NEW
APPARATUSES UNVEIL HIDDEN MICROBE UNIVERSE TO HUMAN EYE
Super
- Magnified Lock Jaw Bacillus Evidences Vegetable Composition;
Disease Study Advanced.
By
Unknown Author
Can you imagine a motion picture film whose hero is tiny enough
to use the head of a pin for a ballroom floor and invite all his
neighbors to come in for a dance?
Going one step further, can you imagine the film showing that
tiny hero being formed within the egg, breaking the shell to
escape, living the normal span of life and dying at a ripe old
age?
It takes a bit of imagining, true enough, but it;s being done
right out on Point Loma, Microbes, bacilli and the smallest
units of the vegetable and animal kingdoms are yielding up the
secrets of their lives to the moving picture camera.
They are magnified as the film records their movements as much
as 11,000 diameters. As they pass through the movie projector,
their size is limited only by the size of the screen. And still
their outlines are sharp.
SUPERIOR EQUIPMENT
This is one phase of the work
being accomplished here by R. R. Rife, who operates a
two-by-four scientific laboratory on Point Loma that contains
equipment which, he says, is not equaled or even approached by
the most impressive institutions of New York, Munich or Vienna.
With it he has photographed bacillus tetain or the germ of
lock-jaw at 13,000 times original size. This enlargement, he
says, gave it a "tail" that never before had been
seen, making it appear similar to a lollipop on a stick.
Then he concentrated on the lollipop or spore, disregarding the
stick and by building it up to 317,000 diameters he made it look
like a chrysanthemum. And it turned out to be what he identified
as a member of the vegetable - not the animal kingdom. This
picture taken from a microbe so small that the average man
cannot even think about it, measures three inches in diameter.
His equipment
allows him to arrive at intimacy with the "unseen
world" of parasites that infest the human system and almost
the parasites that infest those parasites. He ahs, he says,
isolated the microbe of malaria from the corpuscle in the blood
and he believes that he has distinguished sex cleavage in these
microbes.
DRAWS DISTINCTION
This
super-photography enables him, he says, to distinguish for the
first time the germ of typhoid from an entirely harmless living
organism that infests most humans in large quantities. Ordinary
microscopes according to Rife, leave the harmless and the deadly
parasites loosing like twins. The flagellae, or
"feelers" of the typhoid bug cannot be seen.
Rife is doing much to bring this hidden universe of "nits
that worry gnats that plague mosquitoes" within range of
human eyes. He takes moving pictures that go along way down the
scale. Once seen, these minute pests can be studied and perhaps
exterminated.
How small ultimate organism is can be decided only by future
generations if at all, but already he has enlarged human
conception by putting guess work on film.
Rife is an expert in more lines than the average man has time to
dabble in. He is an able bacteriologist, embroyologist,
electrical and scientific engineer, metallurgist, chemist,
photo-micrographer, and he plays with scientific crime
detection. As recreation he takes to target shooting in terms of
half-inch's bullseyes.
His chief
enthusiasm, however, is the inquiry into the causes, agencies
and forms of diseases, and it is is enthusiasm that has caused
him to develop his various pieces of apparatus and to refine
them to an efficiency beyond all precedent.
SCOFFS AT REWARDS
He laboriously
seeks out the exact requirements of a new mechanism, builds it
on the premises, and applies it successfully to the problem that
neither he nor any other man could solve without it.
And after all this he refuses to make money from it. His most
startling achievements are not produced commercially. His creed
is that of the "pure scientist" who believes that when
money comes in the door, science flies out the window.
Cash for his experiments and his astonishing mass of equipment,
is derived from certain minor patents and from an occasional
industrial "job" in the field of chemistry or
metallurgy which saves a matter of a million dollars a year or
so to one of America's giant industries.
His greatest developments in the field of scientific apparatus,
created during the past six or eight years, are
1- The Rife
Micromanipulator, whose flexibility outclasses any similar
machine known to science. With this machine an operation can be
performed on a single blood corpuscle, as a surgeon removes an
appendix, while the corpuscle is enlarges as much as 10,000
diameters.
2-The Rife Cine-micrographic apparatus. This incubates and
reproduces on motion picture film the entire life cycle of the
tiniest organism enlarged by 11,000 diameters.
3- The Rife Super-Regenerative Ray which produces a destructive
ray seventeen times as powerful as the x-ray for the treatment
and control of malignant organisms.
4-the Rife Refractometer, which has unparalleled flexibility for
the measurement of bacteria, parasitic organisms or the
prismatic angles of crystals.
5-The Rife experiment on the weight of bacteria, which
established the weight of a single average specimen at one-third
of a billionth of a milligram. A milligram is the thousandth
part of a gram, and it takes more than 28 grams to weigh an
ounce.
SEEKING NEW SYSTEM
Furthermore he has
at the verge of perfection a new system for preparing slides of
pathological tissue for use under the microscope in
identification, study and differentiation of disease germs. He
holds a theory that the harsh acid stains used to bring out
features of the tissue, as well as the complicated treatment now
necessary to defeat their own object.
He believes that the chemical baths themselves destroy the very
germ that science is trying to pin under the microscope.
