This submission was originally provided in a 50 page, 887kb .pdf file. It has been converted to .htm to save space.
Further technical information and update from Doctor Thomas A. Bearden.
Review of Microwave Cancer Therapy
The Commonwealth Minister for Health and Ageing, the Hon Tony Abbott MP, has asked the NHMRC to review the effectiveness of microwave cancer therapy in Australia, including Dr John Holt’s microwave cancer therapy. This referral is made under Section 9 of the National Health and Medical Research Council Act 1992. The Review Committee will provide an evidence-based report and recommendations to Council by no later than 7 December 2004. Following the conclusion of the review, Council will provide its report to the Minister for Health by 21 December 2004.
Terms of Reference The NHMRC Review Committee on Microwave Cancer Therapy will, having regard to the best available evidence (including international scientific and clinical literature) and following consultation with relevant individuals and organisations: 1.) Establish and describe the scientific basis of microwave therapy in the treatment of cancer; 2.) Assess the effectiveness and safety of microwave cancer treatments , including the use of the Tronado machine; and 3.) Identify gaps in research knowledge.
The Review Committee comprises Chair Dr Helen Zorbas Evidence based medicine, Breast Cancer
Members
Dr Julia Nicholls Consumer perspectives, Dr Peter
Greenberg General practitioner, Professor Richard Kefford Oncology and
carcinogenesis, Assoc/Prof John Boyages Oncology, Professor Anthony McMichael
Epidemiology, Professor Linda Kristjanson Nursing, Dr Michael Jefford
Oncology, Dr Guy Van Hazel Oncology
Consultation The
NHMRC is inviting submissions from individuals and organisations about
microwave cancer therapy. The closing date for submissions is 26 November
2004. Contact us
To provide input to the consultation, or
for further information about this review, contact the NHMRC at
microwave.review@nhmrc.gov.au, or send a
letter to:
Microwave Cancer Review Health Advisory Section (MDP 24) National Health and Medical Research Council GPO Box 9848 CANBERRA ACT 2601
This document constitutes the formal submission, in three parts, to the
NHMRC Review Committee on Microwave Cancer Therapy
by Dyson A. Devine*, 775 Upper Coldstream Rd. Tyndale 2460 gaiaguys@nor.com.au www.gaiaguys.net November 22nd, 2004
Part one is an intelligent layperson’s brief introduction to the background to Antoine Priore and
his scientifically proven electromagnetic cure for cancer and other cellular diseases, written in
2001 by Dr Thomas E Bearden.
Part two, including more detail, consists of Appendix 1 of a book entitled “The Case of
Antoine Priore and His Therapeutic Machine: A Scandal in the
Politics of Science” written in 1984 & 1986 by Christopher Bird
Part three is a more technical report by the United States of America, Department of the Navy,
Office of Naval Research, dated August 16th, 1978, by J. B. Bateman, entitled,
“A Biologically Active Combination of Modulated Magnetic and
Microwave Fields: the Priore Machine”
All the material in this submission is publicly available on the website, www.cheniere.org of Doctor (and retired
Lieutenant Colonel, United States Army) Thomas E. Bearden, to whom I extend my deepest gratitude.
*I am a former U.S. Air Force microwave (radar) technician and current Official Disclosure Project Representative. www.disclosureproject.org
Antoine Priore is now dead. His machine has been dismantled. The iron dogma and hatred of
electromagnetic medicine by bureaucratic science may have doomed hundreds of millions of
humans -- whom Priore's device could have saved -- to bitter, agonizing, and unnecessary deaths.
Hitler, Stalin, and Mao combined were not responsible for the deaths of so many.
- Note added by Thomas E. Bearden http://www.cheniere.ong/priore_machine.htm
PART ONE
Background of Antoine Prioré and L’Affaire Prioré
Tomas E. Bearden 2001
Compiled from information received from the late Christopher Bird
Dedication: This short paper is dedicated to the memory of the late Chris Bird, a noted researcher, colleague, and stalwart friend
who first acquainted me with the Prioré affair and with the remarkable results that were obtained by Prioré and his associates.
Some months prior to his passing, Chris gave me most of his most important Prioré file, including the thesis submitted by Prioré
to the University of Bordeaux (the actual document itself). We sorely miss his booming voice and ever cheerful encouragement.
We also express our deep thanks to my colleague Alain Beaulieu for translating the Prioré thesis and several other important
French documents dealing with the Prioré affair.
We further reiterate our remembrances to Bob Whitney and Frank Golden, when we tried so hard to revive the Prioré machine
and work while Prioré was still alive. For our efforts we were resoundingly suppressed. God willing, your efforts will yet prove to
have been worthwhile. At least we have finally deciphered the exact mechanism by which the Prioré machine was able to
accomplish its astonishing cures. We shall continue striving to see that the Prioré work has not been in vain, and that at some
point the scientific community accepts and uses the fact that Prioré had discovered how to time-reverse the treated diseased
cells back to a previous healthy cell state.
1. Antoine Prioré was born in Italy. He graduated from a small provincial school for electricity
in Trieste, Italy and became a radar technician and operator in the Italian Navy. By some manner
he became a prisoner of the Germans (apparently after Italy left the war in WW II), and was
moved as a forced laborer for the Nazi to the vicinity of the submarine base in Bordeaux, France.
2. When it became obvious the Germans were losing the war and were preparing to leave,
Prioré realized he would be killed. He approached a French police agent to plead for his life.
That police officer worked clandestinely for the French underground. He put Prioré in his car and
drove him out of the base to safety. He took Prioré to the nearby province of Dordogne, and
introduced him to the 7th Battalion of French underground resistance fighters. Prioré
distinguished himself in military operations and was eventually decorated by the French
Government.
3. Thankful to the French for saving his life, and loyal to his French companions-in-arms,
Prioré decided after the war to live in Bordeaux. He was encouraged by his French resistance
friends such as Jacques Chaban-Delmas who later rose to become the French Prime Minister.
4. For some time Prioré worked as an electrical repairman and did research on exposing
plants, etc. to EM radiation.
5. Prioré was introduced to Francis Berlureau, former Director of Studies at the School for
Veterinary Medicine in Toulouise, and director of the Bordeaux abbatoir at the time. He worked
together with Berlureau for some 10 years. He noticed effects on a cancerous bull’s testicles,
then began exposing various animals such as cats to the radiations of his early apparatus. The
histological work was done by Professor Drieux at the famous Veterinarian School of Maisons-
Allfort, near Paris. Drieux wrote a technical report proving that the cat’s cancer, developing
before treatment, was benign after treatment.
6. By 1953 Prioré began treating human patients whose cancers had been judged hopeless.
Fournier maintained a huge file of such human cases, but the file later was mysteriously lost.
Nonetheless, Prioré cured cases of a malignant form of Hodgkin’s disease, a case of cancer of
the larynx, etc.
7. Attempts to interest leading Bordeaux physicists and leading cancer experts in the results
of the new approach were laughed off or dismissed with stony silence.
8. Prioré’s response was to build a new and more complicated version of his treatment
device. Secretly he treated dozens of hopeless cancer patients. At Prioré’s funeral, a small
platoon of mourners was composed of the now-older people who had been cured of their terrible
afflictions by Prioré in the late 1950s.
9. He was introduced to Professor Tayeau, vice dean of Bordeaux’s Medical Faculty, in
latter 1959—early 1960. Prioré was sent to Biraben, head of the Faculty’s Department of
Pathological Anatomy, and his assistant, Delmon. To their utter surprise, grafted T-8 tumors in
animals subsequently treated with Prioré’s machine were reduced by 60%, a first in the history of
cancerology.
10. The mayor of Bordeaux, who later became prime minister of France, was Jacques
Chaban-Delmas. He was a fellow resistance fighter and very interested in Prioré’s work.
Chaban-Delmas invoked two commissions of Bordeaux and Parisian scientists to study the
Biraben-Delmon results in detail. Both commissions rejected Prioré and his machine
offhandedly. Biraben and Delmon could not explain the nature of the radiations from Prioré’s
machine. A certain professor Lachapele on the first commission was ever an ardent foe of the
Prioré method, dismissing the results offhand because the tumors were grafted. His view
prevailed. Neither of the commissions interviewed Prioré himself, nor did they run an experiment
under their own control.
11. Biraben and Delmon continued their experiments, achieving unequivocal and complete
success, but because of the political climate in the medical community, did not publish these
outstanding results. Biraben, e.g., was told he could either get his degree or publish his
research, but not both. Biraben and Delmon finally published a memoir in the Revue of
Comparative Pathology. But a vicious campaign to destroy the Prioré work and suppress it was
already underway.
12. Other persons involved with L’affair Prioré were: Professor Guerin, at the cancer institute
at Villejuif (equivalent to the American National Cancer Institute in Bathesda, Maryland). Buerin
was a co-discoverer of the T-8 tumor. Guerin assigned his colleague Marcel-René Riviére to
delve into the entire question. Reviére confirmed the Biraben-Delmon findings. A note was sent
for publication in the Proceedings of the French Academy of Science. Reviére also tested the
Prioré Ray against other types of tumors, achieving spectacular results.
13. Robert Courrier, an eminent endocrinologist still in his 30s, a full professor, and Secrétaire
Perpétuel to the Academy of Sciences and head of the biology section (and later to become
President of the Academy of Medicine), took up the cudgel to interest high French scientists and
scientific agencies. The CNRS director took offense because Prioré was essentially self-taught
and not academically credentialed. Others did not understand anything at all about the
machine’s operation. To Bordeaux, Courrier sent his trusted assistant Madame Colonge, to
repeat Riviére’s experiments under her personal supervision. A physicist sent to examine the
machine could make "neither heads nor tails" of its operation. There is little wonder! The Prioré
machine involved a dramatic extension to present nonlinear phase conjugate optics (NLO)
before NLO was even born! It also involved a dramatic extension to both U(1) electrodynamics
and to general relativity. It is also little wonder that Prioré, who discovered the process by
intuition and by trial and error, could not explain the operation of his own machine or the
mechanism by means of which the cures were accomplished by the "ray" emitted by his device.
In fact, the best physicists in France could not comprehend or explain the mechanism whereby
such spectacular results were produced by Prioré's machine when used to treat patients with
non-ionizing EM radiation from it.
14. On May 1, 1965, Robert Courrier formally presented the astounding Prioré results to the
assembled French Academy of Science. He was met with stony silence. A leading cancer
specialist even stalked out of the assembly hall in full view. No serious discussion among the
scientists present at the meeting ever took place.
15. Controversy and research continued, in the midst of a raging controversy over "l’Affair
Prioré".
16. Prioré’s sister in Italy then came down with cancer. Prioré issued an ultimatum to his
associates to build the bigger machine he needed, so that he could save his sister’s life.
Conventional engineers repeatedly changed Prioré’s design, thinking many components
unnecessary, etc. and causing machine failures. Prioré’s sister died (mid-60s) before the
machine could be finished because of these unnecessary setbacks. A grief-stricken Prioré went
into isolation, unwilling to talk to anyone.
17. In early 1967, Professor Raymond Pautrizel entered the picture. At 40, Pautrizel was an
eminent parasitologist, on the Faculty of Medicine at Bordeaux, and soon became known
worldwide as the "father of parasitological immunity." Pautrizel was awarded the first academic
chair in France for immunology, and later headed a special unit on parasitological immunology.
[This subject is of particular significance to the study of AIDS, because it deals also with the
continual adaptation and genetic change of the invading parasites and agents.] Pautrizel
specialized on a particularly lethal parasite, the trypanosome family (which causes sleeping
sickness, equine syphilis, and other afflictions). Pautrizel was one of the first scientists to
recognize and utilize ambivalence in biological drugs. Pautrizel also noticed that the Prioré ray
was not killing the tumor cells, and therefore must be doing something else instead. Pautrizel
personally persuaded the distraught Prioré to return to work.
18. From 1966 on, many papers were published on the results of applying the Prioré
technique to various animals and diseases. The results continued to be revolutionary.
19. Another scientist-ally of Prioré’s was Pierette Chateau-Reynaud Duprat. Over the years
she worked with the Prioré method, showing that the Prioré ray had no direct effect on the
trypanosomes themselves but stimulated and reinforced the defense mechanism of the infested
organisms. [No one knew to investigate the regenerative system of the body, poorly understood
and using the very kind of infolded EM extension to NLO that Prioré’s ray used.] The ray was
shown to cause the rejection of both allografts and isografts, so that the machine affected not
only the defense mechanisms of the organism but also the recognition system. The original P-1
(Prioré 1) machine affected cellular defense mechanisms. The second machine, P-2, seemed to
act not on the cellular but on the humoral defense mechanisms.
20. Prioré himself also cured cases of malaria and also tuberculosis in humans, but
apparently did not publish these results.
21. Biologist André Lwoff went from an ardent skeptic to an admirer and supporter of Prioré’s
work, because of the undisputed results. His favorable opinion of the Prioré results prevailed in a
DRME report on the matter, which was classified for some years. A synthesis of the report was
published in November 1979 by Herbert Gossot, Secretary General for the French Association
for Bioelectromagnetism. Its title was, "A Scientific Balance Sheet on the Prioré Ray." It reports
that two physicists who studied the machine in detail favorably correlated the machine’s ray to
the results produced, and confirmed the biological efficacy of Prioré’s device. The two physicists
were named Bottreau and Berteau. In their note to L’Academie, they were not allowed to even
use the names of the laboratories where they worked, which were (1) the CNRS Magnetic
Laboratory at Bellevue near Paris, and (2) the Laboratory of Ultra-Hertzian Optics and Talence
near Bordeaux.
22. Eventually the French Government backed the construction of a more powerful Prioré
device. Professor Courrier had also sent a report on Pautrizel’s behalf to the Nobel Committee in
1979. The M-600 machine was built but its huge tube functioned only about a week before it
exploded. Meanwhile Pautrizel, working with a smaller machine, verified the utility of the Prioré
Ray on atherosclerosis. Rebuilding the M-600 went slowly. The machine weighed some 50 tons
and required 3-1/2 stories to contain it. The pyrex tube was 60 cm in diameter and 6 meters tall.
It imploded twice and was replaced each time. The coil which generated the DC-pulsed
magnetic field weighed 5.5 tons and had 11 miles of copper wire. During the week or 10 days
that the machine was in operation, the results were formidable. The results were presented in
notes to the Academy of Sciences by Pautrizel and his team in 1978.
23. Pautrizel then came under suppression himself, with funds being pulled, postings being
denied, etc. Pautrizel eventually became so emotionally overwrought that he gave up his
medical career and retired and gave himself over to alcohol. Every one of the collaborators of
Pautrizel saw their careers put in jeopardy, compromised, or broken.
24. About this time Prioré's doctoral thesis, backed by both Pautrizel and Nobel Laureate
André Lwoff himself, was summarily refused by the President of the University of Bordeaux.
25. In 1977 Professor Georges Dubourg urged Prioré to treat human cancer patients and jolt
the medical establishment. Pautrizel contacted Courrier, who gave the green light. A few
terminal cancer patients whose immune defense systems had been disastrously weakened by
chemotherapy or radiation or both, were treated. At least one was totally cured. The others lived,
without pain, for much longer than predicted by standard prognosis. The results were submitted
to the French Academy of Medicine for publication – and were rejected.
26. Pautrizel in final desperation turned to a journalist, Jean-Michel Graille, to tell the story.
Graille researched for four years, publishing three long articles in Sud-Ouest France, and finally
a book, Dossier Priore: Une Nouvelle Affaire Pasteur. [The Prioré Dossier: A New Pasteur
Affair?] De Noel, Paris, 1984. [in French].
27. From 1965 to 1980, the Prioré project spent about 20 million francs. Results were
positively demonstrated, many of them sensational.
28. Prioré suffered a debilitating stroke or similar complication in 1981 and died in May 1983
after a lengthy debilitated period.
29. Admiral Pierre Emeury, conseiller scientifique de la presidence, discovered L’Affaire
Prioré. His inquest led him to conclude that the Prioré discovery was the most important medical
discovery of the entire century.
30. The suppression of such a revolutionary discovery, even though its technical methodology
was not understood, remains one of the heinous examples of scientific dogma blocking highly
innovative research and results. Untold millions of human lives would have been saved had
science and government acted along scientific lines.
References Related to Results Achieved by Antoine Prioré and Colleagues
Bateman, J. B. (1978) A Biologically Active Combination of Modulated Magnetic and Microwave Fields: The
Prioré Machine, Office of Naval Research, London, Report R-5-78, Aug. 16, 1978. 26 p. Deals with the Prioré
device and its treatment and positive cures of cancer and leukemia, including terminal cases in numerous
laboratory animals. Bateman is not particularly sympathetic, but realizes that somehow, something
extraordinary has been uncovered. Bateman comes very close when he states that "The possibility that
some hitherto unrecognized feature of the radiation from a rotating plasma may be responsible for the
Prioré effects should not be dismissed out of hand...". He was quite correct: It was the longitudinal EM
radiations and their induction of time-domain pumping of the nonlinear cells and every part of them that
provided the cellular time reversal from the diseased state back to the previous healthy state.
Bateman, J. B. (1977) "Microwave Magic," Office of Naval Research London Conference Report, ONRL C-14-
77, 1977. Deals with the Prioré device and its treatment and positive cures of cancer and leukemia,
including terminal cases in numerous laboratory animals.
Bateman, J. B. (1978) "Staging the Perils of Nonionizing Waves." European Scientific Notes, ESN 32-3-85-88,
1978.
Berteaud, A. J. and A. M. Bottreau, "Analyse des rayonnements électromagnétiques émis par l'appareil
Prioré," [Analysis of the electromagnetic radiations emitted by the Prioré apparatus], D.R.M.E., 1971, p. 3-12.
Berteaud, A. J.; A. M. Bottreau, A. Prioré, A. N. Pautrizel, F. Berlureau, and R. Pautrizel. (1971) "Essai de
corrélation entre l'évolution d'une affection par Trypanosoma equiperdum et l'action d'une onde
électromagnétique pulsée et modulée." [Trial of the correlation between the evolution of a disease by
Trypanosoma equiperdum and the action of a pulsating and modulated electromagnetic wave.] Compt.
Rend. Acad. Sci. (Paris), Vol. 272, 1971, p. 1003-1006. [In French].
Bird, Christopher. (1994) "The Case of Antoine Prioré and His Therapeutic Machine: A Scandal in the
Politics of Science." Explore!, 5(5-6), 1994, p. 97-110. An updated exposition by Bird on the entire Prioré
Affair.
Cambar, R. (1969) "Rapport general des travaux de la Commission de Contrôle constituée en vue de vérifier
l'un des effets biologiques obtenu par l'utilisation de l'appareillage de Prioré A. Bordeaux," [General
findings of the work of the control commission formed to verify one of the biological effects obtained by
use of the apparatus of A. Prioré at Bordeaux], 1969, 1 vol.
