke is pro-CF
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/280/5369/1532

Scientific American “ask a scientist”: CF
http://www.sciam.com/askexpert/physics/physics6.html

bbeaty wrote:

Well, then it’s Rife’s fault that he’s thought of as a crackpot. If he didn’t test his own claims, why should anyone else? If his supporters cannot provide solid evidence of an effect, why should anyone else bother trying to replicate it?

Nobody should have to have an “open mind” when testing. If you follow the same protocols with the same equipment, the results should be the same no matter what you think about the claims.

The current talk from Rife supporters about people being jailed, and/or the theories being suppressed, do not help make matters. They just make it seem even more like Rife and those who came after him were crackpots, since those kinds of claims are standard procedure for quacks. Where is the solid evidence of a broad conspiracy?

You don’t think that a cancer cure would be accepted by the medical community? Why not? Why would they suppress such a thing? Your cite of the STM is absurd, given that Rife did not receive a Nobel Prize a year after “curing cancer,” and his inventions have not become standard technology. The STM did in a decade. Rife’s had seven or eight decades, and is still regarded as a crackpot (yes, your claim of his work being done in the 1950’s is wrong according to many accounts which have him doing his “best” work in the 1920’s or early 1930’s, when “Quack Electrical Healing devices” were still in use).

If I remember optics correctly, a 50,000X light scope would be impossible to use - the laws of physics are against it, not to mention that the amount of light that you would have to use would instantly boil the tissue. If the viewfield was 90 degrees across, then at a 5 centimeter focal length the view would be 5 centimeters across. At 50,000x power, this would correspond to 1 micron. Since the wavelength of visible light ranges from 400 to 800 nm, you would fill the entire viewfield with objects 2 wavelengths across. You could not get a picture like this, as it is against the laws of physics as we know them. It would be like trying to resolve an image of an insect by throwing baseballs at it. Not to mention that the resolving power of the eye is around 0.5 minutes of arc, which corresponds to less than a length of an atomic bond at 50,000x (1.5 angstroms to my calculations). For magnification over about 1,000x, you need to use light with a shorter wavelength. UV scopes are out there, but still you can’t take them much over 5,000x. After that, there are X-rays and EM.

It is claims like these (about 50,000x scopes) that get people branded as crackpots – if he won’t show anybody a scope which apparently contradicts the known laws of physics – then he is either lying, insane, or just plain misguided.

As Carl Sagan said, extraordinary claims require extraordinary results. I was impressed that in your link to Arthur C. Clarke above, he said exactly that. It would be quite easy to show extraordinary results using a Rife apparatus – just cure 20 people of presently untreatable cancer (cold fusion is a more difficult topic perhaps).

The amount that we know about the wide variety of cancer, carcinogenic agents, oncogenic changes, tumor promotion and initiation, and all other cancer biology, makes any such monolithic “cure for cancer” seem all the more unrealistic. I will keep an open mind, but I reserve the right to be extremely skeptical of such things.

My brother in law loves this sort of stuff. He believes in these vast conspiracies, and I had it out with him over R.R.R. a few weeks back.

In a nutshell, he claimed that R.R.R. had invented the cure for “everything”, as his method killed the bacteria that caused all disease and illness. They even claimed


My brother in law believes that drug companies are responsible for the supression of R.R.R.'s work. He is of the opinion that they murdered R.R.R. (when he was 83 years old!!) and associates, and destroyed information relating to his amazing discoveries. His argument is that drug companies couldn’t patent the system, therefore they sought to destroy it rather than lose profits on the sales of medicines. His argument for this being true? That R.R.R.'s treatments aren’t available today. My argument that perhaps they didn’t work met with scorn and derision. Of course they work - why else would there be such a conspiracy to suppress them! Well, how can you argue with logic like that?

