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"Where were you born?" "Santee, California, 1936, outside of San Diego. And then my parents had homesteaded a piece of desert over near Indio, Palm Springs area. And so as a baby I went right from being born near San Diego over to the desert and lived on the desert homestead until I was three. Then went to the town and came to Oregon right after the war started, partly because of the war. My father wanted to get a job in the defense industry and worked at, I think it was Douglas Aircraft for almost a year.
And learned that they had nothing for him to do as a draftsman. The deal was that they got 10% from the government as profit beyond everything they could spend. And so they hired crowds of people and bought useless instruments and machines that simply sat there. And so he realized that he was participating in war profiteering and so he moved to Oregon and sort of dropped out all during the war. The Oregon culture at that time was kind of like all-time anarchists had been populating
a lot of the western Oregon and then southerners moved in during the Dust Bowl years. So it was a very conservative town with a background of radical libertarianism. So just start by telling us your name and general background so that can include your fields of study, occupations, but just a brief rundown of all of that. My name is Raymond Peat. I first decided to become a teacher and went to a teacher's education college, Southern Oregon College, and intended to maybe become a literature teacher. And so I went to the university to get a master's degree.
And at that time it was, I got my bachelor's degree in 1956 and I thought the university would be a place of relative enlightenment compared to the small town. And I found that politics pretty much ruled at the University of Oregon at that time in 1956. And so I tried one department after the other, went from an English major to, I tried philosophy for a while and I spent six months as a psychology major and tried a few months as an art history major and finally decided that politics governed all of them.
Art history was the freest of political influence, but I wasn't that interested in it. So I found that I could write a thesis on a subject that if it incorporated different departmental areas, I could get a degree based on that thesis. And so I had, as an undergraduate, become interested in William Blake. And since he had an interesting philosophical orientation, as well as being a poet and a painter, that became the way to integrate what I had been studying into a master's degree.
And just by chance, I was interested in going from my study of Blake and psychology, philosophy into applying it to the idea of linguistic biology, biolinguistics, and how the brain makes language. And I found that there was a program that would permit a PhD degree to be interdepartmental with philosophy and linguistics as the main areas. So I started this program at Ohio State and there were not many professors sympathetic with the sort of integrated interdepartmental approach that I was interested in.
But there was a Swedenborg Inn College about 45 miles from the university where I found that they needed a biology teacher. And that was really how I got more involved in teaching biology and developing my interests. So I was studying linguistics and philosophy at Ohio State and teaching courses that were the title was physics for biology majors. And the new president of the universe of the, it was called Urbana University, but it was a very small, formerly church seminary college. The new president was revising it by developing a really interesting curriculum.
And he said he didn't want physics taught the way he had experienced it and not to teach the standard mechanics as the introduction to forces and fields and so on. He said he wanted his students to be able to understand physical science topics that they read in newspapers and magazines. And he wanted to prepare them for majoring in biology. So with that instruction as what the course should be, I decided that the computers were a new cultural phenomenon at that time. So I decided that understanding how information theory works in the brain and in computers
would be a good application of physics for biology majors and that the interaction of energy and matter, which is one of the core ideas in physics, that this would make it possible to understand the question of the biological effects of atomic bombs and radioactive fallout. So those were two important ways of organizing the course. And as it turned out, the trustees weren't pleased when the students got interested in questioning the government position on the safety of radioactive fallout from atomic bomb testing. And so that job only lasted for a year.
And that immediately led to the idea of starting a college that would be independent of these extraneous influences of the trustees and their commitments. And so I put some advertisements, for example, in the Saturday Review magazine. And a professor who had been offered the job to replace me as a biology teacher, Leo Koch, it happened that his lecture, his tryout to be a new biology teacher, his topic was the dangers of radiation. And so he was dropped. And he and I together, he went around giving lectures, helping to recruit students to start
a college that would be owned and controlled by the teachers and the students jointly. And so that kept me busy for six or eight years. And on my own, I kept following up these various lines of biological study until in 1968, I decided to go back to graduate school, that I would... The culture had changed somewhat, and I felt that I could stay in one department and simply ignore the political impositions that each department had. So I went back to work on a PhD in biology at the University of Oregon.
Okay, so going back a little further in time, how did you first get interested in the life sciences? What sparked this interest? I... As a very little kid, my parents had made the decision that they weren't going to indoctrinate me with anything with religion or politics, and they would simply answer my questions. And just apparently out of my own inclinations, I was interested in how the natural world worked and how my self worked in such things as perceiving and those simple childish urges to figure things out without getting any answers preformed.
It turned out that organisms and why organisms and people died became a continuing concern. And the resources at that time were, for example, the family encyclopedias and some of the books of my grandparents and parents, old turn of the century literature, philosophy, medical books and so on. These were available. And so I started reading and found lots of interesting things had been done in biology and physics. I ran across J.C. Bose in one of the little encyclopedias, an Indian physicist who actually invented wireless communication.
And he devised instruments to show the reactions of living material to very small stimuli. And it showed similarities between inorganic substances and organic substances. And since I hadn't been given any indoctrination as a little kid, this J.C. Bose's approach to explaining substance and living material seemed very natural to me. And that started a line of looking for information in encyclopedias, magazines, anything that was available. And I, around the same time, found good descriptions of some of the early neo-Lamarckian studies. A professor at, I think it was University of Wisconsin named Michael Geyer did some
experiments showing that, for example, he would grind up eyes and inject it into pregnant rabbits. And some of the babies would be born with damaged eyeballs, some of them blind. And when he bred these offspring with the damaged eyes, he found that the trait could be inherited, a damage or blindness would be passed on from the treatment. And so I, seeing a lot of that evidence that was in the encyclopedias and standard publications, I realized that the biology that was showing up in the textbooks in schools was a very doctrinaire, anti-scientific position.
So it led me to wonder where this natural selection, neo-Darwinian genetic, absolute inheritance of a fixed trait came from. So that involved studying the culture and philosophy influencing science. And so in simply trying to understand the world practically, it involved running into people who were selling something with their constructed facts. And so you talked a bit about earlier problems within the teaching environment at universities, but when did you start to realize that what you were being taught, the science you were being taught was incorrect?
Well, at my very first experience with going to school, we had moved to Grants Pass, or a small country school outside of Grants Pass. And my first reaction to the second grade teachers, I was already skeptical. I had seen stuff in books at home that made me doubt what I was being taught. And then in the country school where I went to third to fifth grade, there were at first eight grades and then six grades in a one-room schoolhouse. And so I could hear what was being taught to all of the different grades.
And that was a very pleasant schooling experience. The teacher had a very open attitude, wasn't imposing anything, had some of us learn oil painting. And then going back to the city schools, again, I had a very oppressed feeling. And for example, in the seventh grade, 1948, they had a student mock election. And I think my brother was the only one in the school to vote for Strom Thurmond just because he wanted to be annoying. And I voted for Henry Wallace.
And in my social science class, I was arguing for why Henry Wallace would be a good candidate because he wasn't for war and wanted to keep the economy going. And so one of my classmates asked the teacher, since they're talking about having capital punishment for communists, are they going to kill Raymond? The teacher said, no, I don't think they will. He's a nice little boy. But basically, I considered most of the high school teachers to be either prisoners of the system. There were several really nice teachers who communicated tolerance and such.
And there were the disgruntled Hitlerites and the standard middle class fascist minded people. So I was eager to try out college. And at Southern Oregon College, after I'd been there for, I guess, two or three terms, I was having a bad reaction to several of my classes and heard about Arthur Kreisman, a Jewish literature teacher who he had had an offer to teach at Harvard but preferred the relaxed atmosphere of Ashland and the very small college atmosphere. And he was sort of an eye-opening experience. He took a philosophical, cultural approach to everything he taught.
