WEBVTT

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 "Where were you born?"

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 "Santee, California, 1936, outside of San Diego.

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 And then my parents had homesteaded a piece of desert over near Indio, Palm Springs area.

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 And so as a baby I went right from being born near San Diego over to the desert and lived

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 on the desert homestead until I was three.

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 Then went to the town and came to Oregon right after the war started, partly because of the

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 war.

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 My father wanted to get a job in the defense industry and worked at, I think it was Douglas

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 Aircraft for almost a year.

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 And learned that they had nothing for him to do as a draftsman.

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 The deal was that they got 10% from the government as profit beyond everything they could spend.

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 And so they hired crowds of people and bought useless instruments and machines that simply

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 sat there.

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 And so he realized that he was participating in war profiteering and so he moved to Oregon

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 and sort of dropped out all during the war.

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 The Oregon culture at that time was kind of like all-time anarchists had been populating

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 a lot of the western Oregon and then southerners moved in during the Dust Bowl years.

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 So it was a very conservative town with a background of radical libertarianism.

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 So just start by telling us your name and general background so that can include your

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 fields of study, occupations, but just a brief rundown of all of that.

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 My name is Raymond Peat.

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 I first decided to become a teacher and went to a teacher's education college, Southern

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 Oregon College, and intended to maybe become a literature teacher.

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 And so I went to the university to get a master's degree.

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 And at that time it was, I got my bachelor's degree in 1956 and I thought the university

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 would be a place of relative enlightenment compared to the small town.

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 And I found that politics pretty much ruled at the University of Oregon at that time in

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 1956.

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 And so I tried one department after the other, went from an English major to, I tried philosophy

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 for a while and I spent six months as a psychology major and tried a few months as an art history

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 major and finally decided that politics governed all of them.

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 Art history was the freest of political influence, but I wasn't that interested in it.

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 So I found that I could write a thesis on a subject that if it incorporated different

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 departmental areas, I could get a degree based on that thesis.

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 And so I had, as an undergraduate, become interested in William Blake.

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 And since he had an interesting philosophical orientation, as well as being a poet and a

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 painter, that became the way to integrate what I had been studying into a master's degree.

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 And just by chance, I was interested in going from my study of Blake and psychology, philosophy

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 into applying it to the idea of linguistic biology, biolinguistics, and how the brain

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 makes language.

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 And I found that there was a program that would permit a PhD degree to be interdepartmental

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 with philosophy and linguistics as the main areas.

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 So I started this program at Ohio State and there were not many professors sympathetic

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 with the sort of integrated interdepartmental approach that I was interested in.

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 But there was a Swedenborg Inn College about 45 miles from the university where I found

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 that they needed a biology teacher.

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 And that was really how I got more involved in teaching biology and developing my interests.

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 So I was studying linguistics and philosophy at Ohio State and teaching courses that were

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 the title was physics for biology majors.

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 And the new president of the universe of the, it was called Urbana University, but it was

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 a very small, formerly church seminary college.

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 The new president was revising it by developing a really interesting curriculum.

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 And he said he didn't want physics taught the way he had experienced it and not to teach

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 the standard mechanics as the introduction to forces and fields and so on.

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 He said he wanted his students to be able to understand physical science topics that

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 they read in newspapers and magazines.

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 And he wanted to prepare them for majoring in biology.

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 So with that instruction as what the course should be, I decided that the computers were

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 a new cultural phenomenon at that time.

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 So I decided that understanding how information theory works in the brain and in computers

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 would be a good application of physics for biology majors and that the interaction of

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 energy and matter, which is one of the core ideas in physics, that this would make it

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 possible to understand the question of the biological effects of atomic bombs and radioactive

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 fallout.

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 So those were two important ways of organizing the course.

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 And as it turned out, the trustees weren't pleased when the students got interested in

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 questioning the government position on the safety of radioactive fallout from atomic

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 bomb testing.

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 And so that job only lasted for a year.

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 And that immediately led to the idea of starting a college that would be independent of these

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 extraneous influences of the trustees and their commitments.

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 And so I put some advertisements, for example, in the Saturday Review magazine.

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 And a professor who had been offered the job to replace me as a biology teacher, Leo Koch,

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 it happened that his lecture, his tryout to be a new biology teacher, his topic was the

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 dangers of radiation.

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 And so he was dropped.

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 And he and I together, he went around giving lectures, helping to recruit students to start

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 a college that would be owned and controlled by the teachers and the students jointly.

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 And so that kept me busy for six or eight years.

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 And on my own, I kept following up these various lines of biological study until in 1968, I

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 decided to go back to graduate school, that I would...

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 The culture had changed somewhat, and I felt that I could stay in one department and simply

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 ignore the political impositions that each department had.

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 So I went back to work on a PhD in biology at the University of Oregon.

00:11:37.940 --> 00:11:45.380
 Okay, so going back a little further in time, how did you first get interested in the life

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 sciences?

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 What sparked this interest?

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 I...

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 As a very little kid, my parents had made the decision that they weren't going to indoctrinate

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 me with anything with religion or politics, and they would simply answer my questions.

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 And just apparently out of my own inclinations, I was interested in how the natural world

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 worked and how my self worked in such things as perceiving and those simple childish urges

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 to figure things out without getting any answers preformed.

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 It turned out that organisms and why organisms and people died became a continuing concern.

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 And the resources at that time were, for example, the family encyclopedias and some of the books

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 of my grandparents and parents, old turn of the century literature, philosophy, medical

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 books and so on.

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 These were available.

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 And so I started reading and found lots of interesting things had been done in biology

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 and physics.

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 I ran across J.C. Bose in one of the little encyclopedias, an Indian physicist who actually

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 invented wireless communication.

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 And he devised instruments to show the reactions of living material to very small stimuli.

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 And it showed similarities between inorganic substances and organic substances.

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 And since I hadn't been given any indoctrination as a little kid, this J.C. Bose's approach

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 to explaining substance and living material seemed very natural to me.

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 And that started a line of looking for information in encyclopedias, magazines, anything that

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 was available.

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 And I, around the same time, found good descriptions of some of the early neo-Lamarckian studies.

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 A professor at, I think it was University of Wisconsin named Michael Geyer did some

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 experiments showing that, for example, he would grind up eyes and inject it into pregnant

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 rabbits.

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 And some of the babies would be born with damaged eyeballs, some of them blind.

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 And when he bred these offspring with the damaged eyes, he found that the trait could

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 be inherited, a damage or blindness would be passed on from the treatment.

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 And so I, seeing a lot of that evidence that was in the encyclopedias and standard publications,

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 I realized that the biology that was showing up in the textbooks in schools was a very

00:16:10.020 --> 00:16:17.700
 doctrinaire, anti-scientific position.

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 So it led me to wonder where this natural selection, neo-Darwinian genetic, absolute

00:16:29.860 --> 00:16:35.540
 inheritance of a fixed trait came from.

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 So that involved studying the culture and philosophy influencing science.

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 And so in simply trying to understand the world practically, it involved running into

00:16:56.460 --> 00:17:06.580
 people who were selling something with their constructed facts.

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 And so you talked a bit about earlier problems within the teaching environment at universities,

00:17:16.380 --> 00:17:21.500
 but when did you start to realize that what you were being taught, the science you were

00:17:21.500 --> 00:17:24.660
 being taught was incorrect?

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 Well, at my very first experience with going to school, we had moved to Grants Pass, or

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 a small country school outside of Grants Pass.

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 And my first reaction to the second grade teachers, I was already skeptical.

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 I had seen stuff in books at home that made me doubt what I was being taught.

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 And then in the country school where I went to third to fifth grade, there were at first

00:18:14.900 --> 00:18:19.340
 eight grades and then six grades in a one-room schoolhouse.

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 And so I could hear what was being taught to all of the different grades.

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 And that was a very pleasant schooling experience.

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 The teacher had a very open attitude, wasn't imposing anything, had some of us learn oil

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 painting.

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 And then going back to the city schools, again, I had a very oppressed feeling.

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 And for example, in the seventh grade, 1948, they had a student mock election.

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 And I think my brother was the only one in the school to vote for Strom Thurmond just

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 because he wanted to be annoying.

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 And I voted for Henry Wallace.

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 And in my social science class, I was arguing for why Henry Wallace would be a good candidate

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 because he wasn't for war and wanted to keep the economy going.

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 And so one of my classmates asked the teacher, since they're talking about having capital

00:19:54.860 --> 00:20:01.220
 punishment for communists, are they going to kill Raymond?

00:20:01.220 --> 00:20:03.540
 The teacher said, no, I don't think they will.

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 He's a nice little boy.

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 But basically, I considered most of the high school teachers to be either prisoners of

00:20:18.460 --> 00:20:20.140
 the system.

00:20:20.140 --> 00:20:28.820
 There were several really nice teachers who communicated tolerance and such.

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 And there were the disgruntled Hitlerites and the standard middle class fascist minded

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 people.

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 So I was eager to try out college.

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 And at Southern Oregon College, after I'd been there for, I guess, two or three terms,

00:20:57.300 --> 00:21:08.980
 I was having a bad reaction to several of my classes and heard about Arthur Kreisman,

00:21:08.980 --> 00:21:20.220
 a Jewish literature teacher who he had had an offer to teach at Harvard but preferred

00:21:20.220 --> 00:21:30.940
 the relaxed atmosphere of Ashland and the very small college atmosphere.

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 And he was sort of an eye-opening experience.

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 He took a philosophical, cultural approach to everything he taught.

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 And so after taking his world literature survey, I signed up for some of his philosophy classes

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 and a comparative religion class.

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 And he was-- the college was so small, he was able to teach many different subjects.

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 And even though he was the main focus of my undergraduate education, people had told me

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 that there would be other people like him at the big university.

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 And so I was eager to start there.

00:22:33.460 --> 00:22:42.900
 Graduated when I was 19 and getting to the University of Oregon, I found that it was

00:22:42.900 --> 00:22:55.500
 much more of a narrow-minded, tuned-in to the political situation, not the backwater

00:22:55.500 --> 00:23:00.500
 tolerance of the little teacher education school.

00:23:00.500 --> 00:23:09.780
 And so then I essentially dropped out of the whole thing, dropping out of four different

00:23:09.780 --> 00:23:22.740
 departments and looking for some outlet, which for a time, it seemed to be this interdepartmental

00:23:22.740 --> 00:23:29.060
 program at Ohio State.

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 The outcome of my PhD program at Ohio State was that I intended to go work somewhere else

00:23:38.980 --> 00:23:45.700
 while I finished my dissertation because I had finished the course requirement.

00:23:45.700 --> 00:23:57.100
 And I kept working on the biolinguistics approach as I did the Blake College project.

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 And about the time I was thinking of going back to Ohio State, almost the whole humanities

00:24:08.220 --> 00:24:20.580
 faculty resigned in protest to the president of the university's expulsion of a student

00:24:20.580 --> 00:24:26.700
 for having Gus Hall speak at his house.

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 And I forget how many it was, but all of my professors and practically the whole liberal

00:24:36.420 --> 00:24:43.300
 arts university went off to the universities on the east and west coast.

00:24:43.300 --> 00:24:53.180
 So that was the end of my Ohio State thesis project.

00:24:53.180 --> 00:25:00.500
 And both as a student and a professor, can you go into a little more detail what some

00:25:00.500 --> 00:25:04.500
 of the consequences were for you when you started to question the system?

00:25:04.500 --> 00:25:13.420
 So you mentioned briefly about the one firing, but just also talk about that as a student,

00:25:13.420 --> 00:25:20.380
 if there was any kind of ostracization or...

00:25:20.380 --> 00:25:35.580
 Even though I had several experiences as a teacher, for example, teaching high school

00:25:35.580 --> 00:25:50.360
 in the San Diego area, I found that the newly hired teachers in one of the area high school

00:25:50.360 --> 00:25:58.260
 schools that had just been created, all of the teachers were lively and we enjoyed talking

00:25:58.260 --> 00:26:00.460
 in the teacher's room.

00:26:00.460 --> 00:26:09.780
 And the other high schools that had been established over the years, the teachers all seemed to

00:26:09.780 --> 00:26:23.800
 be in a depressed, semi-hypnotic state, just unwilling or unable to get interested in anything

00:26:23.800 --> 00:26:34.140
 in their office, free time in the teacher's room.

00:26:34.140 --> 00:26:39.600
 They would just want to gripe about conditions and so on.

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 But in the new school, where the teachers hadn't been around the system for very long,

00:26:48.160 --> 00:26:49.960
 everyone was lively.

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 And after three or four months, I saw the new teachers who had been lively starting

00:26:58.180 --> 00:27:01.320
 to become depressed and dull.

00:27:01.320 --> 00:27:07.920
 By the end of that year, they were pretty much like the teachers in the other schools.

00:27:07.920 --> 00:27:22.760
 And I realized that it was very hard to continue functioning in the system, doing what the

00:27:22.760 --> 00:27:25.640
 system told you to.

00:27:25.640 --> 00:27:32.960
 When Blake College in Mexico ended, I went to teach at the University of Montana for

00:27:32.960 --> 00:27:34.360
 a year.

00:27:34.360 --> 00:27:46.640
 And having designed my own courses, not only at Urbana in biology and physics, but at Blake

00:27:46.640 --> 00:27:56.960
 College, the idea of inventing courses to suit the needs of each student, that guided

00:27:56.960 --> 00:28:02.600
 the way I designed the linguistics courses at Montana.

00:28:02.600 --> 00:28:11.920
 And I found that I could meet the definition of the course according to the college catalog,

00:28:11.920 --> 00:28:19.360
 what the content should include, but I could still do it in a way that didn't deaden

00:28:19.360 --> 00:28:21.760
 either me or the students.

00:28:21.760 --> 00:28:27.420
 For example, there were textbooks that were chosen by the department.

00:28:27.420 --> 00:28:36.720
 And so I would go through the textbook class by class and show what I thought was wrong

00:28:36.720 --> 00:28:44.680
 with the approach in the textbook, so that I didn't repeat anything that was being

00:28:44.680 --> 00:28:54.480
 taught in the text, other than as something to offer perspectives on, so that the students

00:28:54.480 --> 00:29:05.920
 could choose between my perspective as a critic and the standard opinion of the textbook writer.

00:29:05.920 --> 00:29:18.360
 And when it was successful, we could generate new perspectives through the interactions.

00:29:18.360 --> 00:29:29.800
 And I found that it could potentially be very, very functional educationally to work in an

00:29:29.800 --> 00:29:39.520
 established university if you didn't have people guiding you and firing you when you

00:29:39.520 --> 00:29:41.120
 did the wrong thing.

00:29:41.120 --> 00:29:48.400
 But that was when I decided to go back to Eugene and the University of Oregon to work

00:29:48.400 --> 00:29:50.040
 on the PhD.

00:29:50.040 --> 00:30:01.720
 And by that time, I realized that I just wanted to have access to their facilities, the instruments,

00:30:01.720 --> 00:30:10.920
 and use their library and resources to do the research that I wanted, and that I could

00:30:10.920 --> 00:30:21.400
 inform enough to meet the requirements of all of the course individual idiosyncrasies

00:30:21.400 --> 00:30:23.280
 of the professors.

00:30:23.280 --> 00:30:29.400
 And only a couple of the professors really, really disliked me.

00:30:29.400 --> 00:30:40.880
 But the only really bad outcome, they would give me a C in lab because that was the

00:30:40.880 --> 00:30:46.240
 subjective evaluation, whether I was doing my lab work properly.

00:30:46.240 --> 00:30:56.680
 And incidentally, my experiments in lab always turned out interesting and odd and tended

00:30:56.680 --> 00:31:02.240
 to upset the professors.

