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Royal Raymond Rife (May 16, 1888 - August 11, 1971) a fraud and quack celebrated by part of the alternative medicine community with uncritical repetition of his incredible claims for his 1933 "Universal Microscope", an optical microscope claiming an impossible resolution and cures of terminal cancer patients using his "Beam Ray" device in 1934. Some commercial activity depends upon this later publicity.
Biography
Rife was born in Elkhorn, Nebraska, and in 1913 married and moved to San Diego, where he was employed as a family chauffeur.
He is reported to have worked for one of the German optical companies (Zeiss or Leitz) for a few years before World War One , and to have served in the US Navy during this war.
Rife's microscopes
Rife claimed to have used his Universal Microscope to examine microbes in various media seeing living tissues and organisms through the use of polarized light and prisms. His Universal Microscope attained an unecessarily high and obfuscating level of complexity, with 5,682 parts. Rife claimed to have directly observed the life cycles of viruses and bacteria, also claiming to have discovered "cells" between the cells of human tissues too small for light microscopes. Since modern electron microscopy has failed to replicate his observations, it is unlikely that this microscope ever functioned as Rife claimed.
Rife claimed he could identify an individual spectroscopic signature of each microbe. By rotating prisms to focus light of a single wavelength upon the microorganism he was examining, he could purportedly elicit resonance with a "spectroscopic signature frequency" of the microbe, causing it to become easily visible. He described a certain "Mortal Oscillation Rate" at which the resonance would become so extreme as to kill the organism.
Rife reported using ultraviolet light and overcoming assorted physical limitations by heterodyning, a technique used in radio reception which at that time was quite new. Rife is reported to have made microbes visible in UV without killing them.
On November 20, 1931, forty-four doctors attended a dinner advertised as "The End To All Diseases" at the Pasadena estate of Dr. Milbank Johnson.
A 1986 newspaper article by the author of a book about Rife claims that in 1934, the University of Southern California appointed a special medical research committee to bring cancer patients from Pasadena County Hospital to Rife's San Diego Laboratory and clinic for treatment, and further claims that after 90 days of treatment, the committee concluded that 14 of the patients had been completely cured; that the treatment was then adjusted for the two remaining patients over the next four weeks and that the total recovery rate using Rife's technology was 100%.
No paper submitted to a peer-reviewed medical journal, nor any details of the diagnoses of the patients before or after treatment are available.
Claims of government cover-up
Rife and his latter-day supporters account for the absence of demonstrable equipment or detailed notes on its construction by reporting that Dr. Morris Fishbein, then editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association or alternatively the government, raided Rife's labs, destroyed his microscopes, seized his equipment and notes, and forced him to move on.
Re-examination of stories
Rife's work was revived by interested businessmen in the 1980s. An interest in Rife himself was revived by author Barry Lynes, who wrote a book about Rife entitled The Cancer Cure That Worked. This led to such groups as the Bioelectromagnetics Society. Scientists generally characterize Rife's claims as patently absurd when examined critically. Those who claim to be continuing Rife's work today are accused of ignoring the scientific method, and their work is written off as pseudo-science. Both Rife's original work and current theoretical and commercial offerings, such as Rife plasma lamp devices, remain completely unsupported by peer-reviewed research and are condemned as quackery, confidence trickery and fraud by Quackwatch and other skeptics of alternative medicine who take the same view of Rife and his work as Fishbein supposedly did in the first half of the 20th century.
Other devices using Rife's name
In the late 1980's a company by the name of "Life Energy Resources" mass-produced a device they called the "REM SuperPro Generator" on the foundation of Rife's work (giving the acronym REM for Rife's Electromagnetic). Three of the company's top distributors: Pat Ballistrea, Michael Ricotta, and Brian Strandberg, served prison time for device health fraud and selling unapproved medical devices and drugs as a result of their trials in 1993, 1994, and 1995.
By the end of the millennium, devices using Rife's name were widely available from many commercial sources. This included microscopes claiming to be derived from Rife's "Universal microscope," as well as devices advertized as "Beam Ray" equivalents claiming to cure anything from the common cold via Lyme disease to cancer. Peer-reviewed research reporting any real effects of these machines or the technology involved was not available. It was not clear whether or not any of these devices were actually based on Rife's work. Growing criticism from mainstream science and demands for government intervention were apparent in the media. One example was a December 2000 Sydney Morning Herald article that stated "Cancer sufferers have died after putting their faith in a device with electrical parts worth just $15." Some countries saw the advent of "Rife" clinics which attracted customers worldwide, once again without independent verification or accreditation.
More information
Rife's experimental and observational claims conflict with several well-established areas of modern science. Those wishing to examine the evidence may compare the external links below with articles on spectroscopy, microscopy, and heterodyning.
See also
- Albert Abrams, American quack of the 20th century, whose ideas influenced Rife.
- Radionics in the Skeptic's dictionary
Reference
- http://www.rife.de/mscope/mscope5.htm ascribed to Neil Brown of the Science Museum, London
- http://www.quackwatch.org/04ConsumerEducation/News/rife.html
External links
- National Council Against Health Fraud - Rife devices
- FDA Link on the FDA website detailing the successful prosecution of a group selling what they claimed to be a circa 1980's reproduction Rife machine under the name REM Superpro.
Promotional and/or commercial sites
- James Bare sells a device labelled as a modern version of the Rife "Beam Ray" device.
- Rife.org - reviews the original documents concerning Rife
- The European Rife Information Forum is run by Peter Walker, a Rife experimenter, and contains a wealth of links and information concerning modern Rife research.
- The Bioelectromagnetics Society is an association of scientists and doctors conducting experiments that use electromagnetism to heal.
- Aubrey Scoon is an electrical engineer with an interest in Rife technologies who maintains a web site regarding his own research into Rife technologies.
- Jeff Rense A more detailed website putting Rife's work in layman's terms.
- EMR Labs Another website but with photocopies of newspaper clippings