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So, we'd like to start with your explanation of the idea of the interdependence of structure and energy, something that isn't talked about much and how that runs counter to the accepted culture of how... the independence of energy and structure. The physics as it developed in the 17th, 18th, 19th century became more and more abstract in their understanding of energy and matter. And the whole idea of matter tended to define units as sort of lifeless, utterly lacking intelligence. And the kinetic energy concept that Leibniz proposed was living force.
And so, if you abstract kinetic energy and equate it with heat and chemical energy and potential energy and such, then you get this abstract idea of energy as something separate. And when you take away the living force, what you have is a dead matter. And the same abstracting process reduced matter to the idea of elements. And an element is made up of timeless, supposedly timeless, indivisible units, each of which is identical to everyone else in the universe. And in old chemistry classes, they used to talk about how to do a particular experiment.
You would use nascent oxygen, meaning freshly born oxygen, which had the reactive properties that old oxygen doesn't have. And that's an example of one of the properties that you tend to neglect, that if every atom is the same, no matter where it is in its history. The astronomer Halton Arp sort of revived the idea that time is important in matter. When he saw physical connections between galaxies that had different redshifts, so they should have been in utterly different parts of the universe with different ages and so on.
And so he proposed the idea that newly born matter has different properties altogether, mass, energy of ionization and so on. And that the person who, I think he claimed the term isotope, Fred Soddy, he's now in the main line of physics history, but he proposed that cosmic rays are the result of newly born atoms, that he saw time as a real thing affecting the nature of an atom. So these people got away from the abstracted notion of dead matter, all the same everywhere, regardless of context and so on.
And part of the motivation for having that abstracted idea of both energy and matter was because they wanted to build machines, understand the causal interactions, how, what happens when you put energy, fuel or fire into your steam engine, produce steam and motion and so on. And that understanding of a machine with the energy abstracted from the parts that you manufactured, that was used as a model for an organism and it led at the beginning of the 20th century to the idea of aging as wear and tear.
Just like a machine, you run energy through it and it degrades over time, gets worse and worse. And the Vernadsky-Le Chatelier trend is that as you run energy through matter, it complexifies and that's especially relevant to a living system, which is generated and complexified exactly by the flow of energy through it, which should be running the machine down by wear and tear. And still, practically all of my professors were absolutely dedicated to the idea that aging is in one way or another wear and tear, somatic mutations and so on.
So once you see the context, the historical reason for doing this abstraction of energy from matter, it gives you a different picture that you can't separate the existence, the very substance of a thing from its place in the energy system all the way up to the star energy that's driving the life on earth, for example. And applying this to the organism, you get a different view of what stress is from the old view. Stress involves tearing down the system in various ways.
And the idea of a functional system is that whatever the organism decides it has to do, you can call it a stressor or an opportunity. Ideally, problems are opportunities that allow you to develop a part of your system to meet the possibilities or challenge in the environment. And the exercise of that part of your system to fit into the environment in that particular unique time-sensitive way, wherever you are in your development, means that you're going to use a different part of your system to respond.
So if you get a job chopping wood, for example, you will use part of your system and develop the capacity to do that very well. But if you don't talk to people while you're chopping wood, the energy from your talking system goes to strengthen your working system. And whatever the organism is doing as part of its survival and daily living is reinforcing the system that's functioning and backing up the development of what you're using to adapt. The stress hormones like cortisol will take down, like if you're using one set of muscles and not the other.
The cortisol that is helping you adapt is going to dissolve unused muscles, turn them into amino acids, which then feed the muscles that are working. And different kinds of exercise, eccentric exercise means that you're trying to use your muscles in a productive way, but something's resisting it. And instead of doing what you want to, it's stretching it against your intention. Eccentric means that you're achieving doing the work and then relaxing doing the work again. Concentric builds and the eccentric tears down. And the positive building side of your functional system uses things like testosterone to block
the action of the destructive catabolic cortisol-type hormones. Someone used radioactive labeled testosterone and gave it to a weightlifter and then made an image of where the radiation was coming from and they thought it would all be concentrated in their skeletal muscles, but their heart was the brightest concentration of testosterone. And if you're under stress doing hard labor, it's good to take down the muscles you aren't using, build up the working muscles, but you don't want to take down your heart to feed the working muscles.
Your heart, lungs, and brain are where the concentration of testosterone is to protect against the takedown as food. The thymus is very weakly protected and it's the first thing to go away when you're short of protein and under stress. So you can build a muscle quickly and feed it high protein solution just by taking your thymus down. And looking at cadavers, people who had been killed in accidents or died after a sickness, they found that the adults didn't have any thymus gland to speak of, so that created
the idea that it's a gland that normally atrophies. But using isotopes and such, they found that a healthy adult does have a thymus and that good health, progesterone for example, and thyroid, accelerate the regeneration of the thymus gland. And so the old idea of adulthood and aging and stress were really artifacts and a better examination of what's happening shows that in good health at least, the stress effects are temporary and repairable. Becker, I believe, talked about children when they get a digit of their finger severed, if left alone it'll grow back.
If anything's done to it, it won't, and that it's not really accepted, this idea that the digits will grow back. Very few doctors even know that now. Yeah, it's been known for more than 50 years. I've seen it happen three times. Around 50, over 50 years ago was the first time I saw it. Next time was a little kid, four or five years old, caught the tip of his finger in the wheel of his tricycle and cut it off right at the base of his nail.
And I told his mother about what I had seen in the late 1950s, and she got the case of a ballpoint pen that just fit over his finger without touching the tip and just kept it unexposed to air. And I forget, maybe two weeks or something like that, it had completely regenerated, perfect fingertip. And then a friend of mine who was an electrician accidentally sawed off the tip of one of his fingers a few years after that, and he had big, big fat fingers.
And so he used an aluminum cigar tube that just slipped over his finger. And again, I guess he was 40 years old at the time, it regenerated perfectly. So part of my understanding of that is that the carbon dioxide equilibrates and protects it against excess oxidation, and oxidation, I think besides drying it out, it prematurely differentiates a layer of skin, scar tissue and skin, and the carbon dioxide keeps the energy up and lets the tissue sense the cues that it should be sensing to finish its proper development.
And the same, I think, applies to injuries internally that could lead to cancer or fibrosis if you're well soaked in carbon dioxide and the nutrients, the carbon dioxide keeps the energy up and the inflammation down. So instead of making a prematurely differentiated scar tissue, you can go on differentiating replacement proper stem cells. What seems unique to your writings and thought process is that you take the ideas of Hillman and Ling and Pollack and Mae-Wan Ho and others, as well as this idea of the interdependence
of energy and structure and apply it to or impact how you understand disease, aging and nutrition. How did you connect these dots? Because it seems so rare for someone to look at these abstract ideas. Oh, I think the questions that I had in the 50s that led to experiments such as measuring the conductivity of young and old people, seeing that the body seemed to be developing internal obstacles to communication of some sort, the electricity simply doesn't flow through an old body as well as a fresh young body.
That was sort of the background of coming in this direction. And so seeing that the idea of the membrane in the 60s, there was a real mania in the 60s. Scientific American started it early in the 60s and then several new journals, I don't know how many membrane journals around the world started. Nature devoted a whole new magazine, Nature Membrane, I think it was called. So at the time I entered graduate school, the idea of a membrane as a limit to each cell was dominating.
And it conflicted with my idea that the organism is a whole thing that generates its field and has its conductivity. And so running into Lange, he seemed on the path to developing knowledge that doesn't play like a machine with little isolated parts. And right at that same time that I ran into Lange's work, I started, well, I had read Michael Polanyi's book, Personal Knowledge, in the 60s. And in that he said just a very little bit about his own work. Somehow in the encyclopedias earlier I had run across adsorption, the article on adsorption
at that time had a little passage describing Michael Polanyi's adsorption isotherm. And it was one of the few mathematical images that really seemed appropriate to apply to the real world and organisms that the adsorption increases with the concentration or pressure. And that means that you'll get multi-layer adsorption simply as the pressure goes up. And 1915 when he presented that, Einstein and other big shots in physics said, well, in Hungary that might seem convincing, but in the modern world we know that one atom with its electrical charge totally neutralizes the field of the underlying one.
You can't have multi-layer adsorption. And so he went off and did different things. But he went into studying crystals and the elasticity and surface properties, friction, all of the things that people study in crystals, and found that every place he looked, long-range energy was showing him the same kinds of long-range multi-layer effects. That when a crystal, if you work a metal until it cracks, the energy to separate the parts of the crack is drawn from a great surrounding area that this antenna-like effect conducts the energy even for something like breaking a crystal.
And if you wet the surface of a crystal, what you do on the surface affects the elasticity properties of the crystal. So it goes from the inside out and from the outside in. There's no such thing as an abstract surface. There are long-range effects. All this was done in the early 1920s. And again, when he would present his ideas, they weren't acceptable. It was 1931, I think, when he in London finally did a revision that could account for long multi-layer adsorption.
But anyway, I started reading Polanyi at the same time as Gilbert Ling and seeing that these long-range forces were part of creating the coherent image of the cell and the organism. That the membrane thing was really an attempt to preserve the abstractable reductionist parts. The whole is nothing but a sum of the little parts, nothing long-range beyond the membrane, either outside or inside. The inside is all one phase, the outside is all another, and they're kept different by the properties of this membrane.
I wrote to Ling at one point asking him if he had considered using the Polanyi adsorption isotherm because of this intrinsic field idea that was built into it. And he said no, the one he was using, Langmuir, I guess it was, works fine. And then how did this alternate model that you were shaping in your mind change how you thought about nutrition and disease? I think it was much later that I, against a background of deciding that my mental activities should be directed toward use rather than interaction with culture systems, periodically
from the '60s on I kept saying, now how can this be useful? And to the extent that something is useful, how does that affect the theory about it? And so I was constantly trying to remind myself to keep the theory and generalization in the same world as the practical stuff. Right at that time, someone who saw me having a migraine later said she had known someone that said that eating a carrot a day would prevent migraines. And so I started trying it.
And for, I guess it was about six years, I ate a carrot every day and didn't have a migraine. And that started me being receptive to information, which I had again read earlier. The newspaper, Dr. Walter Alvarez in the '40s had written some sort of autobiographical books describing his experiences working with the intestine of his medical students, for example. And so putting together the old medical stuff about the importance of the intestine and the ration experiments in which they would put a balloon in the intestine and inflate the balloon, nothing would happen.
But if they gave the animal some insulin to lower its blood sugar, again, nothing would happen until they blew up the balloon and stretched the intestine. And then it would have constriction of the trachea or seizures or some analog of some symptoms, some disease that's common. And that, when I started writing the Mind and Tissue, doing the course on Russian brain research, I was integrating that with the effects of estrogen, thyroid, progesterone, and so on, and so on. And the information going way back medically, that into the 19th century, people were aware
that dying people very frequently, most of the time, showed intestinal inflammation as though it's a universal factor in sickness and dying. So those components were needing explanation in terms of this coherent picture of the organism. So things reinforced each other until it gradually produced this picture of the organism adapting to its environment, both internal, nutritional chemicals, toxic chemicals running through the system, stresses consuming energy, lowering blood sugar, causing you to shift your fuel type, the way you use your oxygen, and so on.
So besides the daily carrot, what other changes to your diet or lifestyle did you make? When I lived in Mexico, for myself as well as seeing the people in the city and country who were very short on food, I was teaching English classes and paying expenses by cutting my food intake, and that was how I ran across a store that sold wholesale wheat germ. And I found that I could get the required amount of protein and vitamins very cheaply using wheat germ.