Courrier, R. (1977) "Exposé par M. le Professeur R. Courrier, Secretaire Perpetuel de L'Academie des
Sciences fait au cours d'une reunion a L'Institut sur les effets de la Machine de M.A. Prioré le 26 Avril 1977."
[Presentation by Professeur R. Courrier, Perpetual Secretary of the Academy of Sciences, made at the
meeting of the Academy on the effects of the machine of M.A. Prioré.] [In French] Courrier's presentation of
the Prioré machine and its positive cures of terminal cancers and leukemias in laboratory animals, under
proper scientific protocols.
Delmon, G. and J. Biraben (1966) "La croissance du carcinome de Guerin sour l'action de champs
électromagnétiques." [The growth of carcinoma treated by the action of electromagnetic fields.] Rev. Path.
Comp., 3(2), 1966, p. 85-88.
Doubourg, G., G. Courty, A. Prioré, and R. Pautrizel. (1979) "Stimulation des défenses de l'organisme par
association d'un rayonnement électromagnétique pulsé et d'un champ magnétique: tentatives d'application
au traitement du cancer chez l'Homme." [Stimulation of an organism's defenses by association with pulsed
electromagnetic radiation and a magnetic field: Preliminary findings in the application to treatment of
human cancer], Laboratoire d'Immunologie et de Biologie Parasitaire, Université Bordeaux II, 1979, p. 1-5.
Graille, Jean-Michel. (1984) Dossier Prioré: Une Nouvelle Affaire Pasteur. [The Prioré Dossier: A New
Pasteur Affair?] De Noel, Paris, 1984. [in French]. Tumor radiotherapy and neoplasms. Details the entire
Prioré affair. Prioré was an inventor who developed an electromagnetic machine that cured terminal tumors
in laboratory animals under rigorous scientific protocols and while working with eminent French scientists.
Treatment with the device also cured arteriosclerosis (clogged arteries) in lab animals, cured sleeping
sickness, and restored suppressed immune systems. The results of the supervised tests are presented in
the conventional peer-reviewed French medical literature in a number of papers, many of which are by
leading, even world-renowned French scientists.
"Le Probleme Prioré," Rapport de la Commission de l'Académie des Sciences à Monsieur le Ministre d'Etat
chargé de la Recherche et de la Technologie, 1982, p. 1-22.
Mayer, G.; A. Prioré, G. Mayer and R. Pautrizel. (1972) "Action de champs magnétiques associés à des
ondes électromagnétiques sur l'orchite trypanosomienne due lapin." [Action of magnetic fields associated
with electromagnetic waves on the typanosomian orchitis of the rabbit.] Compt. Rend. Acad. Sci. (Paris),
Vol. 274, 1972, p. 3011-3014. [In French]
Comment: Orchitis is inflammation of a testes. Trypanosomes are protozoan flagellates of genus
trypanosoma which infect humans and animals and are responsible for various serious diseases such as
Chaga's disease, dourine, nagana, sleeping sickness, and surra. Chaga's disease is marked by prolonged
high fever, edema, and enlargement of the spleen, liver, and lymph nodes. Dourine is a disease favoring
horses and asses, marked by inflammation of the genitals, subcutaneous edematous plaques, low-grade
fever, progressive paralysis, emaciation, and death. Nagana is a highly fatal disease in/of domestic animals
in tropical Africa marked by fluctuating fever, inappetance, edematous swelling, and sluggishness, and is
transmitted by the tsetse fly and possibly by other biting flies. Sleeping sickness is a serious disease that is
prevalent in much of tropical Africa; it is marked by fever, protracted lethargy, tremors, and loss of weight,
and is transmitted by tsetse flies. Surra is a severe Old World febrile and hemorrhagic disease of domestic
animals and is transmitted by biting insects.
Pautrizel, R. (1979) Letter to his colleagues at the University of Bordeaux, Sept. 11, 1979.
Pautrizel, R. (1969) Letter to his colleagues, Mar. 26, 1969.
Pautrizel, R., M.R. Riviere, A. Prioré, and F. Berlureau. (1966) "Influence d'ondes électromagnétiques et de
champs magnétiques associés sur l'immunité de la souris infestée par Trypanosoma equiperdum,"
[Influence of electromagnetic waves and associated magnetic fields on the immunity of the mouse infected
with the Trypanosoma equiperdum], Compt. Rend. Acad. Sci. (Paris), 1966, Vol. 263, p. 579-582. [in French].
Pautrizel, R.; A. Prioré, F. Berlureau, and A.N. Pautrizel. (1969) "Stimulation, par des moyens physiques, des
défenses de la Souris et du Rat contre la trypanosomose expérimentale." [Stimulation, by physical means,
of defenses of the mouse and of the rat against the experimental Trypanosoma.] Compt. Rend. Acad. Sci.
(Paris), Vol. 268, 1969, p. 1889-1892. [In French].
Pautrizel, R., A. Prioré, A.N. Pautrizel, and P. Chateau-Reynaud-Duprat. (1979) "Guérison de la
trypanosomiase expérimentale par l'association de champs magnétiques et d'ondes électromagnétiques,"
[Cure of experimental trypanosomiasis by associated magnetic fields and electromagnetic waves],
Symposium International de Thérapeutiques Ondulatoires, Versailles, 1979, p. 9.
Pautrizel, R., A. Prioré, A.N. Pautrizel, and P. Chateau-Reynaud-Duprat. (1979) "Guérison de la
trypanosomiase expérimentale par l'association de champs magnétiques et d'ondes électromagnétiques:
une stimulation des defenses de l'organisme-hôte." [Cure of experimental trypanosomiasis by associated
magnetic fields and electromagnetic waves: a stimulation of the host organism's defenses.]. Journées
Nationales Microondes - Colloque Hertzienne et Diélectriques, Lille-Villeneuve, Université des Sciences et
Techniques, 1979, p. 210.
Pautrizel, R.; A. Prioré, F. Berlureau, and A.N. Pautrizel. (1970) "Action de champs magnétiques combinés à
des ondes électromagnétiques sur la trypanosomose expérimentale du Lapin." [Action of magnetic fields
combined with electromagnetic waves on the experimental trypanosoma of the rabbit.] Compt. Rend. Acad.
Sci. (Paris), Vol. 271, 1970, p. 877-880.
Pautrizel, R.; A. Prioré, M. Dallochio and R. Crockett. (1972) "Action d'ondes électromagnétiques et de
champs magnétiques sur les modifications lipidiques provoquées chez le Lapin par l'administration d'un
régime alimentaire hypercholestérolé." [Action of electromagnetic waves and magnetic fields on provoked
lipidic modifications in the rabbit by the administration of a hypercholesterol diet.] Compt. Rend. Acad. Sci.
(Paris), Vol. 274, 1972, p. 488-491. [In French]. Reports curing of high cholesterol condition, clogged
arteries, etc.
Pautrizel, R.; A. Prioré, P. Mattern, and A. N. Pautrizel. (1975) "Stimulation des défenses de la souris
trypanosomée par l'action d'un rayonnement associant champ magnétique et ondes électromagnétiques."
[Stimulation of the defenses of the trypanosomized mouse by the action of irradiation by an associated
magnetic field and electromagnetic waves." Compt. Rend. Acad. Sci. (Paris), Vol. 280, 1975, p. 1915-1918. [In
French]
Pautrizel, R.; A. Prioré, P. Mattern, A. N. Pautrizel, and A. Capbern. (1975) "Guérison de la trypanosomiase
chronique du Lapin à Trypanosoma equiperdum par l'action combinée de champs magnétiques et d'ondes
électromagnétiques modulés." [Healing of chronic trypanosomiasis by trypanosoma equiperdum of the
rabbit by the combined action of magnetic waves and modulated electromagnetic waves.] J. Protozool., Vol.
22, No. 3, 1975, p. A 84.
Pautrizel, R. (1976) "La trypanosomiase experimentale: stimulation des defenses de L'organisme par des
moyens physiques." [Experimental trypanosomiasis: stimulation of the organism's defenses by physical
means.] XVIIth Seminar on Trypanosomiasis Research, Londres, 22-23 Sept. 1976.
Pautrizel, R.; P. Mattern, A. N. Pautrizel, and A. Prioré. (1977) "Effets des champs magnétiques et des ondes
électromagnétiques modulées sur la trypanosomiase expérimentale." [Effect of magnetic fields and
modulated electromagnetic waves on experimental trypanosomiasis]. Ann. Soc. Belge Med. trop. [Annals of
the Belgium Society of Tropical Medicine], Vol. 57, 1977, p. 501-523.
Pautrizel, R, P. Mattern, A. Prioré, A. N. Pautrizel, A. Capbern, and T. Baltz. (1978) "Importance des
mécanismes immunitaires dans la guérison de la trypanosomiase expérimentale par stimulation physique."
[Importance of immune mechanisms in the cure of experimental trypanosomiasis by physical stimulation.]
Compt. Rend. Acad. Sci. (Paris), Vol. 286, 1978, p. 1487-1492. [In French]
Pautrizel, R., A. Prioré, A. N. Pautrizel, and P. Chateaureynaud-Duprat. (1978) "Importance de l'âge de la
souris sur l'efficacité de la stimulation de ses défenses par un rayonnement électromagnétique."
[Importance of the age of the mouse on the efficacy of the stimulation of its defenses by electromagnetic
radiation]. Compt. Rend. Acad. Sci. (Paris), Vol. 287, 1978, p. 575-578.
Pautrizel, R. and A. Prioré. (1979) "Un aspect spectaculaire du bioélectromagnétisme: permettre à
l'organisme de se débarrasser d'un infection aiguë ou chronique sans l'aide d'aucune substance
médicamenteuse." [A spectacular aspect of bioelectromagnetism: Permitting the organism to rid itself of an
old or chronic infection without the aid of any medical substance.] 104éme Congrés National des Sociétés
Savantes, Bordeaux, 17-21 Avril 1979, Sciences section, p. 112.
Pautrizel, R.; P. Mattern, A. Prioré, A. N. Pautrizel, and D. Bernard. (1971) "Etat de protection vis-à-vis de
Trypanosoma equiperdum chex des souris splénectomisées et soumises à une stimulation physique."
[State of protection versus trypanosome equiperdum of splenectomized mice submitted to physical
stimulation], ler Multicolloque Européen de Parasitologie, Rennes, 1 au 4, Septembre 1971, p. 116-118.
Pautrizel, R., A. Prioré, P. Chateaureynaud-Duprat, and A. N. Pautrizel. (1981) "Immunostimulation by
electromagnetic waves compared with effects of hyperthermia." 9th International Congress of
Biometerology, Osnabrueck, 1981, p. 126-127.
Pautrizel, R, P. Chateaureynaud, A. N. Pautrizel, G. Mayer, and A. Prioré. (1983) "Stimulation of protection
mechanisms by magnetic fields and electromagnetic waves (Prioré apparatus)." First Symposium of the
International Society of Bioelectricity, Oct. 1, 1983, Boston, U.S.A.
Perisse, Eric. (1984) Effets des Ondes Electromagnétiques et des Champs Magnétiques sur le Cancer et la
Trypanosomiase Experimental. [Effects of electromagnetic waves and magnetic fields on cancer and
experimental trypanosmiasis] Doctoral thesis, University of Bordeaux II, No. 83, Mar. 16, 1984. [In French]
Presents the results of experimental work with the Prioré machine in curing cancer and other diseases such
as trypanosomiasis. This thesis was in a way a triumph for Pautrizel, who finally succeeded in getting the
Prioré work in a doctoral thesis at the University of Bordeaux, some 11 years after Prioré's own thesis was
rejected due to extreme pressure from the French scientific community and ruthless suppression of the
Prioré project.
Prioré, Antoine. (1963) "Procede et dispositif de production de rayonnements utilisables notamment pour le
traitement de cellules vivantes." [Procedure and Assemblage for Production of Radiation Especially
Serviceable for the Treatment of Living Cells.] Republique Francais: Brevet d'Invention P.V. No. 899.414, No.
1,342,772, Oct. 7, 1963. Antoine Prioré’s electromagnetic treatment device which demonstrated positive
cures for terminal cancers and leukemias in laboratory animals.
Prioré, A. (1966) "Method of producing radiations for penetrating living cells," U.S. Patent No. 3,280,816,
Oct. 25, 1966. Antoine Prioré's method of producing his "conditioned" radiations used to treat cellular
diseases.
Prioré, A. (1968). "Apparatus for producing radiations penetrating living cells." U.S. Patent No. 3,368,155.
Feb. 6, 1968. Antoine Prioré’s electromagnetic treatment device which demonstrated positive cures for
terminal cancers and leukemias in laboratory animals.
Prioré, Antoine. (1973) Guérison de la Trypanosomiase Expérimentale Aiguë et Chronique par L’action
Combinée de Champs Magnétiques et D’Ondes Electromagnétiques Modulés. [Healing of intense and
chronic experimental trypanosomiasis by the combined action of magnetic fields and modulated
electromagnetic waves], thesis submitted in candidacy for the doctoral degree, 1973. This is Prioré’s
original doctoral thesis, submitted to the University of Bordeaux. The university rejected the thesis when
the Prioré project was suppressed.
Prioré, A. (1973) "Etude du rayonnement émis in: Guérison de la trypanosomiase expérimentale aiguë et
chronique par l'action combinée de champs magnétiques et d'ondes électromagnétiques modulés." ["Study
of the radiation emitted in: Healing of intense and chronic experimental trypanosomiasis by the combined
action of magnetic fields and modulated electromagnetic waves]. Laboratoire d'Immunologie et de Biologie
Parasitaire, Bordeaux, 1973, Chap. 1, p. 5-7.
Riviere, M. R., A. Prioré, F. Berlureau, M. Fournier and M. Guerin. (1965) "Phénomènes de régression
observés sur les greffes d'un lymphosarcome chez des souris exposées a des champs
électromagnétiques." [Phenomena of regression observed on the graftings of a lymphosarcoma in mice
exposed to electromagnetic fields]. Compt. Rend. Acad. Sci. (Paris), Vol. 260, 1965, p. 2639-2643 [in French].
This reports the curing of lymphosarcoma, which is a malignant lymphoma that tends to metastasize freely
and spread throughout the body. It easily leads to the condition of lymphomatosis, which is the presence of
multiple lymphomas in the body, including wide distribution through the various organs, lymph tissue, and
tissue resembling lymph tissue.
Riviere, M. R.; A. Prioré, F. Berlureau, M. Fournier and M. Guerin. (1964) "Action de champs
électromagnétiques sur les greffes de la tumeur T8 chez le Rat." [Action of the electromagnetic fields on the
graftings of the T8 tumor in rats." Compt. Rend. Acad. Sci. (Paris), Vol. 259, 1964, p. 4895-4897.
Riviere, M. R.; A. Prioré, F. Berlureau, M. Fournier and M. Guerin. (1965) "Effets de champs
électromagnétiques sur un lymphosarcome lymphoblastique transplantable du Rat." [Effects of
electromagnetic fields on lymphoblastic lymphosarcoma transplantable from a rat.] Compt. Rend. Acad.
Sci. (Paris), Vol. 260, 1965, p. 2099-2102.
Comment: Lymphosarcoma is a malignant lymphoma (malignant tumor of lymph or lymph-like tissue) that
tends to metastasize freely and spread throughout the body. It easily leads to the condition of
lymphomatosis, which is the presence of multiple lymphomas in the body, including wide distribution
through the various organs, lymph tissue, and tissue resembling lymph tissue. A lymphoblast is a cell
giving rise to lymphocytes, the colorless weakly motile cells produced in lymphoid tissue and include the
cellular mediators of immunity, constituting some 20 to 30 percent of the leukocytes (white blood cells) of
normal human blood. In effect the experimenters have healed a transplanted condition that represents a
serious leukemia.
Riviere, M. R. and M. Guerin. (1966) "Nouvelles recherches effectuées chez des rats porteurs d'un
lymphosarcome lymphoblastique soumis à l'action d'ondes électromagnétiques associées à des champs
magnétiques." [New research on rats having lymphoblastic lymphosarcoma, submitted to the action of
electromagnetic waves associated with magnetic fields.] Compt. Rend. Acad. Sci. (Paris), Vol. 262, 1966, p.
2669-2672. Again, in effect the experimenters have healed a condition that represents a serious leukemia.
Rorvik, David M. (1975) "Do the French Have a Cure for Cancer?" Esquire, July 1975, p. 110-11, 142-149.
Summary of the Prioré Affair and electromagnetic curing of diseases by the Prioré machine – including
terminal tumors and infectious diseases such as sleeping sickness – with some details of the working of
the machine.
Bearden, T. E. (1997) Energetics of Free Energy Systems and Vacuum Engine Therapies. Tara Publishing,
Internet node www.tarapublishing.com/books, July 1997 (the site is possibly now no longer online). This
book summarizes the author’s work in two areas: (i) overunity electromagnetic circuits and systems, and (ii)
the Prioré medical therapy and the technical mechanism (pumping cells and all their parts in the infolded
EM domain to cause the cell to form anti-disease vacuum engines).
Bearden, T. E. (1997) "Energetics Update and Summary," Part I, Explore, 7(6), 1997, p. 60-67; Part II, Explore,
7(7), 1997, p. 53-56; Part III, Explore, 8(1), 1997, p. 53-56; Part IV, Explore, 8(3), 1997, p. 56-63. Summary to
date (1997) of the author’s energy work in overunity EM systems, together with a summary to date of his
work on the Prioré therapeutic methodology utilizing vacuum engines to cure cancer, dread infections,
atheriosclerosis, and to restore suppressed immune systems.
Bearden, T. E. (1997-2001) Collection of various draft research papers and write-ups. Strongly updates and
significantly expands version of work in 1998 and prior. Pumping any mass with longitudinal EM waves
produces time-reversal of the pumped mass, and the mechanism and results must be interpreted by a
combination of extended nonlinear optics for time domain pumping and general relativity. The
correspondent to the NLO input "signal wave" in this case is the spacetime internested curvatures (the
spacetime engine, or vacuum engine) associated with the pumped mass and all its parts, including even the
quarks in its nucleons. The output is an amplified specific vacuum anti-engine, that precisely reverses the
mass (either living or inert) back over its previous changes of 3-spatial form with respect to the flow of time.
This is the fundamental mechanism utilized by the body's Regeneration and Recovery (R&R) system, within
its limitations. The Prioré approach used a far more powerful application of the body's method by which the
R&R system is able to slowly reverse cellular damage back to a previous earlier healthy state. The author
has also extended the method by inputting an additional vacuum engine, so that time-reversal of the mass
can be "steered" into any related form desired, whether or not the mass ever previously existed in that 3-
spatial state. Eventually, we will probably produce a book from these research draft papers.