00:31:02.240 --> 00:31:09.120
 If I would say, "Look what's happening in this situation," the professor would

00:31:09.120 --> 00:31:14.960
 prefer to walk away and not comment.

00:31:14.960 --> 00:31:27.440
 But academically, I picked up people as thesis advisors that were very, very competent, interesting

00:31:27.440 --> 00:31:31.920
 people.

00:31:31.920 --> 00:31:38.920
 One professor that wasn't on my committee was sort of a sounding board.

00:31:38.920 --> 00:31:48.120
 He would put up things on his bulletin board that he had seen in the papers that were counter

00:31:48.120 --> 00:31:51.840
 to the dogma.

00:31:51.840 --> 00:31:59.480
 And when I would run into something that was contrary to the dogma, he was someone that

00:31:59.480 --> 00:32:04.040
 was willing to talk about it.

00:32:04.040 --> 00:32:14.800
 But mostly it was a matter of avoiding the dogmatists.

00:32:14.800 --> 00:32:20.800
 I also remember you having an anecdote.

00:32:20.800 --> 00:32:28.680
 One professor, you had questioned something very early in the term and then decided not

00:32:28.680 --> 00:32:32.200
 to call on you for the rest of the year.

00:32:32.200 --> 00:32:36.640
 What was that?

00:32:36.640 --> 00:32:48.960
 Maybe you're thinking of the comparative physiology where the professor had 10, I think

00:32:48.960 --> 00:32:53.720
 it was 10 or 12 lectures the first half of the course.

00:32:53.720 --> 00:32:59.520
 And they were very peculiar.

00:32:59.520 --> 00:33:04.920
 Everything seemed to be skewed a little bit to make it seem different, even though it

00:33:04.920 --> 00:33:09.760
 was standard biological responses.

00:33:09.760 --> 00:33:17.440
 But everything was presented in a sideways fashion that seemed very odd.

00:33:17.440 --> 00:33:21.360
 No one in the class could figure out what he was doing.

00:33:21.360 --> 00:33:30.320
 But I think the purpose was to forestall questioning because it seemed so odd.

00:33:30.320 --> 00:33:39.200
 Then the second half of the term, he had every student do a presentation.

00:33:39.200 --> 00:33:45.320
 I think it was a 20-minute presentation, 15 or 20 minutes for each student.

00:33:45.320 --> 00:33:51.200
 And there were just enough students so that there would be a time slot for each of us.

00:33:51.200 --> 00:33:58.880
 And even though my name was in the middle of the alphabets, he saved me for the very

00:33:58.880 --> 00:34:03.320
 last hour of the course.

00:34:03.320 --> 00:34:12.880
 And during the last hour, he knew that I was going to talk about stuff I had done in the

00:34:12.880 --> 00:34:18.080
 lab, testing some of Gilbert Ling's ideas.

00:34:18.080 --> 00:34:28.880
 And so he saved me for a diminished time slot, about 10 or 15 minutes before the end of the

00:34:28.880 --> 00:34:33.160
 term's time possibilities.

00:34:33.160 --> 00:34:45.040
 And so I spent about five minutes outlining, in just the very roughest way, Gilbert Ling's

00:34:45.040 --> 00:34:48.000
 essential ideas and contributions.

00:34:48.000 --> 00:34:57.240
 And just as I was about to start describing the evidence supporting his general view,

00:34:57.240 --> 00:35:04.120
 Professor said, "We aren't going to have time for the rest of that."

00:35:04.120 --> 00:35:12.200
 And as I sat down, he said, "The ideas are very interesting, but there isn't evidence

00:35:12.200 --> 00:35:14.040
 to support it."

00:35:14.040 --> 00:35:22.320
 But he had very carefully cut me off before I could present the evidence.

00:35:22.320 --> 00:35:31.680
 And he knew I was sort of a menace because I had done...

00:35:31.680 --> 00:35:41.400
 For example, when he was explaining how the glass membrane on a pH meter works, he said

00:35:41.400 --> 00:35:49.240
 the protons, hydrogen ions, diffuse through the glass.

00:35:49.240 --> 00:35:55.400
 And I said, "But sometimes the glass can be very thick and it still gives the same

00:35:55.400 --> 00:35:56.400
 results."

00:35:56.400 --> 00:36:04.360
 And he said, "It shows that glass is very permeable to hydrogen ions."

00:36:04.360 --> 00:36:12.440
 And I said, "But so-and-so uses the same instrument but filled with mercury instead

00:36:12.440 --> 00:36:17.680
 of hydrochloric acid.

00:36:17.680 --> 00:36:23.880
 Does that mean that mercury ions are diffusing through the glass?"

00:36:23.880 --> 00:36:29.360
 And that was...

00:36:29.360 --> 00:36:33.840
 Why he really hated me.

00:36:33.840 --> 00:36:40.840
 As an added inspiration for yourself getting into science and questioning aging and the

00:36:40.840 --> 00:36:47.400
 death of the organism, was there anything going on in your own health?

00:36:47.400 --> 00:36:55.680
 Did you have a health journey getting well that also...

00:36:55.680 --> 00:37:05.840
 When I was going to school in this one-room country school was the first time I noticed

00:37:05.840 --> 00:37:13.680
 that something was different about my eyes.

00:37:13.680 --> 00:37:15.800
 As a little kid, I could...

00:37:15.800 --> 00:37:22.200
 I remember reading science in the distance and having very good eyesight.

00:37:22.200 --> 00:37:29.680
 And around the age of eight or nine, I noticed that I couldn't recognize a face that was

00:37:29.680 --> 00:37:38.440
 100 yards away or 50 yards away and realized that something was fuzzy.

00:37:38.440 --> 00:37:45.640
 And then in the sixth grade, I couldn't see the blackboard to do the arithmetic problems.

00:37:45.640 --> 00:37:48.440
 And so I got my first glasses.

00:37:48.440 --> 00:37:57.560
 But there were girls in my sixth grade class who were also nearsighted.

00:37:57.560 --> 00:38:08.480
 And there weren't any boys that started me thinking about what was causing nearsightedness.

00:38:08.480 --> 00:38:17.200
 And then as I got acquainted with a couple of these girls, I found that they had had

00:38:17.200 --> 00:38:21.520
 migraine headaches, which I had had a couple.

00:38:21.520 --> 00:38:32.880
 And so I started seeing a connection between female hormones, nearsightedness, and migraines.

00:38:32.880 --> 00:38:42.720
 And that was just a sort of a nagging question for years and years that I kept wondering

00:38:42.720 --> 00:38:44.560
 about.

00:38:44.560 --> 00:39:00.920
 But the things that really got me interested in the idea of getting more deeply involved

00:39:00.920 --> 00:39:12.560
 in studying and maybe doing counseling was years later, I had more and more put together

00:39:12.560 --> 00:39:20.960
 the ideas of what I had been eating and what would bring on a migraine headache.

00:39:20.960 --> 00:39:31.080
 And I realized that there were ups and downs in my blood sugar so that if I would do something

00:39:31.080 --> 00:39:40.240
 energetic like going on a hike on a weekend, the next morning I would wake up with a migraine.

00:39:40.240 --> 00:39:49.240
 And so I was progressively interested in the effects of food.

00:39:49.240 --> 00:39:57.440
 And the culture at that time, people were talking in the newspapers and on the radio

00:39:57.440 --> 00:40:02.720
 talking about the effects of vitamin deficiencies and so on.

00:40:02.720 --> 00:40:12.120
 And that was the first time I heard the idea that certain fatty acids might be essential.

00:40:12.120 --> 00:40:24.640
 But at that time in 1948, '49, that information was always qualified with, but that is an

00:40:24.640 --> 00:40:28.160
 issue to be solved.

00:40:28.160 --> 00:40:34.840
 It isn't established that they are an essential nutrient.

00:40:34.840 --> 00:40:41.240
 So in the '50s, Adele Davis's books were coming out.

00:40:41.240 --> 00:40:53.840
 And I read one or two of her books in the '50s and got interested in trying different

00:40:53.840 --> 00:40:55.520
 vitamin supplements.

00:40:55.520 --> 00:41:08.040
 And I found that when I was feeling sort of gloomy and oppressed, I happened to take a

00:41:08.040 --> 00:41:10.160
 vitamin B1 tablet.

00:41:10.160 --> 00:41:20.160
 And within two or three minutes, the sense of gloom and depression and darkness lifted.

00:41:20.160 --> 00:41:29.000
 And I realized how important a simple single vitamin could be.

00:41:29.000 --> 00:41:43.040
 Then years later in Mexico, a friend who had dropped by the school started, he said a niece

00:41:43.040 --> 00:41:49.040
 of his was about a year and a half old, was in the hospital with dysentery.

00:41:49.040 --> 00:41:53.200
 And the next day he came by and said, "She's worse."

00:41:53.200 --> 00:41:59.640
 And I think it was on the third day he said, "She's deteriorating and they think she

00:41:59.640 --> 00:42:01.640
 might not survive."

00:42:01.640 --> 00:42:07.680
 But I had read in Adele Davis about the effect of B6 on the intestines.

00:42:07.680 --> 00:42:10.560
 So I gave him a 10 milligram tablet.

00:42:10.560 --> 00:42:14.200
 He took it to the hospital and gave it to the baby.

00:42:14.200 --> 00:42:21.400
 And almost immediately her diarrhea stopped and she came right out of it.

00:42:21.400 --> 00:42:30.960
 And about the same time, I noticed that my English language students who had come for

00:42:30.960 --> 00:42:40.040
 classes after working all day, some of them just couldn't remember anything.

00:42:40.040 --> 00:42:49.960
 And I found a place that wholesale a crude kind of wheat germ.

00:42:49.960 --> 00:42:57.400
 And I made some wheat germ and egg cakes, sort of like big cookies.

00:42:57.400 --> 00:43:05.320
 And I would serve one of those and a cup of coffee to my English students before class.

00:43:05.320 --> 00:43:11.000
 And suddenly they were bright and could remember everything.

00:43:11.000 --> 00:43:23.920
 And then one of the American neighbors who was a writer, he had a potato nose, rhinophyma,

00:43:23.920 --> 00:43:32.920
 gnarled blood vessels making his nose lumpy and knotted and red across his nose and cheeks.

00:43:32.920 --> 00:43:42.040
 And he was a heavy drinker, but his main concern was that his vocabulary was shrinking.

00:43:42.040 --> 00:43:50.880
 And when he would talk, he would make a great struggle just to get the exact word that he

00:43:50.880 --> 00:43:51.880
 wanted.

00:43:51.880 --> 00:43:57.480
 And since he was trying to be a writer, that was a serious concern.

00:43:57.480 --> 00:44:08.160
 I told him about Adele Davis's observation that a vitamin B2 deficiency makes tissues

00:44:08.160 --> 00:44:11.980
 unable to use oxygen.

00:44:11.980 --> 00:44:20.880
 And being unable to use oxygen, the body invades that tissue with more blood vessels to try

00:44:20.880 --> 00:44:24.440
 to deliver enough oxygen.

00:44:24.440 --> 00:44:34.960
 And so I suggested that his red cheeks and lumpy nose might be evidence of a vitamin

00:44:34.960 --> 00:44:37.120
 B2 deficiency.

00:44:37.120 --> 00:44:44.060
 And so it took him several weeks to remember that, but I kept giving him notes and he would

00:44:44.060 --> 00:44:46.200
 lose the notes.

00:44:46.200 --> 00:44:52.960
 But finally he got to the doctor with a note and the doctor gave him a shot of vitamin

00:44:52.960 --> 00:44:54.600
 B2.

00:44:54.600 --> 00:45:04.680
 And the next time I saw him on a Monday, he spoke fluently, had access to his vocabulary,

00:45:04.680 --> 00:45:11.560
 and there was no redness, just like turning off a switch.

00:45:11.560 --> 00:45:20.080
 All that week, he was fluent and didn't have the red skin.

00:45:20.080 --> 00:45:27.120
 And each week he would go for a shot and he was working fine.

00:45:27.120 --> 00:45:33.720
 But something happened one weekend, he couldn't get to the city for his shot.

00:45:33.720 --> 00:45:41.600
 And he was right back with a red face and absence of vocabulary.

00:45:41.600 --> 00:45:52.480
 And since his memory was necessary to remember to go to the doctor, eventually his nose got

00:45:52.480 --> 00:45:59.360
 bigger and his memory got worse and he finally died of a heart problem.

00:45:59.360 --> 00:46:10.700
 And having that experience, then a friend with a little son who every night would wake

00:46:10.700 --> 00:46:13.640
 up screaming with a nosebleed.

00:46:13.640 --> 00:46:21.400
 And in the afternoon, sometimes he would wake up with a nosebleed and having extreme behavior

00:46:21.400 --> 00:46:24.840
 problems, getting violent.

00:46:24.840 --> 00:46:27.600
 He was about four at the time.

00:46:27.600 --> 00:46:34.120
 And I mentioned the possibility that he was having that same kind of a vascular problem

00:46:34.120 --> 00:46:38.840
 affecting his behavior and blood vessels.

00:46:38.840 --> 00:46:50.080
 So we made him some little sort of puffed egg, scrambled egg with powdered milk and

00:46:50.080 --> 00:46:57.400
 a dissolved 10 milligram vitamin B2 tablet in each pill, in each cookie.

00:46:57.400 --> 00:47:06.240
 And after he ate his first cookie, that nap, he slept right through and didn't have a nosebleed.

00:47:06.240 --> 00:47:12.040
 As far as I know, as long as I knew him, he never had another nosebleed and his behavior

00:47:12.040 --> 00:47:15.920
 improved.

00:47:15.920 --> 00:47:26.080
 So that got me interested in the idea that single vitamins, you could connect a symptom

00:47:26.080 --> 00:47:34.240
 or a disease to a particular vitamin, vitamin B1 or B2 or B6 and so on.

00:47:34.240 --> 00:47:47.720
 And so I got involved in that kind of thinking that you have to be perceptive and informed

00:47:47.720 --> 00:47:52.080
 and match the treatment to the problem and so on.

00:47:52.080 --> 00:48:01.120
 But meanwhile, the other thing was going on, studying how organisms and cells work and

00:48:01.120 --> 00:48:13.440
 seeing that there are very general principles that simplify everything and that it isn't

00:48:13.440 --> 00:48:22.640
 necessary to think medically about matching a nutrient to a symptom.

00:48:22.640 --> 00:48:32.960
 The proper way to go about it would be to find out what is missing in the organism that

00:48:32.960 --> 00:48:38.960
 makes it unstable and work on the most general things.

00:48:38.960 --> 00:48:50.720
 And natural foods happen to have each kind of organism that we use as a food has all

00:48:50.720 --> 00:48:55.960
 of the nutrients basically, but in different proportions.

00:48:55.960 --> 00:49:06.080
 And if you simply pick out the balance of simple foods, you can raise your general level

00:49:06.080 --> 00:49:14.440
 of nutritional intake without having to worry about which thing is specifically related

00:49:14.440 --> 00:49:17.120
 to a symptom.

00:49:17.120 --> 00:49:24.280
 And besides the eyesight and the migraines very early on, was there anything else in

00:49:24.280 --> 00:49:32.160
 your health that helped guide your research maybe later down the road?

00:49:32.160 --> 00:49:36.360
 Not about my own health that I remember.

00:49:36.360 --> 00:49:42.440
 But what about when like the inspiration to start taking thyroid or looking into thyroid

00:49:42.440 --> 00:49:45.600
 as a supplement and the effect of that?