And so after taking his world literature survey, I signed up for some of his philosophy classes and a comparative religion class. And he was-- the college was so small, he was able to teach many different subjects. And even though he was the main focus of my undergraduate education, people had told me that there would be other people like him at the big university. And so I was eager to start there. Graduated when I was 19 and getting to the University of Oregon, I found that it was
much more of a narrow-minded, tuned-in to the political situation, not the backwater tolerance of the little teacher education school. And so then I essentially dropped out of the whole thing, dropping out of four different departments and looking for some outlet, which for a time, it seemed to be this interdepartmental program at Ohio State. The outcome of my PhD program at Ohio State was that I intended to go work somewhere else while I finished my dissertation because I had finished the course requirement.
And I kept working on the biolinguistics approach as I did the Blake College project. And about the time I was thinking of going back to Ohio State, almost the whole humanities faculty resigned in protest to the president of the university's expulsion of a student for having Gus Hall speak at his house. And I forget how many it was, but all of my professors and practically the whole liberal arts university went off to the universities on the east and west coast. So that was the end of my Ohio State thesis project.
And both as a student and a professor, can you go into a little more detail what some of the consequences were for you when you started to question the system? So you mentioned briefly about the one firing, but just also talk about that as a student, if there was any kind of ostracization or... Even though I had several experiences as a teacher, for example, teaching high school in the San Diego area, I found that the newly hired teachers in one of the area high school
schools that had just been created, all of the teachers were lively and we enjoyed talking in the teacher's room. And the other high schools that had been established over the years, the teachers all seemed to be in a depressed, semi-hypnotic state, just unwilling or unable to get interested in anything in their office, free time in the teacher's room. They would just want to gripe about conditions and so on. But in the new school, where the teachers hadn't been around the system for very long, everyone was lively.
And after three or four months, I saw the new teachers who had been lively starting to become depressed and dull. By the end of that year, they were pretty much like the teachers in the other schools. And I realized that it was very hard to continue functioning in the system, doing what the system told you to. When Blake College in Mexico ended, I went to teach at the University of Montana for a year. And having designed my own courses, not only at Urbana in biology and physics, but at Blake
College, the idea of inventing courses to suit the needs of each student, that guided the way I designed the linguistics courses at Montana. And I found that I could meet the definition of the course according to the college catalog, what the content should include, but I could still do it in a way that didn't deaden either me or the students. For example, there were textbooks that were chosen by the department. And so I would go through the textbook class by class and show what I thought was wrong
with the approach in the textbook, so that I didn't repeat anything that was being taught in the text, other than as something to offer perspectives on, so that the students could choose between my perspective as a critic and the standard opinion of the textbook writer. And when it was successful, we could generate new perspectives through the interactions. And I found that it could potentially be very, very functional educationally to work in an established university if you didn't have people guiding you and firing you when you did the wrong thing.
But that was when I decided to go back to Eugene and the University of Oregon to work on the PhD. And by that time, I realized that I just wanted to have access to their facilities, the instruments, and use their library and resources to do the research that I wanted, and that I could inform enough to meet the requirements of all of the course individual idiosyncrasies of the professors. And only a couple of the professors really, really disliked me.
But the only really bad outcome, they would give me a C in lab because that was the subjective evaluation, whether I was doing my lab work properly. And incidentally, my experiments in lab always turned out interesting and odd and tended to upset the professors. If I would say, "Look what's happening in this situation," the professor would prefer to walk away and not comment. But academically, I picked up people as thesis advisors that were very, very competent, interesting people. One professor that wasn't on my committee was sort of a sounding board.
He would put up things on his bulletin board that he had seen in the papers that were counter to the dogma. And when I would run into something that was contrary to the dogma, he was someone that was willing to talk about it. But mostly it was a matter of avoiding the dogmatists. I also remember you having an anecdote. One professor, you had questioned something very early in the term and then decided not to call on you for the rest of the year. What was that?
Maybe you're thinking of the comparative physiology where the professor had 10, I think it was 10 or 12 lectures the first half of the course. And they were very peculiar. Everything seemed to be skewed a little bit to make it seem different, even though it was standard biological responses. But everything was presented in a sideways fashion that seemed very odd. No one in the class could figure out what he was doing. But I think the purpose was to forestall questioning because it seemed so odd.
Then the second half of the term, he had every student do a presentation. I think it was a 20-minute presentation, 15 or 20 minutes for each student. And there were just enough students so that there would be a time slot for each of us. And even though my name was in the middle of the alphabets, he saved me for the very last hour of the course. And during the last hour, he knew that I was going to talk about stuff I had done in the lab, testing some of Gilbert Ling's ideas.
And so he saved me for a diminished time slot, about 10 or 15 minutes before the end of the term's time possibilities. And so I spent about five minutes outlining, in just the very roughest way, Gilbert Ling's essential ideas and contributions. And just as I was about to start describing the evidence supporting his general view, Professor said, "We aren't going to have time for the rest of that." And as I sat down, he said, "The ideas are very interesting, but there isn't evidence to support it."
But he had very carefully cut me off before I could present the evidence. And he knew I was sort of a menace because I had done... For example, when he was explaining how the glass membrane on a pH meter works, he said the protons, hydrogen ions, diffuse through the glass. And I said, "But sometimes the glass can be very thick and it still gives the same results." And he said, "It shows that glass is very permeable to hydrogen ions." And I said, "But so-and-so uses the same instrument but filled with mercury instead of hydrochloric acid.
Does that mean that mercury ions are diffusing through the glass?" And that was... Why he really hated me. As an added inspiration for yourself getting into science and questioning aging and the death of the organism, was there anything going on in your own health? Did you have a health journey getting well that also... When I was going to school in this one-room country school was the first time I noticed that something was different about my eyes. As a little kid, I could... I remember reading science in the distance and having very good eyesight.
And around the age of eight or nine, I noticed that I couldn't recognize a face that was 100 yards away or 50 yards away and realized that something was fuzzy. And then in the sixth grade, I couldn't see the blackboard to do the arithmetic problems. And so I got my first glasses. But there were girls in my sixth grade class who were also nearsighted. And there weren't any boys that started me thinking about what was causing nearsightedness. And then as I got acquainted with a couple of these girls, I found that they had had
migraine headaches, which I had had a couple. And so I started seeing a connection between female hormones, nearsightedness, and migraines. And that was just a sort of a nagging question for years and years that I kept wondering about. But the things that really got me interested in the idea of getting more deeply involved in studying and maybe doing counseling was years later, I had more and more put together the ideas of what I had been eating and what would bring on a migraine headache.
And I realized that there were ups and downs in my blood sugar so that if I would do something energetic like going on a hike on a weekend, the next morning I would wake up with a migraine. And so I was progressively interested in the effects of food. And the culture at that time, people were talking in the newspapers and on the radio talking about the effects of vitamin deficiencies and so on. And that was the first time I heard the idea that certain fatty acids might be essential.
But at that time in 1948, '49, that information was always qualified with, but that is an issue to be solved. It isn't established that they are an essential nutrient. So in the '50s, Adele Davis's books were coming out. And I read one or two of her books in the '50s and got interested in trying different vitamin supplements. And I found that when I was feeling sort of gloomy and oppressed, I happened to take a vitamin B1 tablet. And within two or three minutes, the sense of gloom and depression and darkness lifted.
And I realized how important a simple single vitamin could be. Then years later in Mexico, a friend who had dropped by the school started, he said a niece of his was about a year and a half old, was in the hospital with dysentery. And the next day he came by and said, "She's worse." And I think it was on the third day he said, "She's deteriorating and they think she might not survive." But I had read in Adele Davis about the effect of B6 on the intestines. So I gave him a 10 milligram tablet.
He took it to the hospital and gave it to the baby. And almost immediately her diarrhea stopped and she came right out of it. And about the same time, I noticed that my English language students who had come for classes after working all day, some of them just couldn't remember anything. And I found a place that wholesale a crude kind of wheat germ. And I made some wheat germ and egg cakes, sort of like big cookies. And I would serve one of those and a cup of coffee to my English students before class.
And suddenly they were bright and could remember everything. And then one of the American neighbors who was a writer, he had a potato nose, rhinophyma, gnarled blood vessels making his nose lumpy and knotted and red across his nose and cheeks. And he was a heavy drinker, but his main concern was that his vocabulary was shrinking. And when he would talk, he would make a great struggle just to get the exact word that he wanted. And since he was trying to be a writer, that was a serious concern.
I told him about Adele Davis's observation that a vitamin B2 deficiency makes tissues unable to use oxygen. And being unable to use oxygen, the body invades that tissue with more blood vessels to try to deliver enough oxygen. And so I suggested that his red cheeks and lumpy nose might be evidence of a vitamin B2 deficiency. And so it took him several weeks to remember that, but I kept giving him notes and he would lose the notes. But finally he got to the doctor with a note and the doctor gave him a shot of vitamin B2.
And the next time I saw him on a Monday, he spoke fluently, had access to his vocabulary, and there was no redness, just like turning off a switch. All that week, he was fluent and didn't have the red skin. And each week he would go for a shot and he was working fine. But something happened one weekend, he couldn't get to the city for his shot. And he was right back with a red face and absence of vocabulary. And since his memory was necessary to remember to go to the doctor, eventually his nose got
bigger and his memory got worse and he finally died of a heart problem. And having that experience, then a friend with a little son who every night would wake up screaming with a nosebleed. And in the afternoon, sometimes he would wake up with a nosebleed and having extreme behavior problems, getting violent. He was about four at the time. And I mentioned the possibility that he was having that same kind of a vascular problem affecting his behavior and blood vessels. So we made him some little sort of puffed egg, scrambled egg with powdered milk and
a dissolved 10 milligram vitamin B2 tablet in each pill, in each cookie. And after he ate his first cookie, that nap, he slept right through and didn't have a nosebleed. As far as I know, as long as I knew him, he never had another nosebleed and his behavior improved. So that got me interested in the idea that single vitamins, you could connect a symptom or a disease to a particular vitamin, vitamin B1 or B2 or B6 and so on.
And so I got involved in that kind of thinking that you have to be perceptive and informed and match the treatment to the problem and so on. But meanwhile, the other thing was going on, studying how organisms and cells work and seeing that there are very general principles that simplify everything and that it isn't necessary to think medically about matching a nutrient to a symptom. The proper way to go about it would be to find out what is missing in the organism that makes it unstable and work on the most general things.
And natural foods happen to have each kind of organism that we use as a food has all of the nutrients basically, but in different proportions. And if you simply pick out the balance of simple foods, you can raise your general level of nutritional intake without having to worry about which thing is specifically related to a symptom. And besides the eyesight and the migraines very early on, was there anything else in your health that helped guide your research maybe later down the road? Not about my own health that I remember.
But what about when like the inspiration to start taking thyroid or looking into thyroid as a supplement and the effect of that? The eyesight and migraine thing, I realized that why girls were so much more often nearsighted and having migraines was that females are five or ten times more likely to be hypothyroid. And so I had thought about that for many years that the thyroid probably accounts for the females' symptoms, but since when I worked in the woods, for example, I would work in the summer to pay for college expenses.
And I was sort of the camp joke because my lunch bag, we had cloth bags that we carried our lunch in. Some of the guys would put a sandwich or two in a little packet on their hip. Mine reached below my knees and weighed, must have been seven or eight pounds of lunch I dragged with me through the woods. And that's where I realized that I had an extremely high metabolic rate. One summer on a survey crew where we had to chop down the small trees for the line of
sight surveying, I found that I had to drink a quart of water every 30 minutes and we would work about 12 hours steady. And during that whole time from about five in the morning until six at night, I wouldn't urinate at all, but I would put four or five gallons of water through me and it would all come out as sweat. And calculating how much heat and calories it takes to evaporate that much water, it turns out that I was, during those times of intense work, I would be burning 10 or 12,000 calories a day.
And I just couldn't believe that that could be possible with hypothyroidism. And as I thought about it more, I decided to simply try a supplement and see what happened. And right after I took my first bit of thyroid, I cooled down. I didn't have to eat so much and I became much more relaxed. I had always been a light sleeper so that if the house creaked, I would be jolted awake. And I realized that was like a pregnant woman or a woman with a newborn baby. The hormones make the brain alert.
And when I took the thyroid, there were hormonal changes so that I could sleep soundly like I had as an eight or nine-year-old. And so my reasoning, I think Jerry Aikawa, the magnesium researcher, I think he had the clue to how that works. He showed that cells can't retain magnesium if they're low in thyroid. And the mechanism, I think, is that ATP produced under the influence of oxygen and fuel consumption and thyroid activation, ATP binds magnesium. And in the absence of thyroid, you simply aren't making enough ATP and not binding enough magnesium.
The de-energized molecule ADP binds calcium. And when the cell has a high calcium content, it tends to be in an excited state. So when you're low in magnesium and high in calcium, your cells are stuck in an activated state. And I think that a magnesium deficiency interacting with the thyroid deficiency means that your cells are being overexposed to calcium internally, exciting them, making them waste energy, burning oxygen and fuel, but not being able to relax fully. So your fields of research seem broad as well as your endeavors.
I've just never been able to describe what you do succinctly. How would you describe yourself? I've always thought of myself as a painter who couldn't make a profession of portrait painting because I didn't like the way the clients made demands on how I represented them. And that science is just part of the landscape. It isn't what I do as an occupation or profession. It's just something that everyone really has to deal with because it's a major means of indoctrination and control. People say, "Here's this study that gives this result. Therefore you have to do this."
And it's really a propaganda and control and manipulation scheme as well as a byproduct. It has a lot of useful things. And so I found that I could use the techniques and do some useful things. But I don't subscribe to the culture in general. It's a nice idea. Do you consider yourself a scientist? No. I think if a critic of opinions about reality could be called a scientist, yeah, then. But I think of myself as mainly a critic rather than a participant in the science culture.
And how do you communicate your ideas or interface with others? When I was trying to be a participant in the education culture or the philosophy culture, various academic lines, I would submit papers. And very often the editors would make irrelevant comments. For example, once I wrote a letter with the article I was submitting that was on a college letterhead that had some Hispanic names on it. And the editor sent back the rejection notice with racist comments on it about Hispanics not being genetically qualified to work in that field.
And two or three similar, very inappropriate remarks for a science editor to make made me increasingly skeptical. And some articles I sent to medical journals, I would get a silly rejection letter. And then three or four months later, the same journal would publish essentially the same idea. For example, the effects of light deprivation, vitamin A deficiency causing leukoplakia, several contraceptive function of progesterone. Right after I submitted articles with some evidence supporting each of those things, they would be rejected. And then an MD would be published shortly after my rejection on exactly the same idea.
And I realized I had known composers who would send their song to Irving Berlin to get his approval and they would find that it came out as Irving Berlin's song. And various things I realized that publication was not what it seems to be. And so then why did you choose a newsletter as the medium to communicate your... When I was teaching the science classes in Urbana or the linguistics classes in Montana, I would write up my ideas and some of my criticisms of the textbook, for example, in a handout,
two or three page handout for every class. So that it would... My idea was that the students wouldn't have to take notes if I would tell them everything I was going to talk about in that class. And so then we could talk about things so they wouldn't be occupied trying to record what I was saying. And so I got in the habit of, for every class that I did after that, I would write out a handout. And I did a course on the Russian approach to brain research and did a weekly class and
would give them a handout of several pages for each week. And I realized that that had made a book, the Mind and Tissue book, was just the handouts for that class. And that got me in the habit of distributing my weekly thoughts. People would drop in for a class or just a discussion. And so I would mimeograph at first. And as Xeroxes got cheaper, I would Xerox. At first I made a lot of carbon copies of my typed up handouts. And as Xeroxing got cheaper, then I would send more copies to more people.
