Text: Response to Martin Gardner's Attack on Reich and Orgone Research in the Skeptical Inquirer by James DeMeo, Ph.D. Director, Orgone Biophysical Research Lab PO Box 1148, Ashland, Oregon 97520 USA demeo@mind.net Copyright (C) 1989 All Rights Reserved by James DeMeo (This article was originally presented to the editors of Skeptical Inquirer in response to Martin Gardner's published article. Unfortunately, the editors of SI refused to publish it, nor even a shorter rebuttal letter. In fact, the editors of SI refused even to acknowledge that I had sent them a letter and article rebutting Gardner treating this author with additional silent contempt, as if they were the Bishops of Rome. A subsequent personal letter to CSICOP Fellows Carl Sagan, Steven Jay Gould, and Paul Macready, appealing for their help to have my rebuttal published in SI, elicited total silence also, confirming the existence of a vast academic mafia. Such a failure to acknowledge rebuttal and response to criticism is, of course, completely anti-scientific, undemocratic, and highly unethical. Subsequently, this Rebuttal appeared in Pulse of the Planet #1, 1989. Click here for the OBRL Home Page) The journal Skeptical Inquirer is the official publication of CSICOP, the "Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal". The organization has a reputation for debunking many popular beliefs of either a metaphysical or folk-lore nature. Among their favorite targeted subjects are astrology, ESP, UFOs, psychokinesis, faith-healing, and psychic surgery. CSICOP has made the headlines in recent years for its attacks on advocates of "paranormal" phenomena, and for actual unmasking of a few deceptive "faith healers". But its membership has also expressed opposition to any unusual ideas that do not fit within a very narrow, mechanistic world view, such as solar-terrestrial correlations, acupuncture, and dietary treatments for degenerative disease. In recent months, the organization was itself publicly tarnished following their attack upon Jacques Benveniste, a French scientist whose experiments provided some evidence for the principle of homeopathic dilutions.(1) Given their apparent reluctance to rely upon fair and open discussion, or honestly-conducted research as a means of resolving scientific controversies, CSICOP has since been labeled the "Truth police", "science cops", and other names by various members of the scientific community. Attack Against Wilhelm Reich and Contemporary Scientists Most recently an article attacking Wilhelm Reich and orgonomy, by CSICOP leader Martin Gardner, appeared in the Skeptical Inquirer.(2) Titled "Reich the Rainmaker: The Orgone Obsession", the article takes aim at Reich primarily for his discovery of the orgone energy. To Gardner, Reich was a man gone mad, a "paranoid egoist". In the article, Gardner also recounts a small bit of my own research with the cloudbuster, which he attempts to condemn via association with the distorted picture of Reich he has painted. The article reeks with contempt for Reich, and for the whole concept of energy in space, and contains so many falsehoods, distortions, and half-truths that rebuttal requires some lengthy documentation. Only someone unread about the facts of Reich's life and works will find Gardner's article convincing. Gardner mentions a few of Reich's research findings, but in such a manner as to invite disbelief, without any attention to details, or mention of the specific experiments which led to his conclusions. The article makes cartoons out of serious experimental work, and Gardner calmly asserts that the orgone is "an energy no physicist outside orgonomy circles has detected". This is quite a bald statement, but is completely false. Many examples will be given below of researchers who made little or no mention of Reich, who often strongly disliked him and the whole notion of the orgone energy, but who nevertheless unexpectedly detected an unusual, orgone-like energy in living creatures, in the atmosphere, or in space. First, however, let us briefly review what evidence has been gathered by Reich and his coworkers on the orgone question. I must reject Gardner's attempt to place automatically anyone who obtains positive evidence for the orgone within a suspect (and non-existent) "orgonomy circle". This is a dishonest attempt to cast suspicion and a taint upon anyone who actually does obtain positive evidence favoring Reich's claims. It is a method of ostracism common to cliques of schoolchildren on the playground, but has no place in scientific investigations. Furthermore, there has never been, to the best of my knowledge, any researcher who has ever carefully reproduced Reich's experiments and obtained clearly negative findings. Even Einstein confirmed one of Reich's experimental findings, the temperature differential within the orgone accumulator,(3) but unfortunately without completing the necessary control tests which demonstrate its orgone-energetic origins. Indeed, there are dozens of qualified researchers who have duplicated Reich's experiments, obtained positive confirming evidence, and published their findings in various journals. Several years ago I produced a detailed Bibliography on Orgone Biophysics,(4) which covered the period of research from 1934 to 1986. It contains over 400 separate citations by more than 100 different authors, most of whom possessed the M.D. or Ph.D. degree. Besides my own thesis and doctoral dissertation,(5) which were presented to and accepted by a group of respected scholars at the University of Kansas, I have listed in this Bibliography 17 other theses and dissertations which drew heavily from Reich's works, confirming various aspects of his bioenergetic formulations. There are 38 indexed citations in the Bibliography covering Reich's bion and biogenesis experiments, including Professor du Teil's 1938 confirming presentation on the bions to the French Academy of Sciences. The Bibliography also contains more than 80 indexed citations on the electroscopical, thermical, and biological effects of the orgone energy accumulator. This includes some 22 studies on plant-growth responses, and 6 on cancer retardation or wound-healing in laboratory mice. Another 12 citations discuss or evaluate the Reich bioenergetic blood test. More than 50 citations focus on cloudbusting, with 20 or so papers discussing methods for direct visual observation of the atmospheric orgone. Of particular note is the most recent German dissertation on "The Psycho-Physiological Effects of the Reich Orgone Accumulator",(6) which was a double-blind, controlled study, confirming many details of Reich's original assertions on the parasympathetic stimulation of concentrated orgone energy on the body, and the weather-dependent pulsation of the orgone in the accumulator. But Gardner says nothing about this research, as if it was wothless, the workers involved being somehow deluded into forgetting their research training, or worse. I