The purpose of the following pages is to investigate whether there is a fundamental difference between a living being and an inanimate object, or if the main difference is only in the complexity that a living being shows compared to any non-living thing.
In order to do this, we will expose the work of a series of scientists, who researched the Living Kingdom and who came to the conclusion that there actually is some force or energy that is measurable, and that is specific to living organisms.
Carl Reichenbach
Baron Dr. Carl Ludwig von Reichenbach (1788-1869) was educated at the University of Tübingen where he obtained a degree of Doctor of Philosophy.
His position as the head of a large chemical works, iron furnaces and machine shops allowed him to conduct large-scale experimental research. Among his achievements, was the discovery of a large number of valuable hydrocarbon compounds, such as creosote, paraffin, eupione, phenol (antiseptics) and others.
In 1839 he retired from industry and started researches on pathologies of the human nervous system. He studied neurasthenia, somnambulism, hysteria and phobia, concluding that these condition were affected by the moon. After studying many patients, he found out that these problems tended to affect people who were particularly sensitive. He carried out innumerable experiments and researches on such patients, coming to the conclusion that some kind of force closely related to magnetism was manifesting itself on living things. He called it Odic Force.
Wilhelm Reich
Wilhelm Reich (1897-1957) was an Austrian-American psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who worked with Sigmund Freud in the 1920s. He was a respected analyst for much of his life, focusing on character structure. Already in those years, he was a promoter of adolescent sexuality, the availability of contraceptives, abortion and divorce, and the importance for women to have economic independence. Following Freud’s hypothesis of the existence of a biological sexual energy in the body (Freud’s libido, later redefined as a mere psychological idea) he conducted clinical work that convinced him of the existence of such an energy. He discovered that the function of the orgasm is to maintain an energy equilibrium by discharging excess biological energy that builds up naturally in the body. He also concluded that sexual gratification in fact alleviates neurotic symptoms. He gradually went away from Freud’s path, as he supported the idea that “… you don’t think from the standpoint of the state and the culture, but from the standpoint of what people need and what they suffer from. Then you arrange your social institutions accordingly” (excerpt from “Reich speaks to Freud”). Freud, on the other hand, maintained that culture takes precedence, and that sexual instincts must be adapted to the existing social structure.
He promoted sex education, birth control, divorce rights and better housing. When working in Berlin in the 1930, he was one of the few members of the Berlin Psychoanalytic Association to openly oppose the rise of the Nazi Party. This position eventually brought him to being denounced by his own fellows and in 1933 he was forced to flee Germany when Hitler went on power. He went to Norway where he was able to carry on his researches. Through analysis of human subjects, Reich was able to demonstrate a charge at the skin’s surface directly related to feelings of pleasure and anxiety. From this, he concluded that pleasure is the movement of biological energy toward the periphery of the organism, while anxiety is the movement of this energy toward the center. He initially assumed that biological excitation of living matter might be electrical, but the results of these experiments indicated otherwise. For example, the biological energy that he measured moved in a slow, wave-kind fashion, in contrast to electromagnetic energy which moves much faster.
He then conducted laboratory experiments using time-lapse motion picture equipment affixed to microscopes with over 3000x magnification to record the development of protozoa. During these experiments, he discovered that under certain condition, sterilized and unsterilized substances – grass, blood, sand, charcoal and foodstuff – disintegrate into pulsating vesicles that often exhibit a bluish color. Reich observed internal motility in these vesicles. He called them “bions”, after the Greek word for life. His research also revealed that certain bions exhibited a strong, radiation phenomena, and that these bions could kill bacteria and cancer cells. This radiation confirmed the existence of an energy that did not obey any known laws of electricity or magnetism. Reich called this energy “Orgone”. After publication of his findings, he was attacked by the scientific and psychiatric communities. With the Second Word War starting to rage, he was able to flee to America where he carried on his research on Orgone energy until his death in 1957. We won’t describe his further investigations into this subject. Suffices it to say that he later invented a device, called the Orgone Accumulator, with the use of which he was able to treat various diseases, including cancer. Following the invention of this device, he was persecuted by the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) for years for fraudulent claims on the Orgone Accumulator. They interviewed numbers of Reich’s associates, students, patients, etc. looking for dissatisfied users. None were ever found. Still, his work has gone into oblivion.
