Suppressed Inventions and Other Discoveries (27 page)

In reply to this letter, Naessens's lawyer sent a list of details as requested and stated: "You will, of course, understand that it is impossible for Monsieur Naessens to furnish you, in correspondence, with the complete description of a highly novel microscope which is, moreover, unprotected by any patent." Then, to explain why no patent had yet been granted, he added a key phrase: "since its mathematical constants have, up to the present, not been elucidated in spite of a great deal of tiresome work performed in that regard." In other words, it seemed that Aumont and his colleagues had been unable to explain the superiority of the microscope in terms of all the known laws of optics and it still seems that, so far, no one else has been able to do so.

There have been interesting recent reports on new microscopes being developed that apparently rival the magnification powers of Naessens's somatoscope. It would seem, however, that the 150 angstroms of resolution achieved by Naessens's instrument has not yet been matched.

The Los Angeles-based World Research Foundation's flyer, presenting its autumn (1990) conference "New Directions for Medicine ... Focusing on Solutions," announced the development of an Ergonom-400x microscope, used by a German Heilpraktiker, or healer, Bernhard Muschlien, who paid a visit to Naessens's laboratory in 1985. While his microscope is apparently capable of achieving 25,000-fold magnification, its stated resolution is 100 nanometres (1000 angstroms), or several orders of magnitude less than the 150 angstroms developed with the somatoscope.*

In the July 1990 issue of Popular Science, an article "Super Scopes" refers to an extraordinary new technology in microscopy engineered at Cornell University under the direction of Professor Michael Isaacson, and also in Israel. The technology uses not lenses but apertures smaller than

* One nanometre is one-billionth of a metre; one angstrom is ten-billionths of a metre, or one-tenth of a nanometre.
the wave lengths of visible light to achieve high magnification. Isaacson is quoted as saying: "Right now, we can get about 40 nanometres (400 angstroms) of resolution," though he hopes to heighten that "power" to 100 angstroms "down the road." The 150 angstroms capacity built into Naessens's microscope over forty years ago still seems to lead the field.

Returning to the biography of Naessens, during the 1940s, the precocious young biologist began to develop novel anticancer products that had exciting new positive effects. The first was a confection he named "GN-24" for the initial letters of his first and last names, and for 1924, the year of his birth. Because official medicine had long considered cancerous cells to be basically "fermentative" in nature, reproducing by a process that, while crucial to making good wine from grape juice, produces no such salutary effect in the human body, Naessens's new product incorporated an "anti-fermentative" property. The train of his thinking, biologically or biochemically speaking, will not be here elaborated lest this account become too much of a "scientific treatise." What can be mentioned is that the new product, GN24, sold in Swiss pharmacies, had excellent results when administered by doctors to patients with various forms of cancer.

As but one example of these results, Naessens cited to me the case of his own brother-in-law, on the executive staff of the famed Paris subway system, the Metropolitan. In 1949, this relative, the husband of a now exwife's sister, was suffering through the terminal phase of stomach cancer and had been forced into early retirement. After complete recuperation from his affliction, due to GN-24, he resumed work. Only recently, Naessens, who had lost contact with him for years, was informed that he was alive and well.

Another 1949 case was that of Germaine Laruelle, who was stricken with breast cancer plus metastases to her liver. A ghastly lesion that had gouged out the whole of the left section of her chest had caused her to go into coma when her family beseeched Naessens to begin treatment. After recovering her health, fifteen years later, she voluntarily came to testify on behalf of Naessens, who, as we shall presently see, had been put under investigation by the French Ordre des Medecins (Medical Association). She also allowed press photographers to take pictures of the scars on the left side of her breast-denuded chest. In 1969, twenty years after her initial treatment, she died of a heart attack.

Seeking a more imposing weapon against cancer, Naessens next began developing a serum. This he achieved by hyperimmunizing a large draft horse by means of injecting the animal with cancer-cell cultures, thus forcing it to produce antibodies in almost industrial quantities. Blood withdrawn from the horse's veins containing these antibodies, when purified, was capable of fighting the ravages of cancel. Itproved to have therapeutic action far more extensive than that obtained by GN-24, and led to a restraint or reversal of the cancerous process, not only in cases of tumours but also with various forms of leukemia. Many patients clandestinely treated by their doctors with the new serum, called Anablast (Ana, "without," and blast, "cancerous cells"), were returned to good health.