My brother in law also believes that presidents of drug companies are willing to sell their own grandmothers for a quick profit, and so when I asked why they would allow themselves to die of cancer rather than living forever with the cure for everything, he said it’s because they’d do anything for a billion dollars. Again, my arguments that a billion dollars is no good to a dead man were treated with scorn.

A further insight to my brother in law’s character - he listed himself as a Jedi Knight on the last census because he recieved an email telling him that Jedi would become an official religion if 10,000 people called themselves that on the census. If he’d taken 5 minutes to visit Snopes, he would have seen that he’s more likely to be slugged with a fine than having Jedi given official status as a religion. He’s a nice guy, but jeez… these conspiracies get old.

bbeaty

Welcome to the SDMB.

When posting, you don’t have to hit the “return” button at the end of the line - just keep typing and the program automatically word-wraps - that way it formats better.

“Solid evidence” requires a full-blown study, which requires time and funding, and unless the people doing the study are associated with a reputable organization, there’s a big chance that anything they do will be ignored. If a bunch of amateurs came up with a study showing that Rife stuff actually works, they might be dismissed as crackpots. EVIDENCE CAN BE FLAWED OR BIASED. To eliminate the problem, you need some disinterested 3rd parties to do the work, and you need multiple replications. The Rife stuff is equivalent to a drug study. How do you convince other researchers that a new drug is effective? First of all you need quite a bit of $$, and nobody is going to waste money on something that they’ve already decided is crackpotism. Do the Rife supporters have the $$ to pay for a real study? I doubt it. And even if they did, that would be like having the tobacco companies pay for cancer studies. If the results proved the claims, nobody would trust them.

Ah, you must never have taken a science course where there was any lab work. If you try replicating an experiment and your results don’t match the results of other students, how do you know who’s made the mistake? That’s the whole point of the need for replication. Getting the same equipment is sometimes a problem (e.g. what if a proper experiment requires ptfe gaskets but nobody knows this, but you use neoprene and this screws things up?) Following the same protocols is far more difficult unless someone has spent time writing down incredibly detailed instructions. Only in school labs has anyone done this. Only in school labs do we already “know” what the results are supposed to be. And the results are only reliable for extremely simple experiments.

Why does the typical listing of “scientific method” show replication as a requirement? Simple: because when you don’t know the “right answer” in advance, the results don’t remain the same regardless of what you think about the claims. Scientific research has a large human component: if you have very strong expectations about the results, you’ll start making unconscious mistakes or assumptions which get you the results you want. “Pathological Science” occurs in two instances: when a researcher strongly desires to get a positive result, and when a researcher strongly desires to get a negative result. When a “crackpot” successfully demonstrates their experiment, nobody is suprised, but nobody trusts the results. And when a “scoffer” performs the same experiment and gets negative results… same thing.
“It is really quite amazing by what margins competent but conservative
scientists and engineers can miss the mark, when they start with the
preconceived idea that what they are investigating is impossible. When
this happens, the most well-informed men become blinded by their
prejudices and are unable to see what lies directly ahead of them.”

  • Arthur C. Clarke, 1963
    “There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which
    cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance–that principle is
    contempt prior to investigation.” - Herbert Spencer
    As for me personally, I think that the Rife stuff is probably just bad science. It has all the earmarks. But earmarks can’t decide the issue. Only 3rd-party testing can decide the issue.

Anomalous claims attract crackpots, but it doesn’t matter how many crackpots support a claim, reality remains the same. As for conspiracies, you make a good point: supporters of fringe science don’t understand that widespread disbelief can exist without any conspiracy. E.g. if Uri Geller inspires the disgust of modern scientists, and every reputable scientist refuses to test whether Geller’s claims are real or not, that’s not evidence for a conspiracy to suppress Uri Geller. Or, if the FDA starts jailing people for selling snake oil, that’s not evidence of a conspiracy to suppress snake oil.

My point was that the sneering of the experts is not a good way to judge a claim. Only in hindsight do we know that the sneering about the STM was misguided, and that the “sneer-ee” was going to be vindicated quickly. Also, in many past instances of widespread sneering, fifty years was not enough to convince the experts to cut the hostility crap and to take another look.

