The Case of Antoine Prioré and His Therapeutic Machine: A Scandal in the Politics of Science
Christopher Bird
Forty-four years ago, in 1944, an Italian engineer working as a prisoner and forced laborer for the
Germans in the huge submarine base in Bordeaux, approached a French police agent to plead for his
life. He would be killed when the Germans left Bordeaux, he said, and since they were by that time
obviously losing the war, the day of his execution was at hand.
The police officer, who also worked clandestinely for the French underground, told the engineer to
get in his car, then simply drove him out of the base and introduced him to the 7th battalion of
underground resistance fighters, in the nearby province of Dordogne. There he so distinguished
himself in military operations that he was ultimately decorated by the French
government.
It was due to his thankfulness to his savior, and his loyalty to his companions-in-arms, that
Antoine Priore decided after the war’s end to live out the rest of his life in Bordeaux. Thus he
became the focus of one of the strangest, and most scandalous, chapters in the scientific history
of France or any other nation.
Antoine Priore had earlier graduated from a small provincial school for electricity in Trieste,
Italy and become a radar operator in the Italian Navy. During this period he observed what to him
was an exciting anomaly: some oranges left in a room filled with electrical bric-a-brac had fallen
into an assemblage where they seemed to have been preserved in the same fresh state they had
enjoyed when bought off a fruit stand. Other oranges in the room, bought at the, same time, were
rotten and putrid.
Stunned by his observation, Priore dreamed throughout the war of one day working out an electrical
means of conserving foods in their fresh state based on what he surmised was a new, and wholly
unexplained, principle. Newton’s apple had become Priore’s orange.
Occupied during the day as a humble electrical repairman – and projectionist in a movie theater –
the almost wholly self-taught Priore devoted all his free time and his meager resources to
research. With the help of his war-time companions, some of whom had attained high rank in the
Bordeaux police force, he was able to beg, borrow, steal, scrounge, or otherwise acquire a
mini-warehouse of electrical and electronic components and parts. With these he put together a
device worthy of Rube Goldberg. Exposing lentil seeds to a magnetic field of 225 gauss and
electromagnetic frequencies of 80, 32, 3 and 10 Hertz, Priore’s device caused the lentil plants
which sprouted from them to grow 12-
15 centimeters in length, as against only 5 centimeters for controls not subjected to the same
treatment. He got similar results for tulips, asparagus and other plants.
Shifting his focus, he next irradiated fertilized hens’ eggs, only to see the chicks hatch in 19
days, instead of the normal 21. Though he could not explain these astonishing results, he realized
he had stumbled upon a process basic to the enhancement, or speeding up, of cellular growth.
It was at this point that one of his police friends introduced him to Francis Berlureau, the former
Director of Studies at the School for Veterinary Medicine in Toulouse and, at the time of their
meeting, director of the Bordeaux abbatoir. Priore asked Berlureau to supply him with various
animal tissues for experimentation. For 10 years they worked together, Priore’s free time allowing,
during which Priore noticed he could get no electrical measurement from a cancerous bull’s
testicles. Since he realized that, in some way, his newly constructed device (no trace of which
remains today, except for a snapshot of it) affected the electrical properties of cells, he put two
and two together and his sum
of four led him to believe that he might be onto an electromagnetic cure for cancer. Newton’s
gravity had become Priore’s cancer cure.
Berlureau next allowed him to expose a cat with cancer of the mammary glands to radiation of his
machine. To make absolutely sure that he was not exposing himself to mockery, the veterinarian had
all the histological work done by his friend and colleague, a Professor Drieux at the famous
Veterinarian School of Maisons- Allfort, near Paris. Drieux wrote a technical report proving that a
tumor taken from a cat had, before treatment, started to become cancerous and, after treatment, had
become benign.
By 1953, with the help of a doctor of general medicine, Maurice Fournier, Priore began treating
human patients whose cancers had been judged hopeless. The huge file of cases maintained by
Fournier, and filed with a notary until after his death, was subsequently mysteriously lost. But a
few details were preserved in letters discovered in an old dog-eared file.
Some of these dating to the year 1954 concerned a 12-year old boy, Alain B., whose diagnosis
wavered between one of reticulo-histio-sarcoma and a malignant form of Hodgkin’s disease. The boy
was taken by his parents to Priore, who irradiated him. Though the exact nature of the radiation
was not known, 12 years later a Bordeaux physician, after a medical examination, certified that the
boy, now become a man of 24, was free of disease.
A second case unearthed from the old file indicated that a patient with cancer of the larynx was
able to avoid a laryngectomy and be totally cured after Priore’s new ministration.
Fascinated by the principle which he suspected must lie behind the strange Priore Ray, Dr.
Berlureau tried to get some Bordeaux University physicists interested in the problem but was
laughed out of their offices. He next turned to cancer specialists, beginning with Professor
Lachapele, the Director of the Bergonie Foundation, a prestigious center for cancer research, to
whom he proposed animal experiments to prove the efficacy of Priore’s methodology. His plea met
with a stony affirmation on Lachapele’s part to the effect that he and his colleagues had no need
of the new discovery, inasmuch as “all the patients treated in his hospital were cured and departed
in perfect health.” As if bound in the chains of his curt reply, years later Lachapele was to
become one of the bitter adversaries of Priore’s pioneering research.
Only somewhat discouraged, Priore kept up his momentum. He went on to build a new and more
complicated version of his treatment device, called the P-1, over the next year. When it was
finished he secretly and unofficially began to treat dozens of cancer patients who had been given
up by their doctors as incurable. At his funeral in March of last year, among the crowd of
mourners was, it is said, a small platoon of older people who had been cured of their terrible
afflictions by Priore in the 1950s.
While his findings excited him, he nevertheless felt tremendously frustrated that he could
apparently get no one in the world of medicine or science to pay attention to them. Undaunted by
his previous rebuffs, his friend Berlureau next introduced the Italian at the end of 1959 or the
beginning of 1960 to Professor Tayeau, vice dean of Bordeaux’s Medical Faculty. Unlike Lachapele,
Tayeau behaved as a true physician and scientist. He sent Priore to two researchers, Biraben, head
of the Faculty’s Department of Pathological Anatomy, and his assistant, Delmon. The two had been
working together on cancerous rats for two years — specifically on animals grafted with T-8
tumors, discovered by the internationally famous team of Guerin and Oberling in Paris, which had
proven to be intractable to any form of treatment yet known. To their utter surprise, the tumors in
the rats treated with Priore’s machine were reduced in volume by 60%, marking the first time in the
history of cancerology that the virulent T-8 tumor had in any way been affected by any form of
treatment.
Knowing that the mayor of Bordeaux, Jacques Chabans-Delmas — who has kept his post until this day,
and was soon to become prime minister of France — was most interested in the work of Priore (who,
he too, had known as a fellow resistance fighter), they also informed Chaban.
Promptly Chaban convoked not one, but two, commissions made up of Bordeaux and Parisian scientists
to study the Biraben-Delmon results in detail. Both commissions rejected Priore and his machine out
of hand, and without appeal. It is curious that, in the science of our day, a result, undeniable
though it may be, seems to have no hearing unless and until all means to effect it can be
adequately explained. It was for this ostensible reason that the two commissions decided to so
adamantly reject the research: Biraben and Delmon could not explain the nature of the radiation
engendered by the Priore device.
One can stress the word ostensible here because the principal reason for the rejection lay
elsewhere. The decision by the first commission was, in fact, hardly unanimous. But among its
members was the same Professor Lachapele who had refused Berlureau’s plea for assistance. His
opinion was that even the results themselves were of little value because they were obtained, not
on spontaneously arising, but on grafted, cancers. The fact that no treatment whatsoever had ever
affected a T -8 tumor was totally discounted. As the sole cancerologist on the commission,
Lachapele’s dictum was preponderant.
When he learned that the rejection of the first commission had actually been a split decision, the
Bordeaux mayor asked for the formation of a second commission to re-examine the problem. Fearing a
reversal, Lachapele was able to get one of his colleagues, Professor Courtial, director of the
Radium Institute in Paris, and one of the so-called top authorities of French cancer research,
named to it. It was all but impossible for the other physicians on the new commission now to
outvote not one, but two, cancer specialists, so again the antagonists won the day.
At no time did either of the commissions bother to interview Priore himself or to run a
supplementary experiment under their own control.
This seemingly incomprehensible attitude on the part of scientific authority was only a foretaste
of what was to come, again and again, over the years. Biraben and Delmon went on to do new
experiments. They modified either the time after grafting that the radiation was applied, or the
length of its duration. This time their efforts were crowned with unequivocal and complete success.
The tumors stopped growing and, when still living cells were excised from them and implanted in
healthy control animals, none of them became malignant.
Though these results should normally have fascinated any academy of medicine or sciences, the two
researchers did not publish them. Why? The reasons horrify or disgust. It seemed that Biraben was
simultaneously preparing an examination for the agregation, the highest French academic degree
leading to a senior university teaching post. In charge of the committee to pass on, and award,
this degree was none other than that same Professor Lachapele who told him: “Either you get the
degree, necessary to your professional advancement, or you publish your research paper. But not
both!” Discouraged, Biraben ceded to this demand but nevertheless continued to work on the research
that looked so exciting and promising.
