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| Today Rife's research is being re-visited by such groups as . | Today Rife's research is being re-visited by such groups as . | ||
| But history seems to be repeating itself as those who are looking into Rife's work today are accused of ignoring the ], and their work is described as ]. Current theoretical and commercial offerings, such as ], are |
But history seems to be repeating itself as those who are looking into Rife's work today are accused of ignoring the ], and their work is described as ]. Current theoretical and commercial offerings, such as ], are claimed to be unsupported by peer-reviewed research and condemned as quackery by ] and other ] of ] who seem to take the same view of Rife and his work as Fishbein in the first half of the 20th century.<br> | ||
| To date however, there have been no peer-reviewed double-blind clinical trials on Rife's Beam Ray work or supposed modern day reproductions. The evidence against this technology remains as much as reliant on testimonials as the evidence for it. | To date however, there have been no peer-reviewed double-blind clinical trials on Rife's Beam Ray work or supposed modern day reproductions. The evidence against this technology remains as much as reliant on testimonials as the evidence for it. | ||
Revision as of 12:26, 6 March 2006
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Royal Raymond Rife (May 16, 1888 - August 11, 1971) was known in the alternative medicine community for his inventing the "Universal Microscope" in 1933, an optical microscope claiming a resolution 40 times greater than possible with white light: 60,000X magnification (comparable to that of early (1988) electron microscopes). Also heralded as having 100% cure rate with terminal cancer patients using his "Beam Ray" device in 1934.
His life
He was born in Elkhorn, Nebraska, and in 1913 married and moved to San Diego.
He is reported to to have worked for one of the German optical companies for a few years before World War One (Zeiss or Leitz) and to have served in the US Navy during World War I.
In various places he is described as Dr. Rife, but which university awarded his doctorate, or its subject is not recorded.
Research with the Universal Microscope
Rife claimed to have used his Universal Microscope to examine microbes in various media. According to Rife, an advantage of his optical microscope over other optical microscopes of the day was that living tissues and organisms could be examined as his microscope, through the use of polarized light and prisms, was able to focus clearly on live tissues and living organisms. By 1933, he had had constructed the Universal Microscope, which had 5,682 different parts and was capable of magnifying objects 60,000 times. With this incredible microscope, Rife reported directly observing the life cycles of viruses and bacteria. He is also reported to have seen internal detail in cells between the cells of human tissues, too small for the conventional microscopes of the day to resolve. These observations have not been confirmed by electron microscopy, which now routinely produces magnification of the level Rife claimed but only on dead microorganisms.
Rife reported he could identify an individual spectroscopic signature of each microbe, using a slit spectroscope attachment and claimed that he rotated block quartz prisms to focus light of a single wavelength upon the microorganism he was examining, which resonated with the spectroscopic signature frequency of the microbe.
The result of using a resonant wavelength is that micro-organisms which are invisible in white light suddenly become visible in a flash of light when they are exposed to the color frequency that resonates with their own distinct spectroscopic signature. Rife was thus able to see these otherwise invisible organisms and watch them actively invading tissues cultures. Rife reported viewing organisms that no one else could see with ordinary light microscopes.
More than 75% of the organisms Rife could see with his Universal Microscope are only visible with ultra-violet light. Rife described overcoming this limitation by heterodyning, a technique used in radio reception which at that time was quite new. Rife is reported to have made microbes visible in UV without killing them. Electron microscopes cannot do this, partly due to vacuum.
The Beam Ray
On November 20, 1931, forty-four of the nation's most respected medical authorities honored Royal Rife with a banquet billed as The End To All Diseases at the Pasadena estate of Dr. Milbank Johnson.
Rife commissioned the invention of a device called the "Beam Ray", said to operate on the principle of resonance, which he allegedly used to find the "Mortal Oscillation Rate" to destroy the organism, just as a wine glass can be broken by sound at a certain frequency. In 1934, the University of Southern California appointed a Special Medical Research Committee to bring cancer patients from Pasadena County Hospital to Rife's San Diego Laboratory and clinic for treatment.