But then my teeth started decaying and becoming very painful, and I looked up what the properties of wheat germ are, and it's extremely high in phosphate and it takes calcium out of your system. And so I saw that you have to economize in safe ways. But keeping the idea of economy was a central factor way into the '70s when I was trying to finance my continuing studies by cutting my living expenses to practically nothing. So as part of that, I ran onto the idea that potatoes are very close to a perfect nutrient
balance, adequate protein because of the high quality of the protein and amino acid equivalent, and have basically everything except vitamin A and B12. And then in Mexico, everyone cooks their tacos and such in vegetable oil, and so I was pretty well soaked in safflower oil for all the years that I was in Mexico. And working on my dissertation, looking at the things that cause aging and the wastage of oxygen the way estrogen and radiation do, I saw that in the early 1940s, there are lab
animals had, in several labs, had suffered epidemics of brain softening and atrophy of the testes. And Dr. Shute in the '30s and then his son Evan and Wilfred into the '40s and '50s were working on the idea at first that vitamin E was a fertility nutrient because of being anti-estrogenic. And being anti-estrogenic, it prevented blood clots, among other things. And the preventing blood clots led them into treating it as something to prevent heart disease. But in the middle of that process, the fact that these lab animals getting a grain-based
or bean-based diet very high in polyunsaturated fats, the brain and testicle atrophy was prevented by adding vitamin E. And because of the various industrial forces at that time, 1942, the pharmaceutical industry, I think a dozen different companies, came together to lobby the FDA and medical schools to the idea that estrogen was the female hormone and should be approved as a drug to treat infertile and aging women. And because this coincided in time with the discovery that what had been the anti-estrogenic vitamin E, that it cured male infertility and dementia in the animals, that would be
bad if it was acting as an anti-estrogen to prevent degenerative disease. So they promoted the idea that it's working as an antioxidant, that the vegetables are unstable, and the vitamin E prevents that toxic free radical thing. And so out of that misinterpretation, essentially, of what vitamin E is, developed this whole idea that aging is caused by free radicals excess. And in my dissertation, trying to understand what estrogen was doing, similar to aging and radiation, I saw that previously the toxic effects of the polyunsaturated fatty acids
were producing lipofuscin, or age pigment, and that the degenerating brain and testicles involved the same oxygen-wasting pigment-producing process that had been seen in old infertile uteruses. And so I started extracting the pigment from the aged, sort of gnarled-up uteruses of the hamsters and studied the age pigment in itself and found that it has an enzyme-like oxygen-consuming effect that generates free radicals and wastes oxygen. So that sensitized me to the immediate toxic dangers of unsaturated fatty acids. And then in the '70s, I saw an experiment described in which they had given several
groups of animals, I think it was 15 different compositions of the diet, high-fat diet, low-fat diet, high PUFA, low PUFA in different combinations. And at the end of their life, the fat animals were the high PUFA animals independent of the quantity of fat in their diet. So a low-fat, pure PUFA diet was just as fattening, basically, as a high-fat, high PUFA diet. But a high-fat, all-saturated fatty acid diet wasn't fattening. So that was when I decided to look for a source of coconut oil.
So I read the literature and saw that there were just dozens of studies showing that as the proportion of polyunsaturation in the diet increases, not only obesity, but the rate of cancer goes up directly with the unsaturation of the fat in your diet. And one... coconut oil was such a standard animal food at that time, many people showed that it was very low in its allowance of cancer to develop. And hydrogenated coconut oil... Maybe we should just wait for this siren. Hydrogenated coconut oil was tested in relation to cancer and carcinogens, and it was even
more protective than a normal natural coconut oil. So it was purely the unsaturation. And new studies are showing that red blood cells, for example, are high in stearic acid in people who don't have cancer, and low in stearic acid, the saturated fat, in people who do have cancer. And as far back as the 1920s, there were observations that a fat-free diet made the animals cancer-free. And where did endotoxin fit into this picture for you? For me, it was a way of understanding how bowel inflammation could have so many ramifications
of, for example, in traumatic shock, if the intestine is full of undigested food, the consequence of the shock is much worse. And so just as a reservoir of something, the intestine interacts with stress and shock. When your adrenaline goes up, for example, the movement of the intestine decreases. You don't have bowel sounds when you're tense. And the circulation decreases. That's part of the functional system. The blood flow and energy go to your working muscles, and you don't use your viscera.
So the same thing that shrinks your thymus is shutting off the blood supply to your intestine. And if that goes on very long, your intestine loses the barrier function, and whatever is in the intestine tends to get in the bloodstream. And endotoxin is, it's always present to some extent if you have bacteria, and it's always a mild stress. But when the organism is being intensely challenged, then endotoxin can have systemic, very intense effects. And so endotoxin is just one of the dimensions of the challenges that the organism is defending itself against.
There have been experiments on long-range germ-free effects, and the animals have a very low mortality in youth and middle age than on the diets that they give these germ-free animals. Then they almost catch up in mortality in very old age. But mortality is definitely low, showing that they're more resistant to stress in many ways simply by not having germs growing in their intestine. But they are still eating a standard diet with, among other things, starches and unsaturated fatty acids. And even though one of the factors that gets in your system when you're under stress is
endotoxin, a fairly small molecule, even the bigger molecules, such as starch grains, can get through the wall of the intestine and circulate and, in effect, accelerate aging. The mice have been fed raw starch for a long time and then sliced up and found that there were nests of dead tissue all through their bodies, including their brains, around starch grains that had plugged up small arterioles and cut off the circulation. So the endotoxin is a chronic constant, and starch grains are another factor.
And the polyunsaturated fats are, unless you make an extreme effort to avoid them, they're always going to be absorbed and incorporated into your tissues. And it happens that the unsaturation makes them a little more water-soluble, and so they, to some extent, escape oxidation through the fat-loving cells and are more likely to be stored simply because they stay in circulation and avoid being eaten immediately. But when they're in storage in fat droplets in your fat tissues, the fat cell is needing energy to survive, and it preferentially oxidizes saturated fats.
And so once you start getting fat, your fat cells are eating the good stuff for themselves and letting the stored fat get more and more polyunsaturated. And when you're under stress, these are the water-soluble things which are released preferentially. So the older and fatter you get, the worse any stress is for you. And the polyunsaturated fats not only have their direct effects, hormone-like, and a toxic effect on the mitochondria, the unstable susceptibility to oxidation, and so on, but we have the enzyme system that creates a loop in the molecule creating the prostaglandins.
And at first, the drug companies said, "They're hormones that we make. You find them in semen. That's why they call them prostaglandins." And since they're hormones, they're prospective products for drugs or supplements. And I got some to experiment with around 1970 or '71. I was doing electrical measurements still at that time, and I put some spots on my skin. And for comparison, I made a sleeve covered with tinfoil and had some holes in the tinfoil so I could sunburn spots selectively. And I think it was the F-type of prostaglandin imitated the sunburn electrically.
It created a reducing area on my skin. And around that time, a few people started saying, "Well, they're natural hormones, but some of them have really bad effects, such as knocking out progesterone production in the ovaries." And so there was the yin and yang theory of prostaglandins, the good ones and the bad ones. But when you look at the good ones, as the evidence accumulates, they all have some really bad effects, causing pain or atrophy or inflammation or such. So not having any of these ordinary prostaglandins would be good.
And when you're really deficient, absolutely lacking the vegetable N-6 or N-3 fatty acids, the body produces its own polyunsaturated fats, but they're stable because they have this tail of a hydrocarbon chain of nine carbons. They're the N-9. And these are anti-inflammatory rather than pro-inflammatory. And so our body tends to make those when it isn't being blocked by the vegetable or fish oils. And so our natural defensive anti-inflammatory system seems to be a casualty of the accumulation of these environmental fats. Can you talk about how endotoxin can increase some of the other disease-causing agents like
estrogen and serotonin? The intestine being the main source of endotoxin, you can breathe it if you work on a farm, for example. It gets in the air and can cause respiratory problems. But usually it's the intestine that's the main source. And the intestine is well-supplied with hormone-producing cells and serotonin. There are a lot of conductors and regulators in the intestine, various types of nerves and things like nerve transmitters that regulate the tone and function of the intestine. And the intestine is very richly supplied with these serotonin-producing cells.
And partly the direct effect of the endotoxin activates these cells. And at the same time, it's making the intestine leaky by knocking down the energy production. It's also acting as a signal to activate serotonin production. And the combination of the leakiness, the lowered energy, and the serotonin increase nitric oxide production. And the serotonin and nitric oxide circulate systemically. Ordinarily the serotonin that's absorbed into the blood from the intestine is carried on the platelets to the lungs. And the lungs are a major detoxifying organ.
And nitric oxide interferes with the production of the detoxifying capacity of the lungs. And so the combination of nitric oxide and serotonin, and especially if endotoxin is also reaching the lungs, will swamp the ability to detoxify serotonin. And then the serotonin gets through to the brain. The brain normally produces only a few percent of the body's total serotonin. But it's a very important regulator in the brain, controlling emotion and formation of new cells, for example. And if your intestinal serotonin is getting through to your brain, it's received as a stress signal, creating depression.
It turns on the little peptide signal, which turns on your pituitary signal to produce ACTH to turn on your adrenal glands. So the serotonin caused by stress getting through your lungs into your brain turns on the stress system, activates production of cortisol, which, unless it's compensated with a lot of testosterone and progesterone, is going to start melting down your tissues under the influence of stress. So these three factors, in particular serotonin, nitric oxide, and endotoxin, are a very central part, at least in our present diet, atmosphere, and so on.
They're a very central part of keeping us on the edge of melting down all the time. So having identified some of the stress-causing or disease-promoting substances, what do you consider as life-supporting or energy-protecting? This morning I saw an article from two or three years ago about one of the oldest men in the U.S. I think he lived in New Jersey and was the oldest man in the state when he died at 111. His son said that all through his life he would eat bowl after bowl of strawberry ice
cream as his favorite food, and the staples of his diet were sugar, fat, and when he ate vegetables they were cooked to softness. So choosing the right kind of vegetables and good ice cream, that's really a perfectly supportive long-life diet. In Vilcabamba, where there were people who according to the church records, they were up in their 140s and the churches generally have been very reliable recorders of births and deaths. And living in the high regions, they ate lots of greens because they're easy to grow in
a stressful environment, and sheep, sheep milk or sheep cheese because sheep are a common animal for farmers in the high mountains. So that made me interested in the role of high magnesium and mineral intake. And there's talk that in these high areas the water, a lot of it is glacier water, rich in pulverized minerals, but I think the diet of a very rich in minerals such as magnesium and calcium is an important anti-stress, anti-aging effect. And thinking about the effects of high altitude besides the low oxygen pressure that prevents
an overproduction of lactic acid when you're under stress and working, because in your lungs there's an exchange between oxygen and carbon dioxide. If you reduce the oxygen pressure, you increase the amount of carbon dioxide left in the tissues, and the carbon dioxide pushes towards the continuing oxidation of glucose and inhibits the production of lactic acid. Lactic acid produces inflammation, fibrosis, and so on. So the high altitude in itself, just because of the oxygen relative deficiency, is very protective. But another thing about high altitude is that as water evaporates from the ocean, you get
all of the isotopes pretty much coming off the surface of the ocean. Heavy hydrogen, deuterium, as well as normal hydrogen. But as the water condenses, first in the coastal regions, rising and cooling as it goes, it rains out selectively the heavy isotopes. And so the higher you go, the lighter your water is. And the first experiments were written up in Science News around 1950, in which they were making heavy water for their nuclear industry. And they fed mice some of the heavy water and found that they had accelerated aging,
turned gray in middle age, and died young. And so very little was done from 1950 until pretty much this century. But there is definite evidence that the heavy isotopes slow down biochemical processes, simply lower the energy production of the system. And you can make some improvement in your isotope balance just by, for example, choosing sugar beet derived sugar from the high country in the Midwest, Colorado, for example, if you could get all your sugar from beets grown in Colorado, you would have a distinct advantage
in isotopes over Hawaiian sugar, which is very rich in the heavy isotopes. And so a couple of companies, I think a Hungarian company and a Chinese company, are selling ways to produce light water cheaply and even selling bottled. I saw on the internet $10 a cup for the light water. And would you also consider, you mentioned progesterone and thyroid, would you consider them life-supporting or energy-protective? Yeah, our body is naturally renewing itself and stabilizing itself by supporting the oxidative processes and differentiative processes.
In a challenge, we'll have a flash of reduction, electron rich conditions, but that produces cell growth, accelerates repair, and then to turn off that process, you need energy. And our central stabilizing hormones are thyroid to run the oxidative machinery. And cholesterol is a basic stabilizing substance, but the cholesterol can be turned into pregnenolone and progesterone if you have enough raw material cholesterol and enough thyroid. The thyroid oxidative energy is needed to take off a chain of the cholesterol molecule and it uses vitamin A to do that.
