Suppressed Inventions and Other Discoveries (30 page)

It seems to me that since Dr. Gerson has frankly stated in detail what his diet is and in addition has given the theory on which he personally

believes its claimed efficacy is based, that his material should receive publication and proper attention and criticism by the medical profession. I sincerely hope it will be possible to arrange this.

When both the American Cancer Society and the National Cancer Institute were approached about the Gerson therapy in the 1980s however, both organisations denied having even seen a copy of A Cancer Therapy: The Results of Fifty Cases, despite the fact that due to the heroic efforts of Dr. Gerson's daughter, Charlotte Gerson Strauss, the landmark book has remained in print for 40 years. In 1984, the American Cancer Society, along with the House of Representatives Select Committee on Aging declared that the "Gerson method of treating of cancer is of no value."

Although the "Unproven Methods List" is updated every six months, Gerson's therapy is not likely to be deleted from the list in the near future. The Unproven Methods Committee, according to the director of the Unproven Methods Office, G. Congdon Wood, supposedly makes its decisions on the medical literature. More recent information which supports his therapies, such as that published in the 1978 Journal of Physiological Chemistry and Physics seems to have been ignored—a spokesperson for the ACS explaining that they "had not seen" the article.

Government agencies such as the FDA. are also consulted in the review process. Unfortunately for people's health, the FDA. is notorious for its prejudice against vitamins and other natural therapies. When Charlotte Gerson Strauss was attempting to find a publisher for her father's book, some of the publishing houses considering the book received threats from the FDA, which had recently (May 1992) made a raid on the Tahoma (natural health) Clinic in Washington State, and seized vitamins and patient records, among other things. It is obviously not the sort of agency you would expect to endorse Gerson's therapy any time in the near future.

The National Cancer Institute is another agency that gives the Committee information about therapies on the Unproven Method's List. This agency long ago rejected Dr. Gerson and his work. Would you reasonably expect a prestigious national institute to sully its good name as the Castle of the Valiant Knights in White Coats battling the twentieth century scourge of cancer by associating with a "quack" who was expelled from his own State Medical Society? Hardly.

Section II

The Suppression
of Unorthodox Science

The history of science is hardly the history of free inquiry. Rarely does science engage in self-examination, whether scientifically or simply reflectively. Occasionally we may benefit from the perspectives of those observers and historians from outside this branch of knowledge, who seek to bring to the world some solid wisdom. More frequently they fail to awaken interest within a rigid system that believes, as Organized Science does, that all mistakes were committed in the past. ("We might have got it wrong with Galileo and Semmelweis, but that was then.") Seldom is truth met with unconditional acceptance in professions that are not renowned for their engaging humility and willingness to embrace information that conflicts with their cherished and well-defended beliefs.

And so Freud was leaned on to radically alter his seduction theory. Under duress from colleagues, he lost concern for the welfare of sexually abused and beaten children. Rather, from 1894 onward he helped to found a system that blames the victim, turning his original thinking on its head—it's the children who try to seduce the parents! Only then could he find acceptance in the Viennese community of psychologists who then launched him on his stellar career.

Freud's case was not isolated. Wilhelm Reich's books were publicly burned by the FBI in a New York City incinerator in 1957; Immanuel Velikovsky's work was trashed by the U.S. scientific establishment, his publisher leaned on to offload his contract—in the middle of a bestseller; and Julius Hensel's pioneering work on "rock dust" fertiliser was suppressed by the NPK people who had something big to sell the world. So what if everyone is now lacking in essential trace minerals as a result?

Pat Flanagan's Neurophone patent was confiscated by the U.S. government and held for fourteen years—for "national security reasons"—while this most brilliant of brilliant American scientists was starved out. And what threat did his invention pose? It enabled deaf people to hear sounds through the nerves in their skin.

Are these examples mere abberations in an otherwise inclusive organization, or is there is a system-wide suppression syndrome? And if suppression is the norm in our supposedly objective scientific establishment, what exactly have we lost? I believe that we will probably never know what we have lost, or at least the extent of the loss. That's because who we become is a reflection of the attenuation of our available options by a system in which greed is valued above the human creative potential, and even the life force itself. This system's natural response is to suppress that which threatens its stake in the status quo.

Science is funded by giant corporations that do not have a vested interest in, say, organic agriculture, water as a fuel, or good nutrition and sanitation as ways of improving health rather than vaccinations and antibiotics. Science is not pure, nor has it ever been. The "Scientific Method" exists only for the purpose of censoring the innovations of independent thinkers.

The unconventional scientist, the person who comes up with something that threatens a billion dollar industry, will find him or herself either very rich or very dead. Or possibly both. Still, some courageous souls do try, despite the risks, to make their knowledge public. These truly great researchers and inventors are the pure scientists—the ones with a better idea, a new periodic table, a fresh perspective in looking at the universe, a cure for cancer. They represent thousands of other free thinkers who remain anonymous because their ideas and inventions have been bought up, suppressed, forgotten.

Common sense dictates that the quality of life of the human population would be greatly improved if only good ideas would triumph in a free marketplace of ideas.

But there is no existing free marketplace of ideas, and so good ideas do not triumph in the end. Thus it seems that, despite the vigorous protests of skeptics and others who profit from existing conditions, the evidence would indicate that suppression is the norm.

The current reality of a world in which creativity and independent thinking are stifled portends a dismal future. Is there any hope with a view like this one? Perhaps not. But then, perhaps it is up to us to change our outlook for the years to come.

Science
as Credo

Roy Lisker

It seems to me that there are too many people in today's intellectual agaragar who discovered at some early stage that they could feather their nest egg by the interminable cranking of a handful of dependable algorithms in obsessive-compulsive fashion in the same way as the Hindu peasant chews his betel-nuts, the cracker-barrel philosopher his wad of chaw, or the elderly Jewish housewife in Miami Beach her bag of sunflower seeds—and thereby concluded that any real effort towards a higher spiritual or cultural life is a waste of time.