And in the late '70s, I realized that I could not even consider getting snide remarks from editors and just distribute my articles to people that were interested. I know that some take an approach of touring around, giving lectures, video series, things like that. Is there a reason why you don't take a similar approach and prefer to disseminate? I think it was about '91, 1990 or '91, I had a series of lectures scheduled. I would try to get them scheduled so I could drive from Eugene to San Diego and stop along the way.
And in one of the Northern California towns, we gathered at the lecture hall and the place was locked up. And so we discovered that it wasn't going to be possible to use that place. So we went to one of the person's homes to do the meeting. And next place along the line, same thing happened. And I got to San Diego where I had been giving every few months, I would do a talk at this grocery store that had a theater adjoining the store. And when I got there, the theater was locked.
And I went in the health food department of the grocery store, and the person who had arranged the lecture had been fired. And I realized that the health food industry had caught on to what I was going to say about unsaturated fat. The flax oil syndicate. So what subjects are you currently interested in researching in the general subject matter of your newsletters over the years? Currently the most recent thing is trying to regeneralize almost everything that is conventionally established about cell measurements.
For example, the idea of electricity in the cell interacts with the idea of pH in the cell and the redox potential, the balance between oxidizing and reducing. These interact. In theory, there are ways of explaining those, but they tend to be independent as if they were separate things. And looking at it from the Gilbert Ling perspective, I think everything has a much simpler explanation, even maybe more generalized than Gilbert Ling's, in which, for example, the exterior fields that relate to people like Persinger's work, the living tissue projects a static-like electrical field around it.
Someone used a piece of skin in an isolation compartment and showed that as it's oxidizing, it's projecting a negative field beyond the surface a couple of inches. And adding cyanide to block oxidation, the field collapsed. Washing the cyanide out, the field came back, showing that the outside field around the tissue and cell is reflecting the metabolism and energy intensity inside. But the business of putting an electrode into a cell, the very first thing that Gilbert Ling noticed in the late 1940s, he, simply looking at what he was doing, concluded that
it wasn't behaving the way a membrane potential should act. He described it as a surface difference, a phase potential that he could detect right at the surface. And I think he described the potassium chloride charged microelectrode, three molar solution, very concentrated solution of potassium chloride. I think he was the one that described it as a battery, a source of electrical energy, not a detector, that it was creating a current as the cell sucked the potassium out of your electrode. And I think the membrane potential is probably one of the most important examples of an artifact.
Friedhoff Strostrand, a famous electron microscopist at Southern California, USC, I think it was, he demonstrated in various preparations that the way you prepared the material for the electron microscope created totally different membrane structures. And simply, Sidney Fox, for example, in adding water to hot amino acids, creating little particles, these appear to have a membrane. And since you're creating, when you stain a cell to create a visible membrane, you're causing a charged molecule to concentrate in a particular region. And it happens that where the osmic acid concentrates is where they suggest that the acid of the
fat, fatty acid, should be the phosphate lipid membrane. This phosphate group should repel the stain. But in fact, that's exactly where they're representing that the osmium is being concentrated. But where it will concentrate is at a zone of positive charge. And whenever you have two unlike materials in contact, one will attract electrons away and you'll get an electrical double layer that I think is what is being stained, appearing, looking like a membrane, but it's really a pure artifact of staining. And so I'm working towards a picture of the cell which sees this metabolic projected surrounding
charge with the oxidation reduction process, which governs things like cell division and cell behavior. You have to have an excess of electrons for the cell to break into two parts and multiply. And if you keep the cell in its oxidizing state, you can keep it functioning rather than simply growing. And the acid-base balance is directly connected to the electrical charge of the material. And as you increase the alkalinity or the abundance of electrons, you're causing the gel system of basically proteins to take up more water.
So everything that involves either too much cell division or swelling and interference with function simply because the shape is being distorted, all of these interact with our externally projected fields. And there are models that support each other. For example, the electret, I don't know if our microphones now electret or is there a new technology? The electret is a material that has solidified in the presence of an electrical field so that it freezes with its atoms, molecules arranged so that you take away the field and it stays charged.
And the electret microphone is arranged so that when the sound vibrates, this fixed electrical charge, it creates an electrical current. It's sort of the equivalent of a permanent magnet, but it's a permanent electrical charge. And in the case of living stuff, it's a continuously regenerated electrical charge. But that field is being projected from every cell that's respiring, influencing its environment. And these things have a very long reach, probably analogous to the long distances that germinate. Gerald Pollack shows in his exclusion zone water, charged particles are kept far back from the surface of the face.
Those existing phenomena have simply been left out of membrane-based biological thinking. It seems like along with that, the subjects that you choose to address in your newsletters run such a wide gamut. Can you just in a generalized way mention what some of those subjects are over the years, over the last couple decades? Oh, I've probably forgotten a lot of them. On my website, there's one about William Blake and one about the nature of knowing and how that relates to education. And there's always this trying to make philosophy a part of the awareness.
Any particular concrete question, I think, really should relate to what you're doing philosophically. And that, I've tried to concretize the political meanings of that, but it's necessary, I think, always to be looking at the historical influences that have created this myth of science as a kind of objectivity that is based on absolute, reducible, kind of infinitely describable. In other words, they're so empty and abstract that you can have absolute confidence in what you can deduce from them. But what that amounts to is that we have a deductive science, which it's saying that
you reduce it to these absolute units of genes or atoms or quanta. And from those, since they are pure and not each one is absolutely the same everywhere in the universe, you can make absolute deductions from those. And these deductions can then tell you all you need to know about how the organism works, how it should be treated, how it should be educated, and so on. It's a kind of religious absolutism operating through reductionist science, applying a philosophical physics to sort of denature the organism, to take the life out of the organism.
Okay, so we left off with the newsletter. Was there anything else you wanted to say about your newsletter in regards to how you chose to do that? At times I've hoped that I would get more feedback to the newsletter, but with the development of the computer culture, I get a lot of reactions, not exactly, almost never anything critical of the ideas in the newsletter, which I had hoped that people would sort of stimulate amplification of certain themes in the newsletter by inquiring, like in the class, someone will say, "What does that imply?"
And that leads off into new stuff. But I had been hoping that the newsletters would stimulate that kind of development, but there's very little of it from the emails I get. But still, people are presenting new information, new perspectives. Strange things are always happening. And so I'm constantly learning from the questions people ask in their emails. How do those inquiries direct you from there, the feedback you get? Does that change your focus? Sometimes the questions will reflect something that's going on in the culture, like something
appears in JAMA and everyone will suddenly have the symptom that was discussed in JAMA. I've been noticing that since the 1970s, that an article would come out saying that progesterone suppresses the immune system, and suddenly everyone would say, "I got a cold right after I took progesterone." And that seems to be a major entertainment in the culture, is for symptoms to radiate out from something that appears on the internet now, or in a major medical magazine. Sometimes these symptoms, it's like a little subculture develops.
They talk to each other, and sometimes they reveal really important information, like the chronic fatigue, what is it, myalgia syndromes. Adrenal fatigue. And these together tend to direct the attention of what I'm writing newsletters about. And I think some constructive things are coming gradually out of things that have started kind of as a fetish that certain doctors promote something to sell their services, but gradually enough objective information comes out of it that is useful. Do you wish you were getting more criticism on your subjects?