Most mystifying to him was how the machine operated to achieve its startling results. At the 3rd
Congress of Biometerology held in 1963 in the Pyrennees mountains, a New York City researcher by
the name of Kenneth McLean reported he had been able to obtain regressions on tumors and improve
the health of cancer patients by using a magnetic field of a strength of 3000 gauss or more. Acting
on this hint, Biraben and Delmon made an electromagnet that put out a field of 4,500 gauss and
tried it
out on the T-8 tumors but without the slightest success. Obviously, something other than a simple
magnetic field was at issue.
In 1966, after others had had the same success with the T-8 tumor by irradiating it with the
“Priore Ray ,” the two scientists finally published a memoir in the Revue of Comparative Pathology
in which they stated that neither magnetic fields nor X-rays had any effect on the T-8s and that
“only certain devices associating a magnetic field with high frequency waves seem at present to
reveal therapeutic properties…”
Their conclusions were too late for, by that time, a campaign to stamp out Priore and his
electromagnetic approach to cancer cure was well underway, a campaign that has lasted right up to
the present moment.
The all-powerful Lachapele had sealed the fate of the Priore device as far as the local Bordeaux
medical community was concerned. Veterinarian Berlureau and Priore next decided to carry their case
to Paris. They contacted Professor Guerin at the cancer institute at Villejuif, the leading French
center for cancer research and the equivalent of the American National Cancer Institute in
Bethesda, Maryland. Guerin, one of the discoverers of the T-8 tumor, which for the first time had
been stopped in its tracks by the Priore device, courteously received his guests and heard them
relate the whole story of how the device had come into being, starting at the point when Priore had
seen the oranges strangely preserved by some unaccountable electromagnetic effect.
Guerin was sufficiently impressed that he assigned his colleague, Marcel-Rene Riviere, to delve
into the whole question. For two years, Riviere, who also had teaching
responsibilities at the University of Rennes in Brittany, unremittingly worked to corroborate the
Biraben-Delmon findings. On 9 December 1964 a note was sent for publication in the Proceedings of
the French Academy of Sciences detailing the research and modestly concluding: “… as of now, one
may already state that our first observations show that electromagnetic fields used can lead to
most interesting data from a point of view of the biological behavior of grafts and their
therapeutic action on experimental tumors.”
Riviere next decided to see if the Priore Ray could affect another tumoral form that had never been
affected by any therapeutic method, the 347 lymphoblastic lymphosarcoma. The results were even more
spectacular than for the T-8 tumor. The effects produced were of broader scope and took place more
rapidly. A second note was sent to the Academy for publication. The conclusion read: “We can now
already affirm that our research offers proof that electromagnetic fields are capable of producing
effects on quite different types of neoplasms.”
At this point one of the key characters in this extraordinary drama must be introduced. There might
have been no drama at all without his appearance on stage. This personage was Robert Courrier, an
eminent endocrinologist, who had been named, while still in his 30s, a full professor. Courrier was
now perpetual secretary of the Academy of Sciences and later would become President of the Academy
of Medicine. Because no scientific paper can be accepted by an academy unless introduced by one of
its members, Riviere would have had no chance to see his work so prestigiously published had not
Courrier, who knew Riviere well, since he had shepherded him through the winning of his doctorate,
taken the responsibility for its introduction.
It was Courrier who, at this point, also took up the cudgel to interest various highly placed
French organizations responsible for the administration of scientific projects and their funding.
Thus, he sent a personal letter to the French Minister for Scientific Atomic and Space Research,
who immediately offered to try to make funds available for further research on and with the Priore
Ray. He also personally asked the Director of the CNRS (National Center for Scientific Research,
which coordinates and oversees all such activity in France) to receive Priore and Riviere.
That this meeting was, in its way, somewhat of a disaster, can be explained in part only by a brief
resume of the complex character of Priore himself. Priore throughout his life had great difficulty
making himself understood in the French language and, as the years went by, he even forgot how
adequately to speak his own mother tongue, Italian. Added to these twin impediments was his
lifelong fear that his discoveries and inventions were prone to being stolen, a fear which led him
never to fully explain the exact nature of the complex radiation emitted from his machine, far less
the settings which controlled its various parameters. Whether Priore would not, or could not,
exactly explain the functioning of his invention (which, as we shall see, went through several
increasingly complex generations) is a question to which no precise answer has been given. It would
appear that Priore was an excellent engineer gifted more with a God-given intuition than with
school-book reasoning and logic. In short, Priore had a combination of talents that could remind
one of the same enigmatic personality that was Nikola Tesla, the deductive reasoning behind some of
whose discoveries has never fully been unraveled.
Highly placed scientific administrators are neither comfortable with, nor sympathetic to, what they
see as self-appointed geniuses who have not run the same academic gauntlet through which they
themselves had to pass. Thus the CNRS director took aversion to Priore’s somewhat incomprehensible,
yet fairly prolix explanations of his technology and only recommended that a physicist be sent to
look over his device to properly decipher its working. At the same time, the Minister, together
with the head of the general delegation for Scientific Research (DGRST) – still another key body in
the administration of the French scientific decision-making process – let it be known to Robert
Courrier that they had not understood a single thing about Priore’s invention despite his best
efforts to present it.
Advancing one more step into what was to become for him a 20 year-long expedition into a jungle of
scientific intrigue, Courrier next resolutely decided to send to Bordeaux one of his most trusted
laboratory workers, Madame Colonge, to repeat Riviere’s experiments under her personal supervision.
The DGRST director fully concurred with Courrier’s decision, while letting slip his admission that
he strongly suspected that Riviere might well have been duped in some manner by Priore. When
Courrier asked the minister for travel funds for Madame Colonge, he was refused with the dry remark
that such a request was “premature.” The now angry Courrier telephoned to reply: “You’ve been
spending millions for programs and hypotheses about the cancer problem. Riviere has been presenting
you with facts!”
The physicist who had been sent to try to elucidate the functioning principles of Priore’s device,
reported that he could make neither “head nor tail” of the machine.
Madame Colonge’s experimentation was as prolonged as necessary. She was so meticulous that, in
order not to take her eyes off the experimental animals for an instant, she limited her lunches to
sandwiches eaten in the laboratory. She returned, profoundly impressed, to Paris.
Nor was Riviere idle during this period. He decided to experiment with the L-52 lymphosarcoma, a
tumor similar to, but even more malignant than the 347. This time, he used not rats, but mice, as
hosts for the grafts. So successful were his results that, this time, Courrier decided to bar no
holds. Instead of simply having a note published in the Academy Proceedings on the quiet, he
decided to present it personally, orally, and in all solemnity, before his fellow academicians at
an official meeting scheduled for 1 May 1965.
That date was, and is, a turning point in what came to be known in France as the “Priore Affair.”
From then on the whole French, and even the international, scientific community could be divided
into a minority and a majority group, the first that believed in the research, the second that did
not know enough details about it, did not or would not believe, or simply didn’t give a damn.
Before Courrier could make his presentation, its scheduling and subject were inadvertently and
prematurely leaked to the press. Immediately thereafter, a horde of journalists arrived in
Bordeaux. After one or two of them managed to all but force entry into his lab, Priore closed its
doors and, with the help of his friends, wrote a printed press release that stressed his
thankfulness to the many people who had helped him over the years rather than providing any
comprehensible details about the machine he had brought to birth. Stymied, many of the newsmen
traveled across town to seek an explanation from its leading cancerologist, Professor Lachapele,
who informed them acidly that the machine was all but useless and unworthy of their attention or
their time.
The journalists’ reports, founded as they were on rumor of outright lies, roiled the pages of their
newspapers and magazines in such a way that they either over-exaggerated the potential or a
forthcoming cancer cure, or came close to billing Priore as just one more cancer-cure charlatan.
All of which so alarmed, among many others, Dr. Wilhelm Bernhard, world specialist in electron
microscopy, that he called his friend Courrier to warn him that his forthcoming presentation to the
academy might put his hard-won reputation at risk as well as those of Guerin, Riviere and the
Villejuif cancer institute itself.
In the journalistic melee, no one had bothered to read the declaration carefully issued by Riviere
from Rennes, where he was occupied with his university courses, which formally stated: “Our
experiments are of real interest. Much more experimental research has of course to be done before
any therapeutic application on human cancer victims can even be considered. It goes without saying
that this will take a certain time and no little effort of many types, both scientific and
financial. Our work, as fascinating a perspective as it might hold, in no way, therefore, allows
anyone to offer the public hope which could only lead to deception at the present time.”
On May Day, Courrier gave his report to an Academy assembly hall crowded with scientists,
newspapers and television reporters, photographers and an unusual number of curious bystanders.
Accompanied with slides showing histological details, and animals before and after treatment, his
lecture was heard out in almost tomb- like silence. When the lights came on again, he announced
that he had personally checked the validity of Riviere’s findings through the offices
of his personal assistant, Madame Colonge. He then went on to say that he had taken the
responsibility of presenting three notes to the Academy for two reasons. The first was a ringing
declaration and a challenge to critics and skeptics of every stamp. It reads “When it is a
question of a problem as serious as that of cancer and when one sees a little light beginning to
dawn, one has the obligation to see what this light might represent. One has no right to
snuff it out before learning what it may be worth.”
The second was a tribute to his colleagues who had done the pioneering work, particularly Guerin,
Riviere and Madame Colonge, and a statement of the essence of the problem to be faced down the
road. It read: “Attention must naturally be given to the apparatus which Monsieur Priore has
conceived and constructed. It has apparently already been examined by several physicists. It is
found to be too complicated. While that may be possible, it is nevertheless a fact that Guerin and
Riviere have obtained results with it that had to be made public. What is emitted from such an
apparatus? I hope Monsieur Priore will allow disinterested physicists to study it at their leisure,
for Science cannot tolerate apparatuses enveloped in mystery .” Then, as almost a footnote to the
history of the moment: “The biological action of magnetic fields is the object of intense research
in the United States. In specialized institutes, the influence of these fields on tissue cultures,
microbes, plant forms, diastases and certain tumors is under study. Up to now, the results obtained
on grafted tumors seem less significant than those which have here been presented.”
After Courrier sat down, a leading cancer specialist, Professor Lacassagne, rose to ask snidely why
the notes had included no bibliographical references on work done on the bio-effects on tumors from
electromagnetic fields, and criticized the experimentation as “impromptu.” When Courrier denied
this
allegation as ludicrous, Lacassagne stalked out of the assembly hall in full view of the audience.
The meeting caused a new eruption of media reports which unfortunately accented one of three
aspects of the problem at the expense of the other two. These were 1) the hope that a miraculous
cure for cancer was in the offing 2) the contradictory, not to say discordant, reception of the
data by various academics and 3) the enigma of Priore’s personality.
Remarkably, no serious discussion among the scientists present at the meeting ever took place. This
led a foreign scientist, present in Paris at the time, to remark: “I don’t understand. Here is a
report given to the most authoritative scientific body in France by one of the most respected and
eminent of its members and it is publicly subject to doubt without that leading to any reaction
whatsoever.”
The General Delegation for Scientific Research was at this point still open to the idea of
providing funds for more research with the Priore Ray. The big stumbling block, however, was one
related to niceties involved in relations up and down the scientific hierarchy. To open the way to
the allocation of such funds required the approval of the Delegation’s own section for cancer
research and that section was headed by none other than the same Professor Lacassagne who had so
rudely walked out of the Academy’s assembly hall.
At the same time the General Delegate diplomatically covered himself by suggesting to Robert
Courrier that he had to have more information underscoring the potential importance of the research
accomplished. Courrier told him to simply re-read the three notes he had presented to the academy.
His matter-of-fact, yet terse, come-back then elicited his invitation to a full-dress meeting of
scientific experts at the Institute for Scientific Cancer Research.
In this short historical account we obviously cannot go into the ins and outs of what transpired at
this meeting or any of the many similar meetings which followed it. A paragraph in a brilliant
book, four years in the writing, by the courageous Bordeaux journalist, Jean-Michel Graille and
entitled: Dossier Priore, A New Pasteur Affair (of which this account is but a tenuous synopsis)
must suffice to pointedly characterize the nature of the problem in its
most general sense.
Writes Graille: “To read what follows in this chapter might well seem tedious: an enumeration of
names and titles, the content of a debate held at an administrative meeting, personal remarks by
one ranking personage or another, exchanges of letters following the meeting itself and the
official report which came out of it. Tedious but indispensable for not a few reasons. It is
important to know who were the participants at this meeting and what of these participants each was
trying to represent. It is important to know how such scientific meetings go about their business
at the ‘top level,’ And, finally, it is important to learn about and to understand, in the
particular case of the Priore Affair, the behavior and reactions of all concerned. A reading of all
this could be difficult {and it won’t be the only such passage in this book) yet it is necessary to
understand the essence of the dossier in order to be able to create for oneself as clear and
well-motivated a personal opinion about it as to subsequently be able to discuss it, or to hear it
discussed, with a thorough knowledge of the facts.”
In this single paragraph, Jean-Michel Graille has, in my opinion, pointed to both the nub and the
difficulty in getting at the essence of the real facts behind a case such as that of Priore’s that
are so important to its proper understanding, an understanding which can be painted against the
backdrop of the history of science and the backdrop of human pettiness and maliciousness or human
courage and magnanimity.
One of the participants, Professor Andre Lwoff, soon to become a Nobel Laureate for his work in
virology, was violently against the meeting’s central issue: namely, whether or not funds should be
spent to build a new and better Priore machine. Not only did Lwoff aver that the three notes
presented
to the Academy never should have been published, but he also opined that since all the work was
done, not on spontaneously generated but on grafted cancers, the effects of the machine were hardly
impressive. He later added in writing that 1) the patents issued to Priore for his device were
nothing but a web of nonsense, 2) the machine itself could never be duplicated based on any
description given for it by its inventor and, in a repetition of his oral remarks, 3) the fact that
only cancer grafts were experimented with was nothing to shout about: He strangely added that
because the animals who had been irradiated subsequently were able to entirely reject new grafts,
the whole phenomenon offered no proof that cancer cells could be killed while healthy cells were
not. The whole thing came down to a question of immunity, he said, as if that were not of the
greatest possible importance.
To which, in due course, Guerin and Riviere replied: “It has been claimed that our experiments are
valueless because they were carried out on grafted tumors and that other therapeutic measures were
known to get rid of such tumors and their metastases. We defy those persons who have made such
affirmations to prove, with the use of such other measures, that animals infected with T-8 tumors
can be cured at a percentage rate identical to those obtained by using the device which Monsieur
Priore has developed.”
Not a soul has responded to this challenge, then or since.
A second cancer expert at the meeting, a woman of great influence, resorted only to the cavil that
the experiments had been of doubtful quality since none of the animals had been weighed. The fact
that those same animals had survived normally lethal cancers seemed not to have weighed with her.
There were many more observations of the same ilk. They seem atrociously paltry, trifling and
picayune coming from professionals who, if they no longer believed in the Hippocratic oath to which
they once swore, are considered by the public in general, and by cancer patients in particular, at
least to be concerned with seeing what a little light on the problem might reveal before
extinguishing it, as Professor Courrier expressed it.
At the same time, we must not forget Priore’s decidedly difficult personality. He was an inventor
determined at all costs that his invention be developed for the benefit of humanity, yet anxious
that that same humanity not steal it from him. As author Graille puts it, “His conceptions and
attitude directly or indirectly conditioned the overall essence of this affair. Full of
enthusiasm, from the very day he discovered that the ray he had developed had a curative effect on
a cancerous cat, he developed a single-minded fixation on cancer. One could understand and
sympathize with him on this score. Here he is, a little Italian immigrant without money or means,
and he is going to offer the world a cancer cure. He is so convinced that he wants to move ahead
to doing just that. He will never understand or accept the exigencies of Science or Medicine.
For him, experiments, controls, verifications and parallel research are a waste of precious
time. ‘I’ve made machines which cure cancer. Take them and treat cancer patients. Don’t bother
with the rest.’ Such would be a summation of his point of view.”
Through the efforts of persons kindly disposed to the inventor, this point of view was softened and
he came finally to understand the necessity for what has been called scientific rigor, on the other
hand, another aspect of his character never changed an iota. This was his determination to preserve
the secret of his invention, motivated first of all by his unshakeable desire that it be developed
in Bordeaux, the city of his adoption, for the citizens of that city. Deeply rooted was his belief
that if he made his secret public, the machine would be taken from the Bordeaux region and further
developed by Parisians, those who considered themselves to be in the penthouse of the scientific
edifice. Once this was accomplished, he would likely not have one more word to say about the
matter. Therefore he continued jealously to conserve his secret and put confidence in nobody.
As Graille generously concedes, he may well have been right, and adds: “All his life he had to go
up against men, whether scientists or industrialists, who had but one idea in their heads: to get
to the bottom of the inventor’s secret in order to build for themselves a machine which they then
could exploit for their own account, for their own glory. Many such ‘Priore Machines’ were to be
actually built more or less surreptitiously or clandestinely. Not one of them ever worked.”
While one might easily accuse Priore of a limited view, the horizons of the researchers themselves
were certainly not as broad as they might have been. Those involved in bio-medicine were content
with the results produced by the machine, the workings of which were of no concern to them. A black
box, as it were, emitted a ray that definitely affected experimental animals. At the same time, as
researchers specifically interested in the cancer problem, they never gave a thought to what the
Priore Ray might accomplish in the wider clinical domain of other afflictions.
