The fall of Royal Rife

By Jule Klotter

Nov. 2005

Townsend Letter for Doctors and Patients(Issue 268)

Publisher: The Townsend Letter Group

 

The Rise and Fall of a Scientific Genius (video)

written & directed by Shawn Montgomery.

Zero Zero Two Productions, 3 Baldoon Rd., Toronto, Ontario, Canada M1B 1V6; www.zerozerotwo.org

74 minutes; available in North American standard and European standard video formats; $29.95 (USD) plus $5 for shipping

 

Over a year ago, I had the good luck to review Part I of Shawn Montgomery’s excellent documentary about Royal Rife’s work, The Rise & Fall of a Scientific Genius. In it, Montgomery uses interviews, news and journal articles, film clips and other documents to present Rife’s discoveries. During the 1920s and 30s, Rife collaborated with two well-known bacteriologists, Dr. E. C. Rosenow of the Mayo Clinic (Rochester, Minnesota) and Dr. Arthur Kendall of Northwestern University (Chicago, Illinois). Like Rife, they observed pleomorphic microbes that changed into as many as 16 distinct organisms with the help of Rife’s Universal Microscope. The Universal Microscope used monochromatic light to stain microbes and could achieve magnification of up to 31,000X without losing resolution, rivaling the electron microscope.

Rife and Kendall isolated a filterable pleomorphic organism from a human cancerous tumor. They grew the organism on a culture medium that Kendall had developed and injected it into lab animals. The animals developed cancer. The researchers were able to recover the same organism from the sick animal. Having identified the disease-causing organism, Rife used specific frequencies produced by his Beam Ray Instrument to destroy it. Dr. Milbank Johnson, a medical politician affiliated with the University of South California (USC) and head of the local medical society, was impressed with their work. He helped organize a USC clinical research study with 16 terminally-ill cancer patients in 1934. The panel of medical experts who supervised the study pronounced 14 of the 16 patients in the study clinically cured within 70 days. The other two required 20 more days of treatment before they, too, were well. Part I of The Rise & Fall of a Scientific Genius ends at this point of incredible success. “Part II: Rife’s Fall” tells why Rife’s scientific accomplishments have been cast aside. It’s a depressing tale of greed, character flaws, and despicable misuse of power by the American Medical Association and FDA.

The original Beam Ray Instrument was huge–wall-sized–far too big to make it clinically practical. Rife sought a way to make a smaller portable machine and began collaborating with electrical engineer Philip Hoyland. Hoyland made a smaller version that met with Rife’s approval. Rife, Hoyland, Rife’s assistant Ben Cullen, and business promotor C.R. Hutchinson formed the Beam Ray Corporation to sell and distribute it. Unfortunately, Hoyland began to make changes. Many machines that he produced were unstable and didn’t get the results of the original. In addition, Hoyland made the machines so that the setting did not reveal the actual frequencies responsible for destroying specific organisms. It had taken Rife thousands of hours at the microscope to determine which frequency affected which microbe. Hoyland was trying to protect this proprietary information, but the camouflage made Rife’s scientific discoveries inaccessible to other researchers.

The benefits of Rife’s machine gained the attention of AMA editor Morris Fishbein. Fishbein was notorious for suppressing any new therapy that competed with conventional medicine. Hoyland accepted $10,000 from Fishbein’s agent, who convinced Hoyland to file a lawsuit against Beam Ray Corp. The two men intended to force a new board of directors that would include Fishbein’s agent. Rife countersued and, in 1939, won. But the suit used up all of his money and took a horrible toll on his own well-being. To deal with the stress of testifying, Rife had turned to alcohol and developed an addiction that remained until his death in 1971. That trial also prevented Rife from making a trip to England to explain his work to respected and powerful doctors interested in pursuing his work. By the time the trial had ended, World War II had begun; and Rife was never able to transfer his knowledge to interested colleagues overseas.

Since the AMA could not gain control of Rife’s work, Fishbein decided to crush it. Doctors were told to get rid of their Beam Ray Instruments or lose membership in the AMA. Only doctors close to the politically powerful Milbank Johnson continued to use Rife’s machine; but at Johnson’s death in 1944, they, too, were threatened. In the 1950s, Rife partnered with mechanical engineer John Crane who tried to commercialize Rife’s inventions. Their limited success drew attention. In the early 1960s, FDA agents raided Crane’s laboratory and seized equipment. Agents also demanded that doctors surrender Rife machines to the FDA.

If Rife had found a more trustworthy engineer than Hoyland to reproduce his machine…. If Rife had had the money and stamina to fight Fishbein in court as the presiding judge had recommended…. If Rife had made it to England…. So many factors contributed to the loss of this scientific discovery, but greed and the power grab of the AMA lay at its center. Too many people and organizations profit from an ongoing search for a cancer cure. The Rise & Fall of a Scientific Genius deserves to be widely viewed and distributed as a tribute to scientific discovery and the misuse of power.

review by Jule Klotter

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2005 The Townsend Letter Group
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