00:49:45.600 --> 00:49:55.400
 The eyesight and migraine thing, I realized that why girls were so much more often nearsighted

00:49:55.400 --> 00:50:05.160
 and having migraines was that females are five or ten times more likely to be hypothyroid.

00:50:05.160 --> 00:50:13.160
 And so I had thought about that for many years that the thyroid probably accounts for the

00:50:13.160 --> 00:50:21.640
 females' symptoms, but since when I worked in the woods, for example, I would work in

00:50:21.640 --> 00:50:26.360
 the summer to pay for college expenses.

00:50:26.360 --> 00:50:37.040
 And I was sort of the camp joke because my lunch bag, we had cloth bags that we carried

00:50:37.040 --> 00:50:38.040
 our lunch in.

00:50:38.040 --> 00:50:42.640
 Some of the guys would put a sandwich or two in a little packet on their hip.

00:50:42.640 --> 00:50:51.760
 Mine reached below my knees and weighed, must have been seven or eight pounds of lunch I

00:50:51.760 --> 00:50:54.720
 dragged with me through the woods.

00:50:54.720 --> 00:51:01.400
 And that's where I realized that I had an extremely high metabolic rate.

00:51:01.400 --> 00:51:09.680
 One summer on a survey crew where we had to chop down the small trees for the line of

00:51:09.680 --> 00:51:21.400
 sight surveying, I found that I had to drink a quart of water every 30 minutes and we would

00:51:21.400 --> 00:51:24.400
 work about 12 hours steady.

00:51:24.400 --> 00:51:31.440
 And during that whole time from about five in the morning until six at night, I wouldn't

00:51:31.440 --> 00:51:40.160
 urinate at all, but I would put four or five gallons of water through me and it would all

00:51:40.160 --> 00:51:42.080
 come out as sweat.

00:51:42.080 --> 00:51:51.400
 And calculating how much heat and calories it takes to evaporate that much water, it

00:51:51.400 --> 00:52:01.240
 turns out that I was, during those times of intense work, I would be burning 10 or 12,000

00:52:01.240 --> 00:52:03.440
 calories a day.

00:52:03.440 --> 00:52:15.080
 And I just couldn't believe that that could be possible with hypothyroidism.

00:52:15.080 --> 00:52:23.280
 And as I thought about it more, I decided to simply try a supplement and see what happened.

00:52:23.280 --> 00:52:31.440
 And right after I took my first bit of thyroid, I cooled down.

00:52:31.440 --> 00:52:38.880
 I didn't have to eat so much and I became much more relaxed.

00:52:38.880 --> 00:52:46.080
 I had always been a light sleeper so that if the house creaked, I would be jolted awake.

00:52:46.080 --> 00:52:52.320
 And I realized that was like a pregnant woman or a woman with a newborn baby.

00:52:52.320 --> 00:52:56.440
 The hormones make the brain alert.

00:52:56.440 --> 00:53:04.120
 And when I took the thyroid, there were hormonal changes so that I could sleep soundly like

00:53:04.120 --> 00:53:09.720
 I had as an eight or nine-year-old.

00:53:09.720 --> 00:53:24.800
 And so my reasoning, I think Jerry Aikawa, the magnesium researcher, I think he had the

00:53:24.800 --> 00:53:28.120
 clue to how that works.

00:53:28.120 --> 00:53:36.560
 He showed that cells can't retain magnesium if they're low in thyroid.

00:53:36.560 --> 00:53:47.440
 And the mechanism, I think, is that ATP produced under the influence of oxygen and fuel consumption

00:53:47.440 --> 00:53:54.280
 and thyroid activation, ATP binds magnesium.

00:53:54.280 --> 00:54:01.960
 And in the absence of thyroid, you simply aren't making enough ATP and not binding enough

00:54:01.960 --> 00:54:04.040
 magnesium.

00:54:04.040 --> 00:54:11.320
 The de-energized molecule ADP binds calcium.

00:54:11.320 --> 00:54:19.360
 And when the cell has a high calcium content, it tends to be in an excited state.

00:54:19.360 --> 00:54:27.320
 So when you're low in magnesium and high in calcium, your cells are stuck in an activated

00:54:27.320 --> 00:54:28.320
 state.

00:54:28.320 --> 00:54:36.560
 And I think that a magnesium deficiency interacting with the thyroid deficiency means that your

00:54:36.560 --> 00:54:46.640
 cells are being overexposed to calcium internally, exciting them, making them waste energy, burning

00:54:46.640 --> 00:54:54.000
 oxygen and fuel, but not being able to relax fully.

00:54:54.000 --> 00:55:02.400
 So your fields of research seem broad as well as your endeavors.

00:55:02.400 --> 00:55:08.120
 I've just never been able to describe what you do succinctly.

00:55:08.120 --> 00:55:12.320
 How would you describe yourself?

00:55:12.320 --> 00:55:21.200
 I've always thought of myself as a painter who couldn't make a profession of portrait

00:55:21.200 --> 00:55:29.880
 painting because I didn't like the way the clients made demands on how I represented

00:55:29.880 --> 00:55:31.240
 them.

00:55:31.240 --> 00:55:40.320
 And that science is just part of the landscape.

00:55:40.320 --> 00:55:46.040
 It isn't what I do as an occupation or profession.

00:55:46.040 --> 00:55:55.120
 It's just something that everyone really has to deal with because it's a major means of

00:55:55.120 --> 00:55:57.560
 indoctrination and control.

00:55:57.560 --> 00:56:02.600
 People say, "Here's this study that gives this result.

00:56:02.600 --> 00:56:05.200
 Therefore you have to do this."

00:56:05.200 --> 00:56:17.480
 And it's really a propaganda and control and manipulation scheme as well as a byproduct.

00:56:17.480 --> 00:56:21.720
 It has a lot of useful things.

00:56:21.720 --> 00:56:32.520
 And so I found that I could use the techniques and do some useful things.

00:56:32.520 --> 00:56:39.120
 But I don't subscribe to the culture in general.

00:56:39.120 --> 00:56:41.840
 It's a nice idea.

00:56:41.840 --> 00:56:45.960
 Do you consider yourself a scientist?

00:56:45.960 --> 00:56:47.880
 No.

00:56:47.880 --> 00:56:57.800
 I think if a critic of opinions about reality could be called a scientist, yeah, then.

00:56:57.800 --> 00:57:08.560
 But I think of myself as mainly a critic rather than a participant in the science culture.

00:57:08.560 --> 00:57:19.440
 And how do you communicate your ideas or interface with others?

00:57:19.440 --> 00:57:33.280
 When I was trying to be a participant in the education culture or the philosophy culture,

00:57:33.280 --> 00:57:38.360
 various academic lines, I would submit papers.

00:57:38.360 --> 00:57:48.280
 And very often the editors would make irrelevant comments.

00:57:48.280 --> 00:57:56.640
 For example, once I wrote a letter with the article I was submitting that was on a college

00:57:56.640 --> 00:58:01.000
 letterhead that had some Hispanic names on it.

00:58:01.000 --> 00:58:10.960
 And the editor sent back the rejection notice with racist comments on it about Hispanics

00:58:10.960 --> 00:58:18.000
 not being genetically qualified to work in that field.

00:58:18.000 --> 00:58:31.040
 And two or three similar, very inappropriate remarks for a science editor to make made

00:58:31.040 --> 00:58:34.640
 me increasingly skeptical.

00:58:34.640 --> 00:58:41.600
 And some articles I sent to medical journals, I would get a silly rejection letter.

00:58:41.600 --> 00:58:46.920
 And then three or four months later, the same journal would publish essentially the same

00:58:46.920 --> 00:58:50.120
 idea.

00:58:50.120 --> 00:59:01.520
 For example, the effects of light deprivation, vitamin A deficiency causing leukoplakia,

00:59:01.520 --> 00:59:10.480
 several contraceptive function of progesterone.

00:59:10.480 --> 00:59:18.760
 Right after I submitted articles with some evidence supporting each of those things,

00:59:18.760 --> 00:59:20.360
 they would be rejected.

00:59:20.360 --> 00:59:30.440
 And then an MD would be published shortly after my rejection on exactly the same idea.

00:59:30.440 --> 00:59:42.600
 And I realized I had known composers who would send their song to Irving Berlin to get his

00:59:42.600 --> 00:59:48.480
 approval and they would find that it came out as Irving Berlin's song.

00:59:48.480 --> 00:59:58.960
 And various things I realized that publication was not what it seems to be.

00:59:58.960 --> 01:00:10.040
 And so then why did you choose a newsletter as the medium to communicate your...

01:00:10.040 --> 01:00:20.080
 When I was teaching the science classes in Urbana or the linguistics classes in Montana,

01:00:20.080 --> 01:00:30.200
 I would write up my ideas and some of my criticisms of the textbook, for example, in a handout,

01:00:30.200 --> 01:00:33.080
 two or three page handout for every class.

01:00:33.080 --> 01:00:36.960
 So that it would...

01:00:36.960 --> 01:00:42.800
 My idea was that the students wouldn't have to take notes if I would tell them everything

01:00:42.800 --> 01:00:44.960
 I was going to talk about in that class.

01:00:44.960 --> 01:00:50.600
 And so then we could talk about things so they wouldn't be occupied trying to record

01:00:50.600 --> 01:00:52.280
 what I was saying.

01:00:52.280 --> 01:01:00.280
 And so I got in the habit of, for every class that I did after that, I would write out a

01:01:00.280 --> 01:01:02.000
 handout.

01:01:02.000 --> 01:01:17.720
 And I did a course on the Russian approach to brain research and did a weekly class and

01:01:17.720 --> 01:01:22.680
 would give them a handout of several pages for each week.

01:01:22.680 --> 01:01:32.000
 And I realized that that had made a book, the Mind and Tissue book, was just the handouts

01:01:32.000 --> 01:01:33.600
 for that class.

01:01:33.600 --> 01:01:41.360
 And that got me in the habit of distributing my weekly thoughts.

01:01:41.360 --> 01:01:45.600
 People would drop in for a class or just a discussion.

01:01:45.600 --> 01:01:49.320
 And so I would mimeograph at first.

01:01:49.320 --> 01:01:53.360
 And as Xeroxes got cheaper, I would Xerox.

01:01:53.360 --> 01:01:59.040
 At first I made a lot of carbon copies of my typed up handouts.

01:01:59.040 --> 01:02:06.040
 And as Xeroxing got cheaper, then I would send more copies to more people.

01:02:06.040 --> 01:02:19.720
 And in the late '70s, I realized that I could not even consider getting snide remarks from

01:02:19.720 --> 01:02:27.000
 editors and just distribute my articles to people that were interested.

01:02:27.000 --> 01:02:36.000
 I know that some take an approach of touring around, giving lectures, video series, things

01:02:36.000 --> 01:02:37.000
 like that.

01:02:37.000 --> 01:02:46.360
 Is there a reason why you don't take a similar approach and prefer to disseminate?

01:02:46.360 --> 01:02:59.000
 I think it was about '91, 1990 or '91, I had a series of lectures scheduled.

01:02:59.000 --> 01:03:06.360
 I would try to get them scheduled so I could drive from Eugene to San Diego and stop along

01:03:06.360 --> 01:03:07.680
 the way.

01:03:07.680 --> 01:03:18.680
 And in one of the Northern California towns, we gathered at the lecture hall and the place

01:03:18.680 --> 01:03:21.000
 was locked up.

01:03:21.000 --> 01:03:29.760
 And so we discovered that it wasn't going to be possible to use that place.

01:03:29.760 --> 01:03:35.760
 So we went to one of the person's homes to do the meeting.

01:03:35.760 --> 01:03:40.600
 And next place along the line, same thing happened.

01:03:40.600 --> 01:03:48.960
 And I got to San Diego where I had been giving every few months, I would do a talk at this

01:03:48.960 --> 01:03:53.920
 grocery store that had a theater adjoining the store.

01:03:53.920 --> 01:03:58.120
 And when I got there, the theater was locked.

01:03:58.120 --> 01:04:04.360
 And I went in the health food department of the grocery store, and the person who had

01:04:04.360 --> 01:04:08.360
 arranged the lecture had been fired.

01:04:08.360 --> 01:04:19.200
 And I realized that the health food industry had caught on to what I was going to say about

01:04:19.200 --> 01:04:22.200
 unsaturated fat.

01:04:22.200 --> 01:04:25.600
 The flax oil syndicate.

01:04:25.600 --> 01:04:32.920
 So what subjects are you currently interested in researching in the general subject matter

01:04:32.920 --> 01:04:37.960
 of your newsletters over the years?

01:04:37.960 --> 01:04:52.560
 Currently the most recent thing is trying to regeneralize almost everything that is

01:04:52.560 --> 01:05:01.800
 conventionally established about cell measurements.

01:05:01.800 --> 01:05:10.000
 For example, the idea of electricity in the cell interacts with the idea of pH in the

01:05:10.000 --> 01:05:22.880
 cell and the redox potential, the balance between oxidizing and reducing.

01:05:22.880 --> 01:05:26.600
 These interact.

01:05:26.600 --> 01:05:35.520
 In theory, there are ways of explaining those, but they tend to be independent as if they

01:05:35.520 --> 01:05:37.400
 were separate things.

01:05:37.400 --> 01:05:49.520
 And looking at it from the Gilbert Ling perspective, I think everything has a much simpler explanation,

01:05:49.520 --> 01:05:59.160
 even maybe more generalized than Gilbert Ling's, in which, for example, the exterior fields

01:05:59.160 --> 01:06:13.160
 that relate to people like Persinger's work, the living tissue projects a static-like electrical

01:06:13.160 --> 01:06:15.720
 field around it.

01:06:15.720 --> 01:06:24.440
 Someone used a piece of skin in an isolation compartment and showed that as it's oxidizing,

01:06:24.440 --> 01:06:31.280
 it's projecting a negative field beyond the surface a couple of inches.

01:06:31.280 --> 01:06:38.240
 And adding cyanide to block oxidation, the field collapsed.

01:06:38.240 --> 01:06:49.600
 Washing the cyanide out, the field came back, showing that the outside field around the

01:06:49.600 --> 01:06:59.600
 tissue and cell is reflecting the metabolism and energy intensity inside.

01:06:59.600 --> 01:07:06.840
 But the business of putting an electrode into a cell, the very first thing that Gilbert

01:07:06.840 --> 01:07:16.080
 Ling noticed in the late 1940s, he, simply looking at what he was doing, concluded that

01:07:16.080 --> 01:07:23.520
 it wasn't behaving the way a membrane potential should act.

01:07:23.520 --> 01:07:30.720
 He described it as a surface difference, a phase potential that he could detect right

01:07:30.720 --> 01:07:32.200
 at the surface.

01:07:32.200 --> 01:07:45.640
 And I think he described the potassium chloride charged microelectrode, three molar solution,

01:07:45.640 --> 01:07:49.400
 very concentrated solution of potassium chloride.

01:07:49.400 --> 01:07:57.760
 I think he was the one that described it as a battery, a source of electrical energy,

01:07:57.760 --> 01:08:07.120
 not a detector, that it was creating a current as the cell sucked the potassium out of your

01:08:07.120 --> 01:08:08.120
 electrode.

01:08:08.120 --> 01:08:21.880
 And I think the membrane potential is probably one of the most important examples of an artifact.

01:08:21.880 --> 01:08:33.000
 Friedhoff Strostrand, a famous electron microscopist at Southern California, USC, I think it was,

01:08:33.000 --> 01:08:44.040
 he demonstrated in various preparations that the way you prepared the material for the

01:08:44.040 --> 01:08:52.040
 electron microscope created totally different membrane structures.

01:08:52.040 --> 01:09:04.280
 And simply, Sidney Fox, for example, in adding water to hot amino acids, creating little

01:09:04.280 --> 01:09:08.800
 particles, these appear to have a membrane.