One patient, successfully so treated, was to play a key role in Naessens's life. This was Suzanne Montjoint, then just past forty years of age, who, in 1960, developed a lump the size of a pigeon's egg in her left breast. Over the next year, the lump grew as large as a grapefruit. After the breast itself was surgically removed, Montjoint underwent a fifty-four-day course of radiation that caused horrible third-degree burns all over her chest. Within six months, she began to experience severe pain in her lower back.

Chemical examination revealed that the original cancer had spread to her fifth lumbar vertebra. More radiation not only could not alleviate the now excruciating pain, but caused a blockage in the functioning of her kidneys and bladder. When doctors told her husband she had only a week or so to live, Suzanne said to him, "I still have strength left to kill myself . . . but, tomorrow, I may not have it anymore."

Summoned by the husband, one of whose friends had told him about the biologist, Naessens began treating Madame Montjoint; who, by then, had lapsed into a semicoma. Within four days, all her pains disappeared and she had regained clarity of mind. By April 1962, after an examination of her blood at his microscope, Naessens declared that the somatid cycle in Suzanne Montjoint's blood had returned to normal. As she later told press reporters, "My recovery was no less than a resurrection!"

When these successful treatments, plus many others, came to the attention of French medical authorities, Naessens was twice brought before the bar of justice, first for the "illegal practice of medicine," next for the "illegal practice of pharmacy." On both occasions, he was heavily fined, his laboratory sealed, and most of its equipment confiscated, though, happily, he was able to preserve his precious microscope.

With all the harassment he was enduring (while at the same time saving the lives of patients whose doctors could afford them little, or no, hope for recovery), Naessens was almost ready to emigrate from his mother country and find a more congenial atmosphere in which to pursue his work, with the privacy and anonymity that he had always cherished and still longs for. An opportunity came when he was invited by doctors in the Mediterranean island of Corsica, whose inhabitants speak a dialect more akin to Italian than to French. With a long history of occupation by various invaders before it actually became part of the French Republic, its population has ever since been possessed of a revolutionary streak that, on occasion, fuels an urge toward secession from the "motherland."

In Corsica, Naessens established a small research laboratory in the village of Prunette, on the southwest tip of the island. What happened next, in all its full fury, cannot be told here. Reported in two consecutive issues of the leading Parisian illustrated weekly Paris-Match, the story would require, for any adequate telling, two or more chapters in a much longer book.

Suffice it to say that, having developed a cure for various forms of degenerative disease, Naessens saw his ivory tower invaded by desperate patients from all over the world who had learned of his treatment when a Scots Freemason, after hearing about it during a Corsican meeting with international members of his order, leaked the news to the press in Edinburgh. Within a week, hundreds of potential patients were flying into Ajaccio, the island's capital, some of them from as far away as Czechoslovakia and Argentina.

The deluge immediately unleashed upon Naessens the wrath of the French medical authorities, who began a long investigation in the form of what is known in France as an Instruction—called in Quebec an Enquete preliminaire—a kind of "investigative trial" before a more formal one.

All the "ins and outs" of this long jurisprudential process, thousands of pages of transcripts about which still repose in official Parisian archives, must, however regretfully, be left out of this narrative. Its denouement was that Gaston Naessens, together with key components of his microscope preserved on his person, left his native land in 1964 to fly to Canada, a country whose medical authorities he believed to be far more open to new medical approaches and horizons than those in France. His abrupt departure from the land of his birth was facilitated by a high-ranking member of France's top police organ, the Surete Nationale, whose wife, Suzanne Montjoint, Naessens had successfully treated.

Hardly had Naessens set foot on Canadian soil than he was faced with difficulties, in fact a "scandal," almost as, if not just as, serious as the one he had just left behind.