Yeah, as long as it's people who have actually read the things and find things that need expansion. In the last 25, almost 30 years, there have only been, I think, three people who wrote what were supposed to be criticisms, and basically they just said, "He's wrong, he's wrong, he's wrong, and he's very wrong." But I haven't had anyone really look at either the data or the reasoning. But I think there's, I would like to have people find the areas that need exploration and expansion.
Nothing's finished, and it would be very helpful to have people helping to draw out themes of development. So besides your scientific inquiry, what are your other pursuits? Other... What, your other interests? I've always seen my politics and science and ideas about human nature as being interconnected. For example, being born in the Great Depression before the war, the things people were talking about, the newspaper stories were about military aggression, Spanish Civil War, Guernica and Mussolini bombing Ethiopia, Japanese invading Shanghai, people getting drafted and obviously thinking that they were not coming back.
That whole thing set my attitude as people were hungry in the Depression and elsewhere they were getting killed. Locally cops were maiming people in jails and so on. The culture is still generating these things full speed and science techniques are just one very small approach to trying to correct that stuff. But still, political consciousness is where the real solutions are. This meant more like when you want to take a break from researching and writing about scientific topics, how do you do that? Other activities or...
When I'm in Eugene, I just go out in the backyard and paint something. I always, when I would be writing on any subject, I would feel that I was starting to get over abstract and over verbal. So I would sculpt something or paint something or even try to write a poem or something to change the way I was relating to language. And just to keep myself from getting into a rut. That was one of the reasons I decided to go to Montana to teach linguistics because I
had been doing mainly philosophical, psychological things in Blake College. And I realized that I should sort of tighten things up on the basis of evidence and should do some actual science work. So my first thought was to teach linguistics and on my own, independently do some biological work. So then I started reading some of the current science and realized I could do it much better than these guys. And so I went to Eugene to enroll and use the instruments that you need to do contemporary science.
But the process has always involved trying to keep myself from getting stuck in a way of looking at reality. So it's constantly going between science, philosophy, and painting or sculpting or something. When I'm in Mexico, just going down to the town square and sitting around and talking to people, it's very refreshing and changing to listen to people's very un-American sounding perspectives on reality. It sounds like that's something that you got into intuitively, but it also makes me think of scientifics. Intuitively input. You mentioned before synecdoches, I think that's how.
It just sounds like sort of the same thinking. Yeah. Yeah. Someone, I think it was in the early 1960s, someone gave me W.J.J. Gordon's book on synecdoches, and in his bibliography he had read all the same people that I had in literature and the idea of metaphor in thinking. And I had been teaching my computer as a model of the brain and how information is processed by the organism. And I was having my, already in 1960, I was an anti-digital person, anti-quantizing for coherence of information processing as well as coherence of reality.
And so this Gordon's approach to creative production was on the basis of metaphor rather than logic. And this is what can make science people so deadening that they want to have this logical handling of reality and avoiding metaphoric and projective looking for wholeness. Talking to physicists, I was, in San Diego I knew several people in the various branches of defense and nuclear industry. And so talking to physicists, I would ask their definition for some of the subjects that I thought were constructive ways of using physics like hysteresis.
How does substance remember something so that the way up is not the same as the way down? Going through matter, you change it, leave a trail. And so everything you do is sort of spinning webs of organization in matter. And ideas such as that or as resonance, what does resonance mean when two objects are participating in the same frequency of an energy system? And physicists would generally, unless they were off on the humanistic side, not really physicists, the working physicists would simply quote a textbook definition that didn't mean anything to them or to me.
And I realized that it's very hard to talk across that paradigm. They simply say there's nothing to be perceived. When wave is coming to an electron, when exactly does that absorption happen? Does the electron slowly rise as the wave front passes? And is there a moment when no such imagery exists in physics apparently? It seems like that's one of the major problems in the lack of multiple angles of thinking. If you don't, just me from a visual perspective, looking at problems one way forces you to see the holes in a problem.
Way back, I was attracted to the language of Heraclitus, even though it's fragmentary and odd. And I think Aristotle, even though our culture has stereotyped Aristotle as some kind of an authoritarian monster, but Aristotle had some of the same themes that Heraclitus did, seeing that things are always changing, becoming is what's real, the eternal being is purely fictitious. But the people who consider Aristotle as anti-scientific are really the ones who are susceptible to Plato's fantasy of pure abstraction and pure truth.
Do you want to talk a little bit about your painting, how you got into painting? My parents, my mother had a photography portrait studio and my father had studied art in Kansas City, studied portrait painting among other things. And they both happened to be in San Diego in the '20s and they were selling real estate to make a living, even though their goal was to be a photographer and a painter. And they met and it happened that right at that time, the Depression came, the real estate market collapsed.
And so they decided to drop out, go over to the desert and become painters, basically was their intention. And they homesteaded a piece of the desert and set up a photography shop and a sign painting studio and participated. There were a lot of painters hanging around the desert doing desert scenery. And I still have several of the paintings from these early California people, Carl Hoppe and such. So my parents' friends were, about half of their friends were this arty professional painting crowd.
And so the atmosphere around the house gave as much respect to art as to science and politics. And I think it was my parents' aspirations to be painters that when I was eight, I started trying to understand drawing and learn how colors work. And that was right about the same time I started becoming nearsighted and it made me very interested at my mother's cameras in understanding optics and the physiology of what was happening to my vision and the nature of light bouncing off.
For example, the hairs on my arm produced rainbows and I realized that it was the cell structure of the hair acting as a diffraction grating. And so for a high school term paper, I wrote about diffraction and was starting to study the physics of it and the impressionist theory of light and how the light effect on the retina. But then that, in trying to understand the physiology of light, I realized that the standard idea that we have cells that respond to certain color frequencies, that supposedly accounts for the colors we see.
But experiments were done in which, for example, if you, when you look through red glasses and take them off after you've adapted, everything looks green. You wear green glasses and everything looks red. But some experimenters made the right side of each eye red and the left side green so that when you would move your eyes to one side, you would see one color, to the other side another color. And taking those glasses off, the color after image was exactly the opposite. Glasses were split down the middle.
Looking to the right, you'd see the opposite color to the left, showing that the color perception is in the brain, not the eye. So the interest in painting and representing reality, doing portraits was interesting because I saw it as reflecting that person's presence at the moment, but doing it as a summation of the expressions that I could see during the hour that I would be painting them. I would see much more than a photograph at any one instant would see. So there was this brain process added to what the retina is actually seeing.
And the people that I have known that kept their portraits for a long time, they tended to look more and more like their portrait over the year because I had accentuated things that a young face was only visible in a moving young face, but at any one moment, the elasticity would make it disappear. So as they got old, these expressions would gradually get more intense. And so I was seeing painting as a way of exploring reality across time and focusing on the moment but as a way to spend time.
And how much time do you spend now painting? I suppose about a quarter of my time. Lots of reading, little bits of writing, and resting by painting. So how did you first find the work of Harold Hillman and how did that influence your views? I'm not sure whether it was Hillman himself or people he had influenced by his early publications, but there were several articles in Ling's little journal, Physiological Chemistry and Physics that were showing the sensitivity of molecules to light and storing energy in ways that ordinary bonds shouldn't be able to store.
And one article, I think it was several years after Ling's first publications, but one experimenter measured the ATP hydrolysis in muscle as the pitch of a phone generator varied and found that a certain frequency, like 240 cycles per second or something, was causing a rapid hydrolysis of ATP, but the standard theory was that the amount of sound reaching an ATP molecule was smaller than thermal random noise. So they said that is impossible, but in fact they measured it. And my interpretation of that was that it's because the muscle water system is acting
as an antenna and is actually summating energy over a huge range compared to the molecule itself and its local heat vibrations. So the antenna effect is something that I think Hillman was one of the people responsible for spreading that through the culture. And it was just maybe five years ago or so that I got his books from a Reichian. Could you explain a little bit, break down Hillman's work for us? About which, the resonance thing of... His main thing seems to be artifacts. Oh, yeah, yeah. Everything in biology is artifactual.
When in a nerve muscle physiology lab, my professor only two or three times would stop by my table and ask what I was doing. And one of his visits, I had a microelectrode in a cell and I said, "Notice the oscilloscope pattern is the same when I advance the electrode deeper into the cell and then it repeats in reverse that same pattern as the electrode comes out of the cell. And the membrane, if it's a membrane potential, the inside is supposed to be all the same voltage."
And as soon as he saw what was happening, he turned and I don't think he ever spoke to me again after that. Obviously he had said something like, "Well, Peter, you going to study the mind or the brain?" He had apparently looked at my transcript and seen that I'd been a psychology major for a while. Most of the things I did in lab were like that, showing artifacts were everywhere. That same professor had a grasshopper hooked up so that he could demonstrate stimulating the muscle and making the grasshopper push its leg up.
He had the students put their finger on the grasshopper and then he would push the button. They could feel how strong it was. But when it was my turn, he turned his back and didn't invite me to touch the grasshopper. But since he was turned back to me, I decided to touch the foot anyway. And it held its foot up just from my touch. And when I broke the touch, it dropped its foot back and I would touch it again and it would push it up. So it would have ruined his demonstration if I had...
He didn't know. He just didn't want to give me a chance to disrupt things. But there were lots of similar occasions in that same lab because some of the instrumentation was sensitive electrical stuff, millivolt recorders and such. And my fields would disrupt even the machines. My lab partner had to operate the millivolt recorder because with my, at that time, very high metabolic rate, I apparently had a big field that was overriding the instrumentation. Did your field change once you started taking thyroid? Yeah, I've never had those strange experiences.
In that same period, I visited some of my Reichian friends in San Francisco. One of them worked at the Exploratorium and they took me there just after hours to show me what was what with the Exploratorium. And at one of the displays, it was a cloud chamber. She turned it on and was going to show how you could visualize the cosmic rays in the clouds. And as it clouded up, that aroused my interest. So I moved up close to the cabinet and the cloud disappeared in a cylinder shaped like my body.
As I backed away, the cloud filled in the space and it was like there was a field destroying the condensation in that area. But as soon as I took thyroid, I've never had any of those excessive field effects. Would you agree with Hillman's main findings about the cell when undergoing processing, the main structures being artifacts? Yeah, I took a microscopy technique course and prepared things for electron microscopes. And knowing a show strands work, for example, I just tried some different fixatives instead of a short chain fixative.
I tried using a long chain dialdehyde that would attach with more flexibility and fixing things with these slightly different chemicals where the processing, the whole procedure was supposed to produce a bilayer at the surface. My cells sometimes would look like onions with surface bilayer effects, this one after the other down through the cell. The more subtle your problem, the more likely you are to have artifacts. So it's really an art more than a scientific procedure. A friend in Mexico gave me a very old, hundreds of years old book.
One of his books, he was a collector with an interest in medical anthropology. One of his newer books, I think it was published in 1935 or 40, described how to treat ulcers with osmic tetroxide, osmic acid. It was a medical treatment. And the description medically was that its purpose was to create a false membrane. So this was a medical concept in 1940. And at first, when people believed there was a membrane governing cells, at least that line of thinking, they developed an electron microscope and prepared it with the techniques that they used for light microscopes.
And there was no membrane at all. It was just like a loaf of bread without a crust. And over a period of several years, they evolved stains. And it happened that this chemical that was known medically to create false membranes turned out to make a membrane on all living cells. So just looking at the culture history of how the cell membrane came to be visualized in an electron microscope, it looks like beyond art, it was a sort of a deliberate creation of a false image.
And what Hohmann would say, or what he did say, was he doesn't believe we've learned anything useful in terms of the living cell studying under the electron microscope or studying anything under the electron microscope as being useful. I can't at the moment think of anything. It's the same Gilbert Lange says that what has the membrane theory contributed. Really nothing but entertainment for people who write textbooks. Can you talk about how you discovered Gilbert Lange's work and how that changed things for you?
In my first quarter at the University of Oregon, I had gone from having been thinking about bio-linguistics and how the... Sorry, hold on just one second. When I started at the biology department at the University of Oregon, 1968, I had just come back from a trip to Russia where I talked to Yuri Holodov about the effects of magnetic fields on cells. And I had done various kinds of experiments with studying. In the '50s, my brother had been a radio ham and with his electronics equipment, I tested
all of our neighbors and found that the older a person is, the lower their conductivity is. And this, I later saw that even as I was aging into the '60s, I was coming up into the age where my resistance should have been lower, but it was still the lowest of anyone. And I realized that this was something about my odd high metabolic rate. There was the higher your metabolic rate, the lower your resistance or the higher your conductivity. And I used some very fancy microvolt meters across the brain and on the long axis of the
body and such, and saw the same thing that the conductivity through my head was very high, but the voltage was also very high. When you have a good conductor, you would expect that to collapse the field. But since it was being generated inside, there was a high polarity on the outside and over the whole body at the same time that current flowed freely. So it was flowing freely, but being separated and polarized. So I came to nerve biology with these various perspectives that water was very important,
that the electrical fields were at least participating, if not governing. And the lectures were strictly on the membrane polarity and everything being governed and ruled by the so-called pumps and pores in the membrane. And simultaneously, within a few months at least, there were some articles, I think in the magazine Science, showing electron micrographs of particles of distilled water that showed pore structure. And the freezing process creates a very intense electrical field that can shape the direction of crystallization. But since I had seen these miniature particles of ice showing pores of the same dimension
that were postulated for the cell, I suspected that that was an artifact. As far as they could create them in their imagery, I thought it was the same as the purified distilled water. And so I was skeptical that the professor would assign articles that backed up what he was saying in 1935. These studies proved that this is how a membrane works. So I would go to find that journal, the Bound journal. I would look in the index and look at everything else published that year by that journal.
And every time he would assign an article, I would see what else was being published that year. And I saw that there was something more sympathetic to my position that was being ignored in the current view. And as I followed these people across the years through the '40s, then I saw that Gilbert Ling had, by 1950, sort of brought together several of these problems. And it was only maybe a month into the fall term when I wrote to him and said, "As far
as I can see it, it looks like years ago you already solved all of the problems that are now being taught in this course." And he answered, said, "Your problem is that you don't understand what science is. Science is seeking prestige and power and money." Not about the pursuit of truth. So with Ling's work, where did you go from there with it? Did he still have more to follow or was that at a time when he'd already been pushed out? Oh, well, I brought up his publications to some of my professors and really the intelligent
professors were not hostile to him at all. And he was really like a litmus test for how anti-scientific a professor was, how readily they would try to dispose of his whole position. One of the both, I think Harold Hildman probably made a big point of the lack of high energy bond in ATP. The idea that it has 14 kilocalories per bond is required for running the pumps. And Gilbert Ling said, "Even if you assume that it has this high energy, there's not enough of it being produced to run the pumps that they say are necessary."
But I think Podolsky was the first one to disprove the high energy bond in 1956. And I read, I think it was two or three years later, an article by one of my professors, Sidney Bernhard, and I was doing something in his lab and he, outside of his lectures, he seemed not to be a conversationalist. He was on my committee, but I think we only exchanged maybe a dozen sentences over the years. But I said, "I saw your publication demonstrating that ATP doesn't have a high energy bond,
maybe four kilocalories or something, but all these people, but everyone is basing their models of muscle function and so on." He said, "Not everyone is." But people like that, with the facts, for many years, simply saying not everyone is is a dogmatic idiot. What about May Wan Ho? She's, her visualization of optical coherence, I think, is just massively important. And the whole idea of how light works in organisms, I think, is just as mysterious and under-explained and under-appreciated as how electricity works in organisms.