As for the physicists, they were seemingly not up to the task of comprehending a complex radiation
that had miraculously sprung, as from the head of Zeus, out of the intuition of a man they
considered to be an undereducated and all but illiterate gadgeteer. Still others, whether
physicists, biologists, doctors of medicine or specialists in a dozen other fields, were willing to
throw the baby out even before it went into the bath water. In their eyes Priore was just a nobody.
Behind the scenes, many of these scientists resorted to using the press to achieve their own ends.
Thus, the chief medical chronicler for Le Monde ( the French New York Times), herself a doctor of
medicine, was led to write outright lies about the Priore Affair — specifically and falsely
stating that cancer patients had been treated with the Priore Ray in the clinic of Professor
Lachapele in Bordeaux with not only negative, but disastrous, results.
On the other hand, a journalist for another leading Paris daily, Le Figaro, scrupulously conscious
of his responsibility to fairly report what was going on, aptly wrote: “We would like to see at
least one thorny point clarified as soon as possible. Several years ago Professor Biraben of the
Bordeaux Medical Faculty (who at that time had not become a ranking professor) was involved with
the Priore device. According to certain reports from medical circles, his results seemed, even at
that time, to have been already quite positive on small animals and he seems to have written a
report to that effect. He was advised by highly placed authorities “to keep quiet” and stop talking
about this affair. If this turns out to be true, it would be a veritable medical scandal to be
judged in the harshest terms.”
Could one have put it more succinctly?
The foregoing is to present something of the flavor of what was transpiring in the wide world far
removed from the laboratory of Priore who, at the time unaware of it, was reveling in the fact that
his machine had been successfully used by high-ranking French cancerologists and its results
reported in three separate notes to the Academy of Sciences.
His courage was also more than buoyed by the arrival on the scene of the commercial director of a
large French industrial firm specializing in the intricacies of manufacturing glass components.
This man had heard that Priore needed a large tube that was beyond all existing norms and perhaps
did not exist anywhere in the world. This tube, it can be stated, contained a rare gas, neon, which
when excited into a plasma, seemed somehow to convert the various electromagnetic inputs into a
single Priore Ray which surged from the business end of the tube. In the tube were an anode and
cathode. Peculiar to the anode was that it had to rotate to produce the desired biological effects
and this is but one of the anomalies in Priore’s equipment which physicists and bio-physicists have
to this day been unable to explain.
The manufacturing company, a subsidiary of the internationally known company, Saint Gobain, was
looking for a new product. The commercial director thought the new tube might fill the bill,
particularly if it could be adapted to a machine that might ultimately cure cancer, a product that
indubitably would have an enormous market across the world. There were plenty of problems with
regard to the tube, notably those of its large dimension, its resistance and its conductibility.
When the tube was finally made, it now seemed that Priore would have to explain his discoveries to
the scientists of the company that had made it. One of these was sent to elicit such an explanation
but was, so to speak, “shot down in flames” by Priore. So a second attempt was made by Ivan
Peyches, a senior executive of the company, and president of the Society of Civil Engineers of
France, who made a detailed investigation of the device. His reports were subsequently lost, but
there remained an article he published in a leading French journal, Sciences and Technics, a short
time before his death in 1978. It bore the intriguing title: “What Are So-Called Paranormal
Phenomena?”
In it the engineer wrote: “There was so great an accumulation of components capable of having some
kind of action, and being unable to work separately, that the results of measurement were limited
to proving that there were no specific rays that issued from the tube (Priore talked about canal
rays), no more than there were any X rays. On the other hand one could detect a magnetic field
which was the end result of a field proper to the tube and of the magnetic field of a solenoid that
constituted the experimental chamber, an electromagnetic field with a frequency of 16 megacycles
(19 meters) and a high frequency field (metric waves), the whole being pulsed at a very low
frequency of an order of one per second. It was impossible, in such an imbroglio, to determine what
was necessary and what was sufficient. Priore maintained that the simultaneous action of his
various generators was indispensable to achieving his effect.”
Peyches then went on to relate how he tried to persuade Priore to offer a more precise definition
of his thinking about the workings of his device. He wrote the inventor: “At this point, I would
say that all reticence on your part, which in your eyes would be justified by the fear of seeing
yourself partially dispossessed of your work, would be of far greater detriment to you than any
safeguard of your interests. Moreover, since it has become a question involved in public health,
you are no longer entirely your own boss… you absolutely must bring all this to the clear light
of day and I don’t believe you can do it alone…You must supply all the characteristics so that
third parties can reproduce your results.” Then, he concluded by citing the words of an
academician: “Many phenomena are rejected by the scientific world because they are considered
irrational: But it is not a proof of scientific honesty to refuse a priori to try, out of homage to
truth, to have a look at them and perhaps to understand them. Will Science one day be able to
abandon its taboos?”
It was Peyches’ final conclusion that, in the end, Priore was a man of genius who knew absolutely
nothing about what occurred in his machine from the scientific point of view. The company which he
represented no longer exists since it was bought out by the American firm of Coming
Glass.
Industrial interest in the Priore device was not limited to the Saint Gobain subsidiary. Next into
the lists was a company in Anguouleme, Leroy-Somer, which specialized in electric motors,
generators and later was to branch out into solar power. Its president, Georges Chavanes, took the
initiative to write to Priore in 1965 that his company was interested in providing some of the
complex electrical equipment needed by the inventor, more particularly high-powered generators, on
the condition that Priore move his operation to the company seat at Anguouleme. When the inventor
categorically refused, Chavanes tentatively agreed to build a factory to manufacture the Priore
device in Bordeaux itself.
The alliance between Leroy-Somer and Priore, shaky at best, lasted two years and blew up on Holy
Thursday of 1967. The period was a stormy one for both parties to the agreement. Priore did his
best to convince Chavanes to commit himself to building a huge machine with a magnetic gauss
strength of
10,000 gauss. In the end he got one that put out only 920 gauss, not much stronger than the
machine he had already built which put out 620 gauss. Since the field of action increased with the
gauss strength, Priore reasoned that a machine of literally behemoth size would be able to
irradiate the whole, or every part, of a human cancer victim lying on a stretcher, whereas the
smaller machines had been effective only for small animals or for treating a limited
portion of the human body.
Chavanes and his company were aware that it would be a tremendous financial burden to contemplate
building the larger machine. So they went ahead with plans for the smaller one while at the same
time putting great pressure on Priore himself to make him feel that he was the least important cog
in a new gear, in fact that his status was reduced to being a simple employee of Leroy-Somer. In
Graille’s estimation, this lack of psychological finesse on Chavanes’ part constituted what he
called “the blackest pages in the Dossier Priore.”
Even the smaller machine was to cost about half a million dollars, a price which today, due to
inflation, could be tripled or quadrupled. During a stage in which an intermediate machine was
designed by the chief Leroy-Somer engineer, Ribeau, a machine that never did function properly,
Chavanes all but forced Priore, who was heavily in debt, to sign a contract which was falsified.
The falsification was a matter of one word which was changed in the contract. In a phrase reading
that an exclusive license of patents, and subsequent patent modifications, would accrue to the
company “for all countries solely for therapy on cancers concerning animals and humans,” a word was
inserted by hand so that the phrase read: “concerning particularly animals and humans” implying
that other uses of the machine, whatever they might turn out to be, would also accrue to the
company. This one word change was amended on Priore’s copy of the contract by calling the word
“particularly” a “nullified word,” but on Chavanes’ copy it was called an “added word.”
Leroy-Somer believed it was sufficiently well positioned in the driver’s seat to be able to deal on
behalf of Priore himself with the French governmental institutions, mainly the General Delegation,
concerned with the funding of the new machine. When Priore learned of Chavanes’ contact with the
General Delegation he wrote a letter informing it that no one had the right to deal in his name.
Nor did Chavanes even attempt to cut the Saint Gobain subsidiary, which alone could supply the
tube, key to the device’s functioning, in on the government funding.
In the meantime, no less a figure than Professor Kastler, soon to win the Nobel Prize in Physics,
came down from Paris to inspect the existing Priore device. He brought with him Delmon, who, we
recall, had worked with Berlureau on the first animal experiments and who now, it turned out, was
trying to build his own version of a Priore device on the sly without telling Priore. Kastler’s
bringing Delmon with him to Priore’s lab so angered Robert Courrier that he told the physicist he
had committed a real gaffe. He also convinced Kastler that Leroy-Somer should build a machine with
a power of at least 5000 gauss, but Chavanes refused. There seemed to be no harmony of outlook
between the leading industrialist concerned, on the one hand, and the top physical and biological
scientists on the other.
While all these, and many more, peripatetics were proceeding, Priore’s sister in Italy came down
with cancer. Beside himself with grief, Priore informed all concerned to commit themselves either
to building an intermediate machine correctly, under his supervision or, better, the 5000-gauss
machine, and to do this in time to save his sister, or he would wash his hands of the entire
matter. Confronted with this ultimatum, the company began to work round the clock to perfect the
intermediate machine but engineers involved, believing themselves to be more adroit with respect to
its design than Priore, left out a host of what, to them, were unnecessary components. The result
was that when the machine was first put to trial, most of the components burned out or otherwise
failed, and the machine itself became a useless pile of rubble.
Shortly thereafter, Priore’s sister died of cancer. Her grief-stricken brother went into what
amounted to total isolation, unwilling to talk to a soul.
The whole Priore affair might have ended at that point, in the early part of 1967, were it not for
the entry onto the scene of a key figure, Professor Raymond Pautrizel. Born on 3 June 1916 in
Basseterre, capital of the French Caribbean island of Guadeloupe, at forty years of age he was on
the Faculty of Medicine at Bordeaux. He soon became known, world-wide, as the “father of
parasitological immunity,” a title he never accepted, saying that, if others had awarded it, it was
simply because “he had searched through old scientific publications to find ideas that were as
valid for modern research as they were forgotten by modern researchers.” And he later was quoted as
adding: “It is really too bad that researchers today don’t pause from time to tome to dig into
studies made by their predecessors, some of which were performed even decades ago!”
Professor Pautrizel was awarded the first academic chair in France for immunology, and later a
special unit was created for him for parasitological immunology, a subject which is both simple and
complex. The simple part involves the fact that various immunological techniques can be applied to
diagnosing specific parasites that have invaded an organism in order to develop preventative
actions against them via vaccines, or curative actions via serums.
When invaded by parasites, organisms react by creating antibodies, specific substances aimed at
killing the invaders also known as antigens. These antibodies are liberated, like an attacking
army, into the blood. Simple enough so far. The complexity arises because the defending army, the
parasites, don’t just lie down and die under the attack. They are capable of modifying their
“personalities,” as it were, and of changing various of their characteristics such that the
mechanisms that the host uses to recognize, or detect, the invaders are invalidated. Thus, the
substance which an organism would secrete to destroy an invader A becomes incapable of recognizing
A, now become A- 1, and therefore incapable of destroying it.
The organism at this point seems to realize it has to create a different substance to rid itself of
its antagonist but, in the meantime, the metamorphized parasite is getting on with its assigned
destructive task. Alternatively, the parasite has another capability: that of itself liberating
substances which can annul or annihilate the organism’s overall defense system. A sort of “in the
blood” version of Star Wars is going on at the microscopic level.
The study and classification of the substances — call them weapons — emitted by parasite-attacked
organisms allows for the establishment, in turn, of batteries of tests to define the exact nature
of the parasites themselves in order to come up with an appropriate therapy or
counter-weapon.
This then, is the essence of parisitological immunology, Raymond Pautrizel’s area of research. He
specialized on a particularly lethal parasite known as trypanosome, the scourge of tropical
third-world countries where, in one form, it causes sleeping sickness in animals and humans, in
another, equine syphilis, in still others, other afflictions. Over the years, during which he
produced a small library of literature on the problem (known mostly to specialists in countries
where that problem is acute), Pautrizel and his team discovered, among other things, that the
trypanosome can modify itself, again and again, up to 101 times over a period as short as only
three weeks.
Even before his work on trypanosomes, Pautrizel, back in 1949, was one of the first researchers to
discover what is known as ambivalence in drugs, notably histamine. Histamine is a substance which
is secreted by an organism as a defense mechanism but if over secreted by certain cells circulating
in the blood, it becomes virulently noxious, mainly by over dilating blood vessels, thus making
them permeable to water and leading to edema and even death. This process occurs, for instance, in
some human beings who are highly susceptible and over-reactive to bee or wasp stings.
Pautrizel’s research on the noxious aspects of histamine led to his finding that the same
substance, applied in requisite small doses, is extremely important to the defense system of the
organism. Today he stresses the notion of ambivalence in many areas of his work and characterizes
it as “a key to the biology of the day after tomorrow.”
To finish with the background on Pautrizel, before bringing him on stage in the Priore drama, it
may be added that only a few years ago, at a formal reception for him attended by the medical elite
of France, he was given a Basque makila, an iron-bound honorific cane of sculptured wood, in
tribute to his work. On it was the incised inscription: “Sometimes to heal, often to alleviate,
always to console,” an epithet that perfectly characterizes a medical doctor imbued with that kind
of rare compassion that marked Pautrizel’s character.
When Robert Courrier sent Madame Colonge to Bordeaux, it was Pautrizel whom he asked to provide her
with every assistance. In this way, Pautrizel was first introduced to Priore and his device. After
witnessing the results obtained with it he was to say: “What stupefied me, and led me to ponder the
question, was to see the control animals die from their tumors in 3 weeks, while at the same time I
could observe that the tumors in the animals under treatment were literally melting away and the
same animals were taken back to Courrier’s lab at the College de France in Paris in perfect
health.” As a result of his thinking about the problem, Pautrizel came to the belief that the
machine, however it worked, did not exert any action at all to kill cancer cells but, through as
yet unexplained mechanisms, stimulated the afflicted organisms to provide themselves with new
immunological weapons that could overpower the cancer cells.
To shed light on this problem, Pautrizel proposed the simple expedient of experimenting, not on
cancer-infested animals, but on in vitro cultures of cancer cells. He made this proposition to
both French and British cancerologists but they were convinced that the Priore device had to be
actually killing cancer cells themselves,. They could not see the point that, if the machine did
not kill cancer cells, then it was doing something else to the body to allow it, and not the
machine, to do that job.
Pautrizel’s involvement with the British was the result of a team being sent from England to
experiment with cancer mice with the Priore Ray. What happened cannot be related in this brief
resume except to say that, out of a lack of understanding on the part of certain British cancer
experts and malicious conniving on the part of one member of the cancer “aristocracy” in Paris, the
experiments were put under a cloud. It was alleged that mice had been substituted somewhere during
their long round-trip voyage between England and Bordeaux to make it look as if a failed experiment
had been successful. This did not prevent Sir Alexander Haddow, chief of the prestigious Chester
Beatty Research Institute for Cancer from stating, at a meeting in Paris, that the Priore machine
had been indubitably effective on the English mice and supporting Pautrizel’s idea that experiments
should forthwith be done to see if the Priore Ray had any effect on cancer cells in vitro. Haddow’s
suggestion backing Pautrizel’s recommendation fell on deaf ears.
Because of the emotional turmoil and rancor with respect to cancer that had so long surrounded
Priore and the workings of his machine, Pautrizel suggested that it be tried in a completely new
area, one he knew so well, namely on afflictions caused by the trypanosomic pathogen. Before these
could get underway, however, someone had to persuade the still desolate Priore to return to work.
Pautrizel, known to those really concerned with and knowledgeable about the potential of the
Italian’s invention, at last was able to convince the inventor to cooperate and get back into
harness. This he did with that rare combination of diplomatic tact and warm human sympathy with
which only the Pautrizels of this world are gifted.
In the meantime, Riviere had gone on to implant new 347 tumor grafts in rats previously cured of
347 tumors. When none of the tumors developed, that result added one more argument to back
Pautrizel’s idea that the machine was, in fact, affecting the immunological defense system of the
animals. However, when Riviere tried the same procedure with the T -8 tumors, his animals died.
This led to the conclusion that the immunity acquired by the animals to lymphoblastic lymphosarcoma
347 was specific to that tumor. When a note on this research was sent, again through Courrier’s
good offices, to the Academy, for the first time, it strangely omitted from the listing of the
participating researchers the name of Antoine Priore. It seemed that Riviere had been taken to task
by fellow cancerologists who believed that Priore was nothing but a naive bumpkin or, worse, a
swindler. They had warned him against publishing any papers with which Priore’s name would be
associated. This rank injustice and lack of fair play again sent Priore into a fit of despondency
and depression from which he could only be withdrawn by those subtleties involved in Pautrizel’s
sympathetic and friendly counsel.
On 25 July 1966, another note was sent to the Academy filed for the first time not under the rubric
Cancerology but under the rubric Immunology. It was entitled “Influence of Associated
Electromagnetic and Magnetic Fields on the Immunity of Mice Infected with Trypanosoma equiperdum.”
The conclusion read: “The treatment allows the organism to rid itself of parasites even when these
have invaded it in a most intensive way…. There is an enhancement of both the specific and
aspecific factors of immunity.”
Thus, for the first time, the field of research shifted from the narrower field of cancer to the
much vaster domain of immunology. And, for the first time, Pautrizel’s name appeared as the senior
author on the paper. It also appeared that, for the first time, there should no longer be any
problem about experimenting with the Priore machine. Such was not the case.
Still complicating the whole issue was the fact that Priore himself was using different setting to
produce different varieties of radiation depending upon his own intuitive evaluation of the
particular biological experiments being run with his machine. He would never reveal the nature of
these settings.
At this point there appeared on the scene a new researcher who became Pautrizel’s loyal ally, a
young woman, Pierette Chateau-Reynaud Duprat. During her work in Paris, she had learned of the
Priore controversy, and, against the stern advice of mentors senior by many years to her in the
cancer hierarchy, she came to Bordeaux to meet Pautrizel and learn more about the research.