Bearden, T. E. (1995) "Vacuum Engines and Prioré's Methodology: The True Science of Energy-Medicine.
Parts I and II." Explore!, 6(1), 1995, p. 66-76; 6(2), 1995, p. 50-62. Background and light technical coverage of
Prioré's work and methodology. For the educated layman.
Bearden, T .E. (1993) "Mechanism for Long-Term Cumulative Biological Effects of EM Radiation," presented
to the 70th Annual Meeting of the Alabama Academy of Science, University of Alabama at Huntsville, March
25, 1993. Presents a new definition of cancer, and a long-term cumulative mechanism for cancer
incorporating all contributing factors. Cancer is often a result of the body's electrical master cellular control
system sending an order (a vacuum engine) to the most affected cells (in a long condition of hypoxic
stress) to dedifferentiate back toward anaerobic cells, from their dim ancestry on the primeval earth.
Explains in depth how the Prioré method causes an amplified counterorder (an amplified vacuum antiengine)
to be issued, redifferentiating the cancerous cell back to a normal cell. Note added: This entire
engine-antiengine area and functioning can be adequately modeled in Evans' O(3) electrodynamics as a
subset of Sachs' unified field theory.
Bearden, T. E. (1998) Letter to General (Retired) Walter Busbee, Assistant to the Secretary of Defense for
Counterproliferation and Chemical/Biological Defense, Subject: "Saving the Lives of Mass BW Casualties
from Terrorist BW Strikes on U.S. Population Centers," April 2, 1998, 36 p. Explains that longitudinal EM
wave pumping in the Prioré device was time-domain pumping. Viewed general relativistically, this temporal
pumping produced a time-reversal of the entire cellular mass and all its components, from its diseased
state back to a previous healthy state. Advances an extension to the method which allows the targeted
"past" state to be deliberately determined as desired, whether or not the pumped mass ever possessed that
physical state. Proposes a crash project to develop a portable Prioré-type treatment unit in 18 months, to be
used in treatment of mass casualties after terrorist BW attacks on U.S. population centers. 36 p. Two color
briefings and substantial background material were attached to the letter. The color briefing on weapons of
mass destruction and treating the mass casualties, is now carried on http://www.cheniere.org .
Bearden, T. E. (1998) Executive Summary, "Saving the Lives of Mass BW Casualties in Our Population
Centers," Mar. 31, 1998. 2 p.
PART TWO
The Case of Antoine Priore
and His Therapeutic Machine: A Scandal
in the Politics of Science
©1984, 1988 Christopher Bird
Forty-four years ago, in 1944, an Italian engineer working as a prisoner and forced laborer
for the Germans in the huge submarine base in Bordeaux, approached a French police agent to
plead for his life. He would be killed when the Germans left Bordeaux, he said, and since they
were by that time obviously losing the war, the day of his execution was at hand.
The police officer, who also worked clandestinely for the French underground, told the
engineer to get in his car, then simply drove him out of the base and introduced him to the 7th
battalion of underground resistance fighters, in the nearby province of Dordogne. There he so
distinguished himself in military operations that he was ultimately decorated by the French
government.
It was due to his thankfulness to his savior, and his loyalty to his companions-in-arms, that
Antoine Priore decided after the war's end to live out the rest of his life in Bordeaux. Thus he
became the focus of one of the strangest, and most scandalous, chapters in the scientific history
of France or any other nation.
Antoine Priore had earlier graduated from a small provincial school for electricity in Trieste,
Italy and become a radar operator in the Italian Navy. During this period he observed what to
him was an exciting anomaly: some oranges left in a room filled with electrical bric-a-brac had
fallen into an assemblage where they seemed to have been preserved in the same fresh state
they had enjoyed when bought off a fruit stand. Other oranges in the room, bought at the, same
time, were rotten and putrid.
Stunned by his observation, Priore dreamed throughout the war of one day working out an
electrical means of conserving foods in their fresh state based on what he surmised was a new,
and wholly unexplained, principle. Newton's apple had become Priore's orange.
Occupied during the day as a humble electrical repairman - and projectionist in a movie
theater - the almost wholly self-taught Priore devoted all his free time and his meager resources
to research. With the help of his war-time companions, some of whom had attained high rank in
the Bordeaux police force, he was able to beg, borrow, steal, scrounge, or otherwise acquire a
mini-warehouse of electrical and electronic components and parts. With these he put together a
device worthy of Rube Goldberg. Exposing lentil seeds to a magnetic field of 225 gauss and
electromagnetic frequencies of 80, 32, 3 and 10 Hertz, Priore's device caused the lentil plants
which sprouted from them to grow 12-15 centimeters in length, as against only 5 centimeters for
controls not subjected to the same treatment. He got similar results for tulips, asparagus and
other plants.
Shifting his focus, he next irradiated fertilized hens' eggs, only to see the chicks hatch in 19
days, instead of the normal 21. Though he could not explain these astonishing results, he
realized he had stumbled upon a process basic to the enhancement, or speeding up, of cellular
growth.
It was at this point that one of his police friends introduced him to Francis Berlureau, the
former Director of Studies at the School for Veterinary Medicine in Toulouse and, at the time of
their meeting, director of the Bordeaux abbatoir. Priore asked Berlureau to supply him with
various animal tissues for experimentation. For 10 years they worked together, Priore's free time
allowing, during which Priore noticed he could get no electrical measurement from a cancerous
bull's testicles. Since he realized that, in some way, his newly constructed device (no trace of
which remains today, except for a snapshot of it) affected the electrical properties of cells, he put
two and two together and his sum of four led him to believe that he might be onto an
electromagnetic cure for cancer. Newton's gravity had become Priore's cancer cure.
Berlureau next allowed him to expose a cat with cancer of the mammary glands to radiation
of his machine. To make absolutely sure that he was not exposing himself to mockery, the
veterinarian had all the histological work done by his friend and colleague, a Professor Drieux at
the famous Veterinarian School of Maisons- Allfort, near Paris. Drieux wrote a technical report
proving that a tumor taken from a cat had, before treatment, started to become cancerous and,
after treatment, had become benign.
By 1953, with the help of a doctor of general medicine, Maurice Fournier, Priore began
treating human patients whose cancers had been judged hopeless. The huge file of cases
maintained by Fournier, and filed with a notary until after his death, was subsequently
mysteriously lost. But a few details were preserved in letters discovered in an old dog-eared file.
Some of these dating to the year 1954 concerned a 12-year old boy, Alain B., whose
diagnosis wavered between one of reticulo-histio-sarcoma and a malignant form of Hodgkin's
disease. The boy was taken by his parents to Priore, who irradiated him. Though the exact
nature of the radiation was not known, 12 years later a Bordeaux physician, after a medical
examination, certified that the boy, now become a man of 24, was free of disease.
A second case unearthed from the old file indicated that a patient with cancer of the larynx
was able to avoid a laryngectomy and be totally cured after Priore's new ministration.
Fascinated by the principle which he suspected must lie behind the strange Priore Ray, Dr.
Berlureau tried to get some Bordeaux University physicists interested in the problem but was
laughed out of their offices. He next turned to cancer specialists, beginning with Professor
Lachapele, the Director of the Bergonie Foundation, a prestigious center for cancer research, to
whom he proposed animal experiments to prove the efficacy of Priore's methodology. His plea
met with a stony affirmation on Lachapele's part to the effect that he and his colleagues had no
need of the new discovery, inasmuch as "all the patients treated in his hospital were cured and
departed in perfect health." As if bound in the chains of his curt reply, years later Lachapele was
to become one of the bitter adversaries of Priore's pioneering research.
Only somewhat discouraged, Priore kept up his momentum. He went on to build a new and
more complicated version of his treatment device, called the P-1, over the next year. When it
was finished he secretly and unofficially began to treat dozens of cancer patients who had been
given up by their doctors as incurable. At his funeral in March of last year, among the crowd of
mourners was, it is said, a small platoon of older people who had been cured of their terrible
afflictions by Priore in the 1950s.
While his findings excited him, he nevertheless felt tremendously frustrated that he could
apparently get no one in the world of medicine or science to pay attention to them. Undaunted
by his previous rebuffs, his friend Berlureau next introduced the Italian at the end of 1959 or the
beginning of 1960 to Professor Tayeau, vice dean of Bordeaux's Medical Faculty. Unlike
Lachapele, Tayeau behaved as a true physician and scientist. He sent Priore to two
researchers, Biraben, head of the Faculty's Department of Pathological Anatomy, and his
assistant, Delmon. The two had been working together on cancerous rats for two years --
specifically on animals grafted with T-8 tumors, discovered by the internationally famous team of
Guerin and Oberling in Paris, which had proven to be intractable to any form of treatment yet
known. To their utter surprise, the tumors in the rats treated with Priore's machine were reduced
in volume by 60%, marking the first time in the history of cancerology that the virulent T-8 tumor
had in any way been affected by any form of treatment.
Knowing that the mayor of Bordeaux, Jacques Chabans-Delmas -- who has kept his post until
this day, and was soon to become prime minister of France -- was most interested in the work of
Priore (who, he too, had known as a fellow resistance fighter), they also informed Chaban.
Promptly Chaban convoked not one, but two, commissions made up of Bordeaux and
Parisian scientists to study the Biraben-Delmon results in detail. Both commissions rejected
Priore and his machine out of hand, and without appeal. It is curious that, in the science of our
day, a result, undeniable though it may be, seems to have no hearing unless and until all means
to effect it can be adequately explained. It was for this ostensible reason that the two
commissions decided to so adamantly reject the research: Biraben and Delmon could not
explain the nature of the radiation engendered by the Priore device.
One can stress the word ostensible here because the principal reason for the rejection lay
elsewhere. The decision by the first commission was, in fact, hardly unanimous. But among its
members was the same Professor Lachapele who had refused Berlureau's plea for assistance.
His opinion was that even the results themselves were of little value because they were
obtained, not on spontaneously arising, but on grafted, cancers. The fact that no treatment
whatsoever had ever affected a T -8 tumor was totally discounted. As the sole cancerologist on
the commission, Lachapele's dictum was preponderant.
When he learned that the rejection of the first commission had actually been a split decision,
the Bordeaux mayor asked for the formation of a second commission to re-examine the problem.
Fearing a reversal, Lachapele was able to get one of his colleagues, Professor Courtial, director
of the Radium Institute in Paris, and one of the so-called top authorities of French cancer
research, named to it. It was all but impossible for the other physicians on the new commission
now to outvote not one, but two, cancer specialists, so again the antagonists won the day.
At no time did either of the commissions bother to interview Priore himself or to run a
supplementary experiment under their own control.
This seemingly incomprehensible attitude on the part of scientific authority was only a
foretaste of what was to come, again and again, over the years. Biraben and Delmon went on to
do new experiments. They modified either the time after grafting that the radiation was applied,
or the length of its duration. This time their efforts were crowned with unequivocal and complete
success. The tumors stopped growing and, when still living cells were excised from them and
implanted in healthy control animals, none of them became malignant.
Though these results should normally have fascinated any academy of medicine or sciences,
the two researchers did not publish them. Why? The reasons horrify or disgust. It seemed that
Biraben was simultaneously preparing an examination for the agregation, the highest French
academic degree leading to a senior university teaching post. In charge of the committee to
pass on, and award, this degree was none other than that same Professor Lachapele who told
him: "Either you get the degree, necessary to your professional advancement, or you publish
your research paper. But not both!" Discouraged, Biraben ceded to this demand but
nevertheless continued to work on the research that looked so exciting and promising.
Most mystifying to him was how the machine operated to achieve its startling results. At the
3rd Congress of Biometerology held in 1963 in the Pyrennees mountains, a New York City
researcher by the name of Kenneth McLean reported he had been able to obtain regressions on
tumors and improve the health of cancer patients by using a magnetic field of a strength of 3000
gauss or more. Acting on this hint, Biraben and Delmon made an electromagnet that put out a
field of 4,500 gauss and tried it out on the T-8 tumors but without the slightest success.
Obviously, something other than a simple magnetic field was at issue.
In 1966, after others had had the same success with the T-8 tumor by irradiating it with the
"Priore Ray ," the two scientists finally published a memoir in the Revue of Comparative
Pathology in which they stated that neither magnetic fields nor X-rays had any effect on the T-8s
and that "only certain devices associating a magnetic field with high frequency waves seem at
present to reveal therapeutic properties..."
Their conclusions were too late for, by that time, a campaign to stamp out Priore and his
electromagnetic approach to cancer cure was well underway, a campaign that has lasted right
up to the present moment.
The all-powerful Lachapele had sealed the fate of the Priore device as far as the local
Bordeaux medical community was concerned. Veterinarian Berlureau and Priore next decided
to carry their case to Paris. They contacted Professor Guerin at the cancer institute at Villejuif,
the leading French center for cancer research and the equivalent of the American National
Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland. Guerin, one of the discoverers of the T-8 tumor, which
for the first time had been stopped in its tracks by the Priore device, courteously received his
guests and heard them relate the whole story of how the device had come into being, starting at
the point when Priore had seen the oranges strangely preserved by some unaccountable
electromagnetic effect.
Guerin was sufficiently impressed that he assigned his colleague, Marcel-Rene Riviere, to
delve into the whole question. For two years, Riviere, who also had teaching responsibilities at
the University of Rennes in Brittany, unremittingly worked to corroborate the Biraben-Delmon
findings. On 9 December 1964 a note was sent for publication in the Proceedings of the French
Academy of Sciences detailing the research and modestly concluding: "... as of now, one may
already state that our first observations show that electromagnetic fields used can lead to most
interesting data from a point of view of the biological behavior of grafts and their therapeutic
action on experimental tumors."
Riviere next decided to see if the Priore Ray could affect another tumoral form that had never
been affected by any therapeutic method, the 347 lymphoblastic lymphosarcoma. The results
were even more spectacular than for the T-8 tumor. The effects produced were of broader scope
and took place more rapidly. A second note was sent to the Academy for publication. The
conclusion read: "We can now already affirm that our research offers proof that electromagnetic
fields are capable of producing effects on quite different types of neoplasms."
At this point one of the key characters in this extraordinary drama must be introduced. There
might have been no drama at all without his appearance on stage. This personage was Robert
Courrier, an eminent endocrinologist, who had been named, while still in his 30s, a full professor.
Courrier was now perpetual secretary of the Academy of Sciences and later would become
President of the Academy of Medicine. Because no scientific paper can be accepted by an
academy unless introduced by one of its members, Riviere would have had no chance to see his
work so prestigiously published had not Courrier, who knew Riviere well, since he had
shepherded him through the winning of his doctorate, taken the responsibility for its introduction.
It was Courrier who, at this point, also took up the cudgel to interest various highly placed
French organizations responsible for the administration of scientific projects and their funding.
Thus, he sent a personal letter to the French Minister for Scientific Atomic and Space Research,
who immediately offered to try to make funds available for further research on and with the
Priore Ray. He also personally asked the Director of the CNRS (National Center for Scientific
Research, which coordinates and oversees all such activity in France) to receive Priore and
Riviere.
That this meeting was, in its way, somewhat of a disaster, can be explained in part only by a
brief resume of the complex character of Priore himself. Priore throughout his life had great
difficulty making himself understood in the French language and, as the years went by, he even
forgot how adequately to speak his own mother tongue, Italian. Added to these twin
impediments was his lifelong fear that his discoveries and inventions were prone to being stolen,
a fear which led him never to fully explain the exact nature of the complex radiation emitted from
his machine, far less the settings which controlled its various parameters. Whether Priore would
not, or could not, exactly explain the functioning of his invention (which, as we shall see, went
through several increasingly complex generations) is a question to which no precise answer has
been given. It would appear that Priore was an excellent engineer gifted more with a God-given
intuition than with school-book reasoning and logic. In short, Priore had a combination of talents
that could remind one of the same enigmatic personality that was Nikola Tesla, the deductive
reasoning behind some of whose discoveries has never fully been unraveled.
Highly placed scientific administrators are neither comfortable with, nor sympathetic to, what
they see as self-appointed geniuses who have not run the same academic gauntlet through
which they themselves had to pass. Thus the CNRS director took aversion to Priore's somewhat
incomprehensible, yet fairly prolix explanations of his technology and only recommended that a
physicist be sent to look over his device to properly decipher its working. At the same time, the
Minister, together with the head of the general delegation for Scientific Research (DGRST) - still
another key body in the administration of the French scientific decision-making process - let it be
known to Robert Courrier that they had not understood a single thing about Priore's invention
despite his best efforts to present it.
Advancing one more step into what was to become for him a 20 year-long expedition into a
jungle of scientific intrigue, Courrier next resolutely decided to send to Bordeaux one of his most
trusted laboratory workers, Madame Colonge, to repeat Riviere's experiments under her
personal supervision. The DGRST director fully concurred with Courrier's decision, while letting
slip his admission that he strongly suspected that Riviere might well have been duped in some
manner by Priore. When Courrier asked the minister for travel funds for Madame Colonge, he
was refused with the dry remark that such a request was "premature." The now angry Courrier
telephoned to reply: "You've been spending millions for programs and hypotheses about the
cancer problem. Riviere has been presenting you with facts!"
The physicist who had been sent to try to elucidate the functioning principles of Priore's
device, reported that he could make neither "head nor tail" of the machine.
Madame Colonge's experimentation was as prolonged as necessary. She was so meticulous
that, in order not to take her eyes off the experimental animals for an instant, she limited her
lunches to sandwiches eaten in the laboratory. She returned, profoundly impressed, to Paris.
Nor was Riviere idle during this period. He decided to experiment with the L-52
lymphosarcoma, a tumor similar to, but even more malignant than the 347. This time, he used
not rats, but mice, as hosts for the grafts. So successful were his results that, this time, Courrier
decided to bar no holds. Instead of simply having a note published in the Academy Proceedings
on the quiet, he decided to present it personally, orally, and in all solemnity, before his fellow
academicians at an official meeting scheduled for 1 May 1965.
That date was, and is, a turning point in what came to be known in France as the "Priore
Affair." From then on the whole French, and even the international, scientific community could
be divided into a minority and a majority group, the first that believed in the research, the second
that did not know enough details about it, did not or would not believe, or simply didn't give a
damn.
Before Courrier could make his presentation, its scheduling and subject were inadvertently
and prematurely leaked to the press. Immediately thereafter, a horde of journalists arrived in
Bordeaux. After one or two of them managed to all but force entry into his lab, Priore closed its
doors and, with the help of his friends, wrote a printed press release that stressed his
thankfulness to the many people who had helped him over the years rather than providing any
comprehensible details about the machine he had brought to birth. Stymied, many of the
newsmen traveled across town to seek an explanation from its leading cancerologist, Professor
Lachapele, who informed them acidly that the machine was all but useless and unworthy of their
attention or their time.