As Richard Feynman illustrated with his parable of the Emperor’s Nose, you can’t trust mass opinion, even if it comes from the experts. What you need is measurements, and they must come from an unbiased source. Since such measurements are expensive, we certainly need “discovery triage” to keep from wasting money in checking out hundreds of crackpot claims. But we can never be 100% certain that the things discarded in the “crackpot” wastebasket aren’t genuine. Mistakes have been made in the past.

I think it was Shermer (or maybe Carl Sagan) who pointed out that a conspiracy theory can be used to explain EVERYTHING, and therefore a conspiracy theory is useless for explaining anything.

Widespread disbelief about certain topics is common, and if nobody believes that a certain claim is real, nobody is going to waste money in testing it. In this way “supression” occurs. But bad science and medical ripoff artists are SUPPOSED to be suppressed! We certainly don’t need any drug companies to suppress Rife. We just need a concensus among medical researchers that the claims are quackery.

In my opinion, the real problem involves suppression before testing, as well as the suppression of dissenting voices. Legit scientists can get themselves labeled “crackpot” and have their work suppressed on the grounds that we always need to suppress crackpots. This happened with Dr. Margulis and the endosymbiote theory, and with Dr. McClintlock and jumping genes theory. These were “suppressed” not because the researchers were nonscientists, but because their work went against the theories of the day.

One topic which goes against the theories of the day is bioelectromagnetism. Becker’s “The Body Electric” tells of the troubles he encountered in trying to shift the concensus belief that electromagnetism plays little part in biological systems. (It’s more of that bias against Quack Medical Devices?) Today the tide is turning, and things like electrical stimulation of fractures is accepted. Rife was “suppressed” for the same reason that all sorts of other bio-EM research was “suppressed.” Bad science is supposed to be suppressed, and if the scientific mainstream turns against certain research for the wrong reasons, those researchers will have a very hard time being heard.

Here’s a great article about this topic:

New Ideas in Science, Dr. T. Gold (cornell astrophys)
http://amasci.com/freenrg/newidea1.html

<< and if the scientific mainstream turns against certain research for the wrong reasons, those researchers will have a very hard time being heard.>>

This is exactly the problem that Robert Goddard had in the science of rocketry. He had a very hard time and was never believed during his life time, but time (and replicated experiments) proved him right after all.
CedricR.

Here’s a fairly level-headed page about Rife’s “universal microscope.” Note that the magnifications are being estimated by eye, by comparison with conventional microscopes.

http://www.rife.de/mscope/mscope6.htm

(Note: I’m an EE, not an opto engineer, so please point out any mistakes in the following)

The tissue-boiling issue might be solved by the narrow tuning of the illumination: Rife put monochromator(sp?) assemblies on both sides of the sample, and claimed that the illumination frequency was tuned to some sort of resonance with the organism being viewed, and also that the sample was viewed very slightly off axis from the illumination.

If true, this would cause the organism to act as an extremely good optical scatterer, and also create a dark field against which to view it. The illumination power could therefore be greatly increased without damaging the sample. The IR component of the illumination of course would never reach the sample, so it could run that much cooler than a conventional microscope having wideband illumination.

Rife’s technique would be similar to the modern practice of flourescence microscopy, where flourescent dye markers attached to the samples would act as point-sources of light. In conventional microscopy, the samples being viewed create diffraction, and additional diffraction is caused by the objective. But when the sample is an array of flourescing point-sources, only the objective lens’ aperture creates diffraction, and the total resolution is much higher. As Rife apparantly found, naturally occurring color-centers in a sample can behave the same as flourescent dye molecules: as pointlike light sources.