Her work, performed over many years, is too detailed for presentation here but it led to important
conclusions. One was that the Priore Ray had no direct effect on the trypanosomes themselves but
stimulated and reinforced the defense mechanism of the infested organisms, allowing them to reject
the parasitical influence with an effect so durable that they were no longer subject to this
influence even after treatment stopped.
Another conclusion was even more important and involved, in part, British research. It pertained to
the effects of the machine on both allografts or those made between two different individuals of
the same species, and isografts, or those made between two different individuals of the same
genetic line having in common antigens that were characterized by what is called the same
histocompatability. The conclusion was that not only was the rejection of allografts accelerated by
the Priore Ray but that isografts were also rejected. This meant, in sum, that the ray stimulated
not only the defense mechanisms of the organism but also, and more importantly, its recognition
mechanisms. In the case of an isograft, this allowed the recognition of weak antigens that were not
recognized in non-irradiated animals. In other terms, where at first the anti-aircraft batteries
could not shoot down the aircraft because they could not see them, now they could shoot them down
because they could see them. In immunological terms, the ray affected both humoral and cellural,
both specific and aspecific, immunity.
Here we must return to the mystery of the settings on the device. As a result of the new
experimentation it seemed that, depending on those very settings, the active ray, complex as it
was, could have either similar, totally different, or diametrically opposed effects. Thus it was
not a question of a ray having universal effects – a kind of magic bullet capable of killing any
target but of multiple radiations which, due to the complexities in Priore’s personal makeup, have
unfortunately yet to be sorted out and explained.
Thus, the machine originally designed by Priore, called the P-I when it put out a wave length of
from 19-21 meters, had a radical effect on certain animal cancers, on cellular defense mechanisms,
and finally, but not universally, on organisms infested with Trypanosoma equiperum, (hereinafter
called T.e.).
A second machine, dubbed the P-2, was at first not able to produce these frequencies. What it did
put out was a frequency of 17 meters that was universally effective against T.e. and seemed to act
not on the cellular, but the humoral, defense mechanisms. The rejection of grafts depends on the
cellular defense mechanisms, which partially explains why Pautrizel when using the P-2 machine,
selected the
T.e. vector, as it is called in microbiology, just because this creature is fought by the
organism’s humoral defense system.
Consequently, the bio-effects that were successfully attained depend on the varying, not to say
quixotic, nature of the radiation. At one point Pautrizel actually did experiments on animals
infected with plasmodia – the vector for malaria which attacks red cells – and found that the
settings used were effective while never learning exactly what they were or the exact nature of the
radiation. Furthermore, Priore himself maintained that over the years he had successfully treated
cases of human tuberculosis but, again, never revealed which frequencies had been used to achieve
this.
Several more notes were sent to the academy on the successful work performed with the Priore Rayon
animals affected with T.e. But the central issue remained: how to find out exactly how the machine
worked. It fell, not to civilian scientists, but to those in the French army service to attempt, at
this point, to work out the problem. The army service brought into the picture was the DRME (an
acronym which translates as Administration for Research and Test Methods), to which Pautrizel had
sent a request for funds in 1968.
This request was the subject of a meeting at which were present three of the top names in French
science, one representing biology, the second physics and the third, medical physics. The latter
two turned in extremely unfavorable reports recommending that no money be wasted on the problem.
The biologist, however, turned in a most favorable report and, despite the fact that he was in the
minority, his opinion won the day.
As remarkable as was this victory, it was even more stunning and incredible given the fact that
this biologist was the same Andre Lwoff who had so adamantly opposed the Priore research a couple
of years previously. Lwoff had summoned the courage to completely reverse himself only after he
sent one of his most trusted colleagues to do secret experiments with the Priore Rayon mice
injected with peroxydase (an antigenic solution) to see if they would produce a higher level of
antibodies than non- irradiated animals. This they did so well that Lwoff became convinced that the
Priore Ray caused an extremely important increase in immune reactions. These results were never
published because, before the experiments could be repeated to be absolutely sure of their
results, the machine suffered one of its many interminable breakdowns.
The DRME report was at length, and in length, issued but not publicly since it was protected by a
military classification. However, a synthesis of it was finally published in November 1979 by
Herbert Gossot, Secretary General for the French Association for Bioelectromagnetism, under the
title: “A Scientific Balance Sheet on the Priore Ray .” Its contents were as follows:
“The two physicists assigned by the army made a complete analysis of the electromagnetic radiations
and magnetic fields activated by the Priore device. They thus determined the spectrum of
frequencies which the device emitted. They showed particularly that frequencies in the visible
light and infrared range had no biological effect; that there were no X-rays or Y-rays; and that
the pulsed ultra-high frequency electromagnetic wave was modulated in amplitude to that of a
high-frequency wave. They did a topographic survey of the respective intensities of the various
magnetic and electromagnetic fields in the experimental plane of the device. In particular, they
determined the spatial repartition in this plane of the density of the strength of the ultra-high
frequency wave. They showed that its value was very weak and that it could not produce any kind of
overall significant thermal effect imputable to the hyperfrequency ray.
Finally, and most importantly, by using what they had learned about these repartitions, they
demonstrated a clear correlation between the biological effects obtained and the intensity of the
hyperfrequency ray. What they actually observed was that, on the biological model used, i.e.
experimental trypanosomiasis of the mouse, there was a diminution of the rate of evolution of the
parasitemia that was proportional to the strength of the hyperfrequency wave. To quote them: ‘These
experiments of correlation are of certain interest: they confirm, if there is still any need of so
doing, the biological efficacy of this device. ”
The two physicists, Bottreau and Berteaus, are still interested in rebuilding a Priore device with
which additional biological research could go forward. At the same time they suggested to
administrative bodies in French science the creation of a special laboratory for
bioelectromagnetism to fund more work, a suggestion in which Professor Pautrizel concurred. No
action was taken and their report was kept under wraps. In a note they presented to the Academy of
Sciences on their investigation, they were not allowed to include the names of the laboratories
where they worked: in the case of one, the CNRS Magnetic Laboratory at Bellevue near Paris, and of
the other, the Laboratory of Ultra-Hertzian Optics and Talence near Bordeaux. Why? Because the
directors of these laboratories did not want any mud in the Priore affair to be spattered on them.
The next experiment done by Pautrizel was on rabbits whose testicles had been so seriously affected
by trypanosomes as to be almost entirely destroyed. After radiation the same testicles took on
their normal histological appearance and the rabbits, able to procreate again, in no way abstained
from their newly regained ability. This implied the complete regeneration of an organ that had all
but completely degenerated.
Yet journalists, who sought out truths about the Priore affair in Paris from high officials they
believed would know best about what was going on, continued to be led astray. For example, an
American scientific reporter, writing in the Saturday Review of Science in 1973 saw fit to state:
“It is really a question of a mystical problem that has little to do with science.” He was quoting
Professor Bader , a man who for 15 years held top administrative posts in science that could have
allowed him to back the Priore research with all the funding necessary to its accomplishment. At
the time Graille’s book came out, Bader issued a book of his own about the Priore affair which
offers no real idea of what was involved. When I asked several people in France why Bader had
written the book, they were unaware of Bader’s inmost motivation.
Machinations continued to swirl about the case over the next several years. Behind-the-scenes
intrigues, distorted accounts in the press, lethargic attitudes on the part of administrative
officials who would not take responsibility to cut an increasingly tight Gordian knot, outright
fear of various personalities to become too deeply implicated lest they lose their jobs — all
these, and more, continued their daily round in an atmosphere of “Business As Usual,” and “Don’t
Risk Your Neck.”
To get to the nexus of the situation, we have but to cite the observation of one of the few
perspicacious journalists who, in the prestigious scientific monthly, Sciences and Life, wrote:
“The physicists are convinced that the effective Priore Ray is very complex but to analyze this
further some things first have to be made clear. One is to raise the suspicion that has surrounded
Monsieur Priore with a fabulous accretion of misunderstandings, insults and accusations of being a
swindler over many years. What is needed is a veritable national effort to act effectively and to
act rapidly.”
Over the next two years the decision-making process of the French government lumbered its way along
until it was finally decided to back the construction of a powerful machine. This decision was not
favorably accepted in many quarters. As Le Monde would comment: “The decision was made in spite of
the disapproval of many scientists. When money is tight, one should pay particular attention to how
it is being spent. Such seems not always to be the case. A credit of some $3.5 million francs (or
about a million dollars) has just been accorded to finance the construction of a new Priore
machine.”
The scientists to whom the article referred were in a rage. They understood, at this juncture, that
the only way to put an end to the affair was to eliminate Pautrizel who, because of the very
success he was having with his research, was seen as a dangerous competitor that might even become
one of the top figures in medicine and science on a national, or perhaps, on a world scale. Indeed,
it was learned that Professor Courrier had gone to the length of sending a report on Pautrizel’s
behalf to the Nobel Committee in 1979.
To make a long story short, the large powerful machine, the M- 600, was built but a huge tube in
it, after functioning for about a week, exploded. Due to the galloping inflation of the 1970’s, to
replace it would have cost another million dollars. The money was not forthcoming.