The journalists' reports, founded as they were on rumor of outright lies, roiled the pages of
their newspapers and magazines in such a way that they either over-exaggerated the potential
or a forthcoming cancer cure, or came close to billing Priore as just one more cancer-cure
charlatan. All of which so alarmed, among many others, Dr. Wilhelm Bernhard, world specialist
in electron microscopy, that he called his friend Courrier to warn him that his forthcoming
presentation to the academy might put his hard-won reputation at risk as well as those of Guerin,
Riviere and the Villejuif cancer institute itself.
In the journalistic melee, no one had bothered to read the declaration carefully issued by
Riviere from Rennes, where he was occupied with his university courses, which formally stated:
"Our experiments are of real interest. Much more experimental research has of course to be
done before any therapeutic application on human cancer victims can even be considered. It
goes without saying that this will take a certain time and no little effort of many types, both
scientific and financial. Our work, as fascinating a perspective as it might hold, in no way,
therefore, allows anyone to offer the public hope which could only lead to deception at the
present time."
On May Day, Courrier gave his report to an Academy assembly hall crowded with scientists,
newspapers and television reporters, photographers and an unusual number of curious
bystanders. Accompanied with slides showing histological details, and animals before and after
treatment, his lecture was heard out in almost tomb- like silence. When the lights came on
again, he announced that he had personally checked the validity of Riviere's findings through the
offices of his personal assistant, Madame Colonge. He then went on to say that he had taken
the responsibility of presenting three notes to the Academy for two reasons. The first was a
ringing declaration and a challenge to critics and skeptics of every stamp. It reads "When it is a
question of a problem as serious as that of cancer and when one sees a little light beginning to
dawn, one has the obligation to see what this light might represent. One has no right to snuff it
out before learning what it may be worth."
The second was a tribute to his colleagues who had done the pioneering work, particularly
Guerin, Riviere and Madame Colonge, and a statement of the essence of the problem to be
faced down the road. It read: "Attention must naturally be given to the apparatus which
Monsieur Priore has conceived and constructed. It has apparently already been examined by
several physicists. It is found to be too complicated. While that may be possible, it is
nevertheless a fact that Guerin and Riviere have obtained results with it that had to be made
public. What is emitted from such an apparatus? I hope Monsieur Priore will allow disinterested
physicists to study it at their leisure, for Science cannot tolerate apparatuses enveloped in
mystery ." Then, as almost a footnote to the history of the moment: "The biological action of
magnetic fields is the object of intense research in the United States. In specialized institutes,
the influence of these fields on tissue cultures, microbes, plant forms, diastases and certain
tumors is under study. Up to now, the results obtained on grafted tumors seem less significant
than those which have here been presented."
After Courrier sat down, a leading cancer specialist, Professor Lacassagne, rose to ask
snidely why the notes had included no bibliographical references on work done on the bio-effects
on tumors from electromagnetic fields, and criticized the experimentation as "impromptu." When
Courrier denied this allegation as ludicrous, Lacassagne stalked out of the assembly hall in full
view of the audience.
The meeting caused a new eruption of media reports which unfortunately accented one of
three aspects of the problem at the expense of the other two. These were 1) the hope that a
miraculous cure for cancer was in the offing 2) the contradictory, not to say discordant, reception
of the data by various academics and 3) the enigma of Priore's personality.
Remarkably, no serious discussion among the scientists present at the meeting ever took
place. This led a foreign scientist, present in Paris at the time, to remark: "I don't understand.
Here is a report given to the most authoritative scientific body in France by one of the most
respected and eminent of its members and it is publicly subject to doubt without that leading to
any reaction whatsoever."
The General Delegation for Scientific Research was at this point still open to the idea of
providing funds for more research with the Priore Ray. The big stumbling block, however, was
one related to niceties involved in relations up and down the scientific hierarchy. To open the
way to the allocation of such funds required the approval of the Delegation's own section for
cancer research and that section was headed by none other than the same Professor
Lacassagne who had so rudely walked out of the Academy's assembly hall.
At the same time the General Delegate diplomatically covered himself by suggesting to
Robert Courrier that he had to have more information underscoring the potential importance of
the research accomplished. Courrier told him to simply re-read the three notes he had
presented to the academy. His matter-of-fact, yet terse, come-back then elicited his invitation to
a full-dress meeting of scientific experts at the Institute for Scientific Cancer Research.
In this short historical account we obviously cannot go into the ins and outs of what transpired
at this meeting or any of the many similar meetings which followed it. A paragraph in a brilliant
book, four years in the writing, by the courageous Bordeaux journalist, Jean-Michel Graille and
entitled: Dossier Priore, A New Pasteur Affair (of which this account is but a tenuous synopsis)
must suffice to pointedly characterize the nature of the problem in its most general sense.
Writes Graille: "To read what follows in this chapter might well seem tedious: an
enumeration of names and titles, the content of a debate held at an administrative meeting,
personal remarks by one ranking personage or another, exchanges of letters following the
meeting itself and the official report which came out of it. Tedious but indispensable for not a few
reasons. It is important to know who were the participants at this meeting and what of these
participants each was trying to represent. It is important to know how such scientific meetings
go about their business at the 'top level,' And, finally, it is important to learn about and to
understand, in the particular case of the Priore Affair, the behavior and reactions of all
concerned. A reading of all this could be difficult {and it won't be the only such passage in this
book) yet it is necessary to understand the essence of the dossier in order to be able to create
for oneself as clear and well-motivated a personal opinion about it as to subsequently be able to
discuss it, or to hear it discussed, with a thorough knowledge of the facts."
In this single paragraph, Jean-Michel Graille has, in my opinion, pointed to both the nub and
the difficulty in getting at the essence of the real facts behind a case such as that of Priore's that
are so important to its proper understanding, an understanding which can be painted against the
backdrop of the history of science and the backdrop of human pettiness and maliciousness or
human courage and magnanimity.
One of the participants, Professor Andre Lwoff, soon to become a Nobel Laureate for his
work in virology, was violently against the meeting's central issue: namely, whether or not funds
should be spent to build a new and better Priore machine. Not only did Lwoff aver that the three
notes presented to the Academy never should have been published, but he also opined that
since all the work was done, not on spontaneously generated but on grafted cancers, the effects
of the machine were hardly impressive. He later added in writing that 1) the patents issued to
Priore for his device were nothing but a web of nonsense, 2) the machine itself could never be
duplicated based on any description given for it by its inventor and, in a repetition of his oral
remarks, 3) the fact that only cancer grafts were experimented with was nothing to shout about:
He strangely added that because the animals who had been irradiated subsequently were able
to entirely reject new grafts, the whole phenomenon offered no proof that cancer cells could be
killed while healthy cells were not. The whole thing came down to a question of immunity, he
said, as if that were not of the greatest possible importance.
To which, in due course, Guerin and Riviere replied: "It has been claimed that our
experiments are valueless because they were carried out on grafted tumors and that other
therapeutic measures were known to get rid of such tumors and their metastases. We defy
those persons who have made such affirmations to prove, with the use of such other measures,
that animals infected with T-8 tumors can be cured at a percentage rate identical to those
obtained by using the device which Monsieur Priore has developed."
Not a soul has responded to this challenge, then or since.
A second cancer expert at the meeting, a woman of great influence, resorted only to the cavil
that the experiments had been of doubtful quality since none of the animals had been weighed.
The fact that those same animals had survived normally lethal cancers seemed not to have
weighed with her .
There were many more observations of the same ilk. They seem atrociously paltry, trifling
and picayune coming from professionals who, if they no longer believed in the Hippocratic oath
to which they once swore, are considered by the public in general, and by cancer patients in
particular, at least to be concerned with seeing what a little light on the problem might reveal
before extinguishing it, as Professor Courrier expressed it.
At the same time, we must not forget Priore's decidedly difficult personality. He was an
inventor determined at all costs that his invention be developed for the benefit of humanity, yet
anxious that that same humanity not steal it from him. As author Graille puts it, "His
conceptions and attitude directly or indirectly conditioned the overall essence of this affair. Full
of enthusiasm, from the very day he discovered that the ray he had developed had a curative
effect on a cancerous cat, he developed a single-minded fixation on cancer. One could
understand and sympathize with him on this score. Here he is, a little Italian immigrant without
money or means, and he is going to offer the world a cancer cure. He is so convinced that he
wants to move ahead to doing just that. He will never understand or accept the exigencies of
Science or Medicine. For him, experiments, controls, verifications and parallel research are a
waste of precious time. 'I've made machines which cure cancer. Take them and treat cancer
patients. Don't bother with the rest.' Such would be a summation of his point of view."
Through the efforts of persons kindly disposed to the inventor, this point of view was softened
and he came finally to understand the necessity for what has been called scientific rigor, on the
other hand, another aspect of his character never changed an iota. This was his determination
to preserve the secret of his invention, motivated first of all by his unshakeable desire that it be
developed in Bordeaux, the city of his adoption, for the citizens of that city. Deeply rooted was
his belief that if he made his secret public, the machine would be taken from the Bordeaux
region and further developed by Parisians, those who considered themselves to be in the
penthouse of the scientific edifice. Once this was accomplished, he would likely not have one
more word to say about the matter. Therefore he continued jealously to conserve his secret and
put confidence in nobody.
As Graille generously concedes, he may well have been right, and adds: "All his life he had
to go up against men, whether scientists or industrialists, who had but one idea in their heads: to
get to the bottom of the inventor's secret in order to build for themselves a machine which they
then could exploit for their own account, for their own glory. Many such 'Priore Machines' were
to be actually built more or less surreptitiously or clandestinely. Not one of them ever worked."
While one might easily accuse Priore of a limited view, the horizons of the researchers
themselves were certainly not as broad as they might have been. Those involved in biomedicine
were content with the results produced by the machine, the workings of which were of
no concern to them. A black box, as it were, emitted a ray that definitely affected experimental
animals. At the same time, as researchers specifically interested in the cancer problem, they
never gave a thought to what the Priore Ray might accomplish in the wider clinical domain of
other afflictions.
As for the physicists, they were seemingly not up to the task of comprehending a complex
radiation that had miraculously sprung, as from the head of Zeus, out of the intuition of a man
they considered to be an undereducated and all but illiterate gadgeteer. Still others, whether
physicists, biologists, doctors of medicine or specialists in a dozen other fields, were willing to
throw the baby out even before it went into the bath water. In their eyes Priore was just a
nobody.
Behind the scenes, many of these scientists resorted to using the press to achieve their own
ends. Thus, the chief medical chronicler for Le Monde ( the French New York Times), herself a
doctor of medicine, was led to write outright lies about the Priore Affair -- specifically and falsely
stating that cancer patients had been treated with the Priore Ray in the clinic of Professor
Lachapele in Bordeaux with not only negative, but disastrous, results.
On the other hand, a journalist for another leading Paris daily, Le Figaro, scrupulously
conscious of his responsibility to fairly report what was going on, aptly wrote: "We would like to
see at least one thorny point clarified as soon as possible. Several years ago Professor Biraben
of the Bordeaux Medical Faculty (who at that time had not become a ranking professor) was
involved with the Priore device. According to certain reports from medical circles, his results
seemed, even at that time, to have been already quite positive on small animals and he seems
to have written a report to that effect. He was advised by highly placed authorities "to keep
quiet" and stop talking about this affair. If this turns out to be true, it would be a veritable medical
scandal to be judged in the harshest terms."
Could one have put it more succinctly?
The foregoing is to present something of the flavor of what was transpiring in the wide world
far removed from the laboratory of Priore who, at the time unaware of it, was reveling in the fact
that his machine had been successfully used by high-ranking French cancerologists and its
results reported in three separate notes to the Academy of Sciences.
His courage was also more than buoyed by the arrival on the scene of the commercial
director of a large French industrial firm specializing in the intricacies of manufacturing glass
components. This man had heard that Priore needed a large tube that was beyond all existing
norms and perhaps did not exist anywhere in the world. This tube, it can be stated, contained a
rare gas, neon, which when excited into a plasma, seemed somehow to convert the various
electromagnetic inputs into a single Priore Ray which surged from the business end of the tube.
In the tube were an anode and cathode. Peculiar to the anode was that it had to rotate to
produce the desired biological effects and this is but one of the anomalies in Priore's equipment
which physicists and bio-physicists have to this day been unable to explain.
The manufacturing company, a subsidiary of the internationally known company, Saint
Gobain, was looking for a new product. The commercial director thought the new tube might fill
the bill, particularly if it could be adapted to a machine that might ultimately cure cancer, a
product that indubitably would have an enormous market across the world. There were plenty of
problems with regard to the tube, notably those of its large dimension, its resistance and its
conductibility. When the tube was finally made, it now seemed that Priore would have to explain
his discoveries to the scientists of the company that had made it. One of these was sent to elicit
such an explanation but was, so to speak, "shot down in flames" by Priore. So a second attempt
was made by Ivan Peyches, a senior executive of the company, and president of the Society of
Civil Engineers of France, who made a detailed investigation of the device. His reports were
subsequently lost, but there remained an article he published in a leading French journal,
Sciences and Technics, a short time before his death in 1978. It bore the intriguing title: "What
Are So-Called Paranormal Phenomena?"
In it the engineer wrote: "There was so great an accumulation of components capable of
having some kind of action, and being unable to work separately, that the results of
measurement were limited to proving that there were no specific rays that issued from the tube
(Priore talked about canal rays), no more than there were any X rays. On the other hand one
could detect a magnetic field which was the end result of a field proper to the tube and of the
magnetic field of a solenoid that constituted the experimental chamber, an electromagnetic field
with a frequency of 16 megacycles (19 meters) and a high frequency field (metric waves), the
whole being pulsed at a very low frequency of an order of one per second. It was impossible, in
such an imbroglio, to determine what was necessary and what was sufficient. Priore maintained
that the simultaneous action of his various generators was indispensable to achieving his effect."
Peyches then went on to relate how he tried to persuade Priore to offer a more precise
definition of his thinking about the workings of his device. He wrote the inventor: "At this point, I
would say that all reticence on your part, which in your eyes would be justified by the fear of
seeing yourself partially dispossessed of your work, would be of far greater detriment to you than
any safeguard of your interests. Moreover, since it has become a question involved in public
health, you are no longer entirely your own boss... you absolutely must bring all this to the clear
light of day and I don't believe you can do it alone...You must supply all the characteristics so
that third parties can reproduce your results." Then, he concluded by citing the words of an
academician: "Many phenomena are rejected by the scientific world because they are
considered irrational: But it is not a proof of scientific honesty to refuse a priori to try, out of
homage to truth, to have a look at them and perhaps to understand them. Will Science one day
be able to abandon its taboos?"
It was Peyches' final conclusion that, in the end, Priore was a man of genius who knew
absolutely nothing about what occurred in his machine from the scientific point of view. The
company which he represented no longer exists since it was bought out by the American firm of
Coming Glass.
Industrial interest in the Priore device was not limited to the Saint Gobain subsidiary. Next
into the lists was a company in Anguouleme, Leroy-Somer, which specialized in electric motors,
generators and later was to branch out into solar power. Its president, Georges Chavanes, took
the initiative to write to Priore in 1965 that his company was interested in providing some of the
complex electrical equipment needed by the inventor, more particularly high-powered
generators, on the condition that Priore move his operation to the company seat at Anguouleme.
When the inventor categorically refused, Chavanes tentatively agreed to build a factory to
manufacture the Priore device in Bordeaux itself.
The alliance between Leroy-Somer and Priore, shaky at best, lasted two years and blew up
on Holy Thursday of 1967. The period was a stormy one for both parties to the agreement.
Priore did his best to convince Chavanes to commit himself to building a huge machine with a
magnetic gauss strength of 10,000 gauss. In the end he got one that put out only 920 gauss, not
much stronger than the machine he had already built which put out 620 gauss. Since the field of
action increased with the gauss strength, Priore reasoned that a machine of literally behemoth
size would be able to irradiate the whole, or every part, of a human cancer victim lying on a
stretcher, whereas the smaller machines had been effective only for small animals or for treating
a limited portion of the human body.
Chavanes and his company were aware that it would be a tremendous financial burden to
contemplate building the larger machine. So they went ahead with plans for the smaller one
while at the same time putting great pressure on Priore himself to make him feel that he was the
least important cog in a new gear, in fact that his status was reduced to being a simple employee
of Leroy-Somer. In Graille's estimation, this lack of psychological finesse on Chavanes' part
constituted what he called "the blackest pages in the Dossier Priore."
Even the smaller machine was to cost about half a million dollars, a price which today, due to
inflation, could be tripled or quadrupled. During a stage in which an intermediate machine was
designed by the chief Leroy-Somer engineer, Ribeau, a machine that never did function
properly, Chavanes all but forced Priore, who was heavily in debt, to sign a contract which was
falsified. The falsification was a matter of one word which was changed in the contract. In a
phrase reading that an exclusive license of patents, and subsequent patent modifications, would
accrue to the company "for all countries solely for therapy on cancers concerning animals and
humans," a word was inserted by hand so that the phrase read: "concerning particularly animals
and humans" implying that other uses of the machine, whatever they might turn out to be, would
also accrue to the company. This one word change was amended on Priore's copy of the
contract by calling the word "particularly" a "nullified word," but on Chavanes' copy it was called
an "added word."
Leroy-Somer believed it was sufficiently well positioned in the driver's seat to be able to deal
on behalf of Priore himself with the French governmental institutions, mainly the General
Delegation, concerned with the funding of the new machine. When Priore learned of Chavanes'
contact with the General Delegation he wrote a letter informing it that no one had the right to
deal in his name. Nor did Chavanes even attempt to cut the Saint Gobain subsidiary, which
alone could supply the tube, key to the device's functioning, in on the government funding.
In the meantime, no less a figure than Professor Kastler, soon to win the Nobel Prize in
Physics, came down from Paris to inspect the existing Priore device. He brought with him
Delmon, who, we recall, had worked with Berlureau on the first animal experiments and who
now, it turned out, was trying to build his own version of a Priore device on the sly without telling
Priore. Kastler's bringing Delmon with him to Priore's lab so angered Robert Courrier that he
told the physicist he had committed a real gaffe. He also convinced Kastler that Leroy-Somer
should build a machine with a power of at least 5000 gauss, but Chavanes refused. There
seemed to be no harmony of outlook between the leading industrialist concerned, on the one
hand, and the top physical and biological scientists on the other.
While all these, and many more, peripatetics were proceeding, Priore's sister in Italy came
down with cancer. Beside himself with grief, Priore informed all concerned to commit
themselves either to building an intermediate machine correctly, under his supervision or, better,
the 5000-gauss machine, and to do this in time to save his sister, or he would wash his hands of
the entire matter. Confronted with this ultimatum, the company began to work round the clock to
perfect the intermediate machine but engineers involved, believing themselves to be more adroit
with respect to its design than Priore, left out a host of what, to them, were unnecessary
components. The result was that when the machine was first put to trial, most of the
components burned out or otherwise failed, and the machine itself became a useless pile of
rubble.
Shortly thereafter, Priore's sister died of cancer. Her grief-stricken brother went into what
amounted to total isolation, unwilling to talk to a soul.
The whole Priore affair might have ended at that point, in the early part of 1967, were it not
for the entry onto the scene of a key figure, Professor Raymond Pautrizel. Born on 3 June 1916
in Basseterre, capital of the French Caribbean island of Guadeloupe, at forty years of age he
was on the Faculty of Medicine at Bordeaux. He soon became known, world-wide, as the "father
of parasitological immunity," a title he never accepted, saying that, if others had awarded it, it
was simply because "he had searched through old scientific publications to find ideas that were
as valid for modern research as they were forgotten by modern researchers." And he later was
quoted as adding: "It is really too bad that researchers today don't pause from time to tome to
dig into studies made by their predecessors, some of which were performed even decades ago!"
Professor Pautrizel was awarded the first academic chair in France for immunology, and later
a special unit was created for him for parasitological immunology, a subject which is both simple
and complex. The simple part involves the fact that various immunological techniques can be
applied to diagnosing specific parasites that have invaded an organism in order to develop
preventative actions against them via vaccines, or curative actions via serums.
When invaded by parasites, organisms react by creating antibodies, specific substances
aimed at killing the invaders also known as antigens. These antibodies are liberated, like an
attacking army, into the blood. Simple enough so far. The complexity arises because the
defending army, the parasites, don't just lie down and die under the attack. They are capable of
modifying their "personalities," as it were, and of changing various of their characteristics such
that the mechanisms that the host uses to recognize, or detect, the invaders are invalidated.
Thus, the substance which an organism would secrete to destroy an invader A becomes
incapable of recognizing A, now become A-1, and therefore incapable of destroying it.
The organism at this point seems to realize it has to create a different substance to rid itself of
its antagonist but, in the meantime, the metamorphized parasite is getting on with its assigned
destructive task. Alternatively, the parasite has another capability: that of itself liberating
substances which can annul or annihilate the organism's overall defense system. A sort of "in
the blood" version of Star Wars is going on at the microscopic level.
The study and classification of the substances -- call them weapons -- emitted by parasiteattacked
organisms allows for the establishment, in turn, of batteries of tests to define the exact
nature of the parasites themselves in order to come up with an appropriate therapy or counterweapon.
This then, is the essence of parisitological immunology, Raymond Pautrizel's area of
research. He specialized on a particularly lethal parasite known as trypanosome, the scourge of
tropical third-world countries where, in one form, it causes sleeping sickness in animals and
humans, in another, equine syphilis, in still others, other afflictions. Over the years, during which
he produced a small library of literature on the problem (known mostly to specialists in countries
where that problem is acute), Pautrizel and his team discovered, among other things, that the
trypanosome can modify itself, again and again, up to 101 times over a period as short as only
three weeks.
Even before his work on trypanosomes, Pautrizel, back in 1949, was one of the first
researchers to discover what is known as ambivalence in drugs, notably histamine. Histamine is
a substance which is secreted by an organism as a defense mechanism but if over secreted by
certain cells circulating in the blood, it becomes virulently noxious, mainly by over dilating blood
vessels, thus making them permeable to water and leading to edema and even death. This
process occurs, for instance, in some human beings who are highly susceptible and overreactive
to bee or wasp stings.
Pautrizel's research on the noxious aspects of histamine led to his finding that the same
substance, applied in requisite small doses, is extremely important to the defense system of the
organism. Today he stresses the notion of ambivalence in many areas of his work and
characterizes it as "a key to the biology of the day after tomorrow."
To finish with the background on Pautrizel, before bringing him on stage in the Priore drama, it
may be added that only a few years ago, at a formal reception for him attended by the medical
elite of France, he was given a Basque makila, an iron-bound honorific cane of sculptured wood,
in tribute to his work. On it was the incised inscription: "Sometimes to heal, often to alleviate,
always to console," an epithet that perfectly characterizes a medical doctor imbued with that kind
of rare compassion that marked Pautrizel's character.
When Robert Courrier sent Madame Colonge to Bordeaux, it was Pautrizel whom he asked to
provide her with every assistance. In this way, Pautrizel was first introduced to Priore and his
device. After witnessing the results obtained with it he was to say: "What stupefied me, and led
me to ponder the question, was to see the control animals die from their tumors in 3 weeks,
while at the same time I could observe that the tumors in the animals under treatment were
literally melting away and the same animals were taken back to Courrier's lab at the College de
France in Paris in perfect health." As a result of his thinking about the problem, Pautrizel came
to the belief that the machine, however it worked, did not exert any action at all to kill cancer
cells but, through as yet unexplained mechanisms, stimulated the afflicted organisms to provide
themselves with new immunological weapons that could overpower the cancer cells.
To shed light on this problem, Pautrizel proposed the simple expedient of experimenting, not
on cancer-infested animals, but on in vitro cultures of cancer cells. He made this proposition to
both French and British cancerologists but they were convinced that the Priore device had to be
actually killing cancer cells themselves,. They could not see the point that, if the machine did not
kill cancer cells, then it was doing something else to the body to allow it, and not the machine, to
do that job.
Pautrizel's involvement with the British was the result of a team being sent from England to
experiment with cancer mice with the Priore Ray. What happened cannot be related in this brief
resume except to say that, out of a lack of understanding on the part of certain British cancer
experts and malicious conniving on the part of one member of the cancer "aristocracy" in Paris,
the experiments were put under a cloud. It was alleged that mice had been substituted
somewhere during their long round-trip voyage between England and Bordeaux to make it look
as if a failed experiment had been successful. This did not prevent Sir Alexander Haddow, chief
of the prestigious Chester Beatty Research Institute for Cancer from stating, at a meeting in
Paris, that the Priore machine had been indubitably effective on the English mice and supporting
Pautrizel's idea that experiments should forthwith be done to see if the Priore Ray had any effect
on cancer cells in vitro. Haddow's suggestion backing Pautrizel's recommendation fell on deaf
ears.
Because of the emotional turmoil and rancor with respect to cancer that had so long
surrounded Priore and the workings of his machine, Pautrizel suggested that it be tried in a
completely new area, one he knew so well, namely on afflictions caused by the trypanosomic
pathogen. Before these could get underway, however, someone had to persuade the still
desolate Priore to return to work. Pautrizel, known to those really concerned with and
knowledgeable about the potential of the Italian's invention, at last was able to convince the
inventor to cooperate and get back into harness. This he did with that rare combination of
diplomatic tact and warm human sympathy with which only the Pautrizels of this world are gifted.
In the meantime, Riviere had gone on to implant new 347 tumor grafts in rats previously
cured of 347 tumors. When none of the tumors developed, that result added one more
argument to back Pautrizel's idea that the machine was, in fact, affecting the immunological
defense system of the animals. However, when Riviere tried the same procedure with the T -8
tumors, his animals died. This led to the conclusion that the immunity acquired by the animals to
lymphoblastic lymphosarcoma 347 was specific to that tumor. When a note on this research
was sent, again through Courrier's good offices, to the Academy, for the first time, it strangely
omitted from the listing of the participating researchers the name of Antoine Priore. It seemed
that Riviere had been taken to task by fellow cancerologists who believed that Priore was
nothing but a naive bumpkin or, worse, a swindler. They had warned him against publishing any
papers with which Priore's name would be associated. This rank injustice and lack of fair play
again sent Priore into a fit of despondency and depression from which he could only be
withdrawn by those subtleties involved in Pautrizel's sympathetic and friendly counsel.
On 25 July 1966, another note was sent to the Academy filed for the first time not under the
rubric Cancerology but under the rubric Immunology. It was entitled "Influence of Associated
Electromagnetic and Magnetic Fields on the Immunity of Mice Infected with Trypanosoma
equiperdum." The conclusion read: "The treatment allows the organism to rid itself of parasites
even when these have invaded it in a most intensive way.... There is an enhancement of both
the specific and aspecific factors of immunity."
Thus, for the first time, the field of research shifted from the narrower field of cancer to the
much vaster domain of immunology. And, for the first time, Pautrizel's name appeared as the
senior author on the paper. It also appeared that, for the first time, there should no longer be
any problem about experimenting with the Priore machine. Such was not the case.
Still complicating the whole issue was the fact that Priore himself was using different setting to
produce different varieties of radiation depending upon his own intuitive evaluation of the
particular biological experiments being run with his machine. He would never reveal the nature
of these settings.
At this point there appeared on the scene a new researcher who became Pautrizel's loyal ally,
a young woman, Pierette Chateau-Reynaud Duprat. During her work in Paris, she had learned
of the Priore controversy, and, against the stern advice of mentors senior by many years to her
in the cancer hierarchy, she came to Bordeaux to meet Pautrizel and learn more about the
research.
Her work, performed over many years, is too detailed for presentation here but it led to
important conclusions. One was that the Priore Ray had no direct effect on the trypanosomes
themselves but stimulated and reinforced the defense mechanism of the infested organisms,
allowing them to reject the parasitical influence with an effect so durable that they were no longer
subject to this influence even after treatment stopped.
Another conclusion was even more important and involved, in part, British research. It
pertained to the effects of the machine on both allografts or those made between two different
individuals of the same species, and isografts, or those made between two different individuals
of the same genetic line having in common antigens that were characterized by what is called
the same histocompatability. The conclusion was that not only was the rejection of allografts
accelerated by the Priore Ray but that isografts were also rejected. This meant, in sum, that the
ray stimulated not only the defense mechanisms of the organism but also, and more importantly,
its recognition mechanisms. In the case of an isograft, this allowed the recognition of weak
antigens that were not recognized in non-irradiated animals. In other terms, where at first the
anti-aircraft batteries could not shoot down the aircraft because they could not see them, now
they could shoot them down because they could see them. In immunological terms, the ray
affected both humoral and cellural, both specific and aspecific, immunity.
Here we must return to the mystery of the settings on the device. As a result of the new
experimentation it seemed that, depending on those very settings, the active ray, complex as it
was, could have either similar, totally different, or diametrically opposed effects. Thus it was not
a question of a ray having universal effects - a kind of magic bullet capable of killing any target
but of multiple radiations which, due to the complexities in Priore's personal makeup, have
unfortunately yet to be sorted out and explained.
Thus, the machine originally designed by Priore, called the P-I when it put out a wave length
of from 19-21 meters, had a radical effect on certain animal cancers, on cellular defense
mechanisms, and finally, but not universally, on organisms infested with Trypanosoma
equiperum, (hereinafter called T.e.).
A second machine, dubbed the P-2, was at first not able to produce these frequencies. What
it did put out was a frequency of 17 meters that was universally effective against T.e. and
seemed to act not on the cellular, but the humoral, defense mechanisms. The rejection of grafts
depends on the cellular defense mechanisms, which partially explains why Pautrizel when using
the P-2 machine, selected the T.e. vector, as it is called in microbiology, just because this
creature is fought by the organism's humoral defense system.
Consequently, the bio-effects that were successfully attained depend on the varying, not to
say quixotic, nature of the radiation. At one point Pautrizel actually did experiments on animals
infected with plasmodia - the vector for malaria which attacks red cells - and found that the
settings used were effective while never learning exactly what they were or the exact nature of
the radiation. Furthermore, Priore himself maintained that over the years he had successfully
treated cases of human tuberculosis but, again, never revealed which frequencies had been
used to achieve this.
Several more notes were sent to the academy on the successful work performed with the
Priore Rayon animals affected with T.e. But the central issue remained: how to find out exactly
how the machine worked. It fell, not to civilian scientists, but to those in the French army service
to attempt, at this point, to work out the problem. The army service brought into the picture was
the DRME (an acronym which translates as Administration for Research and Test Methods), to
which Pautrizel had sent a request for funds in 1968.
This request was the subject of a meeting at which were present three of the top names in
French science, one representing biology, the second physics and the third, medical physics.
The latter two turned in extremely unfavorable reports recommending that no money be wasted
on the problem. The biologist, however, turned in a most favorable report and, despite the fact
that he was in the minority, his opinion won the day.
As remarkable as was this victory, it was even more stunning and incredible given the fact that
this biologist was the same Andre Lwoff who had so adamantly opposed the Priore research a
couple of years previously. Lwoff had summoned the courage to completely reverse himself
only after he sent one of his most trusted colleagues to do secret experiments with the Priore
Rayon mice injected with peroxydase (an antigenic solution) to see if they would produce a
higher level of antibodies than non-irradiated animals. This they did so well that Lwoff became
convinced that the Priore Ray caused an extremely important increase in immune reactions.
These results were never published because, before the experiments could be repeated to be
absolutely sure of their results, the machine suffered one of its many interminable breakdowns.
The DRME report was at length, and in length, issued but not publicly since it was protected
by a military classification. However, a synthesis of it was finally published in November 1979 by
Herbert Gossot, Secretary General for the French Association for Bioelectromagnetism, under
the title: "A Scientific Balance Sheet on the Priore Ray ." Its contents were as follows:
"The two physicists assigned by the army made a complete analysis of the electromagnetic
radiations and magnetic fields activated by the Priore device. They thus determined the
spectrum of frequencies which the device emitted. They showed particularly that frequencies in
the visible light and infrared range had no biological effect; that there were no X-rays or Y-rays;
and that the pulsed ultra-high frequency electromagnetic wave was modulated in amplitude to
that of a high-frequency wave. They did a topographic survey of the respective intensities of the
various magnetic and electromagnetic fields in the experimental plane of the device. In
particular, they determined the spatial repartition in this plane of the density of the strength of the
ultra-high frequency wave. They showed that its value was very weak and that it could not
produce any kind of overall significant thermal effect imputable to the hyperfrequency ray.
Finally, and most importantly, by using what they had learned about these repartitions, they
demonstrated a clear correlation between the biological effects obtained and the intensity of the
hyperfrequency ray. What they actually observed was that, on the biological model used, i.e.
experimental trypanosomiasis of the mouse, there was a diminution of the rate of evolution of the
parasitemia that was proportional to the strength of the hyperfrequency wave. To quote them:
'These experiments of correlation are of certain interest: they confirm, if there is still any need of
so doing, the biological efficacy of this device. "
The two physicists, Bottreau and Berteaus, are still interested in rebuilding a Priore device
with which additional biological research could go forward. At the same time they suggested to
administrative bodies in French science the creation of a special laboratory for
bioelectromagnetism to fund more work, a suggestion in which Professor Pautrizel concurred.
No action was taken and their report was kept under wraps. In a note they presented to the
Academy of Sciences on their investigation, they were not allowed to include the names of the
laboratories where they worked: in the case of one, the CNRS Magnetic Laboratory at Bellevue
near Paris, and of the other, the Laboratory of Ultra-Hertzian Optics and Talence near Bordeaux.
Why? Because the directors of these laboratories did not want any mud in the Priore affair to be
spattered on them.
The next experiment done by Pautrizel was on rabbits whose testicles had been so seriously
affected by trypanosomes as to be almost entirely destroyed. After radiation the same testicles
took on their normal histological appearance and the rabbits, able to procreate again, in no way
abstained from their newly regained ability. This implied the complete regeneration of an organ
that had all but completely degenerated.
Yet journalists, who sought out truths about the Priore affair in Paris from high officials they
believed would know best about what was going on, continued to be led astray. For example, an
American scientific reporter, writing in the Saturday Review of Science in 1973 saw fit to state:
"It is really a question of a mystical problem that has little to do with science." He was quoting
Professor Bader , a man who for 15 years held top administrative posts in science that could
have allowed him to back the Priore research with all the funding necessary to its
accomplishment. At the time Graille's book came out, Bader issued a book of his own about the
Priore affair which offers no real idea of what was involved. When I asked several people in
France why Bader had written the book, they were unaware of Bader's inmost motivation.
Machinations continued to swirl about the case over the next several years. Behind-thescenes
intrigues, distorted accounts in the press, lethargic attitudes on the part of administrative
officials who would not take responsibility to cut an increasingly tight Gordian knot, outright fear
of various personalities to become too deeply implicated lest they lose their jobs -- all these, and
more, continued their daily round in an atmosphere of "Business As Usual," and "Don't Risk Your
Neck."
To get to the nexus of the situation, we have but to cite the observation of one of the few
perspicacious journalists who, in the prestigious scientific monthly, Sciences and Life, wrote:
"The physicists are convinced that the effective Priore Ray is very complex but to analyze this
further some things first have to be made clear. One is to raise the suspicion that has
surrounded Monsieur Priore with a fabulous accretion of misunderstandings, insults and
accusations of being a swindler over many years. What is needed is a veritable national effort to
act effectively and to act rapidly."
Over the next two years the decision-making process of the French government lumbered its
way along until it was finally decided to back the construction of a powerful machine. This
decision was not favorably accepted in many quarters. As Le Monde would comment: "The
decision was made in spite of the disapproval of many scientists. When money is tight, one
should pay particular attention to how it is being spent. Such seems not always to be the case.
A credit of some $3.5 million francs (or about a million dollars) has just been accorded to finance
the construction of a new Priore machine."
The scientists to whom the article referred were in a rage. They understood, at this juncture,
that the only way to put an end to the affair was to eliminate Pautrizel who, because of the very
success he was having with his research, was seen as a dangerous competitor that might even
become one of the top figures in medicine and science on a national, or perhaps, on a world
scale. Indeed, it was learned that Professor Courrier had gone to the length of sending a report
on Pautrizel's behalf to the Nobel Committee in 1979.
To make a long story short, the large powerful machine, the M- 600, was built but a huge tube
in it, after functioning for about a week, exploded. Due to the galloping inflation of the 1970's, to
replace it would have cost another million dollars. The money was not forthcoming.
In the meantime Pautrizel, ever experimenting with the still functioning smaller machine, was
to discover new facts. Mice with their spleens cut out, for example, also could survive injections
of T .e. The Priore Ray had important implications for Arterio-sclerosis, since it effected lipid
modifications in rabbits given a dietary regime high in cholesterol. This research, published in
another note in the Academy Proceedings, instead of being warmly received, only irritated the
cardiological fraternity which felt, as some of its members put it, "trapped" by Pautrizel's efforts.
One particularly virulent opponent was Professor Bricault, Dean of the Bordeaux Medical
School who, as late as 1980, was telling his own students that the published results were a farce
and had never been obtained. The students, who carried out a special investigation of the
matter on their own, were able to judge what a farce their own medical dean might represent.
L'Express, the Time magazine of France, read by at least half the population of French
intellectuals, had the gall to compare the results of the Priore research to those of the infamous
Trofim Lysenko of the Russia of Stalin's day. Haughtily L'Express added: "Today Priore's
defenders explain that his machine has not only cured cancer but, in all probability, altered the
immunological characteristics of mice. Were this, in fact, so, all the immunologists, all the
geneticists of the world would unite to affirm that a machine capable of changing the genetic
patrimony is the discovery of the century , far more important than the atomic bomb or the
conquest of the moon. Unfortunately, the history of the whole thing has never been properly
elucidated. "The article was illustrated with photos distortedly selected to convince viewers that
the Priore machine was as serious and effective as the one that purportedly brought
Frankenstein to life.
In this poisonous atmosphere the slow work of building the M-600 went forward. To give
anyone who was not there a feeling for this endeavor we may now cite verbatim a passage from
Graille's book: "The construction and assembly of the prototype - the M-600, that of highest
power and variable parameters - were fraught with many uncertainties and delays on the one
hand and, on the other, were marked by the stamp of Antoine Priore's sparkling genius.
"To go from an apparatus that developed 1,240 gauss applied over an effective area of some
20 centimeters, to one developing 5000 gauss over an area of 60 centimeters means to take on
an extremely risky technical and technological wager. Electrical, mechanical and glass-blowing
specialists plunged into the unknown. They had to conceive, make, adapt and put together all
the various myriad components almost haphazardly with no precise technical study being
previously available. Priore's stubbornness forced them to take on a trial-and-error
manufacturing "gimmickry" without precedent. As the thing was put together and preliminary
tests made, it became clear that many of the components were unsuitable and that they would
have to be modified or replaced. The tube itself, made of pyrex, 60 centimeters in diameter, and
6 meters tall, had to be replaced twice after it imploded. In fact, practically everything had to be
reconsidered or readapted. "Everything" meant the parts going to make up a generator of 50
tons in weight. For example, the coil which created the magnetic field: 5.5 tons with 11 miles of
copper wire. For example, the numerous cooling circuits which stabilized the thermal equilibrium
of the generator and its environment or, additionally, the circuits governing command, control
regulation and selection - 6 tons of electrical cables of which 15 miles were of tele-command
wiring.
"Priore astonished everyone. Breakdown after breakdown, incident after incident, it was he
alone who showed what to do next, indicated the proper steps to take, the right settings to adopt,
the right way to assemble the components: He was virtually building his machine by himself,
nursing its construction along day after day, all the engineers' studies and efforts actually, and
ultimately, serving only as a preliminary attempt, a sketch as it were. When Priore made his
presence felt, things began working. "
Then after the machine was built: "The part of the entire apparatus to generate electricity
was set up on a provisional basis. It was so noisy that, while functioning, it woke up the whole
neighborhood. The number of experiments had therefore to be curtailed so that the machine
would not be used at night. And, all at once, everything came to a halt. The Faraday cage,
shielding and isolating Priore's apparatus, was torn and fissured by the shock of the cement
pilings that were being sunk into the ground all around to hold up the building under construction.
This allowed high- frequency waves to escape which disturbed radio broadcasts emitted by local
radio stations, the army, and civilian aircraft for miles around."
Nevertheless during the week or ten days that the machine was in good operation the results
of experiments performed with it were more than formidable. First of all, it allowed for as many
as forty experiments to be performed on some 280 animals in a remarkably short period of time.
Among the discoveries made were: The ray emitted provided the treated animals with an
extremely strong immunitary response. Animals whose immune defenses had been attenuated
by an immuno-depressant were able to overcome the effects of injected parasites but relapsed a
few days later. One could therefore conclude their immune response was much weaker than
those normally infested and treated.
Newborn animals, whether treated or not, developed a marked parasitemia leading to their
deaths. At the time of death, the parasites had the same antigenic structure as those of the
innoculum which thus implied that they had met with no defense at all in the infected organisms.
This also proved that the Priore Ray did not act directly on the parasites themselves but only by
way of an increase in the immune defense system of the organisms. The newborn animals
succumbed to their parasitemia because their immune system was not yet sufficiently developed
to be stimulated by the P-Ray. The phenomenon of a stimulation of the immune defenses was
demonstrated by the fact that animals which had received soluble antigens developed, after
being irradiated, a level of antibodies far superior to the controls.
These and other conclusions were the object of notes presented to the Academy of Sciences
by Pautrizel and his team in 1978. Even before, at a colloquium held in Antwerp, Belgium
devoted to African human trypanosomiasis, the same team had offered the conclusion that the
stimulation of the immune defense system that allowed organisms to throw off the effects of
trypanosomiasis had to be very significant in that all attempts to try to effect such stimulation
through immuno-stimulants as well known as B.C.G., or Coryne-bacterium granulosum, had led
neither to the cure produced by the Priore Ray, nor to any prolongation of the infected animals'
lives, nor even to the slightest modification in the evolution of the Trypanosomiasis.
These three scientific papers did little for the cancerologists who read them except to
exacerbate their urge to oppose the Priore research, if not to arouse their outright hatred for the
principal experimenter, Raymond Pautrizel. Could this have been because, for over 20 years,
the same cancerologists had been working in vain to provoke in cancerous organisms immunostimulative
reactions by intensively and successively vaccinating them with B.C.G.? Many
others had been life-long apostles of chemotherapeutic cocktails of all sorts, or life-destroying
ionizing radiations, or, what more recently has become the fashion, of applying the two methods
in endless combination.
For this reason, they saw Priore and Pautrizel as nothing more than spoil-sports who had to
be destroyed.
One of the opening shots in this campaign was a letter received by Pautrizel to inform him
that his request for funds to continue his research through Unit-89, a unit that had been specially
set up for him to direct, had been denied. It took many months of investigation for Pautrizel to
learn that the real reason for the refusal was because of his work with Priore.
Next Pautrizel was informed that his appointment as director of the same research unit would
be extended for only two years, whereas the normal extension for similar units was five years.
A third insult came when Pautrizel tried to win a post within his unit for a high-ranking military
physician, who had been his student and who had decided to quit the military in order to
participate in the fascinating research prosecuted by his mentor. Pautrizel's request for funds to
pay this physician, who all his life had been working on tropical medicine closely associated with
problems of trypanosomiasis, were refused four times in a row with no cogent reason given.
The physician, who in the meantime had volunteered his time without pay, finally became so
emotionally overwrought that he gave up his medical career and retired to the countryside where
he gave himself over to alcohol. Then Pautrizel tried to get a salaried post for another of his
brilliant collaborators (who still works with him). He was told that this man could take up his new
functions only if he left Bordeaux. One could go on with many other shocking stories but we will
leave it to Graille to conclude: "Everything possible was done to isolate Pautrizel, to separate
him from his collaborators. Every single one of these collaborators saw their careers put in
jeopardy, compromised, or broken."
As a final insult, when the time came again to renew Pautrizel as director of Unit 89, those
responsible, not daring to overstep what even they knew to be decent limits by not extending
him, simply abolished the unit. And to add injury to that insult, a doctoral thesis that had now
been prepared by Priore, and backed not only by Pautrizel but by Nobel Laureate Andre Lwoff
himself, was summarily refused by the President of the University of Bordeaux.
It is perhaps unnecessary to state that the details behind all of this skullduggery could, and
did, fill up two chapters of a book and make for the most heart-rending reading imaginable.
So what happened next? In the autumn of 1977, Professor Georges Dubourg, one of the
leading lights in Bordeaux's company of surgeons and a friend and admirer of Pautrizel's, came
to him to say openly and baldly: "My friend, at the point you've reached, there is only one more
way to jolt medical opinion and that is to treat human cancer patients." Pautrizel was hesitant,
believing his role to be one of continuing with his animal experiments but where would the funds
for that come from now? He therefore asked his old mentor, Robert Courrier's advice. Courrier
gave the green light. The treatments were restricted to terminal cancer patients whose immune
defense systems had been disastrously weakened by chemotherapy or radiation or both. At
least one of them was totally cured. The other lived, without pain, for a period many times longer
than predicted by prognosis. Dubourg, Pautrizel and their collaborators wrote up the results and
sent them as an official communication to the French Academy of Medicine for publication.
The reply they received from that Academy's perpetual secretary reads: "Experts whom we
consulted consider that your work does not fall within the jurisdiction of our members and that it
would doubtless find an audience more worthy of its purpose in a more specialized society ."
To which Pautrizel formally replied: "Since two of the four signatories of our note are
corresponding members of your Academy, could we not benefit from the remarks and comments
made by the committee which saw fit to refuse our paper? And even, if this is not too indiscreet
a request, to learn the names of the expert members who were consulted which would allow us
to get into contact with them directly and to benefit from their singular competence?"
His letter has remained unanswered for four years.
There was nothing more to do except one thing which Raymond Pautrizel, as a man of
science, had always been careful to avoid: Get a responsible journalist interested in the case,
inform him of all possible details, and let him carry the Priore Affair in all its harrowingly
loathsome aspects to the broad reading public. That journalist was Jean-Michel Graille.
For four years, Graille went about his task, publishing three consecutive long articles in his
newspaper Sud-Ouest France and finally the book to which we have referred and of which this
presentation is largely a resume. As early as 1980, Graille would write in his newspaper: "The
Priore Affair is simple in essence. It can be reduced to a simple alternative: either the machine
developed by Antoine Priore is of no interest and, having shown this, the affair can be
considered at an end. Or else the machine is of real and demonstrable medical interest and, if
that is officially recognized, he would be allowed to get on with the work. For this dilemma runs
the risk, yet again, of being buried under delays and evasions. Beyond all the powers-that-be
that have been directly connected to the affair for many years now - the power of finance, the
power of medicine, the power of science - perhaps it is now political power with which
responsibility lies if it can rise to meet and assume that responsibility through decision."
That was Graille's statement in 1980. His book which came out four years later ends with the
sentence: "The Dossier Priore thus depends, from here on out, on a decision that must be
taken on the very highest level, and imperatively. This responsibility devolves, in last resort, on
the chief of state and on him alone. Will he assume it?"
Would the President of the United States?
PART THREE
A BIOLOGICALLY ACTIVE COMBINATION OF
MODULATED MAGNETIC AND MICROWAVE
FIELDS: THE PRIORE MACHINE
INTRODUCTION
A very complicated generator invented by Antoine Priore (or Priore}, a former radar
operator without academic qualification, has been said to produce radiation which causes certain
implanted animal tumors to regress and cures trypanosomiasis in certain laboratory animals.
There are several remarkable things about the papers describing these biological effects, the
most remarkable being the contrast between the careful detail in which the biological data
themselves are presented and the absence of anything but the most vague, and often
contradictory, information about the generator. I have given examples of these disparities
elsewhere (1)
.
A first consequence of the publication of these communications in the Comptes rendus
de l 'Académie des Sciences (Paris) was a violent polarization of opinion within the Academy
and in other French scientific circles. There were some who wished to ignore or deny any
phenomenon, however completely attested, brought about by inadequately specified means;
they would have opposed presentation of the reports to the Academy and would probably have
succeeded in suppressing them but for the determined sponsorship of the distinguished
secrétaire- perpétuel, Prof. Robert Courrier. Others felt t that the importance of the results, if they
could be confirmed, made further investigation imperative: if possible, with disclosure of the
inventor's "secret"; if not, then without it.
A second result was the journalistic exploitation of a situation brimming over with
human interest. Commentators (2} (3) (4) (5) ranged from a writer in Esquire who has since
followed another path to notoriety (3) to Lord (Solly) Zuckerman writing in popular vein (4). None
of them resisted the regrettable impulse to step up the popular appeal by introducing
scientifically irrelevant biographical details about Priore in order to demonstrate his worthiness
for political patronage, which indeed he has received in abundance. Aside from this, they
maintained a nice balance between sympathy for the victim of prejudice and healthy scepticism
toward his work. Zuckerman, in a lecture given at the Lovelace Foundation in Albuquerque (5),
gives Priore an honorable place in his catalogue of those whose innovative achievements
remained unrecognized because of conservative prejudice and ignorance, from Babbage to
Peyton Rous, though not without leaving himself a loophole should the initial promise not be
kept. The main point, he insists, is that people who believe in what they are doing should refuse
to be discouraged in an atmosphere of incomprehension and hostility.
The present report is the outcome of a visit to Priore's establishment sponsored by the
organization ADERA for those attending a course of instruction in microwave exposure hazards
(6). I shall write very briefly about the alleged biological effects, then about the Priore
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invention itself and the nature of its biologically active output. Impressions and private
conversations bearing on these matters will be mentioned when they add, reliably or otherwise,
to the total picture.
BIOLOGICAL OBSERVATIONS
There is a pre-history of verbal recollection and gossip connected with the Priore invention.
Priore himself is said (3) to have become interested in possible medical applications of
electromagnetic waves upon observing that fruit and vegetables could be preserved by exposure
to ultra-high frequency fields. A machine was built from US Army surplus and at some stage
sick persons were placed in the field generated (3). According to a US scientist who has been
interested in repeating some of the Priore experiments, a politically well-connected lady who was
cured in this way of cancer after receiving a prognosis of early death is still enjoying perfect
health in Bordeaux.
The first experiments on cancerous animals were done by Delmon and Biraben who
withheld their results from publication after receiving an unfavorable report from a committee,
and because of a fear that publication would prejudice the candidature of one of them for
admission to a fellowship (aggrégation) (7). They used (8) rats implanted subcutaneously with a
well-characterized uterine carcinoma, the so-called T8 (Guérin), having previously studied the
effects of x-rays and of pulsed magnetic fields upon these animals without finding anything
particularly noteworthy: The magnetic fields had no effect on tumor growth or on the occurrence
of lymph node metastases, while the remission produced by x-rays was only transient. After
exposure to the window of Priore's machine, on the other hand, tumor growth could be stopped
for as long as three months afterwards. The animals recovered good general health, and lymph
node metastases were seldom seen.
The T8 tumor in rats was also used by Rivière and colleagues (9) from Guérin's
laboratory in the cancer institute at Villejuif. They found macroscopic regression of the tumors
and of metastases after treatment and observed no relapses up to three months thereafter.
Their publication anticipated that of Delmon and Biraben.
Rivière and colleagues then worked with rats implanted with a lymphoblastic
lymphosarcoma which when untreated invariably proved fatal within 11 to 15 days, with
generalized colonization of the nodes and a leukemic syndrome. Treatment under the Priore
machine led to total regression of the graft and of the accompanying metastatic and leukemic
phenomena (10). Certain of these experiments were done with animals from Courrier's
laboratory under the constant supervision of his as assistant Madame Colonge. The results were
the same, and Courrier reported them in an addendum to a further paper by Rivière et al (11)
describing comparable results with a mouse lymphosarcoma. Further studies with the rat (12)
yielded the discovery that treated rats clinically free of the lymphosarcoma were able to resorb a
second transplant of the isologous tumor while succumbing to an homologous tumor of a
histologically different type.
2
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Courrier (7) complained that, because of a campaign of disparagement, no French
"cancerologists" offered to repeat these experiments. Shortlived cooperation was however
forthcoming from an English laboratory. According to one account (2), cancerous mice were
sent over to Priore's establishment and some healthy ones were later sent from there to
England, but the latter were not the ones that had been sent for treatment. The anonymous
director of the English laboratory withdrew his cooperation, though not without providing "a
French colleague" with a detailed memorandum. In 1977 Courrier (7) issued his own account of
the episode and identified the persons concerned. The director was the late Sir Alexander
Haddow (Institute of Cancer Research, Royal Cancer Hospital, Univ. of London), and his envoys
to Floirac were E. Whisson and Dr. and Mrs. E.J. Arnbrose, the latter being scientists of some
repute. Courrier was evidently not persuaded that any substitution had taken place, for he wrote
that the rumor was put about: "on fait courir le bruit..."
The discovery of specific anti-tumor immunity in the treated animals may have lent force
to the hunch that the Priore radiation might act upon the immune system of the host rather than
directly upon the cancer cells. At any rate, Professor Raymond Pautrizel, a parasitologist already
associated with the work of Rivière and Guérin, exposed mice after they had been injected with
a dose of Trypanosoma equiperdum sufficient to kill them within five days if untreated, and they
all survived (13). At this point extraordinary measures were taken to re move all suspicion of
fraud.. The experiments were repeated successfully under lock and key and under the eye of a
bailiff appointed by a Com mission de Contrôle composed of university officials and local
dignitaries. The official report was certified by all the members of the Commission. A positive
result obtained under such conditions, said Courrier (7), should have put an end to all criticism
from men of good faith.
In a further series of short papers in the Comptes rendus (14) (15) (16) this indirect effect
upon the immune system of animals infected with T. equiperdum was confirmed and elaborated.
These brief published statements represent a lot of work: just how much was apparent from a
lecture given by Pautrizel during my visit to Floirac. When I asked about his plan to publish the
evidence in detail, he told me that he had not found a journal willing to accept such a manuscript.
The evidence presented, furnished by experiments on mice (13) (14) (16), rats (14) and
rabbits (15) , follows fairly conventional lines which I shall not attempt to review in detail. Briefly:
the pathogenic organisms disappeared from the treated animals, which survived indefinitely. In
rare cases where the parasites reappeared, they were of a different antigenic type from these
causing the original infection. Treatment brought about an intense acquired immunity. Some
animals were reinfected 7 times over a period of 6 months, eventually with 100 times the
original, and otherwise invariably fatal, dose. Multiple reinfection resulted in a high titer of
agglutinating antibodies. The blood of these animals conferred upon other normal animals an
immunity which persisted for about 45 days. Treatment with an immunosuppressor,
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cyclophosphamide, depressed, but did not abolish, the appearance of agglutinating antibody
when infected animals were subjected to Priore irradiation, although relapse occurred after about
12 days. Newborn animals died of the infection whether irradiated or not, and the organisms
found in their blood were of the original strain. Trypanosomal antigen of unspecified nature,
injected intraperitoneally after the first irradiation of infected animals, caused an enhancement of
anti-body production. When the parasites were protected from the host's immune system by
being implanted in a diffusion chamber, Priore irradiation failed to inhibit their multiplication. In
his talk, Pautrizel said that in order to elucidate further the apparent effect of irradiation in
exalting the mobilization of the immune system, the course of change of immunoglobulins M and
G, of albumin/globulin ratio, and of agglutinating and hemagglutinating titers was followed in
irradiated and reinfected animals for about one year. The data were given in detail. With no time
in which to understand, much less to assimilate them, I was left only with the impression that a
clear picture has yet to emerge--a conclusion apparently shared by Prof. Czersky of Warsaw.
One point of interest was the passing mention of a failure to modify the course of a malarial
infection. This is not surprising, perhaps, remembering the vastly more complex life cycle of the
plasmodium and its greater antigenic variability.
The postulated general stimulation of "defense mechanisms" by the output of the Priore
machine led Pautrizel to ask whether this effect might extend to the prevention or cure of
atherosclerosis. Another short paper communicated, as usual, by Courrier: (17) , described a
"spectacular" attenuation of the hyperlipemia induced in rabbits by a diet of "industrial granules"
supplemented by l% of cholesterol, resulting in a daily cholesterol intake by each rabbit of about
1 gram. The ob served effect of irradiation took the form of all inhibition of increased
cholesterolemia, persisting for several weeks after treatment, and a marked decrease in the
extent of aortic deposition. I find the data rather unconvincing, with quite a lot of overlap of
experimental and control values. As for the explanation of the effect, if it can be confirmed,
Pautrizel and colleagues (17) ask whether it could be due to an activation of lipid catabolism.
Strangely enough they do not discuss the role of macrophages in the regression of tumors, the
cure of trypanosomiasis, or the prevention of hypercholesterolemia, although macrophage
mobilization might provide a common mechanism.
THE INVENTION
Much has been written deploring Priore's secretiveness. It has been an embarrassment in
one camp and a ground for dismissing his invention in another. My own view is that a secretive
inventor and his invention, if important, must be investigated as a part of the external world, and
the obstacle posed by limited cooperation accepted in the spirit in which the inaccessibility of
nature is accepted as a challenge to our wits. Priore has in fact been much more considerate
than the Almighty, who after all has provided no blueprints to his creations, while Priore included
in his first paper a footnote (9) informing us
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that the physical principle of his invention has been the subject of a patent (18). How strange
that none of the journalistic commentators, from Zuckerman down the line, have thought it
worthwhile even to men tion the existence of this document. When drawing it to the attention of
several members of the party visiting Floirac, I found astonishment at its existence followed by
doubts as to whether, since they had not read it, it could contain any information of value. I had
no opportunity to ask Priore about it, but an associate who did so met with a similar response: it
won't help very much, he said. Nevertheless the apparatus described is presumably that used
by Rivière, in whose paper it is mentioned, and the amount of detail given is such that, unless
indeed it is fraudulent, a reasonable guess as to the nature of the emerging ra diation ought to
be possible for people competent in the field.
Wi th this in mind I planned to include only a summary in this report, but have now decided
upon a full translation (Appendix), with out which the odd flavor of the document would be lost.
A seemingly reasonable description of components and layout is coupled with a quaint--some
might say superstitious-- intrusion of pseudo biology and mention of electrophysiological
pioneers whose identity can only be guessed through a haze of misspellings. There is, for
instance, the choice of modulation frequency of the magnetic field to match the rhythm of the
patient's heartbeat. There is, too, the comment that the best results are obtained when the
cathode generating a stream of positive ions is made of molybdenum, the metal whose valency
is closest to the mean valency of the chemical molecules constituting living tissues.
I leave the reader to form his own impression of the invention described in the patent,
save to mention that the active radiation emerges from a tube containing a rotating deflector
upon which impinge, from several different sources, a stream of positive ions accelerated in a
cyclotron, a beam of centimeter waves generated by a magnetron, and a magnetic field. Any or
all of these may be chopped or modulated according to various patterns.
The machine was working during the visit to Floirac. One could see the exit of the tube
beneath which the biological targets are placed. There was a certain amount of rumbling and
crackling, and the pinkish luminescent plasma appeared to be turbulent. I asked about the
speed of rotation but was told by one of Priore's assistants that the infor mation is strictly
confidential. I would guess it to be well under 100 rpm.
THE EMERGENT FIELD
After several misleading statements about the nature of the bio logically active field
generated by Priore's machine (mentioned in ref 1), a short paper in the Comptes rendus
described the results of experiments in which two physicists of established reputation had been
allowed to cooperate with Priore, Pautrizel, and their associates. Berteaud and Bottreau (19)
were able to analyze the radiation in some detail, up to x- and gamma-ray frequencies. Their
report is confined to
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the assertion that they have established the presence of a 9.4-GHz pulsed electromagnetic
wave, amplitude modulated at HF frequency 17 MHz, and a slowly modulated continuous
magnetic field of the order of 1kG.
Other components, if detected, are not mentioned. There exists, I am told, a confidential report
of the whole investigation. Bottreau assured me personally that there was no trace of ionizing
radiation.
Berteaud and coworkers (19) also mapped the intensity distribution of these radiations in a plane
perpendicular to the axis of the apparatus. Then, using as targets mice infected with T.
equiperdum, they were able to demonstrate a simple relationship between the rate of decrease
of parasitemia in these animals and the relative intensity of the UHF component. However, in
separate experiments they found that fatalities among infected mice were not decreased when
the animals were exposed to an unmodulated 9.4-GHz field of comparable intensity. They
concluded that the UHF field generated by Priore's machine is a necessary but not sufficient
condition for the observed biological effects.
The results of Berteaud et al leave us with some unanswered questions. If their analysis of the
field was complete, the biological activity must rest jointly on the UHF component and the
magnetic field. How critical are the exact value of the many parameters involved and the
relationship between them for the manifestation of biological activity? Is it possible that the
methods available to Berteaud and coworkers were incapable of furnishing a complete analysis?
One can only speculate. It has struck me that in all the papers describing the biological effects of
this radiation, there is nowhere any mention of any search for the the correct operating
conditions of the machine. Apparently the machine, if it works at all, always produces results,
and one must remember that two different models have been built and found to be effective. The
one quantity that is regularly mentioned is the is the magnetic field strength, 620 G in the first
model and 1240 G in the second. The patent document seems to suggest that there is great
flexibility in the mode of operation. It is moreover almost inconceivable that Priore could have
had any genuine theoretical basis upon which to favor one particular set of patterns over another
in relation to biological changes that are themselves of intractable complexity and totally
unpredictable. One is bound to suspect that the mix is anything but critical, and that if the
reported biological effects are genuine they might very well be brought about by much simpler
means. It is of some interest that extremely sharp frequency selectivity has been claimed in
recent biological experiments with monochromatic microwaves, in contrast to the sort of flap
response surmised in the present context. The need for fine tuning could of course be obviated
in a machine designed for sturdiness and broad applicability by arranging for it to generate
"white" energy with respect to the several decisive characteristics, including modulation
frequencies and perhaps their derivatives, or alternatively to generate an output which varies
rapidly in real time, systematically or randomly, over a sufficiently wide range of values. The
biological effects of such
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Little was learned of this latest development during my visit to Floirac. The Priore residence, is
coming to look like an industrial laboratory of electrical engineering geared to pilot scale
operations. There are rumors of serious technical difficulties such as might have been
anticipated in scaling up such a complicated device. It is said to be proving difficult, for instance,
to construct a pyrex container able to cope with the very high energy flux in the plasma.
Is the new machine really needed? At the technical level the answer is almost certainly "no".
Evidently technical considerations are overruled by others, no doubt of personal, political, and
even patriotic nature.
The whole operation takes on a farcical aspect when one considers that the only genuine need
in the present state of affairs is to get independent confirmation, or refutation, of results already
obtained with equipment that was clearly adequate for the original experiments. The funds now
made available would suffice for the building of several replicas of the mark 2 machine. These,
placed in selected centers of research, could be used by independent teams for a critical
repetition and extension of earlier findings. The success or otherwise of the time-consuming
attempt to build a giant machine is largely irrelevant to the central doubts that persist as to the
claims made for the Priore radiation, and this expensive diversion of effort betrays a certain
recklessness which ill serves the quest for a solution to the mystery surrounding "l'affaire Prioré
".
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Note : References (3) to (5) have been available to me in the form of translations into French
and I therefore cite them in this form, with the original English reference when available .
1. Bateman , J.H. 1977. Microwave Magic. ONR London Conference Report, ONRL C-14-
77.
2. Greenberg, D.S., 1978. The French Concoction Saturday Rev. Sol. , May , 36 - 44.
Translated by the Association Nationale de Bioélectromagnétisme (ANB) under the title: La
Mystérieuse Machine Médicale Française.
3. Rorvik, D. M.., 1975. Les Français ont-ils un traitement contre le cancer ? Translation by
ANB of the article in Esquire, July .
4. Zuckerman, (Lord) , 1973. Le grand mystère de la machine magnétique de Bordeaux .
Translation by SERAP of the article: The great Bordeaux magnetic mystery machine. Sunday
Times Weekly Review, 7 Jan.
5. Zuckerman, (Lord) , 1974 . Orgueil et préjugé dans le domaine de la science.
Translation by ANB of the William Randolph Lovelace Commemorative Lecture : Pride and
prejudice in science. Aerospace Medicine 45, 638 - 647.
6. Bateman, J.B. , 1978. Staging the perils of non-ionizing waves. Office of Naval Research
London, European Scientific Notes, ESN 32-3 : 85-88.
7. Courrier, R. 1977. Exposé de M. le professeur Courrier secrétaire perpétuel de
l'Académie des Sciences fait au cours d'une réunion à l'Institut sur les effets de la machine de M.
A. Prioré le 26 Avril 1977.
8. Delmon, G . , Biraben, J . , 1966 . La croissance du carcinome de Guérin sous l'action de
champs magnétiques . Rev. Path. Comp. 3 , 85-88.
9. Rivière, M . R . , Prioré A . , Berlureau, F . , Fournier, M . , Guérin, M ., 1964. Action de
champs électromagnétiques sur les greffes de la tumeur T8 chez le rat. Compt. Rend. Acad.
Sci. 259, 2895-7.
10. Rivière, M . R . , Prioré A . , Berlureau, F . , Fournier, M . , Guérin, M ., 1965a. Effets de
champs électromagnétiques sur un lymphosarcome lymphoblastique transplantable du rat. Ibid.
260, 2099-2102.
11. Rivière, M . R . , Prioré A . , Berlureau, F . , Fournier, M . , Guérin, M ., 1965b.
Phénomènes de regression observés sur les greffes d'un lymphosarcome chez les souris
exposées à des champs électromagnétiques. Ibid. 260, 2639-2642.
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12. Rivière, M . R ., Guérin, M ., 1966. Nouvelles recherches effectuées
chez les rats porteurs d'un lymphosarcome lymphoblastique soumis
à l'action d'ondes électromagnétiques associées à des champs magnétiques. ibid. D262 2669 -
2672.
13. Pautrizel, R ., Rivière, M ., Prioré A ., Berlureau, F . 1966. Influence
d'ondes électromagnétiques et de champs magnétiques sur l'immunité
de la souris infestée par Trypanosoma equiperdum. ibid. D263.
579 - 582.
14. Pautrizel, R., Rivière, M., Prioré A., Berlureau, F., Pautrizel A .N. 1969.
Stimulation, par des moyens physiques, des défenses de la souris
et du rat contre la trypanosomose expérimentale. ibid. D268.
1889 - 1892.
15. Pautrizel, R., Rivière, M., Prioré A., Berlureau, F., Pautrizel A.N. 1970.
Action de champs magnétiques combinés à des ondes électromagnétiques sur la
trypanosomose expérimentale du lapin. ibid. D271, 877 - 880.
16. Pautrizel, R ., Prioré A ., Mattern, F ., Pautrizel A . N . 1975.
Stimulation des défenses de la souris trypanosomée par l'action d'un rayonnement
associant champs magnétiques et ondes électromagnétiques. ibid. D280, 1915 - 1918.
17. Pautrizel, R ., Prioré A ., Dallochio, M . , Crockett, R . 1972.
Action d'ondes électromagnétiques et sur les modifications lipidiques provoquées chez le
lapin par l'administration d'un régime hypercholestérolé. ibid D274, 488 - 491.
18. Prioré, A ., 1963. Procédé et dispositif de production de rayonnements
utilisables notamment pour le traitement de cellules vivantes. République Française :
Brevêt d'invention P.V. N°. 899.424, N°. 1.342.772.
Délivré par arrêté du 7 Octobre 1963.
19. Berteaud, A . C ., Bottreau, A . M ., Prioré, A., Pautrizel, A. N.,
Berlureau , F., Pautrizel, R . , 1971. Essai de corrélation entre l'évolution d'une affectation
par Trypanosoma equiperdum et l'action d'une onde électromagnétique pulsée et modulée.
Compt. Rend. Acad. Sci. D272, 1003 - 1006.
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APPENDIX
Brevet d'Invention. P.V. no. 889.414 No. 1.343.772 Classification Internationale: A 61 k-H OS
g
Procedure and assemblage for production of
radiation especially serviceable for the treatment of
living cells.
Antoine Priore
Requested 1 June 1962, 14.52 hours, Paris
Released by decree (arrête') of 7 Oct 1963
The invention deals in a general manner with radiation capable of penetrating matter. More
exactly, it aims at a procedure and an apparatus making it possible to obtain a combination of
radiations of different types able to penetrate matter and especially to penetrate intimately living
organic tissues in order to produce in them certain effects, particularly in human tissues with a
view to a therapeutic effect without destroying essential elements such as the enzymes.
In conformity with the present invention, one emits in a cavity a stream (rayonnement) of
electrically charged particles upon which one superposes electromagnetic radiation of the
centimeter wavelength range, the wavelength of which is preferably between 3 cm and 80 cm,
and one directs the resulting radiation emerging from the cavity on to the object to be irradiated.
This applicant has shown that the penetration and, in particular, the curative effects are very
distinctly improved when one gives the electromagnetic radiation a frequency determined as a
function of the organ or the tissue to be penetrated or to be treated. For example, a wavelength
of 14 cm is suitable for the liver and a wavelength of 19.5 cm for the spleen.
Preferably, the stream of charged particles is accelerated in a particle accelerator in such a way
as to increase the force of penetration.
The resulting radiation is advantageously applied and directed upon the target, that is to say,
upon the tissue to be penetrated, by the intermediary of a tube which is the site of electric fields
and of magnetic fields for acceleration and control, the said radiation being preferably guided
and/or reflected by a rotary deflector placed in the tube.
It is often advantageous to modulate or impose rhythm on this stream of particles by means of
variable magnetic and/or electric fields so as to augment still more the force of penetration. This
rhythm is preferably consistent, especially in medical applications, with the intrinsic period of the
tissue to be penetrated or of the neighboring tissues, for example, muscle. These intrinsic
periods are well-known in medicine and are applied, particularly, for diathermy; they are situated
in the wavelength range from 1 m to 50 m and more especially from 1 m to 18 m.
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Preferably, one arranges to modulate the emission of radiation, the accelerating electric
and magnetic fields, and perhaps also the rotary deflector, to the cardiac rhythm of the subject.
It seems that the result obtained by the invention in the treatment of maladies of living
cells (vegetable or animal) are due to certain phenomena which will be described, it being
understood that this exposition will not circumscribe the invention.
As a function of is electro-physico-chemical constitution, the cellular pair nucleusprotoplasm
is endowed with electric conductivity in direct relationship with ion exchange
processes provoked by metabolic phenomena. One finds in tissues the presence of an
accumulation of electricity at different potentials according to the different cellular densities of the
tissues.
The work of Renshaw, Forbes, Morison, Amassian, de Vito, Buser, Albe-Fessard, Tauc,
Adrian, etc. has shown with the aid of micro-electrodes the existence of slowly oscillating
elementary electric activity in the interior of cells; it can be thought that the rhythmeur (or pacemaker)
is achieved by the oscillatory electro-magnetic system comprising the cell nucleus. This
nucleus, in effect, is made up essentially of tubular filaments of insulating material (related to
chitin) containing in its interior an electrically conducting saline liquid, and these filaments, coiled
upon themselves, can be considered to constitute real little oscillatory circuits.
The recent work of Warson [sic] in America, as well as that of French scientists,
including a communication from Polonsky, Donzon and Sadron presented to the Acade'mie des
Sciences by Prof. Frances Perrin on 16 May 1960 (Rec. comptes rend. heb., 250, No. 20, 3414-
3416) making it clear that experimental samples of solid DNA manifest properties analogous to
those known in ferroelectric materials, makes plausible the hypothesis that a potential difference
may exist between nucleus and periphery of cells. Certain recent theories go even further and
liken the cell to an electronic receiver-emitter device normally functioning in harmony with the
ambient media. The oscillatory system of damped waves, constituted by the cell nucleus, would
behave in accordance with the laws governing semi-conducting materials.
The applicant is led to the conviction that in a normal state of physico-electric
equilibrium, the cell nucleus is positively charged but can acquire a negative surcharge following
phenomena analogous to polarization.
The invention, especially, enables organs afflicted by this inversion of their electric
potential, particularly in the case of the pathologic negative surcharge of cancerous nuclei, to
recover their former equilibrium.
The following description in regard to the attached drawing, given as a non-restricting
example, will make it possible to understand how the invention can be realized, the details which
emerge both from the
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text and the drawing being, of course, part of the said invention:
Fig. 1 is a schematic section showing an apparatus for production and emission of an
electromagnetic field combined according to the invention.
Fig. 2 is a frontal elevation of the cathode, taken from the right of Fig. 1.
Fig. 3 is a section through III-III in Fig. 1.
Fig. 4 is the overall scheme of the electric supply.
Fig. 5 is a view analogous to Fig. 1 showing another mode of implementation.
Fig. 6 is a section through VI-VI in Fig. 5.
Fig. 7 represents schematically an apparatus for pulsing the electric current.
Fig. 8 is the circuit of an amplifier permitting activation of the apparatus of Fig. 7 at the
cardiac frequency.
Fig. 9 is the circuit of an oscillator permitting modulation of the electric current according
to a wavelength between 1 m and 18 m.
The assemblage of Fig. 1 contains an apparatus 1 emitting electrically charged particles
2 in a cavity or passage 3, a cyclotron 4 accelerating the particles 2 and sending them into a
cavity 5 forming a tube into which merges another cavity 6 acting as wave-guide for
electromagnetic radiation of frequency in the centimeter range emitted by a magnetron 7. The
cavity 8 formed by the joining of tube 5 and waveguide 6 leads into a tube 9 in which the
resulting radiation is accelerated and aligned. The interior of the cavity-formed by the
assemblage of elements 1, 3, 5, 6, 8 and 9 contains argon at a pressure of 2 mm mercury.
The particle emitter 1 consists of an electron gun comprising a plate 10 and a cathode
11.
The cathode 11 is of molybdenum and has the very special form represented in Figs. 1
and 2. It consists of a rim 11a connected by two aligned spokes 11b to a hub 11c pierced by a
hole 11d with its axis along XX'. The rim 11a is in two parts (as one sees in Fig. 1) which may
be held together by screws (for example) forming a cavity of revolution 11e traversed by a
number of holes 11f parallel to the axis XX' and regularly spaced. The filament for heating, 12,
situated in the interior of the cavity 11e and is connected to the power supply conductors 12a.
The best results are obtained with a cathode 11 of molybdenum. The applicant has
obtained satisfactory, but slightly inferior, results with tungsten cathodes. It turns out that
molybdenum, and to a lesser degree
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tungsten, are the metals whose valency is closest to the mean valency of the chemical
molecules constituting living tissues and more particularly those of human beings. One might
well seek to use this fact to explain scientifically the phenomena involved, but it is understood
that the invention is not limited by any scientific explanation. Concerning, on the other hand, the
gas present in the apparatus at low pressure, the best results have been obtained with argon;
the applicant has also obtained satisfactory, but slightly inferior, results with other gases of the
rare gas series.
Surrounding the tube which constitutes the electromagnetic chamber are arranged: an
electromagnet 13 with its winding 13a, placed at the level of the cathode, and the accelerating
coils 14 and 15. Other accelerating coils 14, 15 and 16 are similarly dispersed around the
cavities 3, 5 and 8.
The two semi-circular boxes or "dees" 4a of the cyclotron 4 are placed in the usual
manner between the poles of the frame around which are wound the accelerating coils 4b and
4c.
The magnetron 7 is of a familiar type and must be capable of emitting in the cavity 3 a
centimeter wave of adjustable wavelength from 3 cm to 80 cm.
The lower portion of the tube 9, for acceleration and alignment, contains a cathode 17
resembling the cathode 11, with a filament 17a. This cathode 17 is supported by a hollow pillar
18 pierced by holes 18a close to its junction with the bottom of tube 9. This pillar 18
communicates with a tube 18b emerging on the axis of a rotary deflector 19 carrying at each end
a "crown" of graphite plates 19a inclined at 45 degrees to the vertical. The rotating axis 19b of
the rotary deflector is mounted in a support 20 fixed to the interior of tube 19 and carries at its
upper extremity magnetic bobs 19c which ensure that it will be set in motion in cooperation with
the magnetic bobs 21a mounted on the shaft 21b of a motor 21. The lower extremity of the
rotary deflector 19 is composed of a piece of molybdenum or of tungsten 19d in the form of a
pyramid whose apex is opposite the open end of the tube 9.
The hollow base 18 and the tube 18b can be of a borosilicate glass of low coefficient of
expansion such as that sold under the trademark "Pyrex". They may also be of quartz. Tube 9
itself can be of "Pyrex" as above or of another glass of the quality currently used for the
manufacture of electronic tubes, but its bottom 9a, which is traversed by the radiation, is
advantageously made of quartz.
The duct 8 joins the tube 9 by way of several tubulures[sic] such as 8a and 8b directed
in vertical planes towards the plates 19a at a certain angle, which is advantageously about 22
1/2 degrees. An electromagnet 23 analogous to the electromagnet 13 of the emitter tube 1 is
placed around the cathode 17. Similarly, accelerator windings 24 are disposed around the tube
9. This tube also carries, at positions indicated in the drawing, three elec-
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trodes 25, 25a, and 25b surrounded by windings 26, 26a, and 26b, respectively. The drawing
shows the supply lines, 17b, 17c of the cathode and its filament and that of the plate 22a.
The basic plan of the electric supply is represented in Fig. 4. The part 27 feeds an
initial branch with low voltage alternating current: this consists of a rectifier 28 (e.g., a Kenotron)
whose rectified current is modulated at a frequency variable between 30 and 120 pulses per
minute of means of a resistance 29, the control apparatus for which will be described with
reference to Figs. 7 and 8. The current so modulated is passed through the electromagnets 13
and 23 in such a manner as to generate, normal to the cathodes 11 and 17, a modulated field of
10,000 to 20,000 gauss.
The part 27 also feeds a variometer (interrupter) 30 which modulates the current of this
part at a variable frequency 30 to 120 pulses per minute, the current pulsed in this way serving
to feed the remainder of the installation, to wit: The magnetron, 7;
A converter 31 whose excitation is modulated at a variable frequency 300 to 900 Hz, yielding a
doubly modulated current (first at 30-120 pulses per minute, then at 300-900 Hz) which feeds the
coils 15, 16 and 26;
Another converter 32 producing a low voltage direct current modulated at 30-120 pulses per
minute by the variometer 30. This current feeds the motor 21 as well as the motors driving the
variometer 30 and the apparatus controlling the resistance 29.
The current produced by the converter 32 also feeds a voltage step-up apparatus 33
consisting of a vibrator followed by a transformer and a rectifier, and producing a direct current
varied at 30 to 120 pulses per minute imposed by the variometer 30. The maximum value of the
voltage produced by the apparatus 33 is, for instance, 300,000 V, but this value may vary up or
down, depending on the power one wishes to operate with.
The current produced by the voltage step-up apparatus 33 feeds the coils 4b of the
cyclotron and 24 of tube 9, as well as a rheostat 34 permitting regulation of voltage to the
desired value between 5000 V and 70,000 V. This voltage is applied to an oscillatory circuit 35
which produces oscillations at a frequency variable at will of wavelength between 1 m and 18 m.
The current available to the output terminals 35a, 35b of this oscillating circuit 35 is thus a high
tension current modulated first at 30 to 120 pulses per minute (by the variometer 30) and
secondly at a wavelength 1-18 m. This current feeds the coils 4c and 14; the electrodes, 25a,
and 25b are connected to terminals 35a and 35b, respectively, and electrode 25 is connected to
the midpoint 35c.-
Cathodes 11 and 17, the "dees" of the cyclotron, and the plates 10 and 22, not shown in
the diagram of Fig. 4, are connected to the output of the step-up assembly 33, while the heating
current for the filaments 11e and 17a is furnished by the resistance 29.
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To operate the apparatus, one adjusts the controls of the resistance 29 and the
variometer to the desired rhythm; in medical applications, this is advantageously the subject's
cardiac rhythm: This rhythm is thus imposed upon the whole installation. The cathode 13 emits
toward the left a stream of positively charged particles 2, which are concentrated by the
electromagnet 13 and accelerated by the coils 14, 15 and 16 and by the cyclotron 4.
Superimposed on this particle stream in the duct 8 is the electromagnetic radiation from the
magnetron 7, which is adjusted to the wavelength found by experience to be most appropriate to
the cells which are to be penetrated, e.g., 14 cm for the liver and 19.5 cm for the spleen. The
resulting radiation is deflected, directed and accelerated in tube 9 and is directed by way of the
base of this tube toward the target to be penetrated.
It must be noticed that the magnetic field of the coils 15, 16 and 26 is modulated, by
means of the converter assembly 31, at a frequency adjustable between 300 and 900 Hz. This
modulation has the effect of concentrating the particles, that is to say to detach them from the
walls of the tubes, and it also permits an appreciable saving in weight of the iron cores of the
coils. One chooses the highest frequencies (i.e., around 900 Hz ) when one wishes to produce
hard radiation at the exit of tube 9, and the lower frequencies for soft radiatiot[sic] (radiation?).
The unidirectional magnetic fields of the coils 4c of the magnetron (sic) (cyclotron?) and
the accelerator coils 14 as well as the electric field of electrodes 25, 25a, 25b, are modulated by
the oscillatory circuit 35 at a chosen wavelength between 1 m and 18 m. In medical applications
notable one selects the wavelength that best suits the organ to be treated or its surroundings,
such as muscle. As already indicated, experience with diathermy makes it possible to determine
the most suitable wavelength.
It must be noted that the resulting radiation already posesses, in tube 8 (Fig. 1) a
considerable penetrating force. One could therefore use the assemblage described by omitting
tube 9 and terminating the cavity at the end of tube 8 by means of a glass or quartz base, the
resulting radiation being accelerated and directed, for example, immediately upstream from the
base, by a final coil (not shown) surrounding tube 8, However, tube 9 appreciably improves the
results.
Figs. 5 and 6 represent another mode of realizing the assemblage in accordance with
the invention, in which the elements playing the same role are indicated by the same signs as in
Figs. 1 and 3, modified by primes.
The arrangement of the connecting ducts of Fig. 5 in relation to tubes 1' and 9', to the
magnetron 7' and the cyclotron 4', is different from that of Fig. 1 and has been used successfully
by the applicant. The waveguide 6' of the magnetron 7' opens into the end of tube 1' and the
duct 3' carrying the resulting radiation, divides into two branches: Branch 36 which conducts the
radiation directly to tube 9', and branch 37 which conducts it to the cyclotron 4'. This blocks the
electromagnetic radiation and accelerates the stream of particles which is passed by way of duct
38 to the tube 9'.
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This arrangement can be used with a particle emitter and an accelerator and director tube similar
to tubes 1 and 9 of the preceding figures. However, tubes 1' and 9' of Figs. 5 and 6 are
constructed in a different manner with regard to their cathodes and anodes.
Tube 1' contains a first electrode 11' exactly like that of the cathode 11 of tube 1, and an
identical second electrode 39 furnished with a filament 39a. Tube 9' (Fig. 6) contains in its lower
part a first electrode 17' with filament 17'a and an identical second electrode 40 with its filament
40a.
In normal operation, i.e., to produce radiation identical to that described in connection with Figs.
1 to 4, electrode 11' serves as cathode and electrode 39, given a positive potential, plays the
role of the plate 10 in Fig. 1, the filament 39a being unheated. Electrode 40 and its filament 40a
are disconnected; cathode 17' and plate 22' are supplied. as in Fig. 3.
To obtain particularly penetrating radiation, the polarities are reversed: Electrode 11' becomes
an anode and its filament 11'e is disconnected, while electrode 39 receives the cathode supply
and its filament 39a is heated; electrode 17' (with filament 17'a disconnected) and electrode 22'
become anodes, while electrode 40 serves as cathode and its filament 40a is heated. For
example, one can establish a potential difference of 250,000 V between 40 and 17', and 50,000
V between 40 and 22'. It is understood that in these conditions the cathode 39 emits to the left a
steam of electrons which is concentrated, modulated and accelerated by the various coils and in
the cyclotron, the polarities of which must of course be established in the proper direction. This
stream of electrons is combined with the centimeter radiation emitted by the magnetron 7',
resulting in tube 9' in the emission of very hard x-rays, modulated at the chosen frequencies,
combined with the centimeter radiation of the desired frequency.
The assembly shown in Figs. 5 and 6 thus permits one to obtain at will either very hard x-rays or
the radiation described in connection with the preceeding diagrams.
The following description, referring to Figs. 7 and 9, relates to certain details of the apparatus
used for modulating the electric current.
Fig. 7 represents schematically the apparatus for control of the resistance 29 and the variometer
30. The variable resistance 29 consists of a graphite helix 29a immersed in a conducting liquid
29b; another electrode 29c, also of graphite, partly immersed in the liquid, is set into up-anddown
oscillations by a connecting rod 41a linked to a fly-wheel 41. The fly-wheel is set in
rotation, through the intermediary of a worm transmission 41b, by an axle 42 which can be
driven, thanks to a double clutch 42a, 42b, either by a motor 43, or by the shaft 30a of the
variometer 30. The variometer 30 is driven by a motor 44 by ways of the worm transmission
44a.
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If the fly-wheel 41 is driven by the motor 43 at the proper speed, the resistance 29 causes the
supply current of the electromagnets 13 and 23 (Figs. 1 and 4) to vary at the chosen rhythm
which as we have seen can be between 30 and 120 pulsations per minute and which can be
checked by means of a rotation counter shown schematically in 45. In this case, the motor 44 of
the variometer 30 can be stopped and the remainder of the installation is then not pulsed. If, on
the contrary, the fly-wheel 41 is engaged in 42b and disconnected from 42a, the motor 44
activates the variometer 30 and the resistance 29 at the chosen rhythm.
The speed of rotation of motors 43 or 44 can be regulated at the required speed, corresponding
visibly to the cardiac rhythm of the subject, by acting upon the excitation of these motors by
means of a manually adjustable rheostat. If one prefers to regulate the speed of motors 43 or 44
in direct accord with the cardiac rhythm of the subject, one can use an assembly such as that
represented schematically in Fig. 8: At 46 there is a contact microphone which, when placed
over the subject's heart, produces impulses. These are amplified in the circuit shown and
applied to an electromagnet at 47 with a moving core which activates a rheostat; this in turn
regulates the current running the motors 43 or 44.
Fig. 9 shows schematically the principle of the oscillating circuit 35. The rectified potential,
adjustable between 5000 V and 70,000 V by means of rheostat 34 (Fig. 4) is applied between
the terminals 48 and 48a. Terminal 35c (which is also connected to electrode 25, Figs. 2 and 4)
is connected to the neutral point on the high tension side of the transformer which is a
component of the step-up assembly 33 (Fig. 4). The terminals 49 and 49a receive the heating
current produced by the resistance 29. The variable condensers 50 and 50a make it possible to
regulate to the desired wavelength (which, as seen, is between 1 m and 18 m) the current
available at the output terminals 25a and 25b of the oscillator shown.
The modes of implementation described have been successfully carried out but it is self-evident
that these are only examples, and that they might be modified, notably by substitution of
equivalent techniques, without going beyond the bounds of the invention. In particular, the
electron gun 1 or 1' could be replaced by another charged particle generator.
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Resume'
The invention includes especially:
1. A procedure for obtaining a combination of radiations of different kinds capable of penetrating
matter, especially of intimately penetrating living tissues in order to produce in them certain
effects and more particularly in human tissues with a therapeutic effect in mind, consisting of the
emission in a cavity of a stream of electrically charged particles, upon which is imposed
electromagnetic radiation in the centimeter wavelength range, and the guiding of the resulting
radiation emerging from the cavity toward the target to be penetrated.
2. Types of implementation exhibiting the following features taken separately or in the various
possible combinations:
a. The centimeter radiation has a wavelength between 3 cm and 80 cm;
b. This wavelength is set at the value found by experience to be most suitable for the tissues to
be penetrated, e.g., 14 cm for liver and 19.5 cm for spleen;
c. The particle stream is accelerated by magnetic and electric fields such as those which are
used in particle accelerators;
d. The resulting radiation is accelerated and guided, before its emergence from the cavity, by
means of electric and magnetic fields;
e. The resulting radiation is guided, before its emergence from the cavity, by means of deflecting
and/or reflecting surfaces;
f. The stream of particles and/or the resulting radiation are concentrated and accelerated by
means of individual magnetic fields modulated at a frequency between 300 and 900 Hz, the
highest frequencies being used to produce hard rays and the lower frequencies to produce soft
rays;
g. The emission of the particle stream, as well as the acceleration and concentration of the
radiation resulting at its exit from the cavity, are aided by individual magnetic fields of temporally
variable intensity, advantageously pulsed at a rhythm between 30 and 120 pulsations per minute
and preferably at the cardiac rhythm of the subject;
h. The assemblages for production of the resultant radiation are pulsed in their entirety at the
same rhythm as the magnetic fields according to g;
i. The stream of particles and/or the resulting radiation are accelerated and concentrated by
direct magnetic and/or electric fields modulated at a wavelength between 1 m and 50 m and
preferably between
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1 m and 18 m, this wavelength being advantageously chosen as that which is known in
diathermy as suitable for the tissues to be penetrated or for the surrounding tissues.
3. An assemblage making it possible to obtain a combination of a stream of electrically charged
particles and a beam of centimeter electromagnetic waves in order to penetrate intimately and to
irradiate living tissues and particularly human tissues, the said assemblage comprising at least a
particle emitter, means for channeling said particles in a cavity serving as waveguide for an
emitter of electromagnetic radiation of which the wavelength is included in the range of
centimeter waves and preferably adjustable from 3 cm to 80 cm, means for generating in the
cavity magnetic field for acceleration and concentration and means for concentrating and
accelerating the resulting radiation at the exit of the cavity.
4. Modes of implementation with the following details taken separately or in the various possible
combinations:
a. The particle emitter is an electron gun of which the anode is at the end of the cavity and the
cathode is situated further along, this cathode being hollow and placed in the magnetic field of
an electromagnetic in order to ensure emission of a stream of particles towards the mouth of the
cavity;
b. The cathode consists of a rim connected by two aligned spokes to a hub, the said rim being
provided internally with an annular housing containing a heated filament and the said housing
communicating with a number of holes arranged annularly and traversing the rim transversely;
c. The cathode is made of a metal of valency close to the mean valency of the chemical
molecules comprising the tissue to be penetrated;
d. The cathode is of tungsten or preferably of molybdenum;
e. The cavity contains a rare gas, preferably argon, under a vacuum of the order of 2 mm Hg;
f. The cavity contains a duct carrying at least part of the stream of particles to a cyclotron and a
duct bringing back into the cavity the particles accelerated in the cyclotron;
g. The cavity passes through several coils, the supply current for the various coils being capable
of undergoing modulation at different frequencies;
h. The downstream end of the cavity is composed of a tube containing, in the part from which the
resulting radiation must emerge, a cathode and an electromagnet which may be identical to the
cathode and the electromagnetic according to para. a, an anode near the other end, and a rotary
deflector consisting of a number of plates arranged en
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couronne on a rotor facing the incident radiation at such an angle that the radiation deflected
and/or reflected is directed toward the cathode, several coils whose supply current can be
modulated being distributed over the length of the tube;
i. This tube also contains electrodes supplied by alternating current generating an electric field
at the level of the rotary deflector, each of the said electrodes being surrounded by a bobbin of
which the supply current can be modulated;
j. Methods are anticipated for modulating, at an adjustable rhythm between 30 and 120 cycles
per minute, the supply current of the electromagnetic according to a and h, and preferably to
modulate the supply current of the rest of the assemblage at the same rhythm;
k. Methods are anticipated for modulating, at a frequency between 300 and 900 Hz, the supply
current of the bobbins surrounding according to i and one or several coils according to g;
l. Methods are anticipated for modulating, at an adjustable wavelength between 1 m and 50 m
and preferably between 1 m and 18 m, the supply current of the electrodes according to i, of one
or several of the coils generating the magnetic field of the cyclotron;
m. The electrodes of the electron gun consist of two electrodes identical to the cathode
according to a, b, c, or d, the cathode of the tube according to h is replaced by a double
electrode reproducing the arrangement of the electrodes of the electron gun, and methods are
anticipated for reversing at will and simultaneously the polarities of these two pairs of electrodes
and the direction of flow of the current supplying the acceleratory coils, a first pattern of polarities
assuring the functioning of the apparatus in the conditions which are laid down according to a,
and a second pattern of polarities assuring emission in the cavity of a stream of electrons
combined with the centimeter radiation and giving rise, at the exit of the said tube, to emission of
very hard x-rays.