During the French Instruction proceedings in 1964, one Rene Guynemer, a Canadian "war hero" of uncertain origin and profession, had accosted Naessens in his Paris home to beg him to come to Canada in order to treat his little three-year-old son, Rene Junior, who was dying of leukemia.

Though puzzled about a certain lack of "straightforwardness" in the supplicant, Naessens, ever willing to help anyone in distress, and with the approbation and assistance of the Canadian ambassador to France, immediately flew to Montreal, where he hoped, as agreed by Guynemer pere, to be able to treat fits in complete discretion. Upon his arrival at Montreal's Dorval Airport, however, Naessens was aghast to see a horde of representatives of both the printed and visual media, creating, in anticipation of his arrival, what amounted to a virtual mob scene.

The Quebec "Medical College" had, at the time, agreed, for "humanitarian" reasons, to allow the treatment of the Guynemer child, in spite of the fact that Anablast had not been licensed for use in Canada. Various tests, lasting for several weeks, were made on the product at Montreal's well-known microbiological Institut Armand Frappier to confirm the presence of gamma globulin in it, the presence of which purportedly thorough French examinations had failed to detect.

Virtually at death's door, the Guynemer child was said to have been given nine injections of Anablast. Naessens himself was never given official confirmation that the injections had actually been administered. Nor was he permitted to make any examination of the little patient's blood at his microscope, or even to meet him face to face. After the little boy succumbed, the Quebec press exploded with stories that, in their luridness matched the ones that had been appearing all over France after the Corsican "debacle."

Some of the mysteries of the "Guynemer connection" will likely never come to light. Only later did it become clear that the true name of the leukemic child's father was actually Lamer, a man who had claimed that, in past years, he had been an officer in the Royal Canadian Air Force and a "secret agent" attached to the French "underground" during World War II. To the Naessenses, the question has always remained: If he was an "agent," then for whom, or for what?

In the spring of 1965, Naessens journeyed to France for his trial. When he returned to Quebec in the autumn of that year, he retired from the public scene to live incognito in Oka, a Montreal suburb, with a newfound friend, Hubert Lamontagne, owner of a business selling up-to-date electronic devices, whom he had met while looking for electrical components for his microscope in 1964. As a person skilled in electronics, Naessens was able to be of great assistance to his host, who also operated a large "repair shop" throughout the winter and the following summer, when, on tour with a troupe of comedians, he was put in charge of solving all the acoustical problems in the many provincial cabarets and theatres hosting the troupe's performances. Deprived, for several years, of any support to pursue his life goals, Naessens was constrained to utilize his skills as "Mr. Fixit," able to repair almost anything, from automobile engines to rectifiers.

After five years of working in electronics, Naessens had a stroke of luck, perhaps the most important of his career, when, in 1971, through a friend, he was introduced to, and came under the protective wing of, an "angel" who saw in Naessens the kind of genius he had for a long time been waiting to back.

That "'angel" was the late David Stewart, head of Montreal's prestigious MacDonald-Stewart Foundation, which for many years had funded, as it still continues to fund, orthodox cancer research. Despondent about the recent death from cancer of a close friend, and in serious doubt that any of the cancer research he had so long supported would ever produce any solution, Stewart's guiding precept and motto was "In the search for a remedy for cancer, we shall leave no stone unturned." The philanthropist therefore decided personally to back Naessens's research. But after setting up a laboratory for the biologist on the Ontario Street premises of the well known MacDonald Tobacco Company, which Stewart's father had inherited from its founder, tobacco magnate Sir William MacDonald, David Stewart came under such violent criticism by leaders of orthodox cancerology that he advised Naessens to move his research to a low-profile provincial retreat.

Having, by that time, established a "liaison" with his bride-to-be, Francoise Bonin, whose parents lived in Sherbrooke, Naessens was, by 1972, able to take over the elder Bonin's summer house on the banks of the Magog River in Rock Forest, "winterize" it, and establish a well equipped laboratory in its basement. And there, the Naessenses, who were married in 1976, have ever since been located. Of his wife, Naessens has said to me: