Metascience (2016) 25:79–82 DOI 10.1007/s11016-015-0039-4 BOOK REVIEW
The rehabilitation of a dismissed scientist James E. Strick: Wilhelm Reich, biologist. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015, 455pp, $39.95 HB Philip W. Bennett1,2
Published online: 25 November 2015 Ó Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015
There is a standard narrative about the radical psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich that includes the claims that following an admittedly brilliant youthful career in Vienna he became mentally ill and that his supposed laboratory work related to life energy was based on self-delusion at best, or conscious deceit at worst. To the US Food and Drug Administration of the early 1950s Reich was little more than a cancer quack, abusing desperate patients with his fraudulent claims about a new form of energy, ‘‘orgone energy,’’ and a simple enclosure for accumulating it (the orgone energy accumulator, usually referred to derisively as ‘‘the orgone box’’), used by Reich in experimental treatment of cancer patients. The FDA pursued him with a vengeance and was able to have all of his books that include the word ‘‘orgone’’ legally designated as ‘‘labels’’ for the allegedly worthless accumulator. Once his books were no longer books but mere labels, destroying them was not an outrageous act of censorship, but akin to disposing of worthless pills or some brochures lying about in a doctor’s office, or the so the Government reasoned. As pointed out in the book under review, Reich is probably the only person in history to have his books burned in both the USA and Nazi Germany. Strick devotes his book to Reich’s so-called pseudoscientific work on life energy, specifically the laboratory work on microscopic entities Reich named ‘‘bions’’ conducted in his well-funded research facility in Oslo between the years 1934 and 1939. It was during this period that Reich the psychoanalyst, sexologist, political activist, Marxist social theorist, therapist, became Reich the biologist—thus Strick’s chosen title. Focusing on but one aspect of Reich’s multi-varied work allows the author to examine Reich’s laboratory work in great depth. The result of this
& Philip W. Bennett
[email protected] 1
Graduate School of Education, Fairfield University, Fairfield, CT, USA
2
279 Thornton Street, Hamden, CT 06517, USA
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examination is clear: whatever else can be said about Reich’s biology, it cannot be dismissed out of hand as fraudulent, or misguided. In light of Strick’s account, one can no longer be excused for repeating the time-worn assertions about Reich as a pseudoscientist. While Reich’s approach may have been idiosyncratic and his conclusions may admit of alternate explanations, his work was that of a genuine scientist and not a fantast. Strick is well suited to the task. His previous books—Sparks of life: Darwinism and the Victorian debates over spontaneous generation (2000), also published by Harvard University, and The Living universe: NASA and the development of astrobiology, co-authored with Steven Dick (2004)—together with numerous articles and conference presentations have established him as a reputable historian of biology and medicine, especially origin of life research. In addition, Strick is one of the first scholars to access Reich’s voluminous archive (the largest held by the Countway Library of Medicine also at Harvard), where he uncovered material that fleshes out Reich’s published text central to this part of his work, Die Bione (1938), available in English as The Bion experiments on the origin of life (1979). Indeed, those interested in the recent work in the history of the life sciences involving the comparison of private notebooks with published work (Gerald Geison’s book on Pasteur is paradigmatic) will find this aspect of Strick’s work in itself worthy of attention, quite apart from his evaluation of Reich’s microbiology. Reich began laboratory investigations soon after arriving in Oslo. His first set of experiments, discussed briefly by Strick (63–73), concerned Reich’s attempts to determine whether the electrical potential of the skin would change with different subjectively felt states of pleasure and anxiety. The experiment was prompted by a number of theories Reich had been formulating since his early psychoanalytic work on the function of the orgasm in health and neurosis. One hypothesis, which later became central to his microbiology, is the ‘‘four-beat orgasm formula’’ (58): mechanical tension leading to energetic charge leading to energetic discharge culminating in mechanical relaxation (‘‘tension–charge’’ formula for short). Reich surmised that this tension–charge formula is ubiquitous in nature; a second closely related hypothesis is that Freud’s libido ‘‘was a real, physical ‘something’, not merely a ‘psychological urge’’’ (60). The bioelectrical experiments showed a definite correlation between changes in electrical charge and subjective feelings. Encouraged by these results, Reich set out to determine if the tension–charge formula applied to unicellular organisms, leading him to the microscope and the discovery of bions, microscopic vesicles, which he understood as transitional entities between the non-living and the living. The heart of Strick’s book is a careful reconstruction of Reich’s bion experiments, based on his published work, correspondence, journals, and other material Strick found in Reich’s archives. Perhaps Strick’s most important discovery is what he refers to in the text as ‘‘The Bion Cookbook,’’ now available from the Wilhelm Reich Museum (Anonymous 2009). It consists of the recipes for the various culturing media used by Reich and his associates, as these media were all made from scratch. Thus, exact duplication of Reich’s work is now ever more possible, thanks to the published recipes. Toward the end of his book, Strick calls upon research scientists to take Reich seriously, to give his work the examination it