Georges Lakhovsky
Georges Lakhovsky (1869-1942) was an engineer, scientist, author and inventor. He conducted extensive research into biological mechanisms, concluding that all living cells (plants, humans, bacteria, parasites, etc.) possess attributes which are normally associated with electronic circuits. These cellular attributes include resistance, capacitance and inductance. These 3 electrical properties, when properly configured, will cause the recurrent oscillation of high frequency sine waves when sustained by a small, steady supply of outside energy of the right frequency (similar to modern radio circuitry). This effect is known as resonance. His research showed that not only do all living cells produce and radiate oscillations of very high frequencies, but they also receive and respond to oscillations imposed upon them from outside sources. But where do these outside frequencies come from? Lakhovsky says that they are due to cosmic rays which bombard the earth continuously (a well-known fact which has been studied extensively in the last century). He found that healthy cells have a specific frequency, which is changed or dampened when a cells has a disease. He further discovered that if he could increase the amplitude (but not the frequency) of healthy cells, this increase would overwhelm and dampen the oscillations produced by the disease causing cells.
Lakhovsky initially proved his theory using plants. He inoculated 10 germanium plants with a plant cancer. On one of the infected plants, he simply fashioned a heavy copper wire coil (a coil is a fundamental element of resonant circuitry) with the right diameter which in turn acted as an antenna collecting and concentrating oscillation energy from high frequency cosmic rays. Ho chose the diameter in such a way as to make it resonate to the range of healthy plant cells. Reinforcing the natural health frequency of the cells, this allowed the plant to overwhelm the oscillations of the cancer cells and the tumors fell off in less than 3 weeks and by 2 months the plant was thriving. All of the other cancer-inoculated plants died within 30 days. He later fashioned similar coils for human use, and in the European pre-war period they were widely used and researched in universities and hospitals. With the advent of the war, he fled from France (where he was working) and went to the United States. He developed a machine called Multiple Wave Oscillator which was tested in a New York Hospital with remarkable results. But after his unexpected death in 1942, his devices where quickly removed from hospitals and his work too fell into oblivion.
Harold Saxton Burr
Harold Saxton Burr (1889-1973) was a Professor of Anatomy at Yale University School of medicine. In 1911 he received his Ph.B. at Sheffield Scientific School, and got his Ph.D. at Yale in 1915. He later became Professor at Yale in 1929. Over forty years (from 1916 to 1956) he published 93 scientific papers. Studies on meninges and other neural bodies (such as the amblystoma) led him to propose the “electro-dynamic theory of development”, which he later published in his general papers “The electro-dynamic theory of life” and “Electrical characteristics of living systems”.
He was noted for his use of voltmeter to detect the electromagnetic potential of the body. His researches contributed to the electrical detection of cancer cells, experimental embryology, neuroanatomy and the regeneration and development of the nervous system. His studies of the bio-electrics of ovulation and menstruation eventually led to the marketing of fertility-indicating devices. Other studies of the electrodynamics of trees, carried out over decades, suggested entrainment to diurnal, lunar and annual cycles.
In his late book “Blueprint for immortality” he contended that the electro-dynamic field of all living things, which may be mapped and measured with standard voltmeters, control each organism’s development, health and mood. He named these fields “fields of life” or L-fields.
As is being clearly stated in the Wikipedia Article on the L-field: “..The voltage measurements he used are not in doubt, but the scientific community has all but ignored Burr’s term and his interpretation of the field as a blueprint-like mold for all life”.
In his research, he showed that changes in the electrical potential of the L-field were associated with changes in the health of the organism. For instance, he found that the axis of EM polarity in a frog’s egg could predict the spinal axis of fetal development, a fact which suggested that the L-field was the organizing matrix for the body.
In his work with humans, he detailed his successes in charting and predicting the ovulation cycles of women, locating internal scar tissue and diagnosing potential physical ailments through the reading of the individual’s L-field.
Student and colleague Leonard Ravitz carried Burr’s work forward. He focused on the human dimension, concluding that the human L-field directly relates to changes in a person’s mental and emotional states. Most intriguingly, Ravitz showed that the L-field as a whole disappears before physical death.
Robert Becker and Gary Selden
These two scientists and authors have written a book called “The Body electric: Electromagnetism and the foundation of life”.
Robert Becker, an orthopedic surgeon, describes in this book his research on regeneration of tissue after lesions. Starting from the idea that the electric fields play an important role in the control of the regeneration processes, he mapped these electric potential at various body parts during regeneration.
