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234 Suppressed Inventions and Other Discoveries
the FDA decreed were useless. Granted, Wilhelm Reich was brought to
court because another physician transported Reich's orgone accumulators
across state lines in defiance of a federal FDA order. Reich believed the
courts had no mandate to judge basic scientific research nor to order him
to destroy his life's work, so he returned to his laboratory and continued
his writings. As a result of his attitude, he was fined heavily for contempt
of court, sentenced to two years and four months, jailed despite his heart
condition, and later died in prison just before he was eligible for parole.
So far, the story is comprehensible even though it is tragic. But why do
writers even today deflect attention from Reich's most important discoveries
related to a cosmic life force—weather control, and the Oranur
demonstration of the dangerous effects of atomic radiation Even academics
who present themselves as researchers publish distortions of Reich's
ideas. Reich's biographers, W. Edward Mann and Edward Hoffman, point
to a 1980 textbook which has sixteen factual errors in two pages on Reich.
"Most of them are vicious distortions . . . feeding the notion that Reich
was either a quack or a nut."
Other writers, aiming for popular publications, look for ridiculous if not
lewd material. Out of the remains of forty years of published opinions, personal
correspondence and spontaneous statements from a prolific, courageous
freethinker, it is not hard for a skeptic to find a few items which can
be presented as amusing. A continual barrage of such ridicule put Reich
down in popular history mainly as a psychiatrist and "sex doctor."
The labels do not do justice to Reich. His well-known studies of orgasmic
potential (measurements of bio-electric charge correlated with emotions
reported by patients) were only a part of the evolution of his work.
Each step of his career—from being Sigmund Freud's most promising
disciple who worked out how neuroses show up in the human body, to
uncovering the pathology of fascism, to discovering entities under the
microscope which he claimed were links between the non-living and the
living—led him toward wide-ranging findings about the primordial substratum
that he called orgone. He found it moving in living organisms and
everywhere, saw it pulsating in "bions" under the microscope and glowing
in the dark of an orgone accumulator. In the unpolluted oceans and
atmosphere the energy could be seen in the blue colour and lively sparkle.
It is attracted to water but recoils from certain manmade factors. His later
discoveries about the pre-atomic atmospheric substratum, and their implications
for health and the environment, dwarfed any of his earlier work
which led up to them.
In addition to the question of why detractors still try to diminish Reich,
another nagging question remains: Why did the United States government
burn his soft cover books and papers wholesale The fires destroyed piles