01:09:08.800 --> 01:09:23.400
 And since you're creating, when you stain a cell to create a visible membrane, you're

01:09:23.400 --> 01:09:31.440
 causing a charged molecule to concentrate in a particular region.

01:09:31.440 --> 01:09:44.040
 And it happens that where the osmic acid concentrates is where they suggest that the acid of the

01:09:44.040 --> 01:09:51.120
 fat, fatty acid, should be the phosphate lipid membrane.

01:09:51.120 --> 01:09:56.560
 This phosphate group should repel the stain.

01:09:56.560 --> 01:10:06.880
 But in fact, that's exactly where they're representing that the osmium is being concentrated.

01:10:06.880 --> 01:10:14.880
 But where it will concentrate is at a zone of positive charge.

01:10:14.880 --> 01:10:24.280
 And whenever you have two unlike materials in contact, one will attract electrons away

01:10:24.280 --> 01:10:37.440
 and you'll get an electrical double layer that I think is what is being stained, appearing,

01:10:37.440 --> 01:10:46.160
 looking like a membrane, but it's really a pure artifact of staining.

01:10:46.160 --> 01:11:01.200
 And so I'm working towards a picture of the cell which sees this metabolic projected surrounding

01:11:01.200 --> 01:11:15.920
 charge with the oxidation reduction process, which governs things like cell division and

01:11:15.920 --> 01:11:18.520
 cell behavior.

01:11:18.520 --> 01:11:29.760
 You have to have an excess of electrons for the cell to break into two parts and multiply.

01:11:29.760 --> 01:11:37.960
 And if you keep the cell in its oxidizing state, you can keep it functioning rather

01:11:37.960 --> 01:11:41.200
 than simply growing.

01:11:41.200 --> 01:11:54.560
 And the acid-base balance is directly connected to the electrical charge of the material.

01:11:54.560 --> 01:12:05.480
 And as you increase the alkalinity or the abundance of electrons, you're causing the

01:12:05.480 --> 01:12:13.600
 gel system of basically proteins to take up more water.

01:12:13.600 --> 01:12:25.240
 So everything that involves either too much cell division or swelling and interference

01:12:25.240 --> 01:12:34.240
 with function simply because the shape is being distorted, all of these interact with

01:12:34.240 --> 01:12:40.840
 our externally projected fields.

01:12:40.840 --> 01:12:49.680
 And there are models that support each other.

01:12:49.680 --> 01:12:59.640
 For example, the electret, I don't know if our microphones now electret or is there a

01:12:59.640 --> 01:13:01.120
 new technology?

01:13:01.120 --> 01:13:13.000
 The electret is a material that has solidified in the presence of an electrical field so

01:13:13.000 --> 01:13:21.920
 that it freezes with its atoms, molecules arranged so that you take away the field and

01:13:21.920 --> 01:13:24.080
 it stays charged.

01:13:24.080 --> 01:13:36.920
 And the electret microphone is arranged so that when the sound vibrates, this fixed electrical

01:13:36.920 --> 01:13:41.760
 charge, it creates an electrical current.

01:13:41.760 --> 01:13:50.080
 It's sort of the equivalent of a permanent magnet, but it's a permanent electrical charge.

01:13:50.080 --> 01:13:58.320
 And in the case of living stuff, it's a continuously regenerated electrical charge.

01:13:58.320 --> 01:14:11.280
 But that field is being projected from every cell that's respiring, influencing its environment.

01:14:11.280 --> 01:14:20.040
 And these things have a very long reach, probably analogous to the long distances that germinate.

01:14:20.040 --> 01:14:28.760
 Gerald Pollack shows in his exclusion zone water, charged particles are kept far back

01:14:28.760 --> 01:14:34.440
 from the surface of the face.

01:14:34.440 --> 01:14:47.520
 Those existing phenomena have simply been left out of membrane-based biological thinking.

01:14:47.520 --> 01:14:57.120
 It seems like along with that, the subjects that you choose to address in your newsletters

01:14:57.120 --> 01:14:59.800
 run such a wide gamut.

01:14:59.800 --> 01:15:07.320
 Can you just in a generalized way mention what some of those subjects are over the years,

01:15:07.320 --> 01:15:11.200
 over the last couple decades?

01:15:11.200 --> 01:15:19.280
 Oh, I've probably forgotten a lot of them.

01:15:19.280 --> 01:15:32.000
 On my website, there's one about William Blake and one about the nature of knowing

01:15:32.000 --> 01:15:37.560
 and how that relates to education.

01:15:37.560 --> 01:15:48.600
 And there's always this trying to make philosophy a part of the awareness.

01:15:48.600 --> 01:15:57.860
 Any particular concrete question, I think, really should relate to what you're doing

01:15:57.860 --> 01:16:00.240
 philosophically.

01:16:00.240 --> 01:16:14.720
 And that, I've tried to concretize the political meanings of that, but it's necessary, I think,

01:16:14.720 --> 01:16:25.360
 always to be looking at the historical influences that have created this myth of science as

01:16:25.360 --> 01:16:38.960
 a kind of objectivity that is based on absolute, reducible, kind of infinitely describable.

01:16:38.960 --> 01:16:50.160
 In other words, they're so empty and abstract that you can have absolute confidence in what

01:16:50.160 --> 01:16:52.200
 you can deduce from them.

01:16:52.200 --> 01:17:03.960
 But what that amounts to is that we have a deductive science, which it's saying that

01:17:03.960 --> 01:17:11.840
 you reduce it to these absolute units of genes or atoms or quanta.

01:17:11.840 --> 01:17:21.840
 And from those, since they are pure and not each one is absolutely the same everywhere

01:17:21.840 --> 01:17:27.240
 in the universe, you can make absolute deductions from those.

01:17:27.240 --> 01:17:35.360
 And these deductions can then tell you all you need to know about how the organism works,

01:17:35.360 --> 01:17:40.280
 how it should be treated, how it should be educated, and so on.

01:17:40.280 --> 01:17:50.600
 It's a kind of religious absolutism operating through reductionist science, applying a philosophical

01:17:50.600 --> 01:17:57.880
 physics to sort of denature the organism, to take the life out of the organism.

01:17:57.880 --> 01:18:00.040
 Okay, so we left off with the newsletter.

01:18:00.040 --> 01:18:08.640
 Was there anything else you wanted to say about your newsletter in regards to how you

01:18:08.640 --> 01:18:12.440
 chose to do that?

01:18:12.440 --> 01:18:25.000
 At times I've hoped that I would get more feedback to the newsletter, but with the development

01:18:25.000 --> 01:18:40.520
 of the computer culture, I get a lot of reactions, not exactly, almost never anything critical

01:18:40.520 --> 01:18:51.360
 of the ideas in the newsletter, which I had hoped that people would sort of stimulate

01:18:51.360 --> 01:18:58.280
 amplification of certain themes in the newsletter by inquiring, like in the class, someone will

01:18:58.280 --> 01:19:00.480
 say, "What does that imply?"

01:19:00.480 --> 01:19:03.720
 And that leads off into new stuff.

01:19:03.720 --> 01:19:10.640
 But I had been hoping that the newsletters would stimulate that kind of development,

01:19:10.640 --> 01:19:16.000
 but there's very little of it from the emails I get.

01:19:16.000 --> 01:19:26.000
 But still, people are presenting new information, new perspectives.

01:19:26.000 --> 01:19:29.200
 Strange things are always happening.

01:19:29.200 --> 01:19:34.760
 And so I'm constantly learning from the questions people ask in their emails.

01:19:34.760 --> 01:19:41.680
 How do those inquiries direct you from there, the feedback you get?

01:19:41.680 --> 01:19:53.840
 Does that change your focus?

01:19:53.840 --> 01:20:01.280
 Sometimes the questions will reflect something that's going on in the culture, like something

01:20:01.280 --> 01:20:09.680
 appears in JAMA and everyone will suddenly have the symptom that was discussed in JAMA.

01:20:09.680 --> 01:20:16.880
 I've been noticing that since the 1970s, that an article would come out saying that progesterone

01:20:16.880 --> 01:20:22.160
 suppresses the immune system, and suddenly everyone would say, "I got a cold right after

01:20:22.160 --> 01:20:24.520
 I took progesterone."

01:20:24.520 --> 01:20:35.320
 And that seems to be a major entertainment in the culture, is for symptoms to radiate

01:20:35.320 --> 01:20:45.280
 out from something that appears on the internet now, or in a major medical magazine.

01:20:45.280 --> 01:20:52.240
 Sometimes these symptoms, it's like a little subculture develops.

01:20:52.240 --> 01:21:02.600
 They talk to each other, and sometimes they reveal really important information, like

01:21:02.600 --> 01:21:11.040
 the chronic fatigue, what is it, myalgia syndromes.

01:21:11.040 --> 01:21:13.680
 Adrenal fatigue.

01:21:13.680 --> 01:21:27.040
 And these together tend to direct the attention of what I'm writing newsletters about.

01:21:27.040 --> 01:21:40.360
 And I think some constructive things are coming gradually out of things that have started

01:21:40.360 --> 01:21:51.080
 kind of as a fetish that certain doctors promote something to sell their services, but gradually

01:21:51.080 --> 01:21:58.640
 enough objective information comes out of it that is useful.

01:21:58.640 --> 01:22:02.640
 Do you wish you were getting more criticism on your subjects?

01:22:02.640 --> 01:22:11.720
 Yeah, as long as it's people who have actually read the things and find things that need

01:22:11.720 --> 01:22:15.480
 expansion.

01:22:15.480 --> 01:22:32.040
 In the last 25, almost 30 years, there have only been, I think, three people who wrote

01:22:32.040 --> 01:22:39.480
 what were supposed to be criticisms, and basically they just said, "He's wrong, he's wrong,

01:22:39.480 --> 01:22:42.960
 he's wrong, and he's very wrong."

01:22:42.960 --> 01:22:52.120
 But I haven't had anyone really look at either the data or the reasoning.

01:22:52.120 --> 01:23:03.080
 But I think there's, I would like to have people find the areas that need exploration

01:23:03.080 --> 01:23:05.080
 and expansion.

01:23:05.080 --> 01:23:15.080
 Nothing's finished, and it would be very helpful to have people helping to draw out

01:23:15.080 --> 01:23:19.560
 themes of development.

01:23:19.560 --> 01:23:28.040
 So besides your scientific inquiry, what are your other pursuits?

01:23:28.040 --> 01:23:29.040
 Other...

01:23:29.040 --> 01:23:40.360
 What, your other interests?

01:23:40.360 --> 01:23:56.760
 I've always seen my politics and science and ideas about human nature as being interconnected.

01:23:56.760 --> 01:24:03.960
 For example, being born in the Great Depression before the war, the things people were talking

01:24:03.960 --> 01:24:17.520
 about, the newspaper stories were about military aggression, Spanish Civil War, Guernica and

01:24:17.520 --> 01:24:27.200
 Mussolini bombing Ethiopia, Japanese invading Shanghai, people getting drafted and obviously

01:24:27.200 --> 01:24:31.640
 thinking that they were not coming back.

01:24:31.640 --> 01:24:42.960
 That whole thing set my attitude as people were hungry in the Depression and elsewhere

01:24:42.960 --> 01:24:45.360
 they were getting killed.

01:24:45.360 --> 01:24:53.960
 Locally cops were maiming people in jails and so on.

01:24:53.960 --> 01:25:06.240
 The culture is still generating these things full speed and science techniques are just

01:25:06.240 --> 01:25:13.240
 one very small approach to trying to correct that stuff.

01:25:13.240 --> 01:25:21.360
 But still, political consciousness is where the real solutions are.

01:25:21.360 --> 01:25:29.960
 This meant more like when you want to take a break from researching and writing about

01:25:29.960 --> 01:25:33.960
 scientific topics, how do you do that?

01:25:33.960 --> 01:25:37.520
 Other activities or...

01:25:37.520 --> 01:25:46.880
 When I'm in Eugene, I just go out in the backyard and paint something.

01:25:46.880 --> 01:26:02.360
 I always, when I would be writing on any subject, I would feel that I was starting to get over

01:26:02.360 --> 01:26:06.560
 abstract and over verbal.

01:26:06.560 --> 01:26:14.040
 So I would sculpt something or paint something or even try to write a poem or something to

01:26:14.040 --> 01:26:18.800
 change the way I was relating to language.

01:26:18.800 --> 01:26:27.960
 And just to keep myself from getting into a rut.

01:26:27.960 --> 01:26:33.600
 That was one of the reasons I decided to go to Montana to teach linguistics because I

01:26:33.600 --> 01:26:43.120
 had been doing mainly philosophical, psychological things in Blake College.

01:26:43.120 --> 01:26:53.800
 And I realized that I should sort of tighten things up on the basis of evidence and should

01:26:53.800 --> 01:26:57.920
 do some actual science work.

01:26:57.920 --> 01:27:09.680
 So my first thought was to teach linguistics and on my own, independently do some biological

01:27:09.680 --> 01:27:10.680
 work.

01:27:10.680 --> 01:27:17.520
 So then I started reading some of the current science and realized I could do it much better

01:27:17.520 --> 01:27:19.400
 than these guys.

01:27:19.400 --> 01:27:32.440
 And so I went to Eugene to enroll and use the instruments that you need to do contemporary

01:27:32.440 --> 01:27:36.720
 science.

01:27:36.720 --> 01:27:48.040
 But the process has always involved trying to keep myself from getting stuck in a way

01:27:48.040 --> 01:27:52.520
 of looking at reality.

01:27:52.520 --> 01:28:01.000
 So it's constantly going between science, philosophy, and painting or sculpting or something.

01:28:01.000 --> 01:28:13.600
 When I'm in Mexico, just going down to the town square and sitting around and talking

01:28:13.600 --> 01:28:29.520
 to people, it's very refreshing and changing to listen to people's very un-American sounding

01:28:29.520 --> 01:28:34.680
 perspectives on reality.

01:28:34.680 --> 01:28:39.960
 It sounds like that's something that you got into intuitively, but it also makes me think

01:28:39.960 --> 01:28:40.960
 of scientifics.

01:28:40.960 --> 01:28:45.560
 Intuitively input.

01:28:45.560 --> 01:28:50.200
 You mentioned before synecdoches, I think that's how.

01:28:50.200 --> 01:28:53.120
 It just sounds like sort of the same thinking.

01:28:53.120 --> 01:28:54.120
 Yeah.

01:28:54.120 --> 01:28:55.120
 Yeah.

01:28:55.120 --> 01:29:04.640
 Someone, I think it was in the early 1960s, someone gave me W.J.J.

01:29:04.640 --> 01:29:16.040
 Gordon's book on synecdoches, and in his bibliography he had read all the same people

01:29:16.040 --> 01:29:22.520
 that I had in literature and the idea of metaphor in thinking.

01:29:22.520 --> 01:29:34.280
 And I had been teaching my computer as a model of the brain and how information is processed

01:29:34.280 --> 01:29:37.480
 by the organism.

01:29:37.480 --> 01:29:51.720
 And I was having my, already in 1960, I was an anti-digital person, anti-quantizing for

01:29:51.720 --> 01:29:58.760
 coherence of information processing as well as coherence of reality.

01:29:58.760 --> 01:30:11.360
 And so this Gordon's approach to creative production was on the basis of metaphor rather

01:30:11.360 --> 01:30:13.640
 than logic.

01:30:13.640 --> 01:30:27.280
 And this is what can make science people so deadening that they want to have this logical

01:30:27.280 --> 01:30:44.560
 handling of reality and avoiding metaphoric and projective looking for wholeness.