And in the brain, this is at the basis of all of the degenerative brain diseases, psychoses, euphoria, depression, and so on. The failure to convert cholesterol into pregnenolone, progesterone, and the neurosteroids. So without adequate thyroid and adequate cholesterol, your brain can't do what it should be doing. And instead, under stress, it produces the esters of cholesterol. So the young, healthy brain, it's very rich in plain cholesterol, which is a stabilizer. And the demented, Alzheimer's brain is low in real cholesterol, but instead has the ester form, a relatively soap-like water, relatively water-soluble, and tending to destabilize
the brain. And in fairly recent publications, they've described giving, I think it was 9 or 10 grams of purified cholesterol every day to autistic kids and improving their brain function because they had seen that their brains were being deprived of the neurosteroids. And I think sugar, which lets your liver and intestine and other cells produce more cholesterol, sugar and thyroid will support your body's ability to make neurosteroids, testosterone, progesterone, and so on. Have all these findings and connections you've made led you to believe there is a root cause
of disease, or how can disease be understood differently within this larger context? How can disease be understood as a general process? Exactly, yeah. Deprivation, I think, essentially, energy deprivation, environmental degradation in every sense. A lot of the fossil and mummy records and such, Egyptian mummies had practically no cancer, and so the record shows that there have been whole periods of history or prehistory when people either had very different diseases or practically no disease, showing how important the environment is. And insurance companies over the last, well, they've been in business for hundreds of years,
and they've accumulated information about where people are better bets for insuring, and mortality decreases according to their figures, decreases as you go higher in altitude, and cancer decreases, even fairly small differences. And people have said, "But what about the radiation?" And let's look at melanomas, theoretically caused by ultraviolet burning of the skin. Someone, a cancer geographer in Texas, and the altitude differences between the northwest Texas and the flatter, lower areas isn't very great, but looking at this most radiation-sensitive, supposedly cancer melanoma, they found that there is an inverse gradient, even within
Texas and in the higher ranges. The insurance companies have seen that the mortality for heart disease and cancer both are much lower at high altitude. So the nature of the whole ecosystem in itself is a factor, and things like living where there's abundant mineral-rich food, good digestible fruits, for example, will help us to make our own carbon dioxide, but at a given diet and other conditions, the higher you are, the more protected you are from these intrinsic processes of polyunsaturated fats, endotoxin, starch absorption, and so on.
How did you come to believe, or why do you think that fruit seems to be such an ideal or healthful food? I think I was thinking about an article of J.D. Bernal's in 1960. He was talking about the evolution of heavy atoms in stars and the sun, and that started me thinking about the nature of energy and matter in general, and just in the most generalized way that I could conceive in 1960, I was thinking of what the ideal flow from the sun to our
brain would be, what things would simplify and generalize that flow to reduce the costs and side effects, problems, disease, and so on, and looking at the flow of energy. Trees that could stay in place for many years, dropping their leaves to fertilize the ground, humans putting their sewage back into the soil, and eating the fruit as their main energy, the plants evolved. Most of the things we consider edible fruits were specifically evolved to tempt and support animal life to disseminate their seeds.
So the plants would put really serious toxins in their bark and leaves and roots, but they would create things that would promote animal life in the fruit so that the animals would live long enough to spread their seeds. So the environment is deliberately supporting animal life in the form of fruit. And ruminants have developed a system for detoxifying the environment that other animals have neglected. So if you put fatty acid into, polyunsaturated fatty acid, into a typical person or non-ruminant, about 98% of it survives into the system if it's quickly absorbed.
2% of the bacteria can saturate. But the ruminants simply extended parts of their intestine to allow that kind of bacteria that can hydrogenate polyunsaturated fats to develop and cook their food before it gets into their system. So they have about 98% of their fats become saturated, where 98% of ours are remaining unsaturated. So the way a tree can continue producing fruit constantly, a cow can constantly continue converting vegetation into almost a perfect food. So it turns out that the two most compatible foods with our system and with the cosmic
energy scheme, fruit is the basic energy efficient one. Milk is the practical conserver of energy and provider of a concentrated nutrient. Can you talk a little bit more about milk and what made you start to integrate it more into your own diet? When I was living in Mexico City, much of the milk, probably 70 or 80% of the milk was adulterated and tasted terrible and was known to be other stuff than milk. So I pretty much stopped drinking it when I was doing the college.
And over several years, every spring, I would develop pneumonia and really started having health deterioration. When I would go back to the border, the first thing I would do would be to have a giant milkshake. Back when they didn't put glue in the milkshakes. So my health would improve just for having this milkshake diet while I was in the U.S. Then I would come back. When I was 16 and working in the woods, I weighed 160 pounds. And after several years of not having all of the milk and fancy diet that I got in the
woods, my weight went down to 145. And a friend of mine, a professor there, said, "You should go back to the U.S. before you die," because I was getting so skinny. And besides the larger connections you made about fruit and health and milk and health, what about the carbohydrates in them are more health-supporting than starch? The nutritionists in the 1970s started talking about the glycemic index in connection with the idea that sugar is the cause of diabetes and so on.
And in looking, they were saying that it's good to eat foods that don't have such a high glycemic index on the idea that glycemia is what is harmful, causing diabetes. But the actual figures show that a pure starch is much more glycemic than a pure sucrose. Pure glucose and pure starch have the absolute perfection of raising your blood sugar. Sucrose is much lower, and when you test the components, the glucose half of the molecule is just like starch. And the fructose part of the molecule can actually lower the insulin because it goes
into your cells so easily and is converted. It promotes the production of glycogen when it's taken in ordinary physiological amounts. It raises your glycogen, helps to steady your blood sugar over time because the glycogen is available as soon as your blood sugar falls to oxidize. So the fructose part of the sucrose molecule that you find in most fruits is anti-stress, anti insulin-stimulating, anti-obesity because it prefers to increase your glycogen stores and steadier blood sugar rather than stimulating insulin, insulin-stimulating fat synthesis as well as glycogen synthesis.
So it's a little steadier to have a sugar diet rather than a starch diet. And besides the fruits come with a high concentration of certain minerals, pretty much the balance of minerals that we have in our cells, a high potassium concentration, for example. You hear about bananas and orange juice as rich sources of potassium, but that's typical of any fruit or any cellular material. And so it's compatible supplying the nutrients that we need. And the potassium itself has an insulin-like action, helps the cells to take up and use carbohydrates, bypassing the need to secrete insulin.
So it's easy on the pancreas. Your pancreas doesn't have to do anything if you're eating fruit. So there's very little insulin stimulation. So some of these conclusions specifically that simple sugars are beneficial and that polyunsaturated fats are harmful seem to run counter to what's considered healthy today, both by medical professionals and by nutritionists. How did the establishments and so-called experts get everything so wrong? I mentioned how the pharmaceutical industries collaborated and conspired against the public and the government to sell the idea that estrogen is the female hormone that prevents infertility and aging and so on.
And that helped to shape the interpretation of what vitamin E is doing. And instead of recognizing the toxic estrogen-like effect of the polyunsaturated fatty acids, it happened that during the 1940s, the war cut off the supply of coconut oil. Things like Oreo cookies had been made since the 19th century using coconut oil. And so a lot of our standard commercial foods had been using coconut oil because it was cheap coming from backward countries, free labor. And the war cut off access to those sources of coconut oil.
And so other alternative food materials, as well as especially animal food, were becoming available. Henry Ford had been responsible for starting the U.S. soybean industry. He made a soybean car in the 1930s, replacing the steel body parts with plastic made from soybeans. And for various reasons, that didn't go over. But still, the cars, the steering wheel, door knobs, and dashboard parts and such were made of soybean plastic for a while. But the plastics industry and the paint industry found the soybean a good source of raw material.
But then chemists found how to make plastics and paints out of petroleum. So there was this soybean industry that had been started largely for paint and plastics that had no market. And the reinterpretation of why the oils were toxic to animals, this had to be rethought. And when they compared the soybean fat, for example, in a pig's diet to coconut oil, the pigs were healthy and hungry and slim on the coconut oil diet and became fat and marketable eating less food on the soybean diet. So they realized that it was great pig fattening food.
And still they had leftover soy oil that couldn't be used in the paint and plastic industry because petroleum was so much cheaper. And as the paint industry shifted to petroleum, the marketing of these toxic oils to humans looked for evidence in biology and biochemistry to support why they should be human food. And the Burrs, who in the 1930s had argued that they were essential fatty acids, despite the contemporary published evidence showing that they were carcinogenic and fattening, Burr himself showed that giving the so-called essential fatty acids to rats suppressed their
metabolism by a huge amount of 30 percent or something. And he theorized that maybe their skin was leaking fluid and making them need extra heat to evaporate all that water. But the pig industry saw that it was really slowing their metabolic rate and making them need less food to put on weight. But Burr, because he was the one outstanding figure who insisted that he had found that they were really nutritionally important, that the ex-paint industry found him as their historical support for saying, "Look, it's essential. If it's essential, it must be good for you.
And so how can it be good for you?" And that was when they discovered or reinvented the idea that cholesterol is toxic rather than protective. And if you define cholesterol in the blood as rather than a defense against stress, as the cholesterol in the blood rises, your ability to turn it into protective pregnenolone, progesterone, and brain steroids rises. So when you're injured, you defensively increase your cholesterol production. But if you reinterpret that and say, "Look, stressed people have high cholesterol, must be causing the stress.
Therefore, if we can lower that, we will have a health food product." And the polyunsaturated fat does lower cholesterol a little bit. And so that was the whole basis of the saturated fat cholesterol thing causing heart disease. Medical studies in the 1960s, like a veteran's study, put people on this high polyunsaturated diet, and they started dying at a higher rate of cancer. And so they stopped that. But still, the industry push was to present the N-6 seed oil polyunsaturates as essential and beneficial.
So the idea of going from essential in a minimal trace amount to beneficial in any amount, that finally, through things like the heart study that turned out to be the carcinogenic diet study, that gradually started coming into the public consciousness that there really can be seriously toxic. So as the seed oil toxicity was coming up, with people like Clarence Ip showing that as you increase the percentage of linoleic acid in the diet, the cancer mortality of the rats increases linearly. That sort of thing was such clear evidence of linoleic acid as probably the main motor
of cancer and aging. This coming into the public consciousness required some marketing changes. And so the idea of essential fatty acids said, well, maybe it's not the N-6, maybe it's the N-3, because we have all of this excess fish oil. The Environmental Protection Agency, I think, was who gave a boost to that. The canneries along the coast were dumping their fish skins and heads into the lagoons and in landfills and such, and creating horrible pollution. So the EPA told them they had to clean up their factories.
And they economized by refining the fish heads and skins into protein powder and fats. And I guess the fish oil lamp market was extinct, so they had to find something to do with the fish oil, and a very limited market for fish oil varnish and lamp fuel and such. So the marketing of it as a health food has developed over the last 20 years. And since it took about 50 years for the toxicity of seed oils to come to consciousness, I think we've got another 20 years, anyway, of fish oil promotion.
The marketing seems to have been so successful in that it's a billion-dollar-a-year industry now as well as it seems to be the one supplement that everyone is taking, especially people that aren't so conscious of... One of the marketing ideas is that the brain has a lot of N-3 fatty acids in it. And so they say it's an essential fat, and especially essential for the brain. And so you'll have a better brain, and you can use it to cure schizophrenia, depression, Alzheimer's disease, and everything, especially in the brain, because the brain is so full of it.
But people have noticed that ruminants in particular, a newborn ruminant, is really highly saturated. And newborn humans, the brain is pretty free of the N-3 fatty acids, and so people have said, "What kind of a catastrophe is this that almost all babies are being born deficient in essential brain fatty acids?" And so they started saying, "You need to give it to the babies in their artificial milk to let their brains and retinas develop properly." And some French researchers devised an experiment for electrically monitoring the brain, the babies, the fetuses' responses to sounds.
So they would play a sound into the mother's abdomen and record how the baby's brain accommodated to it, and so they were studying prenatal learning or adaptability. And they predicted that by feeding the mother a lot of fish oil, that they would be improving the brain, preventing the essential fatty acid deficiency. And it turned out that it had the opposite effect. It impaired their brain adaptability and reduced the birth weight and brain size of the babies, which this outcome using seed oil, this had been done in the 1960s and '70s, showing
that feeding a pregnant rat or dog a very saturated fat diet, the babies had bigger brains and were much more trainable. Feeding them a highly polyunsaturated diet, the babies had smaller brains and were less trainable. So the French study has simply applied to humans what had been learned 30-some years earlier. And so what do you think could be the root of the problem? Is it simply just the influence of money, dogmatism, rationalism? Do you think it's one thing in particular? I think Wilhelm Reich spent his life thinking about what the source of authoritarian, irrational,
cruel behavior is. And he increasingly saw it as incurable in adults and that it required an early start in life. And I think to a great extent there is curability in adults. People can, given the right setting, radically change their way of thinking and living. But given a change in institutions, the whole society can, in one generation, I'm sure, make the switch, give up the destructive ways of upbringing and so on. But making the switch and deciding what's wrong, I think, is what's being prevented.
And there are the corporate institutions and their subservient government regulatory agencies that are enforcing, creating laws to keep in place the wrong ways of doing things because there's investment in it that has to be protected. The property rights of mistaken science are being built into the legal system. And you had sent us that talk by Gerald Pollack about why there's fewer and fewer breakthroughs in science. It seems like there was a definite shift when science and medicine took a turn for the worst
and that a lot of pre-1950s or '40s or whenever this happened seemed to be so much more good science and science open to or more receptive to outlying ideas. I ran across some articles in the 1920s in which the drug companies and chemical companies were talking among themselves about how Germany's chemical pharmaceutical industry had been so important to them in the First World War and that America had better start imitating German science and culture and that and various other influences working with government.
The atomic bomb project, the government sort of in an unpublic way was seeing these needs of industry and of the country to compete against Germany and Japan in the 1920s and '30s. Japan and Germany had the chemical industries, for example, and the poison gas industries and so on. And so the U.S. wanted to get in on germ warfare, radiological warfare, chemical warfare and so on. And so a lot of this was very secret in the U.S., but it was developing in the '30s. So the government was intimately involved at the beginning with the corporations in
developing a new kind of science. The Manhattan Project was where the money flowed in huge quantities to beat Germany and Japan to the atomic bomb. And as soon as the bomb was produced, the industry, which had been very secretive for German chemical warfare, started receiving the money that wasn't needed to be concentrated purely in the bomb research. So to get the money funneled efficiently, they converted this secret chemical and germ warfare industry into molecular biology. And E.B. Jensen was the person who invented the estrogen receptor.
He had been a chemical warfare specialist until the government financed him to be part of the endocrine molecular revolution in biology. And he was given isotopes from the nuclear industry. So he had a government connection that allowed him to do experiments that supported his argument that estrogen, as an analog of chemicals and hormones in general, estrogen acted only by turning on genes by attaching to this so-called receptor. And he demonstrated using the government isotopes, which no one else had. And the real science developing at the same time had shown that estrogen is acting like
a cofactor in many ways, affecting the activity of enzymes. In the cancer metabolism, for example, it's acting as a shuttle, oxidation reduction on one side and oxidation reduction on the other side. It helps to shift energy to facilitate the shift from glucose oxidation to fatty acid oxidation, essential for cancer metabolism. The enzymologists working on endocrinology in the '40s were moving in this direction, which happened to be showing the ramifications of the dangers of estrogen excess. But besides the industry pressure, selling estrogen as a vital anti-aging pro-fertility
drug, there was the government industry with its germ warfare people creating the idea that estrogen can do nothing but turn on enzymes, turn on genes. And what it's going to turn on are the female genes. So it's harmless to men because women have the genetic tendency to be women. And if estrogen is acting only to activate genes, then it's only going to affect breasts and hips and maybe the pituitary. But it was an ideological setup that turned out everything he argued to show why estrogen receptors were what he claimed them to be.
All of those claims proved to be absolutely false, like he had just invented a story and then said, "I have the tools to prove I'm right. You don't have them." But as they became more generally available, his claims turned out to be wrong, that estrogen is activating enzymes and doing massive changes instantly when it reaches the cell, where the process of activating a receptor, turning on genes and making proteins, there's quite a delay between putting it in the cell and getting your change. But actually, estrogen acts.
You can demonstrate chemical changes in the first five minutes, taking up water, changing enzyme activity and so on. So the shift to molecular biology, the whole thing has to be suspected and reinterpreted. It wasn't just scientists said, "Oh, now I'm going to stop making bombs and I've become a moral person. I'll think about how to cure cancer by studying molecular biology and genes and how the brain works and so on." But it was being pushed by huge amounts of government financing. Additionally, it seems another problem is that most scientists see with blinders on,
only focused on their very specific field of inquiry. What do you think that says about both them individually, as well as the system that seems to support that? A typical person working in science starts right away in high school and undergraduate college studies thinking they're going to be a career scientist or doctor. So they're shaping the way they think and accepting the authority of textbooks and professors. And the liberal arts education used to be centered on learning some kind of universal context and learning how to take a critical approach to knowledge.
But with the turning of science into a career, the idea of becoming a scientist affected how doctors were trained. Medicine was turned into a science and a technology rather than in the 19th century, it was thought of as primarily an art in which everything had to be evaluated and judged. So the training of scientists and doctors has become textbook-ized. And textbooks even used to be the reflection a famous physicist or doctor or whatever would sum up his knowledge in a textbook.
And they used to be very, a lot of them were very readable, better than novels, for seeing how a person was holding reality together and making sense of things. But as science education became institutionalized and turned into a career, textbook publishing became very practical and they looked for who was going to be buying their books. And so the well-financed professors in the biggest universities who were getting introductory courses of 400 or 500 students, one of those professors could, if they charged $100 per book, they had their expenses paid just by sales to one professor.
And so a chemistry textbook, for example, would look for who had the biggest classes around the country and then what they had published. And the text would be laid out according to the achievement of who was available to buy their books. So you would learn the chemistry according to who had the biggest classes in the country. Going back to some of your own self-experimentation with your diet or certain vitamins, environment and lifestyle, can you talk about how the relationship is set up between doctor and
patient in this society and how that sort of self-experimentation is often discouraged? I was always trying to apply what I read, like in Adelle Davis or Linus Pauling, to my own practical situation. And sometimes it had really bad consequences, like when I was overly impressed with Linus Pauling's advocacy of vitamin C. Before Linus Pauling got onto vitamin C, it was sold in the late 40s and early 50s in little tiny 25 or 50 milligram tablets. And it was usually called cevitamic acid.
And when I worked in the woods my first few weeks, I was getting terrible poison oak. And someone said he had heard that vitamin C made you immune to it. So on the weekend, very itchy and inflamed, I went to the drug stores and were selling little bottles of it. And I took a couple of pills on the weekend and the itchy inflammation blisters disappeared. And since then I've never had poison oak sensitivity. So I was very impressed with vitamin C.
And then a few years later, 1956, it started coming out manufactured in a new way where it was very cheap to make 500 milligram tablets. And I took one of those. And the next morning, woke up with a sore throat. And repeatedly I would try it and get a sore throat. And then in the mid 60s, I read Linus Pauling and was really convinced. Read some backup studies that it should have anti-stress, anti-itching effect. And so I started taking some and got chronic bronchitis and had a horrible cough.
And then on some trip, I was in a hotel and the maid threw out my bottle of vitamin C and my cough cleared up. And so I started getting interested in what might be in the ascorbic acid that didn't have good effects. And with further study over the years, I learned that there were manufacturing trace metal impurities in the most purified synthetic ascorbic acid that made it create oxidation byproducts equivalent to very intense X or gamma rays. So it's always a stress to take the manufactured stuff.
I found that just a milligram or two of the synthetic stuff, even without knowing that I was taking it, a bread profile, bread and breakfast cereals and things contained a little bit of ascorbic acid added to the formula. And just a piece of one of those foods containing a tiny amount of ascorbic acid synthetic would make me sick. But then I could drink a gallon of orange juice, other fruit juice, and get thousands of milligrams with no symptom at all. But anyway, I became a lot more careful with my experiments on myself.
And I was doing volunteer work with a free clinic in Eugene, the White Bird. And I advised a couple of people to stop using their vitamin supplements that contained ascorbic acid and several other irritants. And they had total recovery from their allergy symptoms, which was at that time, field burning was done every summer. And so everyone in Eugene got some poisoning smoke symptoms. And from those people at White Bird who recovered from their chronic allergies by stopping their vitamin pills, that started people coming to see me.
And that has continued until I stopped traveling and lecturing. People were constantly coming to the house to have me encourage them to stop taking supplements. I think we'll go more into that later. But what I was imagining is, or from my own experience, there's nothing a doctor seems to hate more than when his patient comes in saying, "Oh, I started to do my own research." And I read this on the internet, seemingly questioning their authority and that you're thinking for yourself.
Yeah, I haven't gone to a doctor except for like a physical to get a driver's license in Mexico or something. I think I was 12 the last time I had a doctor for being sick. So I didn't really have any personal experience with how doctors act. But a couple of times I went to the hospital with friends who were sick or dying. And I would ask the doctor, "Why are you prescribing that rather than this older drug that has a lot of information about it and the brand new drug? What's the reason for that prescription?"
And their reaction was just like a professor that I had embarrassed or something. Just great hostility and refusal to comment. And I can imagine a patient going to a doctor with information, "Why shouldn't I take vitamin K to prevent clotting as well as bleeding?" A handful of articles. The doctor insists vitamin K is for clot. It'll cause clotting and not prevent it. So simply wouldn't read the papers. And it's generally just useless to try to present information to a doctor. And apparently sometimes it'll make the doctor so hostile that they'll refuse to
continue treating the person. Why do you think this great sort of hostility or skepticism towards self-experimentation or self-... The calling the customer a patient is they're supposed to be patient and passive. A client, not a customer. And the idea is that they aren't selling you something for money in a normal business deal. You aren't hiring them to do something, but you're submitting to them, to their authority. And the doctor now submits not only to the authority of the professors who give the instruction
and doctrine, but to the authority of the state in terms of the licensing board. And many of the licensing boards have de-licensed doctors because they prescribed thyroid, natural Armour thyroid, on the basis of symptoms rather than a blood test. Having shown that the blood test is wrong, they lost their license and couldn't practice medicine. So the context is that doctors know that they'll get in trouble with the powers if they act too rationally. And if the customer is presenting information that should be taken into account, that's part of potentially being too rational.
And it means challenging the system all the way up to the government. And so the doctors are authoritarian subordinates, and they need their authoritarian passive subordinates to work. So the system is intended to channel products from the corporations to the mouths of the recipients. So we'd like to talk a little bit about evolution. If you could talk about your views on neo-Darwinianism. About? Neo-Darwinism? Well, in the family encyclopedia, when I was probably nine years old or so, I ran into the section on Lamarck and Darwin.
My parents had a 19th century edition of Darwin's Descent of Man. And in the introduction to that, he said, "People are misrepresenting me." And talking about natural selection as the only thing he named several different points that were very close to Lamarck. And later, I read Samuel Butler's book on something like the biology of memory. It was his theory of a Lamarckian mechanism of inheritance as memory of the tissues. And he discussed Darwin's grandfather's theory of evolution. Erasmus Darwin was contemporary with Lamarck and with William Blake.
And in London, at that time, knowing that evolution wasn't popular with the government and the church, he wrote it in the form of poetry. And at one point, he had his carriage painted with the slogan on the side, "Everything," in Latin, everything comes from sea critters, seashells or such. And that's part of the culture that Blake lived in. Swedenborg and his advanced brain research and so on in the 1700s. And because of the pressure of commerce, church and government, Darwin, the grandson, didn't put much emphasis on the Lamarckian aspects of inheritance.
And that's why Samuel Butler denounced him as a coward and a fraud, stealing his grandfather's and Lamarck's ideas. But at least in his later edition of Descent of Man, Darwin said, "Don't get me wrong. I'm not really a Darwinist, a neo-Darwinist." But then the people who revived Gregor Mendel's P-work were really very anti-Darwinian. They totally eradicated and rewrote anything that sounded Lamarckian. And Mendel was basically a careerist who wanted to be a higher-up in the religious business. And so he knew it was going to please the higher-ups if he disproved Darwin's evolution
as Darwin had the idea that these little particles taken out of the various tissues were sent to the gonads to reflect the experience of the organism and become part of the germ cells. And that meant that your traits were being modified by the environment and passed on reflecting time and experience. And the church and Mendel knew that they had to preserve something of the timeless, abstract, unchanging thing that God created. And so they said, "Well, maybe God didn't create the exact type of animal and plant, but God did create the traits.