So he is evolving a new method that will do away with chemicals.
Instead of five days hard work being necessary before a pickled
and probably worthless section of tissue can be put under the
lense, he expects within three minutes to place a perfectly
normal, un-doped slice of the diseased substance in position for
examination.
The possibilities of this process once it is perfected, he
believes are boundless. Medical men who for all time, have been
destroying the very thing they were looking for. While they were
getting ready to look for it, may in this one step find an end
to much of human suffering.
This is Rife's great aim at present, and it has inspired much of
the apparatus which he has needed, designed and built. He has
known what he wants to get at, and when existing machinery will
not get him there he builds himself something that will do the
job.
LIFE OF HOOKWORM
Motion pictures
have been taken of tiny objects before and they have recorded on
film the growth and budding of flowers. But Rife's photography
of microbes, it is said, is head and shoulders above anything so
far achieved at this time.
For example, Rife has a movie showing the life cycle of a
hookworm. He began by placing an egg, almost extravagantly
small, on an electrically heated diaphragm under the microscope.
As the other end of the apparatus was a motion picture camera
with a a 21 - jewel clockwork attachment. this will snap
pictures as much as five hours between exposures or click along
at slow-motion speed, according to the nobility of the object
being photographed.
Development of the egg was slow, so the exposures at first were
widely spaced. At first a group of six nuciei were visible
within the shell magnified 11,000 diameters. Then, as the heat
caused the egg to incubate, the nuciei merged into one and took
on the shape of the worm.
At the proper time it broke the shell and squirmed from the egg.
The apparatus was accelerated to catch the swift squirms of the
growing animal and continued to record its evolutions, feeding
and digestion until the film was complete.
The film probably
never will be exhibited on any screen save at an international
medical convention, or at private showings. Regardless of any
money he might make. Rife restricts his inventions to
"those who know how to make use of them."
SUMS UP METHOD
He feels that one
of the reasons for this success at developing almost
supernatural devices is his versatility. "If one man is a
bacteriologist and knows what is needed and another is a
mechanic who tries to build it, they will do it slowly and
imperfectly." he says.
"But if both these men are the same man he will know the
set-up from both angles. Then if you add delicacy, accuracy,
mechanical skill, the willingness to keep proper records,
ingenuity and the patience to learn from failure, you will be
well along toward solution of your problem and perfection of the
necessary apparatus, whatever it is."
The patience stressed by Rife is no joke as he proved by
describing one of his achievements in micro-photography. A
minute object so hopelessly invisible to the eye as to be
practically nonexistent is picked out from an organism under his
micromanipulator. the selection of the object is made by means
of a mechanical finger, which is the half of a very fine human
hair, split down the center and secured in a controlling device
of incredible delicacy.
The shred of substance, which is tiny even in comparison with
the split hair, is place all by itself on a quartz slide,
photographed and magnified 10,000 times to a diameter of three
inches.
And the picking out of this speck in caparison with which the
hair on a gnat's wing are mountainous takes about ten hours.
His operations and
structural experiment, performed on blood corpuscles or bacteria
of any kind, are performed with this machine by the aid of an
"operating chamber. "This chamber is a drop of fluid,
smeared on the UNDER side of slip of quartz. Within this
drop, which is more like smear, is suspended the
"patient," and with quartz pipettes and dissecting
needles Rife can shake half the nucieus out of a corpuscle as
pretty as you please. Or he can stretch it, to test its
resiliency. Or as he has just done, he can extract microbes from
it.
REMARKABLE INSTRUMENT
Rife's
refractometer, though less intelligible to the layman, probably
is just as remarkable. Its virtue is best shown by a comparison
with manufactured types, which register a maximum of one arc
ratio with a 65-degree rotation. Rife's device, which he
invented because he happened to need it, handles seven different
ratios with arcs of 90 degrees each, in a 360-degree rotation.
Before he could work out his super-regenerative ray it was
necessary for him to work out a method for changing the
polarization of vacuum tubes at will. He can switch them from
negative to positive, and then back switch them back. That
again, is something that is not being done in New York, Munich,
Vienna, or anywhere else, he says.
One revolutionary idea after another followed in the evolution
of this apparatus. In its final form the juice runs all around
the room through one gadget or another, and finally feeds
through a platinum electrode in a quartz tube filled with helium
gas. These are a few of the refinements that make it 17 times as
penetrating as x-ray.
Minor details of his achievements are perhaps more astonishing,
than the achievements themselves, because they are more readily
comprehended. A light for illuminating subjects on a slide, for
instance, contains a 21 - candlepower automobile headlight bulb.
This spark is built up in a cylinder three inches long and two
inches in girth, to a beam whose power is 2000 candlepower cold
light.
CULTURE APPARATUS
Another of his
productions is the anaerobic culture apparatus, with whose help
a culture can be studied in a vacuum or under pressure, with or
without free oxygen, without disturbing the culture or troubling
more than twist of a couple of valves and the strokes of a
piston. effects of various conditions on cell structure may in
this way be determined without difficulty.
An article of readable length can only scratch the surface of
Rife's experiments and achievements, even without going into
these which can.
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