For a great deal of science is nothing more than such forms of compulsive cud-chewing. Truly original ideas are few; many famous scientists have built their entire careers on one or two ideas.

In mathematics (the science with which I have the greatest familiarity), those who developed two original and entirely unconnected trains of thought are given special mention in the bibliographies and histories of the science: Bernhard Riemann, for work in both complex variables and differential geometry; or Gauss for work in number theory, probability and physics.

Really independent ideas are difficult to come by in any field—and by "idea" I mean something like "evolution" or "the square root of minus one," or "the atom." Consider Thomas Hardy, capping a successful career as a novelist with a second career as a poet. Serving us as the exception which proves the rule, his poetry, though much of it is of a high quality, is monotone in its affect of dreary gloom. He is fond, for example, of grieving the miseries of children who aren't even born yet!

Most scientific work, to return to the point, is mechanical, methodical, repetitive and dull. A person may turn out several hundred papers in his lifetime of work without the grace of a single idea worthy of the name. It must be stressed that this in no way negates his competence, dedication or "credibility." He can indeed be quite a good scientist.
Yet one retains the impression, buttressed by numerous historic encounters with every sort of bully in scientist's clothing, that a lifetime of this sort will reinforce an impoverishment of the soul, stinginess of the heart and narrowness of mental vision that is hardly any different from that of the medieval monk, scribe, soldier or peasant. . .

A few months ago, I attended a poetry reading given by a Czech poet/neurophysiologist Miroslaw Holub, at the Lamont Library of Harvard University. I liked his poetry quite a bit; I am sure he is a good neuro (etc.), and know him also as a prominent activist in the years between Dubcek and Havel. Commenting on the differences between literary theory and scientific work, Holub related this conversation between Paul Valery and Albert Einstein.

Valery asked Einstein: "Albeit, answer me this: When you get a new idea, do you run to your notebooks to write it down as fast as you can before it's forgotten?" To which Einstein replied: "In our profession, Paul, a new idea arises so very rarely, that one is not likely to forget it, even years later."

To support my thesis that the scientists of the modern world are in no sense the torchbearers of true civilization, but are little different (in the majority) than the brain-dead scholastics of the Middle Ages, I have identified a Credo of thirteen articles resembling the dogmatic catechisms of various cults and creeds, such as the words of the Mass, the laws of Leviticus, the Nicene Creed, the Benedictine Rule, the Confessions of Faith, the Book of Common Prayer, and the like:

THE SCIENTIST'S CREDO

I. That research be its own justification, whether its purpose be noble, silly or malevolent.

We see this in particular in research on animal subjects, however there are many examples to be taken from all the sciences. The truism that many discoveries which were useless at the time they were made turned out to be of some use, even a century or two later, has, in our day, been elevated into the above principle, which asserts that "All research must be valuable because it may be useful." Such an argument would, in the older religious credos, be equivalent to an exhortation to monks to commit murder because they might find something which, thirty years later, will give them some good reasons to instruct novices in the evils of murder.

II. That there are hidden laws of Nature which guarantee that the fruits of all research must ultimately be of benefit to mankind.

This is a stronger version of Article I, however, the emphasis here is on the "hidden laws," which posit a kind of ultimate "Moral Essence," or "Unconditioned Virtue" in research. There has been no attempt, as far as I know, made by anyone to discover these laws or to derive them from raw data. I may myself approach the NSF [Nation Science Foundation] to underwrite a few decades of Research to validate or invalidate the belief that Ultimate Goodness lies at the bottom of All Research.

III. That the unbelievable amounts of suffering inflicted on living creatures, including human beings, through research in biology, medicine, psychology, and related Sciences, have been as necessary to our Salvation as torturings were necessary to the Salvation of the victims of the Inquisition.

The definition of salvation changes from one era to the next, but the facts of power and sadism undergo little alteration. As long as there exist so many highly qualified professionals in respected fields who enjoy causing suffering to the helpless, it matters little that they toil in this service of some given creed or another one. Ten minutes of rational judgement could easily cancel 50 percent of all the experiments in which living creatures are subjected to such horrible tortures. (It is my belief that this figure can be raised to 100 percent, but that constitutes another essay.)

Still, there is no arguing with Salvation.

IV. That there exists a well-defined methodology known as the "Scientific Method," and that every intelligent person not only knows what it is, but has exactly the same idea of what it is.

We are here confronted with yet another classical barge before the tugboat dilemma: the standard definition of intelligence as that mental factor which understands and uses the "Scientific Method." The vulgar definition of this method, that which is adhered to by most members of the scientific community, is some dreary mix of Positivism and Empiricism. Positivism claims that Universals can be proven by the accumulation of Particulars, while Empiricism claims that facts, and facts alone, are selfevident.

In point of fact, this author knows quite a large number of intelligent people who don't buy either of these viewpoints, but they are also not among the legions who recite the Credo every morning upon rising.

V. That science is not responsible for its creations.

We all know that Szilard, Fermi, Ulam, Oppenheimer, etc., didn't make the A-bomb: God made the A-bomb. One is reminded of the famous remark of Pope Clement II in the fifteenth century, when he was asked how he and his friends might, in good faith, throw all the gold plates used during their daily feast through the windows of the Vatican and into the Tiber River, while at the same time most of Europe was starving:

"God made the papacy; it's our business to enjoy it."

VI. That science has absolute control over its creations.

Most of us go to sleep secure in the knowledge that genetic engineers are following all those guidelines (that they, in their superior wisdom also established), and that therefore Godzilla will not spring out of a test tube, at least not while we're alive.