(One modern microscopy technology is based on just this effect. A microscopit bit of flourescent material is placed at the tip of a UV-emitting optical fiber, then the sample is scanned in very close proximity to this visibly flourescing pointsource. In this way the optical resolution is not limited in the usual way. Only the size of the tiny light source and the distance between the source and the sample imposes a limit.)

Another point: if nobody knew the details of how these microscopes worked, then rejecting them according to 2-lens microscope theory is wrong, since they wouldn’t necessarily have followed the rules of conventional 2-lens microscopes. After all, the same flawed reasoning could be used to sneer at any scope which gets around the microscope equation (as do the scanning scopes such as STMs and confocal microscopes.) For magnifications above 1000x you either need to use UV, or you need to switch to another technology. Rife could have been a crackpot, or he could have been using “modern” microscope technology back in the 40s.

Who said that he wouldn’t show others the device? He was apparantly selling them to doctors. But it does appear that he was keeping his methods secret (which is the behavior of an inventor, not of a scientist who publishes everything.) The above website mentions that a couple of these microscopes still exist in museums, but major parts are missing. And again I must say: anyone who makes claims that contradict the known laws of physics is either a crackpot or is a revolutionary who can show us where the flaws lie in our understanding of the laws of physics. Then we revise the textbooks. This is called “scientific progress.” If research starts being rejected on the grounds that it violates the “laws of physics”, then a good part of scientific advancement will halt.

If our understanding of the laws of physics is now complete, then science is at its end, just as Dr. Michaelson said in 1894 (below). This would be very good news for those who need to sort out the crackpots from the revolutionaries, since there would BE no more revolutions in any theory. In that case, anyone who claims to violate well-known theory would ALWAYS be a crackpot.


 "The more important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have
  all been discovered, and these are now so firmly established that the
  possibility of their ever being supplanted in consequence of new
  discoveries is exceedingly remote.... Our future discoveries must be
  looked for in the sixth place of decimals."  -Albert. A. Michelson,
      speech given in 1894 at the dedication of Ryerson Physics Lab,
      Univ. of Chicago

OK, so this fellow claims he has an optical microscope that can magnify by a factor of fifty thousand. Now, such a microscope would, in fact, violate what we know of the laws of physics, but let’s ignore that for a moment. It is, after all, conceivable that what we know is wrong or incomplete, and that Mr. Rife has discovered some new principle.

So let’s see the scope. If he actually has such a device, and was able to use it to conduct extensive biological experiments, which were previously impossible, then it should be trivially easy for him to prove that it works. If he could prove that, he could easily sell the devices, at almost any price, to any number of labs across the country. Once he establishes that it works as described, he should then share with other scientists the principle he used to make it, in the hopes that said principle could be more fully understood, and that other marvelous devices could perhaps be designed on a similar basis.

Let me guess: He hasn’t done any of this, has he?

Since R. Rife died decades ago, and the surviving
microscopes are not in working order, we can assume
whatever we like about their status as crackpot devices.

That website I mentioned earlier has lots of stuff,
but mostly about his EM devices, not the microscope

Rife interview:
http://www.rife.de/interview/interview.html

Here’s the article my brother in law sent me. I don’t know where it came from and it doesn’t have a name credited on it. It is written in a sensationalist manner which made me immediately dubious about the claims within.

[quote]

Get ready for a shock. We urge you to keep an open mind and reserve judgment until you read all the facts. This is the true story of the use of deceit, arson, sabotage, and murder to deliberately bury what doctors called the end to all disease.

The scientist Royal Raymond Rife discovered that THE UNIQUE ELECTRONIC SIGNATURE OF EACH SPECIFIC DISEASE can be modified to eliminate nearly every affliction known to man - rapidly and harmlessly.

The distinguished medical doctors who originally confirmed part or all of this discovery included: E.C. Rosenow, Sr. (Chief of Bacteriology, 32 yrs., at Mayo Clinic), Frederic Koch (Detroit, Brazil), Gaston Naessens (Quebec), Sakae Inoue (Japan), George Mazet (France), Franz Gerlach (Germany), Niello Mori and Clara Fonti (Italy), Cameron Gruner (McGill Univ.), T.J. Glover (Canada), Florence Seibert (V.A. Research Lab, Bay Pines, Fla.), Irene Diller (Inst. of Cancer Research, Phila., Penn), Eleanor Alex. Jackson and Virginia Livingston (NJ and San Diego clinics).

The University of Southern California sponsored a Special Medical Research team years ago, to evaluate the electronic therapy of Rife’s on the terminally ill. An initial success rate of 87.5% was recorded. After Rife developed some improvements on the treatments, EVERY PATIENT, all 16 in the study, had recovered without side effects of any kind after 130 days.

Rife’s medical team which evaluated the therapy for the University of Southern California included: Rufus Klein-Schmidt (President, Univ. of Southern California), Milbank Johnson (then President of the southern Calif. AMA), Arthur Kendall (Director, Northwestern Medical School), Edward Kopps (Metabolic Clinic, La Jolla), George Fischer (Children’s Hospital, NY), Karl Meyer (Hooper Foundation, San Francisco), Whalen Morrison (Chief Surgeon, Santa. Fe Railway), George Dock.

The gifted scientist Royal Raymond Rife truly had discovered the cure for deadly disease. Rife’s treatments were based upon a mechanical application of frequency to the body. Other medical treatments were either biological or chemical in nature and depended on the bodies own immune system to heal the sick. In reality a sick person has a very poor immune system or one that is temporarily losing the battle. Rife’s discoveries took the burden of healing off the body and left only the task of removing the dead disease from the systems.

Rife’s work was so astonishing that he was awarded 14 government contracts to develop practical uses for his discoveries of specific frequency. Rife discovered that any disease can be eliminated with frequencies based on its individual electromagnetic signature. One of Rife’s projects was to eliminate the diseases that were plaguing the poultry industry. Rife treated an entire flock of chickens and made them disease free. One government contract requested that Rife destroy the bacteria in fossil fuels so that our national reserve of gas and oil would not spoil and could be stored indefinitely without being replaced every few months. Think of the money that would be saved by the American public. Alas, Richard Nixon announced that his friends in the oil industry would never have to worry about Rife hurting their business and had his inventions destroyed.

Royal Raymond Rife was perhaps the most brilliant and persistent scientist in history. What follows is a brief description of how Rife developed this remarkable technology. Where technology didn’t exist, Rife invented it - the first microdissectors, micromanipulators, and heterodyning ultraviolet microscopes. Rife won 14 government awards for scientific discoveries, and a medical degree (hon.) from the University of Heidelberg. Millionaires like Henry Timken (owner of Timken Bearings) financed Rife’s work, such as the Universal Microscope, with 5,682 parts. With this superb microscope, Royal Raymond Rife became the first human being to actually SEE a living virus in its natural color.

After nearly 20,000 unsuccessful attempts, Rife finally isolated and identified the human cancer virus, and named it Cryptocides Primordiales. Rife inoculated 400 lab animals with this virus, created 400 tumors, and then eliminated them. He did the same with many other diseases. The discoveries of Rife were presented to the Smithsonian Institute in Washington and the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia along with the instruments used. This is all chronicled in The Cancer Cure That Worked, a book written by Barry Lynes in 1987.

How did Rife’s instruments eliminate so many different afflictions? For decades, Rife painstakingly identified the precise energetic signature unique to each disease, using spectroscopic microscopes. By exposing disease organisms to destructive resonance derived from their own unique pattern of oscillation, Rife discovered he could destroy them by the millions in seconds. Every biochemical compound oscillates at its own distinct frequency pattern. Therefore, every living thing has its own unique electromagnetic signature, and this pattern is unlike any other species or organism.

After decades of research, Rife isolated the patterns, modified them and used them to kill the microbes that produced them! Just as the resonant frequency which shatters a wine glass can only shatter that type of glass, so Rife’s frequencies destroy only disease organisms with the exact same pattern of oscillation. Therefore, Rife therapy is one of the very few therapies known to be free of ANY side effect. This is in contrast to any synthetic drug, whose unnatural chemistry eventually produces such damaging side effects as impotence, high blood pressure, hair loss, and damage to heart, kidneys, and immune system. If history is any indication, the drug industry will stop at nothing to eliminate any threat to its profits. I believe that it will use every ounce of its political muscle to restrict sale of Rife instruments before customers find them far more effective than drugs.

Now why would the medical industry destroy a cure for disease? The cartel was alarmed that their customers might abandon drugs for a far more effective cure such as Rife’s that costs only pennies in electricity to use. This would eliminate profits of nearly a billion dollars a week for the drug industry. How long do you think it would ignore such a threat? The answer is, not long. After a preliminary offer you can’t refuse made by Morris Fishbein (the President of the American Medical Association), to buy the miraculous discoveries of Rife, Rife refused to sell out and tried to bring his electronic cures to the people.

This is what happened to Rife and his astonishing electronic therapy: First, arsonists burned the Burnett Lab in New Jersey, which was validating Rife’s work. Then, someone fatally poisoned Dr. Millbank Johnson, president of the Southern California American Medical Association. He died hours before a press conference where he was to announce to the world that Rife’s electronic therapy had cured every patient (16 out of 16) in that medical study supervised by the University of Southern California. (First thought to be accidental death, the poison was discovered years later by federal investigators when Dr. Johnson’s body was exhumed). Dr. Nemens, who had duplicated some of Rife’s work just 40 miles from Rife’s lab, was killed in a mysterious fire which destroyed his lab. Rife himself was finally killed at Grossmont Hospital by an accidental lethal dose of Valium.

Following Dr. Milbank Johnson’s murder, threats, and a string of other incidents, doctors who had actually been photographed with Rife denied they ever met him. Dr. Isaac Kendall, Rife’s chief research associate and Dean of Northwestern Medical School, disappeared for years after receiving $200,000 in grants.

By now you are probably saying to yourself, But this is crazy! Are you saying that after all these doctors proved there is a harmless electronic method to rapidly eliminate all this pain and suffering, the medical profession didn’t use it? Maybe you think that hospitals would want it. But why would hospital administrators be interested in anything that costs pennies to use, and keeps people out of the hospital? Remember - conventional therapy keeps a patient in bed at $600 a day (for the bed). And hospitals can bill a cancer patient $200,000 if he has insurance.

Okay, then how about research foundations or teaching institutions? Wrong. Who wants a cure that eliminates hundreds of millions of dollars in grants along with the diseases it eliminates? Even the billion - dollar insurance industry could be eliminated by a cure for most illness such as Rife discovered. First, understand that the drug industry supports the medical journals almost entirely with its advertising. It kept Rife’s electronic therapy out of the journals merely by threatening to pull its ads from any one publishing it. Meanwhile, the regular news media naively assumes that if anyone had such a versatile cure, the proper authorities would tell them. But health care is just too profitable. Those whose livelihood depends on treating disease are often quick to mislead those who ask about anything that might replace their services. Even using beneficial herbs or vitamins is often branded quackery.

If you discovered a cheap and harmless method of eliminating nearly every incurable disease, what would you expect? Medicine’s highest awards? It’s more likely that your discovery will be received as heresy, for challenging orthodox views and authority. Pasteur, for example, was ridiculed and reviled, until medicine finally accepted his germ theory of disease. And before him, Semmelweis was hounded to death merely for claiming that 19th century surgeons might be killing patients by operating with dirty hands. Other visionaries who were discredited and roasted over a pit in a medical Inquisition were Roentgen for discovering X-rays, Morton for Ether anesthesia, and Harvey for claiming that blood circulates! And now that health care is the nations’s largest industry, anything that eliminates all illness will be highly unpopular with a lot of folks whose services become unnecessary.