In the meantime Pautrizel, ever experimenting with the still functioning smaller machine, was to
discover new facts. Mice with their spleens cut out, for example, also could survive injections of
T .e. The Priore Ray had important implications for Arterio-sclerosis, since it effected lipid
modifications in rabbits given a dietary regime high in cholesterol. This research, published in
another note in the Academy Proceedings, instead of being warmly received, only irritated the
cardiological fraternity which felt, as some of its members put it, “trapped” by Pautrizel’s
efforts.
One particularly virulent opponent was Professor Bricault, Dean of the Bordeaux Medical School who,
as late as 1980, was telling his own students that the published results were a farce and had never
been obtained. The students, who carried out a special investigation of the matter on their own,
were able to judge what a farce their own medical dean might represent.
L’Express, the Time magazine of France, read by at least half the population of French
intellectuals, had the gall to compare the results of the Priore research to those of the infamous
Trofim Lysenko of the Russia of Stalin’s day. Haughtily L’Express added: “Today Priore’s
defenders explain that his machine has not only cured cancer but, in all probability, altered the
immunological characteristics of mice. Were this, in fact, so, all the immunologists, all the
geneticists of the world would unite to affirm that a machine capable of changing the genetic
patrimony is the discovery of the century, far more important than the atomic bomb or the conquest
of the moon. Unfortunately, the history of the whole thing has never been properly elucidated.
“The article was illustrated with photos distortedly selected to convince viewers that the Priore
machine was as serious and effective as the one that purportedly brought Frankenstein
to life.
In this poisonous atmosphere the slow work of building the M-600 went forward. To give anyone who
was not there a feeling for this endeavor we may now cite verbatim a passage from Graille’s book:
“The construction and assembly of the prototype – the M-600, that of highest power and variable
parameters – were fraught with many uncertainties and delays on the one hand and, on the other,
were marked by the stamp of Antoine Priore’s sparkling genius.
“To go from an apparatus that developed 1,240 gauss applied over an effective area of some 20
centimeters, to one developing 5000 gauss over an area of 60 centimeters means to take on an
extremely risky technical and technological wager. Electrical, mechanical and glass-blowing
specialists plunged into the unknown. They had to conceive, make, adapt and put together all the
various myriad components almost haphazardly with no precise technical study being previously
available. Priore’s stubbornness forced them to take on a trial-and-error manufacturing “gimmickry”
without precedent. As the thing was put together and preliminary tests made, it became clear that
many of the components were unsuitable and that they would have to be modified or replaced. The
tube itself, made of pyrex, 60 centimeters in diameter, and 6 meters tall, had to be replaced twice
after it imploded. In fact, practically everything had to be reconsidered or readapted.
“Everything” meant the parts going to make up a generator of 50 tons in weight. For example, the
coil which created the magnetic field: 5.5 tons with 11 miles of copper wire. For example, the
numerous cooling circuits which stabilized the thermal equilibrium of the generator and its
environment or, additionally, the circuits governing command, control regulation and selection – 6
tons of electrical cables of which 15 miles were of tele-command wiring.
“Priore astonished everyone. Breakdown after breakdown, incident after incident, it was he alone
who showed what to do next, indicated the proper steps to take, the right settings to adopt, the
right way to assemble the components: He was virtually building his machine by himself, nursing its
construction along day after day, all the engineers’ studies and efforts actually, and ultimately,
serving only as a preliminary attempt, a sketch as it were. When Priore made his presence felt,
things began working. ”
Then after the machine was built: “The part of the entire apparatus to generate electricity was set
up on a provisional basis. It was so noisy that, while functioning, it woke up the whole
neighborhood. The number of experiments had therefore to be curtailed so that the machine would not
be used at night. And, all at once, everything came to a halt. The Faraday cage, shielding and
isolating Priore’s apparatus, was torn and fissured by the shock of the cement pilings that were
being sunk into the ground all around to hold up the building under construction. This allowed
high- frequency waves to escape which disturbed radio broadcasts emitted by local radio stations,
the army, and civilian aircraft for miles around.”
Nevertheless during the week or ten days that the machine was in good operation the results of
experiments performed with it were more than formidable. First of all, it allowed for as many as
forty experiments to be performed on some 280 animals in a remarkably short period of time. Among
the discoveries made were: The ray emitted provided the treated animals with an extremely strong
immunitary response. Animals whose immune defenses had been attenuated by an immuno- depressant
were able to overcome the effects of injected parasites but relapsed a few days later. One could
therefore conclude their immune response was much weaker than those normally infested and treated.
Newborn animals, whether treated or not, developed a marked parasitemia leading to their deaths. At
the time of death, the parasites had the same antigenic structure as those of the innoculum which
thus implied that they had met with no defense at all in the infected organisms. This also proved
that the Priore Ray did not act directly on the parasites themselves but only by way of an increase
in the immune defense system of the organisms. The newborn animals succumbed to their parasitemia
because their immune system was not yet sufficiently developed to be stimulated by the P-Ray. The
phenomenon of a stimulation of the immune defenses was demonstrated by the fact that animals which
had received soluble antigens developed, after being irradiated, a level of antibodies far superior
to the controls.
These and other conclusions were the object of notes presented to the Academy of Sciences by
Pautrizel and his team in 1978. Even before, at a colloquium held in Antwerp, Belgium devoted to
African human trypanosomiasis, the same team had offered the conclusion that the stimulation of the
immune defense system that allowed organisms to throw off the effects of trypanosomiasis had to be
very significant in that all attempts to try to effect such stimulation through immuno-stimulants
as well known as B.C.G., or Coryne-bacterium granulosum, had led neither to the cure produced by
the Priore Ray, nor to any prolongation of the infected animals’ lives, nor even to the slightest
modification in the evolution of the Trypanosomiasis.
These three scientific papers did little for the cancerologists who read them except to exacerbate
their urge to oppose the Priore research, if not to arouse their outright hatred for the principal
experimenter, Raymond Pautrizel. Could this have been because, for over 20 years, the same
cancerologists had been working in vain to provoke in cancerous organisms immuno-stimulative
reactions by intensively and successively vaccinating them with B.C.G.? Many others had been life-
long apostles of chemotherapeutic cocktails of all sorts, or life-destroying ionizing radiations,
or, what more recently has become the fashion, of applying the two methods in endless
combination.
For this reason, they saw Priore and Pautrizel as nothing more than spoil-sports who had to be
destroyed.
One of the opening shots in this campaign was a letter received by Pautrizel to inform him that his
request for funds to continue his research through Unit-89, a unit that had been specially set up
for him to direct, had been denied. It took many months of investigation for Pautrizel to learn
that the real reason for the refusal was because of his work with Priore.
Next Pautrizel was informed that his appointment as director of the same research unit would be
extended for only two years, whereas the normal extension for similar units was five years. A third
insult came when Pautrizel tried to win a post within his unit for a high-ranking military
physician, who had been his student and who had decided to quit the military in order to
participate in the fascinating research prosecuted by his mentor. Pautrizel’s request for funds to
pay this physician, who all his life had been working on tropical medicine closely associated with
problems of trypanosomiasis, were refused four times in a row with no cogent reason given. The
physician, who in the meantime had volunteered his time without pay, finally became so emotionally
overwrought that he gave up his medical career and retired to the countryside where he gave himself
over to alcohol. Then Pautrizel tried to get a salaried post for another of his brilliant
collaborators (who still works with him). He was told that this man could take up his new functions
only if he left Bordeaux. One could go on with many other shocking stories but we will leave it to
Graille to conclude: “Everything possible was done to isolate Pautrizel, to separate him from his
collaborators. Every single one of these collaborators saw their careers put in jeopardy,
compromised, or broken.”
As a final insult, when the time came again to renew Pautrizel as director of Unit 89, those
responsible, not daring to overstep what even they knew to be decent limits by not extending him,
simply abolished the unit. And to add injury to that insult, a doctoral thesis that had now been
prepared by Priore, and backed not only by Pautrizel but by Nobel Laureate Andre Lwoff himself, was
summarily refused by the President of the University of Bordeaux.
It is perhaps unnecessary to state that the details behind all of this skullduggery could, and did,
fill up two chapters of a book and make for the most heart-rending reading imaginable.
So what happened next? In the autumn of 1977, Professor Georges Dubourg, one of the leading lights
in Bordeaux’s company of surgeons and a friend and admirer of Pautrizel’s, came to him to say
openly and baldly: “My friend, at the point you’ve reached, there is only one more way to jolt
medical opinion and that is to treat human cancer patients.” Pautrizel was hesitant, believing his
role to be one of continuing with his animal experiments but where would the funds for that come
from now? He therefore asked his old mentor, Robert Courrier’s advice. Courrier gave the green
light. The treatments were restricted to terminal cancer patients whose immune defense systems had
been disastrously weakened by chemotherapy or radiation or both. At least one of them was totally
cured. The other lived, without pain, for a period many times longer than predicted by prognosis.