This mapping showed that the central parts of the body normally was positive, and the limbs negative. When a limb of a salamander or frog was amputated, the voltage at the cut changed from about -10 mV (millivolts) to +20 mV or more the next day. In a frog, the voltage would simply change to the normal negative level in four weeks or so, and no limb regeneration would take place. In a salamander, however, the voltage would during the first two weeks change from the +20 mV to -30 mV, and then normalize (to -10 mV) during the next two weeks—and the limb would be regenerated. Following the results of his researches, he applied external electrical stimulation in the proper form to patients whose bones had failed to heal, and was thus able to induce the bones to heal faster.
Semyon Davidovich Kirlian
Semyon Davidovich Kirlian (1898-1978) was a Russian inventor and researcher who discovered and developed Kirlian photography.
During the 1940s he and his wife developed and perfected apparatuses which employed a high-frequency oscillator and that were able to “take photographs” around objects. These photographs showed strange spark-like bursts being released around living tissue. Kirlian was convinced that these sparks originated from some kind of energy field that living organisms have. An experiment advanced as evidence of energy fields in living entities involved taking Kirlian contact photographs of a picked leaf at set periods, its gradual withering being said to correspond with a decline in the strength of the living energy field. In some other experiments, if a section of a leaf was torn away after the first photograph, a faint image of the missing section would remain when a second photograph was taken. By 1949 it was determined that Kirlian photography could detect incipient plant disease that was not otherwise detectable.
Experimenting further upon themselves, the Kirlians acquired the first results showing that Kirlian photography could provide an index of a person’s physical health.
In the 1960s the Kirlians’ effort attracted widespread recognition and official support. Their first scientific paper was published in 1961 and in 1962 Scientific institution around the Soviet Union were set to work on Kirlian photography.
Pier Luigi Ighina
I’d like to mention Ighina cause I personally met him in 2001, just before his death in 2003.
He was born in 1908 in Milan and studied electronics and radio electronics. He allegedly became a cooperator of Guglielmo Marconi sharing with him all the most important experiments and inventions (not confirmed by the Marconi institutions).
He developed a theory of his own, where he explained that life is the result of a combination of 2 energies, the first coming from the sun and spiraling clockwise, and the second coming from the earth and spiraling anti-clockwise. He further stated that he had succeeded in watching what he called the “magnetic atom” with a special microscope that he developed by himself. He later was apparently able to generate and manipulate such magnetic atoms, with which he could do many of the things done by the other scientist presented above. He also talks of frequencies, resonance, life energy and the like. He lived an isolated life, only ridiculed by the institutions and academic organizations. Given the small amount of documentation he has left behind, we will never know if he really did what he said. I just wanted to mention him here for the apparent parallelisms with the other scientists we are presenting.
Conclusion
The scientists which I have presented are just a small part of a large quantity of scientists who, over a time-span of 4-5000 years and coming from different places, have studied similar things obtaining similar results and developing similar theories. I have intentionally said 4-5000 years because to anyone familiar with ancient Chinese, Indian and even Greek philosophies and practices, the analogies with what these scientists have discovered are more than obvious.
Furthermore, what is most impressive in all these scientists is that they were often studying completely different fields of knowledge (from biology to electronics, from psychology to physics) but came to conclusions which were astoundingly similar as to the basic theory underlying all facets of nature, the cosmos and human life. They were also sadly similar in the persecution they suffered from Established Authorities and Academic Circles. In Wilhelm Reich’s case, his books were once even publicly burned in Post Second World War America!!
I don’t want to support or dismiss any of the theories presented, but I think that a honest and scientific attitude towards knowledge would require that the findings exposed above should be investigated for the good of all mankind. If they should be dismissed as quackery (which is being done everyday by mainstream scientists), then this should be done AFTER a thorough study and research and not just on the basis that they are too different or too “crazy” for being accepted by the scientific community. And this is even more so when considering the chaos which is leading science nowadays. The biologist will not agree with the neuroscientist, the chemist will not agree with the physicist, the archaeologist will not agree with the engineer, etc., etc., etc.
Follows a short list of other scientists, know and unknown, living and not living, who have independently obtained similar results.
Nikolas Tesla (Electronic engineer)
Viktor Schauberger (physicist)
Ruth Drown (medical doctor)
Albert Abrahms (medical doctor)
Franz Anton Mesmer
Royal Rife (inventor)
William Thomson (Lord Kelvin, physicist)
Konstantin Meyl (quantum physicist)
Trevor Constable
Samuel Hahnemann (physician)
Italian 
English