What's timeless is the trait, not the way the traits are mixed up in the organism." So by breeding peas, he claimed to have disproved Darwin and Lamarck and that, in fact, things are timeless and unchanging. It's just that breeding mixes them up in different proportions, but really nothing changes because all of the inner parts are timeless, perfectly formed units. And then the neo-Darwinists in reviving Mendel were basically doing the same thing, saying, "Here we can incorporate the knowledge of the physicists, of the statisticians, and
basically the whole platonic tradition that the particles can be absolutely understood because they're standardized and unchanging." And the very recent, just the last few years of research, well, actually starting in 1960 in Korea, this Korean reported the way he had stained pieces of tissue showing what he called a third circulatory system. Besides blood vessels and lymph vessels, he showed another system separate from the lymphatic system carrying very tiny particles rich in RNA. And since RNA was recognized as part of our genetic system, it looked like this was, in
a way, maybe analogous to Darwin's gemmules as something circulating information in our body. And the Koreans' work preceded the 1968-1969 discovery of reverse transcriptase, which explained how viruses can be RNA-based rather than DNA-based because they had their own enzymes that could copy themselves into DNA and then be reproduced. But because that hadn't been invented yet in the United States, the Koreans' work was simply dismissed as so totally outside the scheme to have a third circulatory system. But all along, people looking at a sample of blood through a very good light microscope,
it looks like there's a lot of dust in the background, white cells and red cells and platelets and then a kind of dusty granular stuff in the background. And people finally have got around to studying the dust and its particles. I think the range is something like most of them are 5 to 50 nanometers or millimicrons in diameter, up to the size of a bacterium, one micron, but pretty smeared out between five millimicrons to a thousand millimicrons. And it's still so small that they look like dust through an ordinary microscope.
And these are now starting to be examined in different states of health, aging, disease, and so on. And it turns out that every kind of cell under stress is shedding particles of its substance. They call them membrane vesicles or exosomes, but they seem to fulfill the requirements of some of these things all the way back to Darwin's gemmules and the Koreans' third circulatory system and possibly the alternative ways of looking at gene changes under stress like Barbara McClintock's movable genes that stress can increase the mobility.
And it turns out that, in fact, we are constantly circulating even in the blood, but also in the lymph. And now some other Koreans are coming back and validating the 1960 guys' research showing that maybe there is a third specialized circulatory system for little particles of RNA. So what I first ran across was the traditional encyclopedists. The Encyclopedia Britannica had a good article on the Lamarckians, and that was because before the Second World War, the science hadn't been completely taken over by the dogmatists, and so people were still talking about the evidence.
And some people that I knew before I went to graduate school were talking about the training worms, flatwormers. Flatworms and the Worm Runners Digest, for example, came out of the training of flatworms. You would train them, then grind them up and feed them to other worms, and the new worms would have the learned behavior. And following the worm experiments, a Scandinavian, I think he was probably Danish from his name, Hiedenhain, was doing similar experiments with catfish and goldfish and rats and various
other animals, showing that he would train them and then grind up the brain and inject it into an untrained animal and basic types of light avoidance or dark avoidance. He could train the various animals and transmit it by the juices of the brain. And in one type of experiment, he would monitor the RNA and protein in the different sides of the brain of a catfish while putting an odorant molecule into one nostril or the other and show that there were RNA changes corresponding to the sense record and experience.
And then he would take the juice of the brain and show that it was involved in the training and learning. And my first year in graduate school, I was spending a lot of time in the library, and I found a book called Cold War in Biology by C.C. Lindgren. And it was published by the man who started the Worm Runners Digest, because no other publisher would take it. But it was a history of genetics. Lindgren was one of C.L. Morgan's, no, the famous genetics pioneer. I've confused him with a psychologist of emergence.
But anyway, he was the student of the Columbia and the center of the genetic, defining genes by crossing over the classical genetics. And so he was, his graduate study and early career was in contact with the classical geneticists. And it happened that another of, one of his classmates was the person who developed the cancer-prone strain of mice, and his career made him famous for developing genetic strains that would develop a certain kind of cancer, 100 percent or almost never. And both of these people, the mouse men and Lindgren, went away from classical genetics
of the 19-teens and 20s to a perfectly Lamarckian view of things based on their experience. Lindgren worked for the beer industry as a yeast geneticist, and he described his own experiments in which he would stress the particular organisms while watching them under the microscope and show that it wasn't random mutation like the standard university student experiment and the textbook description that you make an imprint of a colony of bacteria and press that onto other plates. You can show that the evolution starts from one random individual, supposedly, so that
that's randomizing the whole idea of genetics to fit the neo-Darwin idea that it's all random variation and natural selection. But Lindgren looked, using yeast that he could follow the individual cell under the microscope while he was starving it for a given nutrient, with a stain that showed their metabolic state. He could show the color change indicating that they were being stressed almost to the point of death. And then he could show that individuals were changing their genes to become able to metabolize something else that was available, so it was visibly non-random.
But this had to be published by the Worm Runners Press because none of the standard biology journals would take it. But in this book, The Cold War of Biology, he went over the whole 20th century genetic situation showing how right around 1947 there were still the Lamarckians teaching in colleges and high school. But under this wave of new science, I think of it as germ warfare molecular biology genetics, there was a removal of all of the Lamarckians from the educational system right across the spectrum. No one was left after 1947.
One guy at Harvard, John Cairns, started seeing the same kind of effect in bacteria that Carl Lindgren had written about. And so he became sort of a token Lamarckian that people say, "How do you explain that away?" and they're still pretty much trying to explain the way Cairns directed evolution in bacteria, meeting the need by changing their own structure. And more recently, a couple of other people are seeing even bacteria as able to do genetic engineering on themselves to meet the need.
And the only way you can achieve that is if you have a meaningful, coherent structure in the cytoplasm that is perceiving the need and knowing how to evaluate which gene needs to be changed and so on. So it's intelligence directed towards the inside and the outside that you can't explain the events without recognizing that, but it's very hard to get that idea into science. There's a website called Cell Intelligence on the internet. For several years, a man who shows, he argues that cells are communicating at the infrared wavelength.
And so he shows a laser-directed spot of infrared energy and how cells can be moved around under the microscope following a spot of infrared light. Albrecht Buehler is that man's name. From the website? Gunter Albrecht Buehler. It seems so intuitive. What do you think the getting stuck on the whole, you know, randomness as a, like the driving force for evolution seems like some kind of, like it gives you the opportunity to not take responsibility for something that might be happening? I've tried to trace the doctrine of randomness or the assumption of randomness.
And the mathematicians were trying to describe how to predict where a cannonball is going to fall. And the insurance companies were looking at how to handle randomness to predict investments and risk judgment and so on. So the mathematicians were working on it in the 18th and 19th century for practical purposes. But in the context of mechanizing, abstracting energy from matter and universalizing the atomization or quantization into these out of time and out of interaction, the absolute unit, you didn't want any intelligence or susceptibility or memory left in matter itself.
And so you had to find ways of explaining it in terms of statistical chance. And that was the context that S.J. Bose was working against when he showed that matter and organisms all have these properties of sensitivity, reaction, memory, and fatigue and recovery right across from inorganic to organic and living matter. But that was very deliberately a definition of matter was created to eliminate anything but random mindless causality. And so the conflict currently between the neo-Darwinists and the creationists, it's going back to around 1800 when the universities and the government said you must believe that
God created it and if he isn't intervening, he's at least responsible for setting it up. And the random people who said, no, it's all stupid and mindless, it all happened by chance. So they're both basically committed to the same system and ideology. The neo-Darwinists are just as extreme as the antique religionists in how they view change and matter. And the whole thing comes down to what is substance and what is an element and so on. Aristotle didn't commit himself to any of these ultimately deadly ideas.
And so he's very hard to understand coming from a contemporary. You learn what the Greek word meant in his time, try to figure out how you would translate it and it really becomes impossible to translate into this system. You've got to change your mind about what substance and change and being, everything has to radically change before you can translate someone like Aristotle or even read him properly. And for example, for him apparently a substance was anything. It wasn't necessarily an abstract thing, but Socrates was a particular substance and a goat is another kind of substance.
There's no defining absolute distinction between iron and the emperor. Each thing has its properties and a law, a natural law is what a thing does. And so the laws are governed by the thing rather than the thing being governed by the law. And so if the thing is becoming and changing through time, if it decides to change because of its something intrinsic to it, if it changes in a certain direction, then you can say that it's following a law, but it wrote the law.
And so if substances keep developing through time, so do the laws that they, at one time there were maybe volcanoes and clouds and so on. And there were certain natural laws, but as organisms appeared, new natural laws appeared. And the organization is the substance. A new organization appears in response to physical conditions and that new organization is a new substance. So there's a substantial difference between a sponge and a person, but each one has its organization, and so it has its ways of, its laws of behavior and reacting and so on.
And Blake was one of the first people to think through this issue and to apply it to social thinking and said one law for the horse and the tiger, I guess, is tyranny, that each thing has its own natural laws. It's mind-blowing to me to think about things from that perspective, because like you said, both of the other ideas are based completely on external control of some kind, as opposed to things having internal motivation and that that is like a driving force in the universe.
No one seems to ever take that possibility into as a real motivation for anything. You can see how Plato generated a good ideology for emperors and kings, because things that weren't timeless weren't quite real. Real things were the general ideas or the things that don't change. And so all of this stuff, I think it was somewhere in Plato that he said there's no real entity for things like fur and mud. Things really are not quite defined. And so that idea that things are timeless and perfect and clean, and all of this is
erroneous and not fully real. So it says that don't try to change things. The way it's set up, by those of us who know how it is, that's the only way there is. And Hegel, recognizing certain ways that history has changed things, kept the idea that it's still a mental process, and so it's all closed and has a predetermined outcome. The same way Plato said the outcome is known beforehand because there's no real time, Hegel said, well, maybe there's time that it has this definite outcome with the king at the top.
Can you talk a little bit about the dangers of genetic determinism, how that's destructive? I've known actual living eugenicists, people functioning in society who not only supported molecular biology and genetic engineering, but who advocated it for the purpose of improving, eliminating the wrong types of humans. One of the, when Philip Abelson was the editor of Science Magazine, they were regularly publishing things by Herrnstein and some of these Harvard racists, fascists, who were applying genetic determinism to intelligence. And Abelson or his editorial staff kept publishing these basically fascist, racist things.
And one of them, I think it was an 11-page article in their fine print, a really long article for Science, talking about, I think it was essentially working class inferiority. And after all of these pages of arguments, their last paragraph drew conclusions about how this determines class ability and stratification and such. But it had no clear evidence, no clear relation to the evidence they'd been talking about. And so I said, well, since, in a little tiny letter to the editor, I said, since they haven't considered intrauterine conditions according to the environment experienced by the mother,
this last paragraph doesn't have anything to do with the preceding 11 pages. And I got back a rejection letter. My little two-sentence comment on that article had gone to two different referees, and each referee wrote a little article explaining why my comment shouldn't be published. One of them said my position was almost as extreme as the author's. And the other one said in these publications, his comments are shown to be erroneous. The reference he gave was work done in 1942 and '43 at Hitler's Racial Hygiene Institute.
Could you talk a bit about the importance of novelty and stimulation for the organism? Or I think you've called it, or at least relates to what you've mentioned as the orienting reflex? If you start with something like Heraclitus's consciousness, and there is nothing but novelty, but with a certain kind of upbringing, we get indoctrinated and start thinking abstractly. And that creates a suppression of the experience of novelty, and we start seeing things in stereotyped ways. And that creates a kind of depression that reduces our motivation to contact novelty,
makes us not only less adventuresome, but to start fearing change and adventure. But the natural Heraclitian state is to, when an environment is stable, so that it's really presenting some things that are repetitive, you're experiencing change, but there are no demands for changing yourself if your environment is very stable. But when the environment changes a little, then you have an opportunity for adapting and finding out why it's different. And if you move, your environment is different. And so every time you move, you're creating opportunities to see new stuff in the environment.
And so the natural state of being alive is to move and create a changing environment, to have this exploration tendency. Every time you move, you are receiving different stimuli and getting a new opportunity or a demand for action. So the environment can become chronically more and more stimulating. And as you understand each of these changes, each one calls up a need to reinterpret. And every time you reinterpret, you have the opportunity to generalize and see how one thing helps to explain another thing.
