Eisen-Suppressed-Inventions-and-other-Discoveries-True-Stories-of ...

Scientist With
an Attitude:
Wilhelm Reich
Jeane Manning
Federal employees worked with a vengeance when instructed to destroy
the work of scientist Wilhelm Reich, M.D., at his laboratory in the state of
Maine. Their 1956 court injunction said that construction materials in
Reich's boxlike "orgone accumulator" could be salvaged, but the workers
slashed the Celotex panels into useless junk.
Down the coast in New York, Reich's associates Dr. Michael Silvert and
Dr. Victor Sobey were forced to load the literature in the Orgone Institute
stock room into a large truck. The freight truck dumped the papers at a
Lower Manhattan incinerator, for an FDA-ordered book burning.
The American Civil Liberties Union stepped in when it was too late,
with a press release saying that the court order was a violation of free
speech because only one of the torched books could be considered [an aid]
to promote or explain the controversial orgone accumulator. (Orgone is
the name Reich gave to a life force which he discovered to be within and
around all living organisms, including the earth.) The civil liberties press
release said, in part, "It is a serious challenge to freedom of the press, principles
of free thought on which our democratic government is based, for
an agency of government to take advantage of such a dragnet injunction
to thwart the dissemination of knowledge, however eccentric or unpopular
that knowledge may be."
MEDIA LOOKED THE OTHER WAY
No major newspaper used the press release. Furthermore, six scientists
and educators sent all major papers in England a letter of protest about the
book burning and Reich's sentencing. All the papers remained silent on
the topic.
What was the suppression of Reich's scientific work really about It
was apparently about more than just (he FDA's responsibility to protect
supposedly gullible consumers from spending money on devices which
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