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deserved from the start, to carry out ‘‘careful, thorough replication experiments’’ (310), now possible thanks to Strick’s research, and especially his finding the ‘‘cookbook.’’ The reconstruction of Reich’s experiments includes extensive attention to two key ideas raised by Reich’s critics, that his samples were contaminated due to insufficient sterilization, and that the motility of his bions was nothing but Brownian movement. Both objections, typically raised by scientists who would not bother to read his material with care or observe his cultures, were met by Reich and a French scientist, Roger du Teil, who, independently, reproduced successfully much of Reich’s work and introduced it to scientific circles in Nice, where he taught, and in Paris. The centrality of du Teil to the retelling of Reich’s bion experiments is such that the cover of Strick’s book is a 1937 photograph of du Teil standing alongside Reich. As for the standard dismissal of Reich’s work, concerning sterility and motility, Du Teil devised ingenious methods for eliminating any possibility of contamination, while Reich was able to establish internal pulsatory movement in bions under high magnification (30009), allowed by his state-of-the-art microscopes. He also took extensive time-lapse films, showing that bions moved in ways that could not be attributed to the randomness of Brownian movement. Strick’s text is rich with historical context, specifically with regard to the changes in biological research in the 1930s. Discussed in some detail is the intriguing role the Rockefeller Foundation played in shaping these changes, by mainly funding biological research done with the electron microscope, supporting the movement toward reductionism, and away from the examination of live cellular activity. The author provides illuminating digressions about the mechanism–vitalism debate; dialectical materialist biology; Friedrich Kraus’s fluid theory; colloid chemistry; Brownian movement; and Otto Warburg’s theory of cancer. The latter is of particular interest, as Reich came to believe that the process of what he called ‘‘bionous disintegration’’ was at the heart of the formation of cancer cells within the organism. Strick devotes a chapter to Reich’s cancer research, showing its similarities with earlier theories about the possibility that cancer is endogenous. In the course of his research, Reich sought the assistance of Leiv Kreyberg, Norway’s leading cancer specialist. Kreyberg’s initial interest quickly turned to scorn, and he went on to participate in the scandalous media campaign against Reich’s work in the Oslo newspapers. Strick devotes a chapter to the newspaper attacks on Reich’s bion experiments; it was here that Reich was first labeled a ‘‘pseudoscientist,’’ so as part of Strick’s rehabilitation of Reich, he examines the claims made in the media with some care. But many were not worthy of such attention, as they were often thinly disguised attacks on Reich’s sexual politics and his identity as a Jew. In one sense, Strick’s book tells two parallel stories, one concerning Reich’s highly original biological investigations and the other the dismissive reactions to these investigations: given that most of the critical responses came from those who simply refused to consider the possibility that Reich might be on to something, their reaction merits explanation. In this context, Strick devotes a chapter to other ‘‘paradigm shifts’’ in the history of science, using Kuhn’s work as the guiding
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template and the response to James Lovelock’s ‘‘Gaia’’ hypothesis as an analogy. He tentatively explores possible reasons for such seemingly irrational responses. My strong positive recommendation of this book to historians of science, biologists, and generalists with an interest in Reich and other marginalized thinkers is not without its caveats. Often the black and white photographs of the bions are difficult to decipher; the color photographs that are on the Web site that accompanies the text, http://wilhelmreichbiologist.org/, are of much greater value. Far more importantly, the book lacks a bibliography. This seems to be due to a regrettable policy on the part of Harvard University Press. Perhaps this lack can be addressed by Strick on the accompanying Web site. Finally, while the author includes brief discussions linking Reich’s discoveries and theories to present-day analogues, these discussions could have and should have been expanded, and Strick’s own informed opinion made more evident.
References Anonymous. 2009. From the archives of the Orgone Institute: A laboratory manual for bion experiments. Rangeley, ME: Wilhelm Reich Infant Trust. Dick, Steven, and James Strick. 2004. The living universe: NASA and the development of astrobiology. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Reich, Wilhelm. 1938. Die Bione - Zur Entstehung des vegetativen Lebens. Oslo: Sexpol. Reich, Wilhelm. 1979. The bion experiments on the origin of life. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Strick, James. 2000. Sparks of life: Darwinism and the Victorian debates over spontaneous generation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
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