James DeMeo's OBRL-News Blog

Nature magazine, considered one of the "top" science journals, has long been known to be heavily biased in favor of the pharmaceutical and biotechnology firms, as well as having cozy relationships with the anti-science "skeptic clubbers".  They have systematically engaged in unethical attacks upon natural healing methods, as well as censoring out critics of popular mainstream ideas - as with their dirty tricks and outright censoring of scientists Jacque Benveniste and Peter Duesberg.

So it was not too surprising when they consulted with an "art's journalist" to do a full-page gossip column in their pages, wherein several paragraphs slandered Wilhelm Reich.  The original item was so:

In this article, writer Glausiusz repeated slanders from the 1940s, falsely accusing Reich of offering the orgone accumulator as method for "curing cancer", and as a sexual appliance which could "increase orgastic potency". Glausiusz also confusedly implied that Alan Turing -- one of the famous British code-breakers who significantly advanced the Allied cause during World War II -- was forced into Reich's form of body-oriented psychotherapy, "to cure his homosexuality",  after which he committed suicide in 1954.  But Reich had no British trainees in his methods at that early date, and in fact Turing had been subjected to hormone injections, by court orders when his homosexuality became publicly known.  While Reich considered homosexuality to be a neurosis, he was sympathetic to their plight and had openly advocated for decriminalization and tolerance.

Reich's meeting with Einstein was also misrepresented, where Glausiusz claimed "Einstein pronounced it (the accumulator) a dud".  But in fact, after corresponding with each other, Einstein invited Reich to his Princeton home where they talked for 4-5 hours.  After observing Reich's demonstrations of apparatus, Einstein spent several weeks making independent tests, declaring in a 1941 letter he had confirmed the thermal anomaly inside the orgone accumulator. Everything Glausiusz wrote about Reich was a half-truth or lie, and the language of it left the reader with the impression of Reich as a sleazy crackpot, which might have been the premeditated goal.

After the Glausiusz article appeared, I wrote a four-page rebuttal article titled "In Defense of Wilhelm Reich", correcting the errors and presenting a heavily-cited discussion on the many published articles and books which reported new experimental results affirming and verifying Reich's original findings.  These studies were undertaken by medical and scientific professionals, working within mainstream universities or private institutes and clinics, produced under excellent control and sometimes double-blinded procedures, and published in  peer-reviewed forums, such as university doctoral dissertations or scholarly science journals.

This rebuttal article was firstly circulated privately to a number of other scientists and physicians, notably those whose work had been cited in it, asking for additional signatures in support of Reich.  A public call to "Stand Up for Wilhelm Reich" was also given, and I was most pleased at the positive response.  A total of 22 professional scientists and physicians with the MD or PhD degree, as well as a few MSc and PhD candidates, quickly agreed to sign on, as a public protest against the on-going slanders of Wilhelm Reich and his orgonomic science.  This rebuttal article with the 22 signators was then submitted to Nature magazine for publication consideration.

Nature rejected the article within 24 hours, also deleting it from their on-line submission system thereby making appeals of the rejection impossible.  A shorter Letter to the Editor was then composed and submitted, with the same signators, and this did gain some traction, especially when I informed them we would publish the longer article in another peer-reviewed scientific journal.  Two months of back-and-forth emails then transpired. Nature editors finally refused to publish the shorter letter.  However, they did agree to print their own "Correction" to the Glausiusz article, based upon documents provided to them which allowed no "wiggle room" for alternative interpretations.  Here is what they wrote, though it hardly covers the issues:

The whole procedure was unpleasant, rather like pulling teeth, but I suppose this is something of a small victory, a "first" in the history of Orgonomy, to have even that small public retraction and correction appear within a major scientific journal.  However, one must question how Nature would permit such an article as Glausiusz's to be published in the first instance, where sexual slander obtained by a city-beat non-scientist journalist, repeating "stuff she heard" at an art museum display in New York City, is published without any fact-checking.  Well, that is typical, isn't it?  Reich has become the "whipping boy" for "all the people who matter" in the literary arts scene, as well as within certain lofty scientific circles.  Nature magazine also has lapsed into a careless attitude of maliciousness towards scientific dissenters, and uses unscientific terms such as "deniers" (with open comparisons to Holocaust deniers) to describe critics of the "infectious HIV" hypothesis, or the "CO2 warming" hypothesis, as if their ex-cathedra declarations were so absolutely certain that mainstream views cannot possibly be questioned.  Such mechanisms of ridicule are also used by the "skeptic clubs" and have no place in science.

The original rebuttal article "In Defense of Reich" will soon be submitted to another peer-reviewed science journal which has expressed interest, and announced when it becomes available.  A longer public petition will also be developed, where other signators beyond the original 22 can add their names in solidarity, to Stand Up for Wilhelm Reich.

More later, and thanks for your interest.

James DeMeo, PhD

Director, Orgone Biophysical Research Lab (OBRL)

Ashland, Oregon, USA

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