And the model we have of what we understand in the world and our place in the world, the Russians called it the acceptor of action. When we do something, our model is noticing what we do and what effect it has. And so that action is requiring change in our model. And so the acceptor of action is an actual structural process in the brain that as you have new understanding, you see new possibilities for doing things in the world. And this opens up the need and the opportunity to use your energies in different ways.
And when you have a bigger system understood, you find that you can achieve more by doing less. And so it takes less mental energy the more you understand. But you discover things at a higher rate when you have a broader range of experience. And so it becomes more stimulating but also easier to do. It's the idea of relaxing into complexity. You get an energy reward by the efficiency of understanding things more efficiently. And actually new circuits are set up in your brain combining things that had been separate.
And now the activation or flow of energy between your various brain parts is more abundant, more complex, but also easier. And so generalization of understanding is also a changing of the way the inner processes are working. And it increases the rate of metabolism, rate of energy production, but also the efficiency with which it's used. And that should be a stimulating way of living and accumulating structure in your body as well as modifying the way you exist in the world. And that involves interaction with your economy, your ecology, society in general.
So I guess we want to get into self-ordering systems a little bit and the way nature creates higher order. Is it spontaneous and is there a place for randomness in the ideas? Oh, yeah, randomness is always a threat. Things like Michael Polanyi's adsorption, I say long-range layering, given a concentration or a pressure, you're likely to have a field extending through space, influencing multiple atoms or molecules and those in turn influence others. And everything has these fields and more or less stickiness. And so the things like resonance and hysteresis are spontaneously everywhere reducing randomness.
You move your finger through water or through dust or anything where fields interact, friction. This is all leaving a change and an order for, like you walk through grass in one direction, you bend the grass down and coming back the grass is pointing at you. So the way back is not the same as the way out. And constantly your intended behavior is affecting the environment in ways that tend to support your intention. But if you get counter-intentions, then that has a randomizing, it breaks down the order that you're creating.
The occasionally, like you have very vigorous parasites, their intentions might, if they encounter you in a state where your blood sugar is low, for example, the parasites might find an opportunity and start disorganizing your system. So there are competing systems and a lower system getting too much of a foothold in a higher system counts as randomness. But the assumption of randomness is usually, without stating it, is that everything is always random and that what has been ordered is achieved at high cost.
And so the arrow of time for these people is that you had to expend energy to create the order and get things piled up in a certain way. And you can only do that at the expense of consuming energy somewhere else. And so that develops in the idea of a universe that's running down. You're burning up a lot of energy to create a little bit of order, but that's suppressing all of the alternative ideas that the generation of order is really in many ways a free process, a spontaneous process that just jumps out of things.
Like the way polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons generate their own structure spontaneously from a random gas. Gases are counted as random and most things in solution are counted as random. But that's because we are ignoring the fields that are running through the gas and so on. And it's an idea that the atom is not really responding in any complex way to the fields running through it. But when you look closely enough in the right system, then you see that atoms have their different way of spinning, which matters in many circumstances that you can have memory
even in the gas as it has its own state of electronic excitement and so on. And proton spins and electron spins, these things, and probably subtler and more complicated things on the subatomic level are probably happening. And the idea that nuclear fission is a random process, that's one of the biggest applications of randomness. When I was in the university, one of the professors who pinned things on the bulletin board in the hall put up a clipping of a nuclear physicist who was experimenting with radioactive carbon isotopes.
And he made the carbon into fatty acids or lipid chains of some sort. And in the bottle, they had a perfectly random rate of decay. But he coated these oils, radioactive oils, in a monolayer on a foil, I think aluminum foil, and then measured the nuclear fission, the so-called random decay, and showed that one decay triggered a cascade of other decays. And there would be a burst. Once there was one, there would be a burst. And so he showed clear evidence that even the nuclear fission was interacting.
Something in the surface caused them to coordinate their moment of decaying so that you got bursts intermittently rather than a smooth decay that happened in the bottle. And H.C. Dudley was an ex-Navy physicist who had his pension when he worked as a radiation biologist, I think at the University of Illinois. And he said that because he had his pension, he could do the kind of work he wanted and not worry about getting fired. So he was working out some of the implications that Fred Soddy, early in the century, had
proposed that the Soddy proposal was maybe nuclear radioactivity could be reflecting an ether interaction. And later he proposed the idea that the timing, the birth of new material in the cosmos produced cosmic rays, and that the constant generation of cosmic rays was generating a radio wave background. I think he was the first person to predict that there would be a radio wave background in the cosmos. And when that was finally discovered, I think they forgot that Soddy had predicted it on the basis of new matter being formed.
And instead they said this is fossil evidence of the creation of the universe in the Big Bang. But it was exactly 180 degrees opposite from that theory. It was the constant creation of matter. And Horace Dudley revived the things that at one point Fred Soddy had proposed to explain nuclear decay and suggested that the ether could consist of a sea of neutrinos. And at that time the doctrine insisted that the neutrino had no rest mass. And Dudley was suggesting that there is a very small rest mass in neutrinos and that
if the neutrino, if the background is filled with a flow of neutrinos, that they could be the medium of resonance between atoms. And by coincidence, Dudley's article proposing that there could be a medium of interaction causing the appearance of random nuclear decay, that was published in an Italian mainline physics journal within a week of the other guy's demonstration of non-random carbon isotope decay on the surface. Exactly the thing Dudley was warning about, saying that if things like the crystal structure of nuclear fuel is really the mechanism of nuclear decay, we aren't able to predict
safely what's going to happen with stored nuclear waste and so on. And this idea of a surface affecting even the inner behavior of an atom, it implies that maybe the ordering of a metal is involving other things than electrical charge. Michael Polanyi, in his study of crystals, surface effects, friction, elasticity and so on, was showing that the forces that you see on a surface are really also depth processes in the metal. And when you have a metal surface apparently causing non-random nuclear decay, that means
that you're projecting something, organizing something through the surface of the metal. Alexander Rosson, working at the Rockefeller Institute, was mostly known for being able to measure extremely thin films of substance, measure the thickness by the angle at which a beam of polarized light is absorbed. And so it would allow extremely fine measurements of a layer. And that was acceptable and useful. But in the '50s and '60s, he started refining, looking at places where the technique showed some anomalous results, and started doing some of his experiments overnight, repeating
- he would coat a glass slide with a film of metal and then put a protein or antigen on it, and then maybe a film of fat or plastic over that, and see what could be detected through the layer intervening between the protein and the antibody, for example. And he found that when laid in a thin film on a metal that had been deposited on the glass, the antigen properties, even if the protein had been semi-denatured by being smeared out on the surface, you could lay a film of plastic over it and antibodies would still
be detectable on the surface. And he proposed that you could manufacture slides with an antigen laid out so that you could dip it in someone's serum and through a piece of plastic you could detect by the pattern that it pulled out of the serum what antibodies they had, according to what antigens you had prepared the slide with. And in studying this process, he found that aging the slides overnight would change the activity, and so he saw some process that would go up and down as the daylight changed,
and so it was in some way timed to the electromagnetic or other Earth or solar system environment. But it was showing the long-range effects of not only antigens and antibodies, but he could demonstrate that an enzyme blocked by a layer of plastic polymer could break down a substrate on the other side of the plastic film, both of them knocking out the idea that of lock and key necessary contact, one-to-one neutralization showing the Polanyi long-distance effect opening up the physics for all kinds of long-range coherent processes in the organism.
I think that leads into electromagnetic fields and fields in general. If you could talk about how electromagnetic fields influence biology positively, negatively, what sort of how things are affected by fields? The Becker's book, The Body Electric, described his experiments showing that you could impose a weak electrical field and stimulate accelerated healing of a tissue by increasing the electrical field. The body normally is generating these fields, and when there's a wound, there's an intensified field. Becker's way of measuring these things was pretty free of artifacts. It took the outside way of measuring things.
When you have the injury, you can measure with any kind of electrode, even relatively remotely because there's a field, and that kind of bioelectric measurement is something that gets around the artifacts of sticking a needle in and injuring the cell because you when you poke the cell, you're creating an injury potential. But in the healthy organism, you can externally measure the difference between a healthy field and an injured regenerative field. And if the environment is so intensely full of electrical fields, that's interfering with our body's own generation of electrical fields.
Early experiments at NASA found that you could turn off a person's consciousness just by putting a very intense magnetic field across their neck. Now there are therapies being proposed in which you can magnetically stimulate the brain. The Holodomor in Russia made a big point of saying that he's talking about the sensitivity of the organism to its outside fields, but he wasn't investigating the fields generated by the organism. One of the references he gave me was by Madeline Barnothy and her husband on the sensitivity
to fields, following up on some of the things that Soko Trump had done. The Barnothys showed that everyone is really potentially tuned in to very weak fields in the environment. And the fact that very few people are studying these doesn't mean that they aren't important. But Robert Becker was very definite in saying that we should be a lot more cautious with our exposure to fields because they are so intrinsically involved in maintaining and repairing healthy tissue. That was something Michael Persinger talked about a fair amount when we chatted with him.
The difference that there's such powerful fields in the environment, but that you can have profound changes in consciousness with just a very weak field that he used to apply, causing religious experiences for people with something that has no more power than a hair dryer or something like that. In the '60s, I was experimenting with putting a weak direct current across the brain. And I ran into some people in San Diego working in the military industrial complex who, when they learned that I was interested in experimenting along this line, they told me about stuff
that was being done in their field. And they said that already at that time, people could be monitored from a distance of several feet away, give them a whole physical exam and lie detector test and such without touching them. And there were experimenters changing, imposing a different rhythm on the brain, the brain's natural rhythm, for example, 10 or 11 cycles per second. They would synchronize with that and then gradually slow it down and find that as they drove the brain frequency down below about a third or 40 percent lower than normal, the
person would get sick. And they were talking about the brain's natural oscillation with the Earth's 11-cycle rhythm and probably the brain's alpha rhythm, I guess it is, the 10 or 11 per second, is probably our oscillation with the ionosphere resonance. And anyway, I was interested in the DC fields because I was experimenting and seeing that as conductivity increased, so did the polarity across the head. And after I had been experimenting, seeing if it made sick people feel better and such, I found an experiment in which they had polarized cats.
Remember at first they would train them until they could do a trick. They would plot the performance of the cat's behavior and they would get it to 100 percent of performance. And then they would reverse the DC polarity across the head and they would forget everything they knew, or if they were training a cat and seeing a course of improvement and learning, then they would reinforce that polarity with a positive on the back and a negative on the front and suddenly they would jump up to 100 percent and get it all right, right away.
So it seemed like a potential therapy to simply give a very weak direct current support or doing things that allowed the body to retain, not be interfered with. Like a resonance effect, it seems like? There was someone who isolated people in a chamber, a Faraday cage, and kept out the Earth's resonant frequency and found that people slowed their brain rhythms just by isolation. And you would think that there would be someone trying to optimize the way we resonate, but I don't know if Persinger is proposing wiring your house to resonate with a better frequency?
No, but the effects of grounding, electrically grounding. So like bare feet on the Earth having a specific effect in lowering cortisol and other biomarkers and then there are companies now that they make grounding pads for when you're inside that you plug into the wall and into the ground and put your bare feet on. People have measured the voltage from the surface of the Earth up and it looks like the Earth is a source of electrons and so putting your feet on the Earth, since the
head is positive, then walking around with your bare feet on a source of electrons is a way of reinforcing that polarity. Same idea as putting a battery across your head. He also did experiments with generating a field that he said was I guess the same as the field of the Earth around 7 hertz, I think he said, in a time of magnetic calm and putting the exact same field around two people that he, they would separate people into two rooms
that were dark and flash a light in one person's eyes and if they applied the same field to both people's head, the flash would register in the other person's brain as well. Andrea Puharich, have you run across him? He heard about Wilhelm Reich's, actually Reich ripped off Nikola Tesla's self-charging chamber but Reich developed it as a therapeutic orgone accumulator and Andrea Puharich built a chamber like that and some of his experiments, he said it was financed by the government but either they would eat mushrooms or they would sit in the chamber and people with a
known tendency to clairvoyance sitting in the chamber had a great amplification and I was interested in that because of my own various types of dream experiences that seemed to extend with people having experiences remotely. I think that's what got Persinger started with those experiments was he was working with someone who was somewhat of a clairvoyant and two different people, one who traditionally did remote viewing and then another who was more of a traditional psychic who would be able to read people as they came into the room and by enhancing the field, he found
first that when someone came into the room that his brainwaves would sync up with whoever came in and that seemed to be related to his ability to read them. So I think that's what got him started with trying to apply the same fields to two different people and see the action at a distance of linking their brains. Puharich had the idea that it was a field generated by shifting, I think, to the exaggerated parasympathetic dominance in the brain but that was just a theory to try to explain what he was seeing evidentially.