01:30:44.560 --> 01:30:59.440
 Talking to physicists, I was, in San Diego I knew several people in the various branches

01:30:59.440 --> 01:31:03.600
 of defense and nuclear industry.

01:31:03.600 --> 01:31:12.440
 And so talking to physicists, I would ask their definition for some of the subjects

01:31:12.440 --> 01:31:19.920
 that I thought were constructive ways of using physics like hysteresis.

01:31:19.920 --> 01:31:28.160
 How does substance remember something so that the way up is not the same as the way down?

01:31:28.160 --> 01:31:34.040
 Going through matter, you change it, leave a trail.

01:31:34.040 --> 01:31:43.960
 And so everything you do is sort of spinning webs of organization in matter.

01:31:43.960 --> 01:31:54.800
 And ideas such as that or as resonance, what does resonance mean when two objects are participating

01:31:54.800 --> 01:31:59.680
 in the same frequency of an energy system?

01:31:59.680 --> 01:32:07.600
 And physicists would generally, unless they were off on the humanistic side, not really

01:32:07.600 --> 01:32:15.880
 physicists, the working physicists would simply quote a textbook definition that didn't mean

01:32:15.880 --> 01:32:19.360
 anything to them or to me.

01:32:19.360 --> 01:32:27.240
 And I realized that it's very hard to talk across that paradigm.

01:32:27.240 --> 01:32:34.160
 They simply say there's nothing to be perceived.

01:32:34.160 --> 01:32:46.040
 When wave is coming to an electron, when exactly does that absorption happen?

01:32:46.040 --> 01:32:52.000
 Does the electron slowly rise as the wave front passes?

01:32:52.000 --> 01:33:05.920
 And is there a moment when no such imagery exists in physics apparently?

01:33:05.920 --> 01:33:15.600
 It seems like that's one of the major problems in the lack of multiple angles of thinking.

01:33:15.600 --> 01:33:22.400
 If you don't, just me from a visual perspective, looking at problems one way forces you to

01:33:22.400 --> 01:33:29.200
 see the holes in a problem.

01:33:29.200 --> 01:33:37.760
 Way back, I was attracted to the language of Heraclitus, even though it's fragmentary

01:33:37.760 --> 01:33:39.360
 and odd.

01:33:39.360 --> 01:33:50.280
 And I think Aristotle, even though our culture has stereotyped Aristotle as some kind of

01:33:50.280 --> 01:34:00.120
 an authoritarian monster, but Aristotle had some of the same themes that Heraclitus did,

01:34:00.120 --> 01:34:12.640
 seeing that things are always changing, becoming is what's real, the eternal being is purely

01:34:12.640 --> 01:34:15.120
 fictitious.

01:34:15.120 --> 01:34:25.440
 But the people who consider Aristotle as anti-scientific are really the ones who are susceptible to

01:34:25.440 --> 01:34:34.440
 Plato's fantasy of pure abstraction and pure truth.

01:34:34.440 --> 01:34:47.400
 Do you want to talk a little bit about your painting, how you got into painting?

01:34:47.400 --> 01:35:00.680
 My parents, my mother had a photography portrait studio and my father had studied art in Kansas

01:35:00.680 --> 01:35:05.480
 City, studied portrait painting among other things.

01:35:05.480 --> 01:35:17.040
 And they both happened to be in San Diego in the '20s and they were selling real estate

01:35:17.040 --> 01:35:26.400
 to make a living, even though their goal was to be a photographer and a painter.

01:35:26.400 --> 01:35:35.120
 And they met and it happened that right at that time, the Depression came, the real estate

01:35:35.120 --> 01:35:37.200
 market collapsed.

01:35:37.200 --> 01:35:47.040
 And so they decided to drop out, go over to the desert and become painters, basically

01:35:47.040 --> 01:35:49.520
 was their intention.

01:35:49.520 --> 01:36:01.120
 And they homesteaded a piece of the desert and set up a photography shop and a sign painting

01:36:01.120 --> 01:36:05.360
 studio and participated.

01:36:05.360 --> 01:36:13.800
 There were a lot of painters hanging around the desert doing desert scenery.

01:36:13.800 --> 01:36:23.720
 And I still have several of the paintings from these early California people, Carl Hoppe

01:36:23.720 --> 01:36:25.520
 and such.

01:36:25.520 --> 01:36:35.280
 So my parents' friends were, about half of their friends were this arty professional

01:36:35.280 --> 01:36:37.360
 painting crowd.

01:36:37.360 --> 01:36:54.520
 And so the atmosphere around the house gave as much respect to art as to science and politics.

01:36:54.520 --> 01:37:10.880
 And I think it was my parents' aspirations to be painters that when I was eight, I started

01:37:10.880 --> 01:37:18.520
 trying to understand drawing and learn how colors work.

01:37:18.520 --> 01:37:26.640
 And that was right about the same time I started becoming nearsighted and it made me very interested

01:37:26.640 --> 01:37:35.880
 at my mother's cameras in understanding optics and the physiology of what was happening to

01:37:35.880 --> 01:37:44.520
 my vision and the nature of light bouncing off.

01:37:44.520 --> 01:37:51.840
 For example, the hairs on my arm produced rainbows and I realized that it was the cell

01:37:51.840 --> 01:37:56.840
 structure of the hair acting as a diffraction grating.

01:37:56.840 --> 01:38:06.520
 And so for a high school term paper, I wrote about diffraction and was starting to study

01:38:06.520 --> 01:38:19.200
 the physics of it and the impressionist theory of light and how the light effect on the retina.

01:38:19.200 --> 01:38:29.840
 But then that, in trying to understand the physiology of light, I realized that the standard

01:38:29.840 --> 01:38:40.280
 idea that we have cells that respond to certain color frequencies, that supposedly accounts

01:38:40.280 --> 01:38:43.240
 for the colors we see.

01:38:43.240 --> 01:38:52.680
 But experiments were done in which, for example, if you, when you look through red glasses

01:38:52.680 --> 01:38:57.920
 and take them off after you've adapted, everything looks green.

01:38:57.920 --> 01:39:00.400
 You wear green glasses and everything looks red.

01:39:00.400 --> 01:39:09.020
 But some experimenters made the right side of each eye red and the left side green so

01:39:09.020 --> 01:39:14.680
 that when you would move your eyes to one side, you would see one color, to the other

01:39:14.680 --> 01:39:16.780
 side another color.

01:39:16.780 --> 01:39:26.520
 And taking those glasses off, the color after image was exactly the opposite.

01:39:26.520 --> 01:39:28.680
 Glasses were split down the middle.

01:39:28.680 --> 01:39:34.180
 Looking to the right, you'd see the opposite color to the left, showing that the color

01:39:34.180 --> 01:39:39.160
 perception is in the brain, not the eye.

01:39:39.160 --> 01:39:54.120
 So the interest in painting and representing reality, doing portraits was interesting because

01:39:54.120 --> 01:40:08.920
 I saw it as reflecting that person's presence at the moment, but doing it as a summation

01:40:08.920 --> 01:40:16.040
 of the expressions that I could see during the hour that I would be painting them.

01:40:16.040 --> 01:40:22.460
 I would see much more than a photograph at any one instant would see.

01:40:22.460 --> 01:40:31.680
 So there was this brain process added to what the retina is actually seeing.

01:40:31.680 --> 01:40:43.840
 And the people that I have known that kept their portraits for a long time, they tended

01:40:43.840 --> 01:40:50.520
 to look more and more like their portrait over the year because I had accentuated things

01:40:50.520 --> 01:41:01.080
 that a young face was only visible in a moving young face, but at any one moment, the elasticity

01:41:01.080 --> 01:41:03.200
 would make it disappear.

01:41:03.200 --> 01:41:10.960
 So as they got old, these expressions would gradually get more intense.

01:41:10.960 --> 01:41:25.120
 And so I was seeing painting as a way of exploring reality across time and focusing on the moment

01:41:25.120 --> 01:41:30.000
 but as a way to spend time.

01:41:30.000 --> 01:41:38.600
 And how much time do you spend now painting?

01:41:38.600 --> 01:41:46.920
 I suppose about a quarter of my time.

01:41:46.920 --> 01:41:56.080
 Lots of reading, little bits of writing, and resting by painting.

01:41:56.080 --> 01:42:03.920
 So how did you first find the work of Harold Hillman and how did that influence your views?

01:42:03.920 --> 01:42:15.440
 I'm not sure whether it was Hillman himself or people he had influenced by his early publications,

01:42:15.440 --> 01:42:23.560
 but there were several articles in Ling's little journal, Physiological Chemistry and

01:42:23.560 --> 01:42:36.680
 Physics that were showing the sensitivity of molecules to light and storing energy in

01:42:36.680 --> 01:42:42.960
 ways that ordinary bonds shouldn't be able to store.

01:42:42.960 --> 01:42:53.120
 And one article, I think it was several years after Ling's first publications, but one experimenter

01:42:53.120 --> 01:43:06.640
 measured the ATP hydrolysis in muscle as the pitch of a phone generator varied and found

01:43:06.640 --> 01:43:15.920
 that a certain frequency, like 240 cycles per second or something, was causing a rapid

01:43:15.920 --> 01:43:28.080
 hydrolysis of ATP, but the standard theory was that the amount of sound reaching an ATP

01:43:28.080 --> 01:43:33.800
 molecule was smaller than thermal random noise.

01:43:33.800 --> 01:43:38.840
 So they said that is impossible, but in fact they measured it.

01:43:38.840 --> 01:43:47.280
 And my interpretation of that was that it's because the muscle water system is acting

01:43:47.280 --> 01:43:57.560
 as an antenna and is actually summating energy over a huge range compared to the molecule

01:43:57.560 --> 01:44:03.360
 itself and its local heat vibrations.

01:44:03.360 --> 01:44:12.160
 So the antenna effect is something that I think Hillman was one of the people responsible

01:44:12.160 --> 01:44:16.120
 for spreading that through the culture.

01:44:16.120 --> 01:44:26.520
 And it was just maybe five years ago or so that I got his books from a Reichian.

01:44:26.520 --> 01:44:32.240
 Could you explain a little bit, break down Hillman's work for us?

01:44:32.240 --> 01:44:38.440
 About which, the resonance thing of...

01:44:38.440 --> 01:44:42.000
 His main thing seems to be artifacts.

01:44:42.000 --> 01:44:45.360
 Oh, yeah, yeah.

01:44:45.360 --> 01:44:50.680
 Everything in biology is artifactual.

01:44:50.680 --> 01:45:05.000
 When in a nerve muscle physiology lab, my professor only two or three times would stop

01:45:05.000 --> 01:45:12.840
 by my table and ask what I was doing.

01:45:12.840 --> 01:45:25.520
 And one of his visits, I had a microelectrode in a cell and I said, "Notice the oscilloscope

01:45:25.520 --> 01:45:35.960
 pattern is the same when I advance the electrode deeper into the cell and then it repeats in

01:45:35.960 --> 01:45:42.600
 reverse that same pattern as the electrode comes out of the cell.

01:45:42.600 --> 01:45:49.960
 And the membrane, if it's a membrane potential, the inside is supposed to be all the same

01:45:49.960 --> 01:45:51.440
 voltage."

01:45:51.440 --> 01:45:58.680
 And as soon as he saw what was happening, he turned and I don't think he ever spoke

01:45:58.680 --> 01:46:01.880
 to me again after that.

01:46:01.880 --> 01:46:09.560
 Obviously he had said something like, "Well, Peter, you going to study the mind or the

01:46:09.560 --> 01:46:10.560
 brain?"

01:46:10.560 --> 01:46:15.720
 He had apparently looked at my transcript and seen that I'd been a psychology major

01:46:15.720 --> 01:46:23.800
 for a while.

01:46:23.800 --> 01:46:32.160
 Most of the things I did in lab were like that, showing artifacts were everywhere.

01:46:32.160 --> 01:46:39.840
 That same professor had a grasshopper hooked up so that he could demonstrate stimulating

01:46:39.840 --> 01:46:43.480
 the muscle and making the grasshopper push its leg up.

01:46:43.480 --> 01:46:49.460
 He had the students put their finger on the grasshopper and then he would push the button.

01:46:49.460 --> 01:46:52.200
 They could feel how strong it was.

01:46:52.200 --> 01:46:58.720
 But when it was my turn, he turned his back and didn't invite me to touch the grasshopper.

01:46:58.720 --> 01:47:04.960
 But since he was turned back to me, I decided to touch the foot anyway.

01:47:04.960 --> 01:47:10.080
 And it held its foot up just from my touch.

01:47:10.080 --> 01:47:14.640
 And when I broke the touch, it dropped its foot back and I would touch it again and it

01:47:14.640 --> 01:47:18.800
 would push it up.

01:47:18.800 --> 01:47:23.760
 So it would have ruined his demonstration if I had...

01:47:23.760 --> 01:47:24.760
 He didn't know.

01:47:24.760 --> 01:47:33.840
 He just didn't want to give me a chance to disrupt things.

01:47:33.840 --> 01:47:43.600
 But there were lots of similar occasions in that same lab because some of the instrumentation

01:47:43.600 --> 01:47:48.760
 was sensitive electrical stuff, millivolt recorders and such.

01:47:48.760 --> 01:47:55.200
 And my fields would disrupt even the machines.

01:47:55.200 --> 01:48:04.520
 My lab partner had to operate the millivolt recorder because with my, at that time, very

01:48:04.520 --> 01:48:19.000
 high metabolic rate, I apparently had a big field that was overriding the instrumentation.

01:48:19.000 --> 01:48:22.400
 Did your field change once you started taking thyroid?

01:48:22.400 --> 01:48:27.520
 Yeah, I've never had those strange experiences.

01:48:27.520 --> 01:48:37.220
 In that same period, I visited some of my Reichian friends in San Francisco.

01:48:37.220 --> 01:48:47.280
 One of them worked at the Exploratorium and they took me there just after hours to show

01:48:47.280 --> 01:48:52.120
 me what was what with the Exploratorium.

01:48:52.120 --> 01:48:58.920
 And at one of the displays, it was a cloud chamber.

01:48:58.920 --> 01:49:08.680
 She turned it on and was going to show how you could visualize the cosmic rays in the

01:49:08.680 --> 01:49:09.800
 clouds.

01:49:09.800 --> 01:49:14.680
 And as it clouded up, that aroused my interest.

01:49:14.680 --> 01:49:21.780
 So I moved up close to the cabinet and the cloud disappeared in a cylinder shaped like

01:49:21.780 --> 01:49:22.780
 my body.

01:49:22.780 --> 01:49:33.720
 As I backed away, the cloud filled in the space and it was like there was a field destroying

01:49:33.720 --> 01:49:36.600
 the condensation in that area.

01:49:36.600 --> 01:49:49.560
 But as soon as I took thyroid, I've never had any of those excessive field effects.

01:49:49.560 --> 01:49:58.680
 Would you agree with Hillman's main findings about the cell when undergoing processing,

01:49:58.680 --> 01:50:00.680
 the main structures being artifacts?

01:50:00.680 --> 01:50:11.440
 Yeah, I took a microscopy technique course and prepared things for electron microscopes.

01:50:11.440 --> 01:50:21.380
 And knowing a show strands work, for example, I just tried some different fixatives instead

01:50:21.380 --> 01:50:24.900
 of a short chain fixative.

01:50:24.900 --> 01:50:37.000
 I tried using a long chain dialdehyde that would attach with more flexibility and fixing

01:50:37.000 --> 01:50:46.260
 things with these slightly different chemicals where the processing, the whole procedure

01:50:46.260 --> 01:50:51.940
 was supposed to produce a bilayer at the surface.

01:50:51.940 --> 01:51:02.260
 My cells sometimes would look like onions with surface bilayer effects, this one after

01:51:02.260 --> 01:51:12.340
 the other down through the cell.

01:51:12.340 --> 01:51:24.700
 The more subtle your problem, the more likely you are to have artifacts.

01:51:24.700 --> 01:51:35.660
 So it's really an art more than a scientific procedure.

01:51:35.660 --> 01:51:47.140
 A friend in Mexico gave me a very old, hundreds of years old book.

01:51:47.140 --> 01:51:58.460
 One of his books, he was a collector with an interest in medical anthropology.

01:51:58.460 --> 01:52:12.500
 One of his newer books, I think it was published in 1935 or 40, described how to treat ulcers

01:52:12.500 --> 01:52:16.580
 with osmic tetroxide, osmic acid.

01:52:16.580 --> 01:52:21.380
 It was a medical treatment.

01:52:21.380 --> 01:52:30.540
 And the description medically was that its purpose was to create a false membrane.

01:52:30.540 --> 01:52:35.980
 So this was a medical concept in 1940.

01:52:35.980 --> 01:52:47.500
 And at first, when people believed there was a membrane governing cells, at least that

01:52:47.500 --> 01:52:56.880
 line of thinking, they developed an electron microscope and prepared it with the techniques

01:52:56.880 --> 01:52:59.620
 that they used for light microscopes.

01:52:59.620 --> 01:53:01.620
 And there was no membrane at all.

01:53:01.620 --> 01:53:07.820
 It was just like a loaf of bread without a crust.

01:53:07.820 --> 01:53:13.380
 And over a period of several years, they evolved stains.

01:53:13.380 --> 01:53:23.220
 And it happened that this chemical that was known medically to create false membranes

01:53:23.220 --> 01:53:29.820
 turned out to make a membrane on all living cells.

01:53:29.820 --> 01:53:39.500
 So just looking at the culture history of how the cell membrane came to be visualized

01:53:39.500 --> 01:53:50.420
 in an electron microscope, it looks like beyond art, it was a sort of a deliberate creation

01:53:50.420 --> 01:53:54.420
 of a false image.

01:53:54.420 --> 01:54:00.780
 And what Hohmann would say, or what he did say, was he doesn't believe we've learned

01:54:00.780 --> 01:54:07.380
 anything useful in terms of the living cell studying under the electron microscope or

01:54:07.380 --> 01:54:15.300
 studying anything under the electron microscope as being useful.

01:54:15.300 --> 01:54:19.620
 I can't at the moment think of anything.

01:54:19.620 --> 01:54:30.500
 It's the same Gilbert Lange says that what has the membrane theory contributed.

01:54:30.500 --> 01:54:37.620
 Really nothing but entertainment for people who write textbooks.

01:54:37.620 --> 01:54:44.020
 Can you talk about how you discovered Gilbert Lange's work and how that changed things

01:54:44.020 --> 01:54:46.460
 for you?

01:54:46.460 --> 01:54:58.100
 In my first quarter at the University of Oregon, I had gone from having been thinking about

01:54:58.100 --> 01:55:00.300
 bio-linguistics and how the...

01:55:00.300 --> 01:55:03.020
 Sorry, hold on just one second.

01:55:03.020 --> 01:55:13.060
 When I started at the biology department at the University of Oregon, 1968, I had just

01:55:13.060 --> 01:55:21.180
 come back from a trip to Russia where I talked to Yuri Holodov about the effects of magnetic

01:55:21.180 --> 01:55:24.780
 fields on cells.

01:55:24.780 --> 01:55:34.860
 And I had done various kinds of experiments with studying.

01:55:34.860 --> 01:55:46.980
 In the '50s, my brother had been a radio ham and with his electronics equipment, I tested

01:55:46.980 --> 01:55:53.340
 all of our neighbors and found that the older a person is, the lower their conductivity

01:55:53.340 --> 01:55:55.340
 is.

01:55:55.340 --> 01:56:08.740
 And this, I later saw that even as I was aging into the '60s, I was coming up into the age

01:56:08.740 --> 01:56:14.380
 where my resistance should have been lower, but it was still the lowest of anyone.

01:56:14.380 --> 01:56:21.620
 And I realized that this was something about my odd high metabolic rate.

01:56:21.620 --> 01:56:26.980
 There was the higher your metabolic rate, the lower your resistance or the higher your

01:56:26.980 --> 01:56:28.460
 conductivity.

01:56:28.460 --> 01:56:38.540
 And I used some very fancy microvolt meters across the brain and on the long axis of the

01:56:38.540 --> 01:56:45.780
 body and such, and saw the same thing that the conductivity through my head was very

01:56:45.780 --> 01:56:53.100
 high, but the voltage was also very high.

01:56:53.100 --> 01:56:58.500
 When you have a good conductor, you would expect that to collapse the field.

01:56:58.500 --> 01:57:06.420
 But since it was being generated inside, there was a high polarity on the outside and over

01:57:06.420 --> 01:57:11.700
 the whole body at the same time that current flowed freely.

01:57:11.700 --> 01:57:19.740
 So it was flowing freely, but being separated and polarized.

01:57:19.740 --> 01:57:32.300
 So I came to nerve biology with these various perspectives that water was very important,

01:57:32.300 --> 01:57:42.980
 that the electrical fields were at least participating, if not governing.

01:57:42.980 --> 01:57:54.740
 And the lectures were strictly on the membrane polarity and everything being governed and

01:57:54.740 --> 01:58:02.620
 ruled by the so-called pumps and pores in the membrane.

01:58:02.620 --> 01:58:11.620
 And simultaneously, within a few months at least, there were some articles, I think in

01:58:11.620 --> 01:58:22.060
 the magazine Science, showing electron micrographs of particles of distilled water that showed

01:58:22.060 --> 01:58:25.980
 pore structure.

01:58:25.980 --> 01:58:33.300
 And the freezing process creates a very intense electrical field that can shape the direction

01:58:33.300 --> 01:58:35.220
 of crystallization.

01:58:35.220 --> 01:58:42.980
 But since I had seen these miniature particles of ice showing pores of the same dimension

01:58:42.980 --> 01:58:53.500
 that were postulated for the cell, I suspected that that was an artifact.

01:58:53.500 --> 01:59:00.660
 As far as they could create them in their imagery, I thought it was the same as the

01:59:00.660 --> 01:59:03.380
 purified distilled water.

01:59:03.380 --> 01:59:10.540
 And so I was skeptical that the professor would assign articles that backed up what

01:59:10.540 --> 01:59:14.980
 he was saying in 1935.

01:59:14.980 --> 01:59:20.740
 These studies proved that this is how a membrane works.

01:59:20.740 --> 01:59:28.500
 So I would go to find that journal, the Bound journal.

01:59:28.500 --> 01:59:36.660
 I would look in the index and look at everything else published that year by that journal.

01:59:36.660 --> 01:59:41.660
 And every time he would assign an article, I would see what else was being published

01:59:41.660 --> 01:59:43.300
 that year.

01:59:43.300 --> 01:59:55.220
 And I saw that there was something more sympathetic to my position that was being ignored in the

01:59:55.220 --> 01:59:56.820
 current view.

01:59:56.820 --> 02:00:04.820
 And as I followed these people across the years through the '40s, then I saw that

02:00:04.820 --> 02:00:14.980
 Gilbert Ling had, by 1950, sort of brought together several of these problems.

02:00:14.980 --> 02:00:25.060
 And it was only maybe a month into the fall term when I wrote to him and said, "As far

02:00:25.060 --> 02:00:32.980
 as I can see it, it looks like years ago you already solved all of the problems that are

02:00:32.980 --> 02:00:37.300
 now being taught in this course."

02:00:37.300 --> 02:00:49.020
 And he answered, said, "Your problem is that you don't understand what science is.

02:00:49.020 --> 02:01:00.180
 Science is seeking prestige and power and money."

02:01:00.180 --> 02:01:05.180
 Not about the pursuit of truth.

02:01:05.180 --> 02:01:10.860
 So with Ling's work, where did you go from there with it?

02:01:10.860 --> 02:01:19.020
 Did he still have more to follow or was that at a time when he'd already been pushed out?

02:01:19.020 --> 02:01:34.820
 Oh, well, I brought up his publications to some of my professors and really the intelligent

02:01:34.820 --> 02:01:40.940
 professors were not hostile to him at all.

02:01:40.940 --> 02:01:53.300
 And he was really like a litmus test for how anti-scientific a professor was, how readily

02:01:53.300 --> 02:02:03.780
 they would try to dispose of his whole position.

02:02:03.780 --> 02:02:15.500
 One of the both, I think Harold Hildman probably made a big point of the lack of high energy

02:02:15.500 --> 02:02:22.380
 bond in ATP.

02:02:22.380 --> 02:02:32.780
 The idea that it has 14 kilocalories per bond is required for running the pumps.

02:02:32.780 --> 02:02:38.340
 And Gilbert Ling said, "Even if you assume that it has this high energy, there's not

02:02:38.340 --> 02:02:43.420
 enough of it being produced to run the pumps that they say are necessary."

02:02:43.420 --> 02:02:54.540
 But I think Podolsky was the first one to disprove the high energy bond in 1956.

02:02:54.540 --> 02:03:01.620
 And I read, I think it was two or three years later, an article by one of my professors,

02:03:01.620 --> 02:03:12.140
 Sidney Bernhard, and I was doing something in his lab and he, outside of his lectures,

02:03:12.140 --> 02:03:17.980
 he seemed not to be a conversationalist.

02:03:17.980 --> 02:03:24.260
 He was on my committee, but I think we only exchanged maybe a dozen sentences over the

02:03:24.260 --> 02:03:25.260
 years.

02:03:25.260 --> 02:03:35.140
 But I said, "I saw your publication demonstrating that ATP doesn't have a high energy bond,

02:03:35.140 --> 02:03:43.020
 maybe four kilocalories or something, but all these people, but everyone is basing their

02:03:43.020 --> 02:03:45.780
 models of muscle function and so on."

02:03:45.780 --> 02:03:50.660
 He said, "Not everyone is."

02:03:50.660 --> 02:04:04.900
 But people like that, with the facts, for many years, simply saying not everyone is

02:04:04.900 --> 02:04:08.380
 is a dogmatic idiot.

02:04:08.380 --> 02:04:19.500
 What about May Wan Ho?

02:04:19.500 --> 02:04:31.820
 She's, her visualization of optical coherence, I think, is just massively important.

02:04:31.820 --> 02:04:44.660
 And the whole idea of how light works in organisms, I think, is just as mysterious and under-explained

02:04:44.660 --> 02:04:51.700
 and under-appreciated as how electricity works in organisms.

02:04:51.700 --> 02:05:02.620
 In Lake Potts Squirrel in Michoacan, the fish, they call them white fish, but they're actually

02:05:02.620 --> 02:05:08.380
 clear fish when they're alive or uncooked.

02:05:08.380 --> 02:05:19.540
 And the people selling them in the square would lay out a pile of these fish about the

02:05:19.540 --> 02:05:25.500
 shape and size of little perches and others that were much smaller.

02:05:25.500 --> 02:05:31.620
 But they would lay them on a pile of magazines, and you could read the magazine through the

02:05:31.620 --> 02:05:41.060
 body of the fish that was maybe as much as an inch thick, just glassy clarity.

02:05:41.060 --> 02:05:49.500
 And when they were cooked, you could see that they had heart and liver and bones, everything

02:05:49.500 --> 02:05:58.700
 that should have been visible as you looked through this apparently perfectly transparent

02:05:58.700 --> 02:06:02.260
 jelly appearance.

02:06:02.260 --> 02:06:12.900
 And I don't think anyone other than something like wave guides going right around the blood

02:06:12.900 --> 02:06:24.260
 vessels so that a stream of blood going through an artery doesn't cause anything visible.

02:06:24.260 --> 02:06:35.500
 Apparently the passive light that you're seeing is bypassing everything opaque or colored.

02:06:35.500 --> 02:06:45.220
 And I've heard that there's a lizard in Hawaii that's transparent.

02:06:45.220 --> 02:07:00.380
 And so to understand the cornea and the vitreous of the eye, something similar but not nearly

02:07:00.380 --> 02:07:07.820
 as confusing and problematic as the whole animal that's transparent.

02:07:07.820 --> 02:07:14.060
 But it's essential to understand what light is doing in the organism.

02:07:14.060 --> 02:07:23.060
 And when the sun shines through your ears, they look bright red.

02:07:23.060 --> 02:07:34.740
 The same, you put a flashlight on your hand in the dark, you see red coming through.

02:07:34.740 --> 02:07:44.820
 That shows that our semi-opaque tissues are pretty transparent to red, meaning that the

02:07:44.820 --> 02:07:49.580
 blue and green are being absorbed.

02:07:49.580 --> 02:07:56.100
 But still the transparency is very impressive for red light.

02:07:56.100 --> 02:08:06.900
 And the penetrating light from ordinary daylight happens to be absorbed.

02:08:06.900 --> 02:08:20.420
 This relatively low energy red light is resonated with by the copper atoms that are, for example,

02:08:20.420 --> 02:08:25.020
 in the respiratory pigment cytochrome c oxidase.

02:08:25.020 --> 02:08:34.220
 And during stress, just prolonged metabolism in the dark, this enzyme loses its activity

02:08:34.220 --> 02:08:39.900
 as the copper goes somewhere that it shouldn't be.

02:08:39.900 --> 02:08:47.180
 And passing light through it, the energy of red light is apparently enough to boost the

02:08:47.180 --> 02:08:53.660
 copper out of its ineffective trap and back into where it should be.

02:08:53.660 --> 02:09:06.260
 And experimenters with gamma rays giving a killing dose of gamma radiation to a frog,

02:09:06.260 --> 02:09:12.700
 if they shined bright red light on the frog within the first hour, it wasn't harmed by

02:09:12.700 --> 02:09:14.660
 the radiation.

02:09:14.660 --> 02:09:24.100
 And apparently there's something analogous to everyday restoration of the living function

02:09:24.100 --> 02:09:28.660
 by restoring copper to the respiratory pigment.

02:09:28.660 --> 02:09:39.140
 Something analogous seems to inactivate the radiation damage by putting electrons or ions

02:09:39.140 --> 02:09:46.340
 back into a functional rather than a trap where they would simply cause progressive

02:09:46.340 --> 02:09:47.860
 damage.

02:09:47.860 --> 02:09:57.140
 And you can bleach if you put salt or glass or whatever, any crystal into intense gamma

02:09:57.140 --> 02:10:01.540
 or x-rays, you can turn it purple, for example.

02:10:01.540 --> 02:10:09.460
 But with a slightly less intense radiation tuned to that particular color, you can bleach

02:10:09.460 --> 02:10:12.060
 the crystal again.

02:10:12.060 --> 02:10:20.980
 And so I think the red light detoxifying of gamma rays is equivalent to bleaching a radiation

02:10:20.980 --> 02:10:25.020
 tinted stone.

02:10:25.020 --> 02:10:43.220
 And similar things have been seen with plant material that in a bright light, the electrons

02:10:43.220 --> 02:10:52.300
 are put into an activated state so that if you put it in an ESR, electron spin resonance

02:10:52.300 --> 02:11:02.380
 machine or a paramagnetic resonance detector, you can detect free radicals or excited electrons.

02:11:02.380 --> 02:11:12.780
 And so if you come in out of the sun for a few hours after being sun exposed, your hair

02:11:12.780 --> 02:11:16.500
 in this machine will show excited electrons.

