The Genius of Royal Rife

Townsend Letter for Doctors and Patients, Jan, 2004 by Jule Klotter

The Rise and Fall of a Scientific Genius (video)

written & directed by Shawn Montgomery

Zero Zero Two Productions, 3 Baldoon Rd., Toronto, Ontario, Canada M1B 1V6; www.zerozerotwo.org

74 minutes; available in North American standard and European Standard video formats

$29.95 (USD) plus $5 for shipping.

Writer-director Shawn Montgomery in association with the Rife Research Group of Canada has produced an excellent documentary on the work of Dr. Royal Raymond Rife. Dr. Rife invented the Rife Universal Microscope and the Beam Ray Instrument that destroyed microbes with specific frequencies. In the video, historian Jason Ringas of the Rife Research Group of Canada says that details of Rife's story vary, so the group has collected as much documentation as it can. The Rise and Fall of a Scientific Genius-Part I: Rife's Rise resulted from the group's collection of letters, photographs, journal articles, news articles, film clips, and audiotapes. Those audiotapes, discovered in 1999, contain the voices of Dr. Rife and his assistants talking about the work. The Kinnaman Foundation restored the aged tapes, which lay forgotten for over 40 years.

In the early decades of the 20th century, Royal Rife had the respect of eminent medical researchers and physicists and the patronage of Henry Timken Jr., the wealthy president of Timken Roller Bearing Co. Because Rife had developed a device that saved his company millions of dollars each year in production costs, the industrialist provided Rife with a research lab on the Timken estate in San Diego, California. The lab was one of the most advanced in the world at the time. Rife also had the support of Dr. Milbank Johnson, a medical politician affiliated with the University of Southern California and head of the local medical society. Johnson's networking skill led to Rife's collaboration with two well-known bacteriologists, Dr. E. C. Rosenow of the Mayo Clinic (Rochester, Minnesota) and Dr. Arthur Kendall of Northwestern University (Chicago, Illinois).

In 1920, Rife hypothesized that a filterable microorganism caused cancer, and he needed a new kind of microscope to help him in his research. The particles of acid and analine dyes used with standard microscopes are too large to stain virus-sized microorganisms. Because Rife wanted to be able to see living organisms, he thought "outside the box" and developed the Rife Universal Microscope. In one of the restored audiotapes, Dr. Rife described the "unique illumination system" that used monochromatic light to stain microbes. The Universal Microscope rivaled the electron microscope, achieving magnification of up to 31,000X without losing resolution. Over the years Rife built five microscopes, allowing him to view living organisms the size of a virus.

The Rife Universal Microscope was the answer to a prayer for bacteriologist Arthur Kendall. His own research had convinced him that Antoine Bechamp had been correct. Bechamp believed that the chemical environment in which a microorganism lives determines the form it takes. Kendall and other biologists had cultured up to 16 distinct organisms from a single source by using different culture media. Rife's microscope allowed Kendall to see the living organisms change. In turn, the K culture medium developed by Kendall, led to the discovery of the Bx cancer virus that Rife had hypothesized existed years before. At that time, "virus" referred to any filterable organism too small to be seen with a regular microscope. Rife and Kendall followed Koch's postulates. They isolated the virus from a diseased patient, cultured the organism, caused cancer in lab animals using the culture, and recovered the same organism from the sick animal. Later, Dr. O.C. Gruner of Canada's McGill University identified a fungus in people with cancer. He and Rife discovered that when the Bx virus was cultured on Gruner's asparagus agar, it became his fungus. When they cultured the fungus on Kendall's medium, it became the Bx virus.

Dr. Johnson was so impressed with Rife and Kendall's work that he held a dinner in their honor, inviting prominent doctors to hear about their findings first hand. In 1932, Dr. Thomas Rivers of the Rockefeller Institute announced that he and his colleague at Johns Hopkins had been unable to repeat Kendall and Rife's work and that Kendall's work on filtrable bacteria and pleomorphism was invalid. Rivers had considerable influence. He is credited with defining "virus" as a microorganism that is able to propagate only by modifying genetic machinery of living host cells. Nonetheless, a USC clinical research study with 16 terminally-ill cancer patients took place in 1934. Rife insisted that a panel of medical experts supervise the study in which he used his Beam Ray Instrument to destroy the cancer-causing organisms. The medical staff pronounced fourteen of the sixteen patients in the study clinically cured within 70 days. The other two required 20 more days of treatment before they, too, were well.