The following are just a few of the distinguished medical doctors harassed and persecuted in recent years for discoveries that threatened the health care industry - Doctors Revici, Burzynski, Livingston, Ivy, Burton, W.F. Koch, Coley, Glover, Lincoln, Priore and Naessens, a scientist. There is a tragic story behind each of these names: Dr. Koch was killed by arsenic injected in his toothpaste. Perhaps now you understand 'that any true cure for cancer, diabetes, arthritis and other diseases must always be suppressed for the status quo to continue. It’s just like war: millions of people suffer and die because it’s so very profitable for others. The story you are reading is one of the most fascinating and horrifying tales ever told. Can you imagine the good the discoveries of Rife would bring to mankind, and that Rife’s discoveries were announced and made public in the 1930’s!

Royal Raymond Rife died in 1971 at the age of 83 a broken man. All clinical records of his work have been erased from the archives of the scientific community.

No it wouldn’t. Pouring light into a smaller area would only serve to concentrate the energy. We have this problem all the time with confocal imaging. By definition, you can’t illuminate a sample without heating it. Again, these stubborn laws of physics.

Fluorescent illumination can’t increase the resolution of a microscope beyond theoretical limits. You are still illuminating (exciting) with visible light or UV while viewing through a dichroic filter to allow only fluorescence back into the microscope. You can’t acheive a resolution smaller than the fluorescent wavelength (we use CY3 which fluoresces around 750 nm and FITC at around 500 nm), and that is still exactly what Rife is claiming.

STM doesn’t use visible light. Nor does EM or X-Ray scopes. Confocal, while extremely powerful by virtue of being able to form precise optical sections by point scanning with very powerful laser illumination, can’t resolve greater around 1,000x. Our three-beam multiphoton Nikon confocal scope goes to 1000x.

bbeaty:
I am very appreciative of what you are posting here, and I find it most fascinating. I am not accusing Rife of being a crackpot straight out without evidence. But, his behavior is very unscientific and un-inventor-like. We have a perfectly good system for inventors to prove that their most secret spiffy inventions work – the patent office. Did Rife file patents? Was he awarded patents? Is there any independent confirmation that these things worked (besides the one report linked)?

I am not qualified to examine the physics of the Rife scope, as I am just a biologist. I have read the linked report and it seems that doctors are confirming a high magnification by the Rife scope (although it didn’t make sense that they were looking at bacteria in spinal fluid from a polio case, which is caused by a virus).

I am not willing to dismiss anything out of hand. But physics IIRC dictates that objects less than one wavelength across will not scatter light. Physics as we know it dictates that you are unable to visualize single objects using wavelengths bigger than the object. Confocal, dark field, Nomarski DIC, and fluorescence uses visible light and thus has resolving powers of around 1,000x. We use fluorescence and confocal every day, and we are still limited by the inherent properties of light.

No amount of optical trickery can get around this hard-and-fast rule. If Rife had a way of doing it, he should have revealed it to the scientific community. If he didn’t want to publicize it, then he should have patented it so we would have those records.

I am not asking for much. All I am asking is for some evidence that his stuff actually worked. Just a few independent confirmations. Just a few controlled experiments. Perhaps a few granted patents. Just a few extraordinary results to back up many extraordinary claims. This is the only way the scientific community sorts out the crank from the genius.

The same applies for his cancer trials. There are many many patented treatments for cancer. Many chemotherapeutics are patented still, especially the new protein/biomolecule ones (like Taxol, Herceptin and some of the Interferons). We also have cancer treatment devices that are largely under patent (for instance the Gamma Knife). This has not stopped people from examining the science behind them. It has not stopped clinical trials. It has not stopped determination of efficacy. It is a tried and true process. All Rife would have had to do to get such a process started is show a few extraordinary cures that were well documented by the medical profession. His failure to do this categorically dismisses any claim of legitimacy he once retained.