Dubourg, Pautrizel and their collaborators wrote up the results and sent them as an official
communication to the French Academy of Medicine for publication.
The reply they received from that Academy’s perpetual secretary reads: “Experts whom we consulted
consider that your work does not fall within the jurisdiction of our members and that it would
doubtless find an audience more worthy of its purpose in a more specialized society .”
To which Pautrizel formally replied: “Since two of the four signatories of our note are
corresponding members of your Academy, could we not benefit from the remarks and comments made by
the committee which saw fit to refuse our paper? And even, if this is not too indiscreet a request,
to learn the names of the expert members who were consulted which would allow us to get into
contact with them directly and to benefit from their singular competence?”
His letter has remained unanswered for four years.
There was nothing more to do except one thing which Raymond Pautrizel, as a man of science, had
always been careful to avoid: Get a responsible journalist interested in the case, inform him of
all possible details, and let him carry the Priore Affair in all its harrowingly loathsome aspects
to the broad reading public. That journalist was Jean-Michel Graille.
For four years, Graille went about his task, publishing three consecutive long articles in his
newspaper Sud-Ouest France and finally the book to which we have referred and of which this
presentation is largely a resume. As early as 1980, Graille would write in his newspaper: “The
Priore Affair is simple in essence. It can be reduced to a simple alternative: either the machine
developed by Antoine Priore is of no interest and, having shown this, the affair can be considered
at an end. Or else the machine is of real and demonstrable medical interest and, if that is
officially recognized, he would be allowed to get on with the work. For this dilemma runs the risk,
yet again, of being buried under delays and evasions. Beyond all the powers-that-be that have been
directly connected to the affair for many years now – the power of finance, the power of medicine,
the power of science – perhaps it is now political power with which responsibility lies if it can
rise to meet and assume that responsibility through decision.”
That was Graille’s statement in 1980. His book which came out four years later ends with the
sentence: “The Dossier Priore thus depends, from here on out, on a decision that must be taken on
the very highest level, and imperatively. This responsibility devolves, in last resort, on the
chief of state and on him alone. Will he assume it?”
Would the President of the United States?
Introduction
In thousands of animal experiments in France in the 1960s and ’70s, Antoine Prioré used scalar electromagnetics to cure terminal cancers, infectious diseases, and restore suppressed immune systems. Government funding was cancelled in 1974, and the technology was suppressed.
Much of what we learned about the system had to be reconstructed from fragments of accounts from various individuals, as the inventor had passed on. Another complication was that the inventor himself did not have a clear understanding of the method of operation of the machine, and put it together as most inventors’ do: on a purely intuitive level.
Thomas Bearden arrived on the scene somewhat late in the game, but Priore was still alive at that time, and still engaged in a legal and ethical fight with the French medical establishment, who considered his machine to be unpopular and a threat to the profit margin of the pharmaceutical industry, as it still does today.
Bearden arrived at a working theory for the machine and published this in his provisional patent in 2001. This theory involved something he termed “the porthole concept”-the idea that mitogenic radiation, primarily in the UV region of the spectrum but also involving other frequencies, carry information about the quantum state of the point of emission. Using phase conjugation, Tesla’s “Invisible Wire”, we can phase lock into the wave emitted, and change the quantum state at the point of emission.
Tom Bearden places 20 years of research into the Public Domain to stimulate redevelopment of scalar EM healing (the “Porthole Process”). Application of the “Porthole Process” can potentially cure cancer, AIDS, SARS, anthrax, or ANY cellular affliction in 30-second treatment. Genetic diseases can be similarly treatable.
Since the phase conjugate replica (PCR) wave has negative entropy (this is substantiated in the publications of Pepper and others), it can reverse active entropic states seen as disease in the organism. The PCR wave can also carry information into the cell nucleus that was not there originally, and do correction on inherited genetic damage, thus reversing birth defects. This takes much longer than surgery, of course, as the new tissue conforms to the morphology of the corrected genetic structure. Once the organism is finished with it’s reconfiguration, the condition is permanent unless another signature is needed to “tweak” the structure. Thus the horrible birth defects caused by radiation and chemical damage can be corrected.
An initial test with PCR irradiation of GMO corn shows this is possible, and the artificial genetic modifications were reversed back to normal. Priore also noted that mice that were treated seemed more youthful. If the genetic damage theory of aging is correct, then the PCR would also correct for the distorted standing wave signatures that occur over time. Pepper noted that when an image of a cat was passed through frosted glass to deliberately introduce entropic distortion, and that image went through a phase conjugate mirror, the resultant image showed the original image of the cat minus the distortion. PCR devices are currently being used to correct for phase distortion in fiber optic communication lines for this same reason.
Therefore it is not unreasonable to assume that we are looking at a regenerative effect induced through the phase coupling of the Priore device, as plasmas are known phase conjugators and transducers of transverse into longitudinal waves.
However, the influence of magnetic and electric fields on organs, tissues, and cells has been further investigated during the past 30 years [Ottani et al., 1988; King, 1999; Funk et al., 2009]. EMF is reported to influence a wide variety of biological systems such as bone, skin and hematologic. For example, several in vitro studies have suggested that EMF affects the cellular physiology of many types of human cells [Masiuk et al., 2008; Sullivan et al., 2011]. In physical medicine, particularly, low frequency EMF has been applied clinically for early healing of wounds and certain musculocutaneous and musculotendinous lesions. However, most of these clinical studies are based on experience rather than scientific evidence.
Recent protocols based on electromagnetic fields have been developed as non-surgical and minimally invasive treatments of tumors. In particular, short electric pulses can induce important non-thermal changes in cell physiology, especially the permeability of the cell membrane. Including the unique ability to selectively kill tumor cells without harming normal surrounding tissue.
Nanosecond, high-voltage electric pulses (nsEP) induce permeabilization of the plasma membrane and the membranes of cell organelles, leading to various responses in cells including cytochrome c release from mitochondria and caspase activation associated with apoptosis [T.B. Napotnik et al, 2012].
Pain has been relieved by electricity since ancient times, at first by means of applying live electric fish to the tender areas to cause numbness. But once frictional machines were found to produce electro-static electricity (Franklinism) in the mid 18th century the use of living organisms was discontinued.
By the late 18th century Galvani had discovered the fact that frog muscle tissue responded to electrical currents however he believed the electricity came from the tissue. Volta discovered a chemical means of producing electricity from the first form of battery or voltaic pile after repeating Galvani’s experiments in order to show that the muscle twitching response was due to an external source of electrical current. This discovery led to the medical use of direct current (Galvanism). Its ability to cause necrosis by electrolytic means was employed in the destruction of tumors in early years. This was through the production of sodium hydroxide in the electrolytic process.
Galvanism was also applied to needles, hence the first form of electro acupuncture pioneered by Berlioz and Sarlandiére. When the needles were inserted into hair follicles, it was found that through the electrolysis of saline that the production of sodium hydroxide would cause necrosis of the hair root. This is still being used today as a cure for hirsutism, or excessive hair growth, known as the “Wolf Man Syndrome”. For the first time the combination of electrotherapy and oriental ideas about needling were brought together. Furthermore these early experimenters showed how stimulation of the nervous system brought profound relief from pain. In the early 19th century Faraday’s work on the production of alternating currents and his understanding of electrolysis provided medicine with advancement from these early forms of Galvanism.
A variety of safer alternating and interrupted currents (Faradism) have been employed in electrotherapy ever since, particularly in the form of electro acupuncture, TENS (Transcutaneous Electrical Neural Stimulation) and Dorsal Column Stimulation. The popularity of electrotherapy fell during the early part of the 20th century, as no one knew how its effects were obtained. However now we know how different nerve fibers respond to different frequencies and amplitudes, and electrotherapy permits the modern practitioner to stimulate the nervous system in a number of different ways to induce the selective production of various monoamines, amino acids and peptides in the central nervous system.
During this down period of electrotherapy, two notable investigators experienced success in their experiments, only to have their life’s work ridiculed, destroyed ultimately suppressed, Royal Raymond Rife and Antoine Prioré.
Rife was a California scientist who during the 1930s, invented a powerful optical microscope in order to be able to see living bacteria, viruses and fungi that he suspected to be causing a range of illnesses. He found he could see the individual pathogens better by illuminating them with a light frequency that matched their own resonance frequency and causing them to glow. When he intensified the frequencies, he observed the pathogens either bursting or going inanimate. This led him to create an RF driven tube ‘beam ray’ device that could weaken or destroy various pathogens by energetically exciting destructive resonances in their constituent chemicals. Rife’s claims were ultimately discredited by the medical profession in the 1950s from pressures arising from the growing pharmaceutical industry and their ties to the FDA. He died in 1971, penniless and embittered by the failure of his devices to garner scientific acceptance.
In France in the 1960s and ’70s, Antoine Prioré used what is now called scalar electromagnetics to cure terminal cancers, infectious diseases, and restore suppressed immune systems. Government funding was canceled in 1974, and the technology was again suppressed, due to the same mechanisms as in the US
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