02:11:16.500 --> 02:11:24.860
 And a piece of plant material will persist in the dark with these electrons still being

02:11:24.860 --> 02:11:27.740
 sensitive and detectable.

02:11:27.740 --> 02:11:37.980
 But if you shine red light on that bit of material, it quenches the free radicals and

02:11:37.980 --> 02:11:43.700
 stops the ESR signal.

02:11:43.700 --> 02:11:53.660
 So I think the penetrating light is a very important biological function.

02:11:53.660 --> 02:12:04.140
 And the way the light is handled, the coherence of the crystal structure is probably involved

02:12:04.140 --> 02:12:11.700
 in how sensitive we are to the benefit from it.

02:12:11.700 --> 02:12:21.900
 Faisalko Trump, who founded, I think it was International Biometeorological Society, something

02:12:21.900 --> 02:12:30.940
 like that, and a journal, one of his early books was called Psychical Physics.

02:12:30.940 --> 02:12:45.420
 And he investigated as a physicist the forces involved in dousing and showed that with an

02:12:45.420 --> 02:12:57.980
 electrical detector, he could detect the fields produced by a slow current of water underground

02:12:57.980 --> 02:13:06.420
 that these folk dousers would use a stick or wire or something to detect.

02:13:06.420 --> 02:13:12.700
 He showed that you could measure an actual electrical current produced by the water that

02:13:12.700 --> 02:13:14.220
 they were finding.

02:13:14.220 --> 02:13:25.540
 And so experimentally, he would bury a wire under the ground and produce a current similar

02:13:25.540 --> 02:13:28.780
 to what he had measured produced naturally.

02:13:28.780 --> 02:13:36.020
 And he tested his dousers and they could always find the wire.

02:13:36.020 --> 02:13:44.820
 I got some of these references from Holodov on my visit to Moscow.

02:13:44.820 --> 02:13:48.740
 He had a good bibliography that he gave me.

02:13:48.740 --> 02:13:57.500
 So I started reading this stuff when I was in biology at the same time.

02:13:57.500 --> 02:14:04.340
 May Wan Ho described the moment when she saw the effects of the, we're viewing the drosophilia

02:14:04.340 --> 02:14:13.580
 under the polarized light microscope, kind of a defining moment for her, scientifically,

02:14:13.580 --> 02:14:15.380
 aesthetically.

02:14:15.380 --> 02:14:26.700
 Do you agree with her, I guess, conclusions about why those organisms seem to emit that

02:14:26.700 --> 02:14:31.740
 rainbow or view, you can view that rainbow pattern?

02:14:31.740 --> 02:14:36.420
 She talks about it being a coherent crystalline structure.

02:14:36.420 --> 02:14:43.820
 Yeah, that's why I started talking about Tsolkova Trump because he already, in 1942 or so, was

02:14:43.820 --> 02:14:48.980
 talking about liquid crystal structure of living material.

02:14:48.980 --> 02:14:57.660
 And the idea of antennas in the water structure of the cell and the fields metabolically projected

02:14:57.660 --> 02:15:01.500
 from one cell to the other.

02:15:01.500 --> 02:15:08.980
 I think May Wan Ho is giving an image that ties all of this together.

02:15:08.980 --> 02:15:19.980
 The metabolizing cell produces a field and is able to respond to fields with its coherent

02:15:19.980 --> 02:15:23.460
 internal antenna-like structure.

02:15:23.460 --> 02:15:29.300
 But each of these is both a projector and a receiver.

02:15:29.300 --> 02:15:42.500
 And so the cells are coherent electronically and probably in many other ways.

02:15:42.500 --> 02:15:52.900
 All of the chemical functions are involved in the alkalinity, electrical charge, redox

02:15:52.900 --> 02:15:59.300
 processes, generation of fields and production of structure.

02:15:59.300 --> 02:16:09.460
 And so she is just giving kind of the finishing touch, showing that, yes, in fact, the organism

02:16:09.460 --> 02:16:15.860
 is coherent the way it seems to be in functioning.

02:16:15.860 --> 02:16:17.940
 Great.

02:16:17.940 --> 02:16:28.540
 Then let's move on to Gerald Pollack.

02:16:28.540 --> 02:16:33.860
 It seems like you were already familiar with, I guess, many of the precursors to what Gerald

02:16:33.860 --> 02:16:35.660
 Pollack's doing today.

02:16:35.660 --> 02:16:45.420
 I think the most impressive thing about him, besides his ability to communicate and convince,

02:16:45.420 --> 02:16:54.060
 I think the most impressive thing is that he came up as a conventional muscle biologist

02:16:54.060 --> 02:17:05.700
 and could actually respond to problems and perceptions and change and go off in this

02:17:05.700 --> 02:17:08.780
 extremely important direction.

02:17:08.780 --> 02:17:14.700
 I think it's just amazing as a personality possibility.

02:17:14.700 --> 02:17:21.020
 I guess if you could talk a little bit about structured water in general, just the properties

02:17:21.020 --> 02:17:23.740
 of water.

02:17:23.740 --> 02:17:38.020
 I ran across it, I think it was J.D. Bernal who had a monthly article in a political magazine

02:17:38.020 --> 02:17:47.580
 about talking about the universe and substance, and he talked about structured water.

02:17:47.580 --> 02:17:58.340
 I think he mentioned Max Perutz and his demonstration of very long-range ordering in hemoglobin

02:17:58.340 --> 02:18:04.820
 crystals or some protein crystal.

02:18:04.820 --> 02:18:16.540
 From that I saw that there were things like clay chemists seeing necessarily structured

02:18:16.540 --> 02:18:27.220
 organizing effects of water, applying forces and arranging in an orderly way flakes of

02:18:27.220 --> 02:18:34.780
 clay material and affecting the properties of the macroscopic thing.

02:18:34.780 --> 02:18:44.820
 And around that time, when I was in high school, I had heard stories about Albert St. Georgie's

02:18:44.820 --> 02:18:56.780
 lecture demonstrations of muscle contraction changing the way light causes, in one case,

02:18:56.780 --> 02:19:05.500
 fluorescence of a molecule in the muscle, and when the muscle contracts, that fluorescence

02:19:05.500 --> 02:19:19.220
 disappears showing that the electron response to light is governed by the state of the water

02:19:19.220 --> 02:19:20.620
 in the muscle cell.

02:19:20.620 --> 02:19:32.020
 And later, trying to find out more about those experiments, I saw that he had demonstrated

02:19:32.020 --> 02:19:43.780
 that there's an electron donor-acceptor process, and that if you put in a properly tuned donor

02:19:43.780 --> 02:19:52.140
 and acceptor molecule, the electron moves and will cause the muscle to contract.

02:19:52.140 --> 02:20:02.740
 But you can put the same chemicals in a different combination, in a combination that doesn't

02:20:02.740 --> 02:20:12.380
 have the right tuning, so that the electron doesn't move, the muscle doesn't contract.

02:20:12.380 --> 02:20:28.940
 So that involved oxidation and electrical behavior and led to accidentally noticing

02:20:28.940 --> 02:20:37.860
 that someone who in the '40s, the underground mimeographed leaflets that were circulating

02:20:37.860 --> 02:20:46.300
 in the 1940s were describing William Frederick Coke's troubles with the government.

02:20:46.300 --> 02:20:58.540
 And the government twice tried to convict him of various medical crimes, but in both

02:20:58.540 --> 02:21:07.780
 cases he got his patients to testify that the government was lying and fabricating evidence

02:21:07.780 --> 02:21:11.700
 and harming witnesses and so on.

02:21:11.700 --> 02:21:19.300
 So I knew about W.F. Coke, and I found that there was an amazing parallel between Albert

02:21:19.300 --> 02:21:28.820
 St. Georgi's work with free radical or electron donor-acceptor states and stuff that W.F.

02:21:28.820 --> 02:21:40.020
 Coke had postulated and worked with beginning 1912, was his first publication, and he left

02:21:40.020 --> 02:21:44.900
 Detroit I think around 1926.

02:21:44.900 --> 02:21:57.340
 And then St. Georgi in the '20s and '30s was doing supposedly his own thinking, but

02:21:57.340 --> 02:22:03.620
 it happened to be expanding and exploring W.F.

02:22:03.620 --> 02:22:12.260
 Coke's previous work, and it led to St. Georgi getting the Nobel Prize and such.

02:22:12.260 --> 02:22:21.060
 But he never, until very nearly at the end of his life, St. Georgi never mentioned W.F.

02:22:21.060 --> 02:22:22.060
 Coke.

02:22:22.060 --> 02:22:34.220
 But Moses Gomberg, the person who postulated free radicals, was at the University of Michigan

02:22:34.220 --> 02:22:44.260
 and when Coke was an undergraduate there, and so Coke had inside knowledge of what a

02:22:44.260 --> 02:22:52.420
 free radical was and saw that dilution of Moses Gomberg's.

02:22:52.420 --> 02:23:01.660
 It was a complex arrangement of phenolic groups that hysterically, these big groups tended

02:23:01.660 --> 02:23:09.020
 to pull it apart and leave free electrons stranded simply because of the electrical

02:23:09.020 --> 02:23:12.140
 repulsion of the benzene groups.

02:23:12.140 --> 02:23:20.780
 And so at high dilution, suddenly a clear solution would become dark purple.

02:23:20.780 --> 02:23:31.320
 And this impressed Coke and started his thinking, and it eventually led to St. Georgi's thinking.

02:23:31.320 --> 02:23:43.820
 But in Coke's work, he saw that the carbonyl group, especially if it is resonating with

02:23:43.820 --> 02:23:54.140
 another double bonded two carbons, this intensified the effect of the carbonyl group, which is

02:23:54.140 --> 02:23:56.140
 attracting electrons.

02:23:56.140 --> 02:24:02.460
 The oxygen is making it slightly acidic and electron attracting.

02:24:02.460 --> 02:24:12.060
 And nitrogens, especially if they are resonating with a double bond, they can be a strong electron

02:24:12.060 --> 02:24:15.820
 donating basic group.

02:24:15.820 --> 02:24:25.620
 And Coke, thinking about the properties that govern free radicals, just the right degree

02:24:25.620 --> 02:24:29.180
 of oxidation would activate the electrons.

02:24:29.180 --> 02:24:38.980
 And too much of the electron donating nitrogen groups would blot out that activated effect,

02:24:38.980 --> 02:24:40.940
 would neutralize it.

02:24:40.940 --> 02:24:53.820
 And just by very clear imagining, he said, maybe that's, well, it was more complicated

02:24:53.820 --> 02:24:57.020
 than abstract, absolute imagination.

02:24:57.020 --> 02:25:05.700
 He took out the animal's parathyroid glands and showed that although their calcium does

02:25:05.700 --> 02:25:11.640
 go down and they got convulsions, he found that he could stop the convulsions by giving

02:25:11.640 --> 02:25:17.020
 them salt, sodium chloride or potassium chloride or magnesium.

02:25:17.020 --> 02:25:20.420
 It wasn't just a calcium deficiency.

02:25:20.420 --> 02:25:28.500
 But he found that in the absence of the parathyroid, as they developed convulsions, they put out

02:25:28.500 --> 02:25:34.100
 guanidine in the urine, that very hundred times normal amount.

02:25:34.100 --> 02:25:40.740
 And that this is a quenching type of amino group.

02:25:40.740 --> 02:25:49.900
 And so that started him thinking on the implications of oxidation, reduction, imbalance.

02:25:49.900 --> 02:26:00.620
 And that led to his developing an activated carbonyl treatment for allergies, cancer,

02:26:00.620 --> 02:26:05.460
 infections, basically everything biological.

02:26:05.460 --> 02:26:09.620
 And that was what impressed St. Georgi.

02:26:09.620 --> 02:26:20.460
 And so St. Georgi's concern with the idea of finding just the right electron acceptor

02:26:20.460 --> 02:26:28.340
 was exactly what Koch had postulated, that you need a certain carbonyl activated group.

02:26:28.340 --> 02:26:35.660
 And this was when I started studying the effects of estrogen and progesterone.

02:26:35.660 --> 02:26:46.060
 I saw that progesterone had the carbonyl and estrogen had the phenolic, potentially donatable

02:26:46.060 --> 02:26:50.860
 hydrogen.

02:26:50.860 --> 02:27:10.180
 And St. Georgi's idea that it was the interaction of oxidation structuring the water and the

02:27:10.180 --> 02:27:21.020
 bad electrons destructuring the water that was, I think, the vital central line of St.

02:27:21.020 --> 02:27:22.020
 Georgi's work.

02:27:22.020 --> 02:27:34.220
 Linus Pauling got in the news in 1960 by theorizing that water structuring around a noble gas

02:27:34.220 --> 02:27:44.700
 can explain anesthesia or hydrophobic molecules introduced into the cell will bind water and

02:27:44.700 --> 02:27:46.180
 cause the structuring.

02:27:46.180 --> 02:27:56.820
 But although Pauling popularized the idea of structured water, it was really St. Georgi,

02:27:56.820 --> 02:28:07.100
 Gilbert Ling, and several other people who had already been biologizing the concept.

02:28:07.100 --> 02:28:16.660
 It was implicit in Salko Trump's idea of the electronic sensitivity, the crystalline

02:28:16.660 --> 02:28:21.420
 idea, liquid crystalline cell model.

02:28:21.420 --> 02:28:32.020
 And St. Georgi added the refinement that cells can go back and forth between disorganized

02:28:32.020 --> 02:28:39.380
 water and organized water as part of their functioning.

02:28:39.380 --> 02:28:51.900
 And having read that sort of background, then the reason I submitted those articles to Gilbert

02:28:51.900 --> 02:29:01.580
 Ling's journal was that I saw that all of the enzymes that were known to shift under

02:29:01.580 --> 02:29:13.100
 the influence of excess estrogen happened to be governed by water structure.

02:29:13.100 --> 02:29:22.940
 If you cool most enzymes, their activity simply goes down steadily with the lower temperature

02:29:22.940 --> 02:29:30.480
 as chemicals are less energized to react.

02:29:30.480 --> 02:29:37.980
 But certain enzymes at a certain temperature have a sudden collapse and a complete disappearance

02:29:37.980 --> 02:29:44.860
 of activity, the cold inactivated enzymes.

02:29:44.860 --> 02:29:55.140
 And these are the crucial enzymes for responding to estrogen.

02:29:55.140 --> 02:30:02.780
 But typically, the organism under the influence of estrogen lowers its actual temperature.

02:30:02.780 --> 02:30:13.680
 And as the structural temperature of water, the idea of structural temperature is that

02:30:13.680 --> 02:30:22.580
 cold water is more structured than water that's almost boiling, which has lost a lot of structure.

02:30:22.580 --> 02:30:31.440
 And so the structural temperature is increasing at lower temperatures.

02:30:31.440 --> 02:30:42.460
 But estrogen, by breaking down the structure, can, even at a low temperature, make the water

02:30:42.460 --> 02:30:44.840
 seem to be hot.

02:30:44.840 --> 02:30:58.600
 So estrogen can activate enzymes that are inactivated even at body temperature, 37 degrees.

02:30:58.600 --> 02:31:08.200
 The structuring of water done by the various energy processes inactivates this whole class

02:31:08.200 --> 02:31:10.100
 of enzymes.

02:31:10.100 --> 02:31:13.120
 And estrogen can override that.

02:31:13.120 --> 02:31:21.620
 And even as the body cools itself to try to increase the structure of water, estrogen

02:31:21.620 --> 02:31:27.360
 can keep destructuring the water, overriding the cooling.

02:31:27.360 --> 02:31:35.660
 So you can cool off and keep functioning to some extent, but at a certain point, too much

02:31:35.660 --> 02:31:43.000
 estrogen not only makes you cold, but then can activate things that shouldn't be activated.