Connecting Sheldrake and his creative formative field to this interconnecting clairvoyant reading field, I've had experiences that seem to involve something like an extending field that's sensing the future. Sometimes watching people in a conversation, I could encompass how they were going to be directing their argument minutes into the future. There was a period of a few weeks in 1956 when every morning, just in my last dreams before I would wake up, I would see some sort of an event or image and I would wonder what that meant would be sort of an out of context dream.
Then an hour or two or three hours later, something unexpected would happen and I would say, "Oh, there's that dream." That happened repeatedly over this period of a few weeks in 1956 and I think it was a couple of years ago, exactly the same thing started happening again about 56 years later. I would have a dream, like a very concrete thing an hour or two later. In a couple of cases, I even mentioned it and wanted to have a witness. In fact, a very unique one-time event happened after having a strange dream of that same
sort of one-time event. So it made me think that the people involved seemed to be having an intention to go in that direction that was being projected. So there was a definite span of time that seemed to be covered in these states, usually just from one to three hours. I think some of the work that Michael Persinger did early on was correlating experiences like that, looking at time periods where people had an increase in those sorts of experiences and then looking at the records of the geomagnetic activity of the earth and seeing that they
seemed to line up where people seemed to have more clairvoyant experiences at times of geomagnetic calm and that that ability seemed more disturbed at times of high activity. But anyways, what do you think of the work of Michael Persinger? His work on the brain and consciousness and such in itself is very interesting, just as a neurologist, but his fields, stimulation and detection of synchrony and such, I think a lot more people should be working on that. As far as my experience goes, it was these government people in the '60s who, I don't
know if they were leaking stuff that shouldn't have been leaked, but it was very closely related to that kind of Andrea Puharich research. At what point did your knowledge of biology and health lead you to begin helping other people with their issues? I think reading Adelle Davis and seeing the practicality of using diet changes and such when I was in Mexico, seeing the common protein deficiency and how big a change you could make with a small diet change, that encouraged me to offer my suggestions to people even when they didn't ask for it.
What you had said, it was you started to sort of become known as the person that told people to stop taking their vitamins. Yeah, that started probably around 1970. I don't remember when Whitebird Clinic started, but we had a peace movement anti-war group going in the '60s, and it was probably late '60s when Whitebird Clinic was started. A guy named Lemons, I think, was the founder, and all of the peace movement type were volunteering there. My main idea was, based on my experience with allergies of vitamins, that that started people
telling each other and sending them to talk to me. What sort of things, what kind of issues did people start to come to you with? First, mostly allergy problems, constant runny nose and kids that were constantly having colds. And then fertility problems, lots of young women with their maltreatment by the local medical establishment. Just incredible stories about rudeness, insults, assault, the wrong kind of surgery, having ovaries removed when they were supposed to be having surgery to fix a cyst. They would wake up and their ovaries would be gone.
The counterculture was very conscious to the need to have a different medical establishment, so the pre-clinic wasn't just for the poor student population. It was an outlet, an escape from the dangerous gynecologists. I got acquainted through that connection with a local gynecologist who had, years before, testified for a patient who had been maimed by a local doctor. He was the only doctor in the whole region who would testify for the patient. And so he was ostracized by the profession, but continued his private practice. And his own health was ruined.
He had Addison's, a mixture of stress syndromes, tissue damage from chronic stress. That environment of seeing how dangerous the medical establishment was, and the fact that I had been working on the danger of estrogen and a bad diet, and how that was counteracted by progesterone and thyroid. One of the most serious people to come along was someone with a history of multiple sclerosis symptoms and variations, brain degenerative symptoms, blindness, paralysis, and so on. And she had found Katharine Dalton's book on progesterone therapy.
And I think just before that, a woman with a history of epilepsy had gone to a local neurologist when she was 35 and had been a schoolteacher, and she was having migraines. And the neurologist said, "Migraines are like epilepsy, so I'll give you an anti-epilepsy drug." And she took it during the summer and realized that she couldn't be intelligent enough to teach her classes, so she stopped taking it in the fall. And stopping it suddenly, she had a seizure. She hadn't been warned that withdrawal from an anti-seizure drug had to be gradual.
And so she went back to the doctor and he said, "See, I said migraines are like epilepsy." So then she became an epileptic patient from the age of 35 to 52. And every year she would visit the doctor and he would give her an IQ test and show her how she had become demented by her late 40s. And when I saw her, she was, I think, 52 and couldn't leave the house by herself because she couldn't find the way back.
So her son brought her over and I told them about progesterone and thyroid and how it worked in animals and mentioned inflammation as one of the signs of estrogen poisoning. And she had two purplish kind of fat fingers that she couldn't bend. And I explained how she could dissolve the progesterone in oil and rub it under her skin. She said, "Well, I'll start with these." And she took some home with her. And a week later, even though she had said she was not allowed to leave the house by
herself, she came back down the sidewalk holding a piece of paper I had given her to mark her changes or improvement. And she was grinning and coming down the sidewalk, bending her fingers, showing that five days later her fingers were mobile. And she showed me the paper that she had dotted each day, a radical improvement, until she was now rating herself as the best possible. And that was in the middle of summer sometime. And she went back to graduate school in the fall and signed up for a master's program
in gerontology, got straight A's, got her master's degree after nine months, after 17 years of dementia. So that really encouraged me to make progesterone available. And then this other woman who had MS and blindness and paralysis and such, I had started teaching at a naturopath school in Portland. And she volunteered to come and talk to my class. It was on the second or third floor of an old building in Portland. And she drove herself to the school, came up the stairs walking perfectly, and lectured for about an hour about progesterone and her experience.
And so then I was really encouraged to make progesterone and thyroid available freely. And I bought a drum of Armour, pure thyroid powder, 10 kilograms, I think it was. And because I had sent some of the young women back to their gynecologists with telling them that they were aware of what was wrong with their diagnosis, that in fact one had been told that she was having moral or psychological problems. She couldn't be pregnant, but she felt pregnant. And she found out that he had done an incompetent abortion and left part of the material in
her uterus. And she knew right where it was. It said where in the uterus it was. And after many rejections and insults, she found out that it was exactly where she felt it and had it removed and was okay. And a series of people like that gradually, over a period of just a few months, let the local gynecologists know that their patients were onto them. And they changed and started prescribing progesterone. So for 10 years or so until those guys retired, Eugene had some good gynecologists. How would you describe how you interacted with your patients?
I don't know if that's what you'd call them. But compared to how they interacted with their doctor, how did you... What was different about the way you problem-solved? Since I was a teacher, I thought of each visit as being a little hour class on a subject of their choosing. They would introduce it and explain what they wanted to know about. And so I would give an instant class designed to meet their need for knowledge on what their problem was. And during that period, a middle-class sort of couple, very unfamiliar type of people
from what I had been seeing, these middle-classers came and presented some health problems and said, "What is my diagnosis and what would you prescribe?" I kept telling them that I was there to inform them and that if they wanted a diagnosis or prescription they should go to a doctor. And they were behaving so oddly. I made inquiries around a friend who was a psychologist, had friends in a local medical society, and these were agents sent by the Eugene Medical Society to get me to prescribe or diagnose. And they were such obnoxious people.
I was just as obnoxious back to them saying, "Well, you need a doctor." But because of that environment, I wanted to give the powdered Armour thyroid to the people. And so I would explain what thyroid does and how it related to what they needed and how populations around the world used to include like the fish head, chicken neck, and so on. The thyroid gland was always left in the food supply until the government decided it should be sold to the pharmaceutical companies and sold separately.
So I explained the quantities that used to be in the food supply and how they could use it as a food supplement. But I had powdered kelp, which has a very strong smell, and I would shake up the necessary amount of thyroid powder with a given amount of powdered kelp. And the thyroid is in here, and you take a certain amount, and it'll provide some iodine and so on. So if there were any more spies, they would show it to their doctor, and he would say, "Oh, powdered kelp, he's just fooling you."
That's a good trick. You mentioned making progesterone available. Yeah, I think the next person in the sequence was a suicidal 22-year-old girl that had, in California, she had been taking thyroid from her teens. When she came to Oregon, she couldn't get a doctor to continue her prescription. But she got married at the time she moved, and she thought her depression and suicidal urge had to do with being dissatisfied with her marriage or something. And every month for 10 or 11 days, she was absolutely constantly sobbing and suicidal.
And after that had stopped, she and her husband came to visit and explained the situation. And I recognized it as an estrogen excess symptom, a perfectly monthly rhythm. And she was about four or five days before or after the episode. And I cooked up a jar of olive oil, warmed progesterone into it. She was sobbing uncontrollably when she arrived and couldn't stop. And she was 22 and mostly Chinese-type skin, an ordinarily smooth, slightly tan skin. But she had these hard green veins standing up on the backs of her hands.
And I told her to go in the bathroom and coat her top and face and neck and arms with this oil. And she came back and was sitting at the kitchen table, sobbing with her hands on the table, and just commenting on why she wanted to die and couldn't think of any other possibility. And five minutes after putting that on, her veins had disappeared. And she was getting a little quieter. And watching the clock, I noticed that over the next 30 minutes, her sobbing had subsided.
And then she started actually seeing a possibility of living and started looking almost cheery. I think it was exactly 40 minutes after she put it on. She was smiling and saying, "It's like night turning into day." And so I gave her the bottle and told her next time to apply it. And so the next monthly cycle came along. And she phoned up and said, "If I drank this oil, would it kill me?" And she said, "I oiled myself up and it didn't work anymore. So I'm looking for a way to die painlessly."
And so I went over to their apartment. She was sitting there all oily. And sobbing. And she showed me the bottle that she had oiled herself with. And the progesterone had crystallized out on the bottom. So I went over to the stove, heated it up, stirred it into solution, had her put on another coat and watched the clock again. Exactly the same thing, just like an unwinding. The veins went down in five minutes and at the end of 40 minutes there was this constant improvement in mood.
And she was grinning and saying, "I wish I could always feel this good." Was that before progest-e was around? Before progeste? Yeah, I realized that it wasn't going to be something doctors would want to follow their patients around with re-dissolving it. And so I looked at all kinds of things to hold it in solution. Acetone, for example, has the similar group that makes it a good solvent. But it isn't pleasant smelling and probably wouldn't have a good effect to use repeatedly on your skin.
And experimenting a lot, I found that vitamin E seemed to be the only thing that was biologically very compatible and a very good solvent. I could get a 50/50 with the highest purity vitamin E available. I could get a one-to-one solution that was stable. And because if you ate too much of it, it would knock you out. I had totally a very powerful anesthetic at a high dose. So for a while, I made a 20% solution and still if someone drank a bottle of that, they might stop breathing from this deep anesthesia.
So I decided that 10% was very unlikely that a person could take too much of it. Well, did you want to say anything else about progest-e? I'm just curious how that came about. When I discovered that vitamin E was the practical solvent, I remembered experiments I'd done in the hamster lab when I was working on my thesis. The mouse, Lamarckian, found that he could grind up liver either from the mice or from beef or shark or whatever. And with a pure ethanol extract, evaporate that and find something injecting into the 100% genetic strain of mice.