After 90 days of treatment, the Committee concluded that 14 of the patients had been completely cured. The treatment was then adjusted for the remaining 2 of the patients over the next four weeks. The total recovery rate using Rife's technology was 100%.
Destruction of Research
Rife and his latter day supporters account for the absence of demonstrable equipment or detailed notes on its construction by reporting that Dr. Morris Fishbein, then editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association or alternatively the government, raided Rife's labs, destroyed his microscopes, seized his equipment and notes, and forced him to move on.
Re-examination of Research
Rife's work was revived by interested scientists and laypeople in the 1980s. An interest in Rife himself was revived by author Barry Lynes, who wrote a book about Rife entitled The Cancer Cure That Worked.
Today Rife's research is being re-visited by such groups as the Bioelectromagnetics Society.
But history seems to be repeating itself as those who are looking into Rife's work today are accused of ignoring the scientific method, and their work is described as pseudo-science. Current theoretical and commercial offerings, such as Rife plasma lamp devices, are claimed to be unsupported by peer-reviewed research and condemned as quackery by Quackwatch and other skeptics of alternative medicine who seem to take the same view of Rife and his work as Fishbein in the first half of the 20th century.
To date however, there have been no peer-reviewed double-blind clinical trials on Rife's Beam Ray work or supposed modern day reproductions. The evidence against this technology remains as much as reliant on testimonials as the evidence for it.
Resolving power
Microscopes are conventionally regarded as able to resolve detail of a size similar to the wavelength of the radiation used - thus electron microscopes show much smaller objects than light microscopes, and similarly, radio telescopes have a theoretical limit on the order of milimetres.
Similar, but not identical constraints apply to photo-lithographic techniques, where light is used to print detail onto a medium, or to trigger the erosion of a silicon substrate in integrated circuit manufacture.
Various optical techniques allow limited improvements on these limits.
Modern lithographic techniques experimentally produce features below 30 nm, using deep-ultraviolet light with a wavelength of 193 nm, however triggering the etching of a line is a matter distinct from producing images at that resolution.
Unstained specimens
Phase contrast microscopes use interference between light passing by two paths to reach the observer to enhance the detail visible in essentially transparent objects such as living cells. A Nobel prize was awarded in 1953 for work done in the early part of the century on this. Phase contrast does not increase the resolving power; it only increases the contrast. The curator's report on the Rife microscope in the Science Museum mentions the availability of phase-contrast.
Other devices using Rife's name
In the late 1980's a company by the name of "Life Energy Resources" mass-produced a device they called the "REM SuperPro Generator" on the foundation of Rife's work (giving the acronym REM for Rife's Electromagnetic). Three of the company's top distributors: Pat Ballistrea, Michael Ricotta, and Brian Strandberg, served prison time for device health fraud and selling unapproved medical devices and drugs as a result of their trials in 1993, 1994, and 1995.
See also
External links
- James Bare is an inventor who has designed a modern version of the Rife "Beam Ray" device.
- Rife.org - reviews the original documents concerning Rife
- The European Rife Information Forum is run by Peter Walker, a Rife experimenter, and contains a wealth of links and information concerning modern Rife research.
- The Bioelectromagnetics Society is an association of scientists and doctors conducting experiments that use electromagnetism to heal.
- Aubrey Scoon is an electrical engineer with an interest in Rife technologies who maintains a web site regarding his own research into Rife technologies.
- FDA Link on the FDA website detailing the succesful prosecution of a group selling what they claimed to be a circa 1980's reproduction Rife machine under the name REM Superpro.
- Jeff Rense A more detailed website putting Rife's work in layman's terms.
- EMR Labs Another website but with photocopies of newspaper clippings
- Rife devices
- http://www.rife.de/mscope/mscope5.htm ascribed to Neil Brown of the Science Museum, London