In Lake Potts Squirrel in Michoacan, the fish, they call them white fish, but they're actually clear fish when they're alive or uncooked. And the people selling them in the square would lay out a pile of these fish about the shape and size of little perches and others that were much smaller. But they would lay them on a pile of magazines, and you could read the magazine through the body of the fish that was maybe as much as an inch thick, just glassy clarity.
And when they were cooked, you could see that they had heart and liver and bones, everything that should have been visible as you looked through this apparently perfectly transparent jelly appearance. And I don't think anyone other than something like wave guides going right around the blood vessels so that a stream of blood going through an artery doesn't cause anything visible. Apparently the passive light that you're seeing is bypassing everything opaque or colored. And I've heard that there's a lizard in Hawaii that's transparent.
And so to understand the cornea and the vitreous of the eye, something similar but not nearly as confusing and problematic as the whole animal that's transparent. But it's essential to understand what light is doing in the organism. And when the sun shines through your ears, they look bright red. The same, you put a flashlight on your hand in the dark, you see red coming through. That shows that our semi-opaque tissues are pretty transparent to red, meaning that the blue and green are being absorbed. But still the transparency is very impressive for red light.
And the penetrating light from ordinary daylight happens to be absorbed. This relatively low energy red light is resonated with by the copper atoms that are, for example, in the respiratory pigment cytochrome c oxidase. And during stress, just prolonged metabolism in the dark, this enzyme loses its activity as the copper goes somewhere that it shouldn't be. And passing light through it, the energy of red light is apparently enough to boost the copper out of its ineffective trap and back into where it should be.
And experimenters with gamma rays giving a killing dose of gamma radiation to a frog, if they shined bright red light on the frog within the first hour, it wasn't harmed by the radiation. And apparently there's something analogous to everyday restoration of the living function by restoring copper to the respiratory pigment. Something analogous seems to inactivate the radiation damage by putting electrons or ions back into a functional rather than a trap where they would simply cause progressive damage. And you can bleach if you put salt or glass or whatever, any crystal into intense gamma
or x-rays, you can turn it purple, for example. But with a slightly less intense radiation tuned to that particular color, you can bleach the crystal again. And so I think the red light detoxifying of gamma rays is equivalent to bleaching a radiation tinted stone. And similar things have been seen with plant material that in a bright light, the electrons are put into an activated state so that if you put it in an ESR, electron spin resonance machine or a paramagnetic resonance detector, you can detect free radicals or excited electrons.
And so if you come in out of the sun for a few hours after being sun exposed, your hair in this machine will show excited electrons. And a piece of plant material will persist in the dark with these electrons still being sensitive and detectable. But if you shine red light on that bit of material, it quenches the free radicals and stops the ESR signal. So I think the penetrating light is a very important biological function. And the way the light is handled, the coherence of the crystal structure is probably involved
in how sensitive we are to the benefit from it. Faisalko Trump, who founded, I think it was International Biometeorological Society, something like that, and a journal, one of his early books was called Psychical Physics. And he investigated as a physicist the forces involved in dousing and showed that with an electrical detector, he could detect the fields produced by a slow current of water underground that these folk dousers would use a stick or wire or something to detect. He showed that you could measure an actual electrical current produced by the water that they were finding.
And so experimentally, he would bury a wire under the ground and produce a current similar to what he had measured produced naturally. And he tested his dousers and they could always find the wire. I got some of these references from Holodov on my visit to Moscow. He had a good bibliography that he gave me. So I started reading this stuff when I was in biology at the same time. May Wan Ho described the moment when she saw the effects of the, we're viewing the drosophilia
under the polarized light microscope, kind of a defining moment for her, scientifically, aesthetically. Do you agree with her, I guess, conclusions about why those organisms seem to emit that rainbow or view, you can view that rainbow pattern? She talks about it being a coherent crystalline structure. Yeah, that's why I started talking about Tsolkova Trump because he already, in 1942 or so, was talking about liquid crystal structure of living material. And the idea of antennas in the water structure of the cell and the fields metabolically projected from one cell to the other.
I think May Wan Ho is giving an image that ties all of this together. The metabolizing cell produces a field and is able to respond to fields with its coherent internal antenna-like structure. But each of these is both a projector and a receiver. And so the cells are coherent electronically and probably in many other ways. All of the chemical functions are involved in the alkalinity, electrical charge, redox processes, generation of fields and production of structure. And so she is just giving kind of the finishing touch, showing that, yes, in fact, the organism
is coherent the way it seems to be in functioning. Great. Then let's move on to Gerald Pollack. It seems like you were already familiar with, I guess, many of the precursors to what Gerald Pollack's doing today. I think the most impressive thing about him, besides his ability to communicate and convince, I think the most impressive thing is that he came up as a conventional muscle biologist and could actually respond to problems and perceptions and change and go off in this extremely important direction. I think it's just amazing as a personality possibility.
I guess if you could talk a little bit about structured water in general, just the properties of water. I ran across it, I think it was J.D. Bernal who had a monthly article in a political magazine about talking about the universe and substance, and he talked about structured water. I think he mentioned Max Perutz and his demonstration of very long-range ordering in hemoglobin crystals or some protein crystal. From that I saw that there were things like clay chemists seeing necessarily structured organizing effects of water, applying forces and arranging in an orderly way flakes of
clay material and affecting the properties of the macroscopic thing. And around that time, when I was in high school, I had heard stories about Albert Szent-Györgyi's lecture demonstrations of muscle contraction changing the way light causes, in one case, fluorescence of a molecule in the muscle, and when the muscle contracts, that fluorescence disappears showing that the electron response to light is governed by the state of the water in the muscle cell. And later, trying to find out more about those experiments, I saw that he had demonstrated
that there's an electron donor-acceptor process, and that if you put in a properly tuned donor and acceptor molecule, the electron moves and will cause the muscle to contract. But you can put the same chemicals in a different combination, in a combination that doesn't have the right tuning, so that the electron doesn't move, the muscle doesn't contract. So that involved oxidation and electrical behavior and led to accidentally noticing that someone who in the '40s, the underground mimeographed leaflets that were circulating in the 1940s were describing William Frederick Coke's troubles with the government.
And the government twice tried to convict him of various medical crimes, but in both cases he got his patients to testify that the government was lying and fabricating evidence and harming witnesses and so on. So I knew about W.F. Coke, and I found that there was an amazing parallel between Albert Szent-Györgyi's work with free radical or electron donor-acceptor states and stuff that W.F. Coke had postulated and worked with beginning 1912, was his first publication, and he left Detroit I think around 1926.
And then Szent-Györgyi in the '20s and '30s was doing supposedly his own thinking, but it happened to be expanding and exploring W.F. Coke's previous work, and it led to Szent-Györgyi getting the Nobel Prize and such. But he never, until very nearly at the end of his life, Szent-Györgyi never mentioned W.F. Coke. But Moses Gomberg, the person who postulated free radicals, was at the University of Michigan and when Coke was an undergraduate there, and so Coke had inside knowledge of what a free radical was and saw that dilution of Moses Gomberg's.
It was a complex arrangement of phenolic groups that hysterically, these big groups tended to pull it apart and leave free electrons stranded simply because of the electrical repulsion of the benzene groups. And so at high dilution, suddenly a clear solution would become dark purple. And this impressed Coke and started his thinking, and it eventually led to Szent-Györgyi's thinking. But in Coke's work, he saw that the carbonyl group, especially if it is resonating with another double bonded two carbons, this intensified the effect of the carbonyl group, which is attracting electrons.