And they wouldn't develop cancer in that generation or for two or three generations after. So something in the liver was changing their hormonal environment, which was affecting the hormonal environment for generations afterwards. And I got some of his mice. Before I started working on my dissertation, I got some of his mice and were testing my theories to explain what it might be in the liver. And thinking about Szent-Györgyi's argument that the pigments are electron donors and acceptors which catalyze protective oxidation, I was, among other things, testing these extracts
of liver for anything that would resemble the activated carbonyl or quinone structure. And so one of my oily extracts, I would do paper chromatography and I knew there would be vitamin E and vitamin A and such, and so I compared spots of known substances with a potentially amber to yellow color. And comparing, I bought some ubiquinone coenzyme Q10 from Sigma Chemical as a comparison. And one of the orange extracts ran at the same speed as the CoQ10. And when I had a very pure vitamin E product, when I mixed that with either the CoQ10 or
the extract from the liver or simply a chemical, the simplest chemical analog of benzopinone, each of these mixing with vitamin E produced a black or greenish-black pigment just as soon as they were stirred together. And when I did the paper chromatography, the solvent running past these, not only the coenzyme Q10 and the liver extract moved at the same rate, but the vitamin E moving at a different rate, the solvent separated the vitamin E from the coenzyme Q10. And just the pressure of the solvent reverted them to their colorless or orange original
color showing that the black or greenish-black color was a very tenuous kind of bond that just the solvent moving it across the paper was enough to separate the bond and destroy the color. And so the fact that when I ground up the liver in the ethanol, the fact that it turned white, I was apparently just separating some components from the coenzyme Q10. And thinking about the livers containing vitamin E as well as coenzyme Q, it occurred to me that part of the color of the liver is probably this darkening effect of putting the donor
and acceptor together. And thinking about the metabolic interactions of vitamin E and progesterone, vitamin E as the 1940s anti-estrogen, and some people in Italy called vitamin E the progesterone-sparing material. So it seemed very logical to combine them, not only because it's a perfect solvent, but because biologically they function together. Both of them stabilize and protect respiration and have the anti-estrogenic, anti-inflammatory effects. And vitamin E has some very aspirin-like effects in stopping prostaglandin synthesis and so on. Going back to the helping people, how has that evolved over the years?
Several years ago, the lawyers in California, I think were put up to it by the estrogen industry. There was a mysterious $300,000 grant to a women's law group to go after people producing progesterone products. This was 2005, right after the Women's Health Initiative in 2002 had shown that estrogen causes heart disease, dementia, and cancer, and the prescriptions and profits from estrogen dropped off drastically. By 2005, the industry was thinking of progesterone as a dangerous competitor, and this California women's law group got this big grant to go after sellers of progesterone.
And following that, I essentially stopped talking to people about progesterone because the lawyers were suing people who had absolutely no claims made and no violation of any law, but they saw that they could force people to settle, knowing that lawyers were going to cost them $50,000 to $100,000 just to defend themselves. They could essentially count on getting $50,000 at least as a settlement, even if the person hadn't violated any rules. So seeing the situation in which lawyers can't be sued for malicious prosecution of a civil case, they're totally exempt and defended by the lawyer establishment.
They're allowed to lie and so on. So I saw it as a situation that simply made it impossible. Besides someone earlier had sent my books to someone at the, one of Ralph Nader's organizations, someone has sent my books to a person at this Nader group, said, "Can't you people do something to get the establishment to shift its position on progesterone?" And that person was like an estrogen-soaked devotee of the pharmaceutical industry who turned all of my books over to the FDA and said, "These are all in violation of federal
law by saying good things about progesterone." So I talked to people at the FDA and they said, "There's a fine line between violating federal law and having freedom of speech, and we can't tell you where the line is." So I've been very careful about what I say about progesterone now for the last ten years or so. And just progesterone, or are you careful in general about how you word things or recommend? I'm always conscious of doing it in an information way and not as a recommendation or a sales pitch.
And so how do you then interact with people now? Like currently, what's the medium that you... Periodically, someone emails me that clearly seems to have ulterior motives, but my procedure seems to so far have not appealed to lawyers, and possibly because I don't demonstrate a thriving business or income that would make it worth their while. Are you still currently receiving lots of emails from people asking for help? You mentioned when we talked to you on the phone originally that you were getting maybe hundreds a day. I think that was an extreme.
It goes up and down on work days, it's always higher on weekends, it drops off. And so I guess people are writing from their work computers. And I usually try to answer a few dozen every day, picking out. Like one guy a few days ago said, "Here are a few dozen questions from my pathophysiology lab, could you help me with them?" Things like that I ignore. Have you noticed a spike or noticed trends in, besides the weekdays and weekends, but over the years a growing number of people?
I think it has tapered off over the last several months. About a year ago that was when I was seeing 80 to 100 pretty regularly. But now, I haven't counted them, but it looks like more often it's 30 or 40. What motivates you to spend the time to answer everyone's questions? Same as talking to people who had come to visit, I almost always learn something new. And at least I catch onto the latest medical fad. People catch some concern and a dozen or 20 people will come down simultaneously with
the same problem that was written about. And I try to stereotype my answers to them to redirect their attention as far as possible. What do you think about the growing recent interest in your work? I don't know really what the condition is. Two or three years ago I looked at one of those site traffic things and it seemed like a few people were looking at it every day, but I haven't checked to see what the traffic has been lately. It's increased a lot over the past year?
Yeah, starting about three, four years ago a gentle slope, but then in the last couple years it seems like it's... I think just over a year ago that I was having too many book orders and so I took off the ordering page and it took six months or so for the orders to drop off. But I was not only running out of books, but I was taking up a big part of my time to package and mail books. Are you aware of people who are translating your work and also trying to help and counsel people?
Yeah, there are three or four people that are doing a pretty good job. How do you feel about that happening, people translating your work? If they find useful stuff, that's what it's for. I think the largest growing population is on Facebook. There's a couple groups, they call them, that pretty much mainly discuss your work and how it connects to all sorts of different spheres of life. Very wide ranging, as wide ranging as all of your... Someone sent me 20 questions from some group and so far I've answered 10 of the questions.
Besides from Facebook, there's forums as well. There's a Ray Peat forum, there's Peatarian, and there's people that think that there's a Ray Peat diet. There's one site that I looked at that seemed to be basing a lot on my ideas. He was really a witty person, very entertaining site, but I don't remember... He had sort of a Hindu sounding... Probably. Yeah, he's a guy in... He's actually just a Caucasian guy in England. Oh, he's British. But he's just really into yoga and sort of connecting some of your ideas and the ideas of CO2 retention.
Yeah, the things I read seemed very funny and clever. Yeah, he's a brilliant guy. Yeah, he's applied what he's read from you on CO2 into his spiritual yoga practices and reinterpreting the breathing exercises he's learned from yoga and what's written in the Vedas about breathing and life and consciousness. Understanding that from the perspective of CO2, I think, changed things for him a lot. I knew an Afghan yogi in Mexico who... He was a model for our painting classes and he didn't need rests.
All the other models were given rests every 20 minutes, but the professor would give the class a rest break after an hour and a half or something. And I would stay there to talk to him during the break and got sort of an insight into at least the Afghan yogi's consciousness. He offered some techniques that I thought were interesting, not especially breathing, but using the nerves and such. Yeah, I just always wondered what you thought about just the idea that people are basing
like a diet that they call the "Ray Peat Diet," even though you've never specifically outlined what something like that would be. Yeah, I don't know what such a diet would consist of because when I had an income of $10 a month, it was one thing. Powdered milk and potatoes were at the center. But according to the setting and your resources, if you can import cherimoyas and tropical fruits and Italian cheese or Greek cheese, then it's one thing. But trying to make out with the average supermarket, you have other types of limitations.
I think it sort of goes back to people feeling the need to have someone tell them what to do or have them prescribe a protocol. What do you think that need stems from? When I was teaching school in Urbana, my first college teaching experience, I would explain what the course's purpose was, what my wishes would be, and how I saw my purpose as being there to support their exploration. And about 10 or 15% of any class always was really put off by that attitude. They demanded a prescribed something to learn.
They wanted me to tell them what they should know. And every time I've had a big class, there are always these people who are annoyed by the thought that they can decide what they need to know. You mentioned you have to be careful with that as there's the potential to disable someone's own internal guidance. The purpose of education is largely to disempower the students so that they depend on the system and become reliable. In 1965, a professor at Oregon State, I think a psychology or education professor, did a
study of the academic success of, I guess it was psychology majors, and graphed it according to their scores on the Miller Analogies Test. Did you ever see that? It's 100 questions, each one, I think, four possible answers with purely analogical reasoning. This is to that, as that is to what, and then you get to choose. And so it measures your vocabulary, but also your ability to reason analogically. And every so many questions, they change the type of analogy. So it might be the size or shape of the word or something for a while.
And so it requires also flexibility. And it turns out to be a very quick and good test of general ability, intelligence, even heart rate and body temperature and such. But this professor graphed it according to their academic ranking, the C- students up to the A-students and so on, and showed that up to the school's median score on the Miller Analogies, which in some, like state universities, I think the median score is usually around 45 out of 100 answers. Really poor vocabulary or reasoning or something.
But in rating it with grades academically, there was a direct correspondence from the lower range up to the A-students, which was right around the median score on the test. And then as the score on the test went above the median, the academic ranking dropped back to equivalent to the lowest scorers. So being too bright was as bad as being too stupid as far as academic success goes. And that really confirmed the suspicion of many people that education is all about training
in conformity and obedience, and that you're not going to be successful if you don't know how to cover up what you know. Well, the one other thing I guess I'd like to bring up is if you have anything else, anything else brief to say about taking, you know, your own health, taking your health into your own hands, I think is, it seems to me that's something that people who either haven't had success in medicine or are motivated to experiment and grow in that way seem attracted to your work.
Getting away from anything that doesn't seem to be immediately rewarding, I think, is a good starting point. There's the medical doctrine that cures are going to be difficult. Chemotherapy might kill you, but it'll save you. And the idea that you're always going to get worse before you get better, medicine is bitter and so on. But I think people should be open to the idea that maybe the medicine is pleasant and that the reward is going to be instantaneous, practically. The first time I tried progesterone for a migraine, I was in the middle of a horrible
migraine because I had either stopped taking thyroid or I'd been in a place that had fluoridated water, which inactivated the T3 I was taking. And anyway, in the middle of a horrible migraine, twice, I decided not to worry about the anti-testosterone effects and so I took a big glob of it, about probably 100 milligrams of progesterone, put it on my tongue and went back to bed expecting to continue mourning. By the time I got lying down in bed, with my eyes closed, I saw the flashing turmoil
suddenly getting quiet and velvety black, just about at that speed, spreading out over my visual field and the sickness and headache faded. As the smoothness got to the edge of my visual field, the sickness and pain were about half gone and then I could feel something continuing to move at the same rate as if it was completing the circuit of removing whatever the turmoil in my brain was. A period of just about a minute from putting it in my mouth to being just absolutely peaceful and then going to sleep.
But sometimes just a big dose of sugar or aspirin can be almost as quick as that. And with T3, when I was experimenting with a full dose, 25 micrograms of T3 in the morning, it felt okay for a couple of weeks. But then at sunset, I started noticing just as the sun was going down, I would start having my heart stop for about three seconds at a time, several, about every 10 or 15 seconds. And if there was a slight stress, that would make it stop even longer.
And in one of those times when I was having very predictable, every 10 seconds, a stoppage, I chewed up 10 micrograms of T3 and I estimated it was about 15 seconds from chewing it up, my rhythm was perfectly straight, no skipping at all. And I tried that out on a couple of friends. One guy in his 80s, whose feet were rotting black holes into the bones of his toes, and the doctor said they would have to be amputated. And he was soaking them in an antiseptic water bath, and his pulse was doing the same thing.
Mine was five or 10 seconds of beating and then stopping for a while and coming back. And I gave him some Armour thyroid, and not as quick as the T3, but it quickly brought his pulse rate up to a steady, no skipping. And two or three weeks later, I visited him and he had his shoes on and was dressing up to go out to his lodge and asked him how his rotten feet were. And he said, "What feet? No symptoms."
But then he kept going back to his doctor and the doctor would tell him he had to stop that stuff. And we went through two or three episodes of rotten black feet, and each time I would impose on him to take his Armour thyroid and the feet would recover just absolutely and perfectly. One old guy who had been an acrobat and was very self-confident, he was essentially blind and insisted on driving, but he would do things like going down the wrong side of the street in Santa Monica on the way home.
And he reached the point where people convinced him not to drive, but he couldn't see the way around his apartment. And so I gave him a handful of thyroid tablets in a dish by his chair, and he couldn't feel his feet at that time. Just a week later I came back and he was walking, could feel his feet, and could see enough to get around and scare his friends by driving again. So the matter of experimentation shouldn't get you involved in, like people tell me about
trying the low carbohydrate diet for a year or the low fat or high fat or whatever diet for a year or two and ruining their health. A week is more than enough, I think, for any experimental diet. If you aren't cured in a week, there's something wrong.