ask, can he specifically cite anyone, even a single person, who has duplicated any one of Reich's experiments and obtained a fully negative result? Has he ever personally attempted to reproduce a single one of Reich's experiments, or even the more simple observational tests? Can he demonstrate even a cursory knowledge of this body of positive research evidence, which extends back some 50 years, or give a convincing, rational reason for his contrived and easy dismissal of it all? Does Gardner, a master with math games, card tricks, and use of the English language, have any research training or credentials to support his self-proclaimed authority over this matter? Does he not care a whit for the facts in his overwhelming drive and passion to skewer Reich and the orgone? The answer appears to be NO on all counts. What Gardner fails to mention is also telling. For example, one would not know from his article that Reich had his books and research journals banned and burned by an American court of law, with five actual episodes of court-ordered book-burning taking place, most recently in the 1960s. He mentions the fact that Reich was, in 1932 and 1933, disowned by both the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA) and the German communists, but failed to mention that he was likewise attacked, and put on death lists, by both the Nazis and Stalinists, who also burned his books. After fleeing from Hitler's Germany, Reich was welcomed by the Norwegian analysts, who liked his writings, and disagreed with the politically-motivated actions of the IPA.(7) But Gardner is not concerned with details, as he considers Reich's work, and that of his coworkers, to be "religion". He compares orgonomy, which makes no claim to metaphysical truths or salvation, and has no gurus, churches, and the like, to Scientology, a self-proclaimed religion with churches, sunday services, and a messianic leader widely know for his science-fiction writing. One would not know, for example, that orgonomy is a research discipline developed from new natural scientific observations and experimental findings. Gardner's History of Attacking Reich Gardner's first attack against Reich appeared in the Antioch Review of 1950,(8) though he was then more restrained in his linguistic distortions and vituperation. In 1952 he attacked Reich, with similar clever wit and fervor, in a chapter in Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science.(9) His articles helped fuel the Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) pseudo-investigation, which has since been demonstrated, through at least three different Freedom-Of-Information-Act searches of FDA files,(10) to have been conducted in a most shabby, antiscientific "get Reich" manner. Today, we know that there is no credible evidence contained in FDA files by which they could have justified their actions.(See the article on Page 18 in this issue of the Pulse.) Reich, of course, was outraged that various hack journalists had slandered him, and put false words into his mouth about the effects of the accumulator.(11) Gardner incautiously repeats some of these falsehoods in his recent article, such as "The concentrated orgone is said to relieve symptoms of almost every illness from cancer to impotence."(2:26) He was more cautious in his earlier articles on Reich. In the Antioch article he also asserted that no competent scientist would bother to refute Reich's findings, condemning them with a wave of the hand. Gardner was obviously wrong in that Reich has not been ignored since the 1950s, by either scientists or laypeople. But Gardner continues to deny and ignore the experimental, empirical nature of Reich's findings, which have guaranteed a continuing, growing interest in them for over three decades. Having failed in his 30-year mission to distort the facts, Gardner's latest attack reveals a harsher, more frustrated tone. Interestingly, in his early articles the younger Gardner made at least passing mention of Lysenko, a Stalinist bureaucrat who put many scientists to death for their research findings; but not so the elder Gardner, who has lost sight of the lessons of history, and seems glad that Reich died in jail, his books condemned to flames. I believe this is because Gardner, and other politically-powerful media-darlings of the CSICOP gang, have been quietly and consistently asserting a deadly new form of Lysenkoism in the USA, for at least 30 years. Is there anyone who would deny the fact that academic freedom is almost non-existent in the USA if one wishes to seriously study certain questions, such as the orgone energy, or, for that matter, anything which challenges the assertions of "empty space", "every cell from a cell", or non-genetic mechanisms for heredity? My files grow increasingly full of recent examples of American researchers and medical pioneers who have been trounced into silent submission, into jail, or prematurely into their graves, for doing nothing more than exploring such questions! CSICOP claims, on the back cover of its publication, that it investigates "fringe-science claims from a responsible scientific point of view", and also does "not reject claims on a-priori grounds antecedent to inquiry, but rather examines them objectively and carefully". However, from the above, we have seen that the Gardner article, at least, has violated these high-sounding goals in an extreme way. The detailed scientific research of Reich and his coworkers is flippantly ignored, as if it does not really constitute "research", their experiments somehow failing to be real "experiments". But he, Gardner, writes as if he had examined all the facts and evidence, when the truth is that he has done little or no examining at all, other than to select quotes cleverly here and there from a few books. CSICOP and Gardner have set a pattern for themselves. They proclaim expertise over matters where they have none, and condemn it where it exists. It is not so much different from the 1950s, when the FDA substituted rumor and gossip for "evidence", granted "expertise" only to those scientists who had demonstrated the proper quanta of ignorance, contempt, and prejudice, and concocted "experiments" which bore no resemblance to those previously published. What Are the Facts About Wilhelm Reich's Discoveries? Dr. Reich's findings have not died with him because his experiments, when carefully conducted under the original conditions, produce the same results now as when he first developed them. They yield clear evidence for a pulsatory, weather-active and biologically-active energy continuum. It can, and has been, measured and photographed, and found to exist in high vacuum as well.(4) Reich called this energy continuum the orgone, but other scientists, working completely independent of Reich, and usually without knowledge of his works, have likewise measured or strongly inferred the existence of such an energy.

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