02:31:43.000 --> 02:31:54.220
 And that involves cell division, water uptake, fat production, failure to oxidize glucose

02:31:54.220 --> 02:32:01.200
 into carbon dioxide, and that contributes to the destructuring effect.

02:32:01.200 --> 02:32:12.720
 So the toxic effects of too much estrogen I saw as analogous to all of the dangerous

02:32:12.720 --> 02:32:18.080
 stressors, radiation, aging, lack of oxygen, and so on.

02:32:18.080 --> 02:32:27.360
 Do you think you could give us a brief description of what the association induction hypothesis

02:32:27.360 --> 02:32:31.080
 is, Gilbert Lange's theory?

02:32:31.080 --> 02:32:32.080
 Yes.

02:32:32.080 --> 02:32:52.160
 My approach to Lange came through these pre-Lange people and problems.

02:32:52.160 --> 02:33:07.760
 And so when I saw Lange's first book and his confirmation that, in fact, people hadn't

02:33:07.760 --> 02:33:22.880
 found any problem that hurt his theory, that encouraged me to explore what he was doing

02:33:22.880 --> 02:33:34.080
 with his approach and how it related to other people with an anti-membrane approach to cell

02:33:34.080 --> 02:33:36.240
 function.

02:33:36.240 --> 02:33:50.160
 And that required thinking about Bungenberg de Jong and his complex coacervate theory,

02:33:50.160 --> 02:34:04.560
 which was, I think, more interesting than Oprin's idea of early colloidal life.

02:34:04.560 --> 02:34:15.480
 The behavior of several components in a system spontaneously breaking up into highly structured

02:34:15.480 --> 02:34:25.680
 systems was giving a physical chemical basis that was more complex than Oprin's sort

02:34:25.680 --> 02:34:28.040
 of abstract thing.

02:34:28.040 --> 02:34:44.360
 And looking at other ways to see these physical systems having lifelike properties, much more

02:34:44.360 --> 02:34:49.640
 chemical and involved than J.C.

02:34:49.640 --> 02:34:54.400
 Bose had done with his physical sensitivities and so on.

02:34:54.400 --> 02:35:07.880
 But all of the ion-selective properties, for example, that you can see in a water softener

02:35:07.880 --> 02:35:17.720
 and that are in contemporary biology, they're ascribed to the membrane and its pumps and

02:35:17.720 --> 02:35:31.560
 pores, but not only a chemically engineered gel or resin for softening water, but if you

02:35:31.560 --> 02:35:40.920
 take a piece of hair, thoroughly dead cells, and wash all of the ions out of it and then

02:35:40.920 --> 02:35:49.440
 dip it in serum, it will select against a gradient, excluding sodium and concentrating

02:35:49.440 --> 02:35:52.040
 potassium.

02:35:52.040 --> 02:36:05.680
 And so Gilbert Ling's detailed analysis of how a water softener works is really all

02:36:05.680 --> 02:36:19.960
 the imagery you need, that it's an electrically active polymer holding stuff with some steadiness

02:36:19.960 --> 02:36:32.520
 in a gel system that affects the water around it and so excludes because of its structural,

02:36:32.520 --> 02:36:36.840
 polymeric and electrical properties.

02:36:36.840 --> 02:36:45.720
 Simply like clay or hair or anything, it's simply selective in how it interacts with

02:36:45.720 --> 02:36:48.760
 its environment.

02:36:48.760 --> 02:36:59.080
 And Bungenberg de Jong's complex coacervate was doing the same thing.

02:36:59.080 --> 02:37:11.680
 And Ling complexified his arguments to meet the objections of the people who simply had

02:37:11.680 --> 02:37:13.840
 something wrong with their brains.

02:37:13.840 --> 02:37:28.160
 And so he really just massively swamped all of the arguments and that accounts for a lot

02:37:28.160 --> 02:37:40.040
 of what makes it hard to read, is that he's doing such a detailed job of trying to counter

02:37:40.040 --> 02:37:47.440
 irrationality all the way through biology.

02:37:47.440 --> 02:37:55.900
 The idea of the electron cloud is where Gilbert Ling and W.F.

02:37:55.900 --> 02:38:04.960
 Koch and St. Georgi have great overlap, but neither St. Georgi nor Gilbert Ling talked

02:38:04.960 --> 02:38:08.120
 about each other very much, I don't think.

02:38:08.120 --> 02:38:17.520
 But the electron withdrawing Lewis acid, for example, carbon dioxide is a Lewis acid, two

02:38:17.520 --> 02:38:21.920
 carbonyls and W.F.

02:38:21.920 --> 02:38:33.840
 Koch's reagent in some of the models, it included a chain of parallel carbonyls.

02:38:33.840 --> 02:38:42.280
 And his way of identifying it was that the free radicals at a very high dilution caused

02:38:42.280 --> 02:38:45.160
 his solution to be purple.

02:38:45.160 --> 02:38:49.280
 So there was almost nothing present, but it was purple.

02:38:49.280 --> 02:38:53.440
 And the government said, "There's nothing there, it's a fraud.

02:38:53.440 --> 02:38:55.480
 We can't detect it."

02:38:55.480 --> 02:39:00.640
 But they didn't have electron spin resonance machines yet.

02:39:00.640 --> 02:39:06.960
 When they came into existence, they said, "Oh yeah, the cells are full of free radicals.

02:39:06.960 --> 02:39:16.080
 This thing that makes mitochondria able to respire, the ubiquitous quinone."

02:39:16.080 --> 02:39:20.520
 And the quinones were part of W.F.

02:39:20.520 --> 02:39:24.800
 Koch's reagent.

02:39:24.800 --> 02:39:32.160
 So the government was simply ignorant and irrational in saying that it was fraud because

02:39:32.160 --> 02:39:34.240
 they couldn't...

02:39:34.240 --> 02:39:40.840
 He demonstrated in court, he would mix his stuff as he used it therapeutically and then

02:39:40.840 --> 02:39:44.880
 gave it to the government to test.

02:39:44.880 --> 02:39:47.400
 They said, "There's nothing there."

02:39:47.400 --> 02:39:58.040
 And that was why the jury acquitted him, because the government was simply incompetent.

02:39:58.040 --> 02:40:04.440
 This is totally an aside, but is that same property what gives liver its dark color?

02:40:04.440 --> 02:40:07.120
 That's George's theory.

02:40:07.120 --> 02:40:13.560
 And if you grind liver up with water, it fades.

02:40:13.560 --> 02:40:17.920
 And that was an essential part of it.

02:40:17.920 --> 02:40:19.920
 In the brain, you have pigmented stuff.

02:40:19.920 --> 02:40:25.120
 And he said, "What's it doing there in the dark?"

02:40:25.120 --> 02:40:27.020
 It's doing something metabolically.

02:40:27.020 --> 02:40:35.000
 But I think the red light is actually doing something to it too.

02:40:35.000 --> 02:40:45.480
 What would you say biological energy is and why is understanding it so important?

02:40:45.480 --> 02:41:03.480
 That's something that the way you go about answering it explains who you are, really.

02:41:03.480 --> 02:41:12.000
 For thousands of years, people had different ways of talking about biological energy.

02:41:12.000 --> 02:41:25.240
 That it's something that makes potential become real and it's something that causes change

02:41:25.240 --> 02:41:26.760
 of properties.

02:41:26.760 --> 02:41:29.600
 It's a property of matter.

02:41:29.600 --> 02:41:36.800
 And some of the first physicists called it the living force.

02:41:36.800 --> 02:41:48.600
 So physical force, physical energy, originally was somehow identified with life process itself.

02:41:48.600 --> 02:42:01.040
 They used life language to explain the energy involved in swinging balls or converting motion

02:42:01.040 --> 02:42:04.280
 to heat and so on.

02:42:04.280 --> 02:42:17.800
 And from about Leibniz' time on, it became abstracted increasingly until they got a very

02:42:17.800 --> 02:42:22.760
 neat conservation idea for energy.

02:42:22.760 --> 02:42:32.080
 That this property, which is the living force in something moving, kinetic energy, this

02:42:32.080 --> 02:42:43.240
 is the same stuff which changes and becomes a heat property in something else or in the

02:42:43.240 --> 02:42:44.720
 same stuff.

02:42:44.720 --> 02:42:53.000
 And this heat property is also the kinetic energy which can become chemical energy and

02:42:53.000 --> 02:42:59.800
 stored and released by burning and so on.

02:42:59.800 --> 02:43:07.160
 And potential energy is even abstracter.

02:43:07.160 --> 02:43:18.360
 It's related to, for example, the distance between charges and separation of heavy objects

02:43:18.360 --> 02:43:19.400
 and so on.

02:43:19.400 --> 02:43:35.720
 But despite the abstraction of it, the idea that it's a property of things or of matter,

02:43:35.720 --> 02:43:46.480
 it's okay when you start thinking about hysteresis, the trace that energy leaves in matter as

02:43:46.480 --> 02:43:50.640
 it runs through whatever it is.

02:43:50.640 --> 02:43:58.240
 One substance passing through another one or near another one traces some kind of a

02:43:58.240 --> 02:44:09.120
 track that is more or less detectable as an interaction.

02:44:09.120 --> 02:44:27.240
 And that idea that the energy produces a change in the arrangement of substance, that's

02:44:27.240 --> 02:44:34.760
 I think the most important idea for thinking about biological energy.

02:44:34.760 --> 02:44:50.440
 Vernadsky, who integrated biology with cosmology, and he showed that organisms through photosynthesis

02:44:50.440 --> 02:45:02.680
 and metabolism are converting solar energy, light and heat, to structure.

02:45:02.680 --> 02:45:13.640
 First they turn carbon dioxide and water to sugar and then the sugar is processed through

02:45:13.640 --> 02:45:22.680
 the cells and eventually you get an organism which has this energy flowing through it.

02:45:22.680 --> 02:45:34.160
 And the more intense the flow, the more hysteresis is writing changes in the structure and capturing

02:45:34.160 --> 02:45:39.200
 some of the energy in the form of complexity.

02:45:39.200 --> 02:45:52.880
 And Vernadsky described the tendency of any system in terms of the French person describing

02:45:52.880 --> 02:46:02.480
 a disturbed system that readjusts to minimize the disturbance, le châtelier.

02:46:02.480 --> 02:46:12.640
 Vernadsky simply applied that to the cosmos and showed that solar energy being absorbed

02:46:12.640 --> 02:46:19.240
 on the earth complexifies and generates structure.

02:46:19.240 --> 02:46:29.160
 And that the structure tends to maximize the flow of energy through itself.

02:46:29.160 --> 02:46:34.680
 And in the case of plants this leads to very, very big sequoia trees and such.

02:46:34.680 --> 02:46:42.440
 In the case of animals you get elephants and especially the brain, there's a tendency,

02:46:42.440 --> 02:46:51.120
 the brain is part of the complexifying of the organism so that you can get more complex

02:46:51.120 --> 02:46:58.960
 structures of all sorts as well as a greater complexity of energy processing right in the

02:46:58.960 --> 02:46:59.960
 brain.

02:46:59.960 --> 02:47:15.480
 So the biggest brain is projected to come in the future as the energy supply becomes

02:47:15.480 --> 02:47:17.960
 greater.

02:47:17.960 --> 02:47:30.840
 And so he saw life as being driven rather than as being an accidental accumulation that

02:47:30.840 --> 02:47:35.480
 somehow at its essence was random.

02:47:35.480 --> 02:47:47.520
 For him the whole process from the bottom up is driven and tending to a maximum of complexity.

02:47:47.520 --> 02:48:02.360
 The idea that it's the flow of energy through the whole system that constitutes us and that

02:48:02.360 --> 02:48:10.440
 all of our functions and purposes are energy exchanges.

02:48:10.440 --> 02:48:21.760
 So in our very being we represent the history of energy flowing and everything we do involves

02:48:21.760 --> 02:48:22.760
 consciousness.

02:48:22.760 --> 02:48:33.000
 I think the essential way to grasp consciousness is that it's what happens when you have a

02:48:33.000 --> 02:48:39.560
 very complex flow of information through stuff.

02:48:39.560 --> 02:48:47.400
 If you simply heat a rock on one side, energy is flowing through it and it's creating some

02:48:47.400 --> 02:48:50.040
 coherent processes.

02:48:50.040 --> 02:49:00.640
 But when you get a nervous system and all of the complex juices surrounding the nerves

02:49:00.640 --> 02:49:10.680
 and the electrical fields interacting, then the flow of energy through a system, essentially

02:49:10.680 --> 02:49:18.480
 what's happening when you heat a rock but in an infinitely more complex way.

02:49:18.480 --> 02:49:29.040
 And the substance participates in guiding and intensifying that.

02:49:29.040 --> 02:49:48.920
 So our goals and functions are in a way as inclined to a certain kind of direction as

02:49:48.920 --> 02:49:58.320
 the development of large-brained big organisms is simply because it's being driven.

02:49:58.320 --> 02:50:13.000
 And as participants in this energy flow, the optimization of energy flow or of consciousness

02:50:13.000 --> 02:50:23.320
 involves certain ways of interacting between people and atmosphere and light and so on.

02:50:23.320 --> 02:50:35.000
 And so the nature of our each little behavior has this context in which we're trying to

02:50:35.000 --> 02:50:46.600
 reach a higher energy level and in effect a better resonance between the components

02:50:46.600 --> 02:50:48.840
 of the system.

02:50:48.840 --> 02:51:00.800
 The idea of resonance in substance is very applicable to what's going on in our organism.

02:51:00.800 --> 02:51:14.800
 If you have methane in the atmosphere and some oxygen and you ignite it, the first thing

02:51:14.800 --> 02:51:23.840
 that happens isn't that you get carbon dioxide and water.

02:51:23.840 --> 02:51:30.240
 The first thing that is likely to happen is you get a lot of soot.

02:51:30.240 --> 02:51:42.840
 And soot consists of graphite-like systems in which you get polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons.

02:51:42.840 --> 02:51:49.640
 And those are highly organized resonant systems.

02:51:49.640 --> 02:51:56.080
 And stability guides the chemical reactions.

02:51:56.080 --> 02:52:04.120
 So it's more stable to be in this complex system and so more favorable energetically.

02:52:04.120 --> 02:52:14.160
 And when our brains resonate with the environment in a certain way, they are improved by finding

02:52:14.160 --> 02:52:22.840
 the niche in which they can resonate and find a higher functioning.

02:52:22.840 --> 02:52:32.440
 So it's as if we're relaxing into a more intense consciousness.

02:52:32.440 --> 02:52:43.840
 The high energy resting state is what I call the individual cell attitude or state.

02:52:43.840 --> 02:52:49.440
 But it also applies to the brain itself.

02:52:49.440 --> 02:53:00.040
 In the very high energy resting state, we get resonance and so things are more meaningful.

02:53:00.040 --> 02:53:07.040
 And so the consciousness is more intense, more coherent, luminous, and so on.

02:53:07.040 --> 02:53:08.040
 Excellent.

02:53:08.040 --> 02:53:09.040
 Yeah.

02:53:09.040 --> 02:53:10.040
 Amazing.

02:53:10.040 --> 02:53:11.040
 All right.

02:53:11.040 --> 02:53:15.080
 That's going to take a little while to sink in.

02:53:15.080 --> 02:53:16.080
 Yeah.

02:53:16.080 --> 02:53:17.080
 We'll cut there.

02:53:17.080 --> 02:53:18.080
 Thank you.

02:53:18.080 --> 02:53:18.080
 [END OF TRANSCRIPT]

02:53:18.080 --> 02:53:21.200
 Thank you.