The oxygen is making it slightly acidic and electron attracting. And nitrogens, especially if they are resonating with a double bond, they can be a strong electron donating basic group. And Coke, thinking about the properties that govern free radicals, just the right degree of oxidation would activate the electrons. And too much of the electron donating nitrogen groups would blot out that activated effect, would neutralize it. And just by very clear imagining, he said, maybe that's, well, it was more complicated than abstract, absolute imagination.
He took out the animal's parathyroid glands and showed that although their calcium does go down and they got convulsions, he found that he could stop the convulsions by giving them salt, sodium chloride or potassium chloride or magnesium. It wasn't just a calcium deficiency. But he found that in the absence of the parathyroid, as they developed convulsions, they put out guanidine in the urine, that very hundred times normal amount. And that this is a quenching type of amino group. And so that started him thinking on the implications of oxidation, reduction, imbalance.
And that led to his developing an activated carbonyl treatment for allergies, cancer, infections, basically everything biological. And that was what impressed Szent-Györgyi. And so Szent-Györgyi's concern with the idea of finding just the right electron acceptor was exactly what Koch had postulated, that you need a certain carbonyl activated group. And this was when I started studying the effects of estrogen and progesterone. I saw that progesterone had the carbonyl and estrogen had the phenolic, potentially donatable hydrogen. And Szent-Györgyi's idea that it was the interaction of oxidation structuring the water and the
bad electrons destructuring the water that was, I think, the vital central line of St. Georgi's work. Linus Pauling got in the news in 1960 by theorizing that water structuring around a noble gas can explain anesthesia or hydrophobic molecules introduced into the cell will bind water and cause the structuring. But although Pauling popularized the idea of structured water, it was really Szent-Györgyi, Gilbert Ling, and several other people who had already been biologizing the concept. It was implicit in Salko Trump's idea of the electronic sensitivity, the crystalline idea, liquid crystalline cell model.
And Szent-Györgyi added the refinement that cells can go back and forth between disorganized water and organized water as part of their functioning. And having read that sort of background, then the reason I submitted those articles to Gilbert Ling's journal was that I saw that all of the enzymes that were known to shift under the influence of excess estrogen happened to be governed by water structure. If you cool most enzymes, their activity simply goes down steadily with the lower temperature as chemicals are less energized to react.
But certain enzymes at a certain temperature have a sudden collapse and a complete disappearance of activity, the cold inactivated enzymes. And these are the crucial enzymes for responding to estrogen. But typically, the organism under the influence of estrogen lowers its actual temperature. And as the structural temperature of water, the idea of structural temperature is that cold water is more structured than water that's almost boiling, which has lost a lot of structure. And so the structural temperature is increasing at lower temperatures.
But estrogen, by breaking down the structure, can, even at a low temperature, make the water seem to be hot. So estrogen can activate enzymes that are inactivated even at body temperature, 37 degrees. The structuring of water done by the various energy processes inactivates this whole class of enzymes. And estrogen can override that. And even as the body cools itself to try to increase the structure of water, estrogen can keep destructuring the water, overriding the cooling. So you can cool off and keep functioning to some extent, but at a certain point, too much
estrogen not only makes you cold, but then can activate things that shouldn't be activated. And that involves cell division, water uptake, fat production, failure to oxidize glucose into carbon dioxide, and that contributes to the destructuring effect. So the toxic effects of too much estrogen I saw as analogous to all of the dangerous stressors, radiation, aging, lack of oxygen, and so on. Do you think you could give us a brief description of what the association induction hypothesis is, Gilbert Lange's theory? Yes. My approach to Lange came through these pre-Lange people and problems.
And so when I saw Lange's first book and his confirmation that, in fact, people hadn't found any problem that hurt his theory, that encouraged me to explore what he was doing with his approach and how it related to other people with an anti-membrane approach to cell function. And that required thinking about Bungenberg de Jong and his complex coacervate theory, which was, I think, more interesting than Oprin's idea of early colloidal life. The behavior of several components in a system spontaneously breaking up into highly structured
systems was giving a physical chemical basis that was more complex than Oprin's sort of abstract thing. And looking at other ways to see these physical systems having lifelike properties, much more chemical and involved than J.C. Bose had done with his physical sensitivities and so on. But all of the ion-selective properties, for example, that you can see in a water softener and that are in contemporary biology, they're ascribed to the membrane and its pumps and pores, but not only a chemically engineered gel or resin for softening water, but if you
take a piece of hair, thoroughly dead cells, and wash all of the ions out of it and then dip it in serum, it will select against a gradient, excluding sodium and concentrating potassium. And so Gilbert Ling's detailed analysis of how a water softener works is really all the imagery you need, that it's an electrically active polymer holding stuff with some steadiness in a gel system that affects the water around it and so excludes because of its structural, polymeric and electrical properties. Simply like clay or hair or anything, it's simply selective in how it interacts with
its environment. And Bungenberg de Jong's complex coacervate was doing the same thing. And Ling complexified his arguments to meet the objections of the people who simply had something wrong with their brains. And so he really just massively swamped all of the arguments and that accounts for a lot of what makes it hard to read, is that he's doing such a detailed job of trying to counter irrationality all the way through biology. The idea of the electron cloud is where Gilbert Ling and W.F. Koch and Szent-Györgyi have great overlap, but neither Szent-Györgyi nor Gilbert Ling talked
about each other very much, I don't think. But the electron withdrawing Lewis acid, for example, carbon dioxide is a Lewis acid, two carbonyls and W.F. Koch's reagent in some of the models, it included a chain of parallel carbonyls. And his way of identifying it was that the free radicals at a very high dilution caused his solution to be purple. So there was almost nothing present, but it was purple. And the government said, "There's nothing there, it's a fraud. We can't detect it." But they didn't have electron spin resonance machines yet.
When they came into existence, they said, "Oh yeah, the cells are full of free radicals. This thing that makes mitochondria able to respire, the ubiquitous quinone." And the quinones were part of W.F. Koch's reagent. So the government was simply ignorant and irrational in saying that it was fraud because they couldn't... He demonstrated in court, he would mix his stuff as he used it therapeutically and then gave it to the government to test. They said, "There's nothing there." And that was why the jury acquitted him, because the government was simply incompetent.
This is totally an aside, but is that same property what gives liver its dark color? That's George's theory. And if you grind liver up with water, it fades. And that was an essential part of it. In the brain, you have pigmented stuff. And he said, "What's it doing there in the dark?" It's doing something metabolically. But I think the red light is actually doing something to it too. What would you say biological energy is and why is understanding it so important? That's something that the way you go about answering it explains who you are, really.
For thousands of years, people had different ways of talking about biological energy. That it's something that makes potential become real and it's something that causes change of properties. It's a property of matter. And some of the first physicists called it the living force. So physical force, physical energy, originally was somehow identified with life process itself. They used life language to explain the energy involved in swinging balls or converting motion to heat and so on. And from about Leibniz' time on, it became abstracted increasingly until they got a very neat conservation idea for energy.
That this property, which is the living force in something moving, kinetic energy, this is the same stuff which changes and becomes a heat property in something else or in the same stuff. And this heat property is also the kinetic energy which can become chemical energy and stored and released by burning and so on. And potential energy is even abstracter. It's related to, for example, the distance between charges and separation of heavy objects and so on. But despite the abstraction of it, the idea that it's a property of things or of matter,
it's okay when you start thinking about hysteresis, the trace that energy leaves in matter as it runs through whatever it is. One substance passing through another one or near another one traces some kind of a track that is more or less detectable as an interaction. And that idea that the energy produces a change in the arrangement of substance, that's I think the most important idea for thinking about biological energy. Vernadsky, who integrated biology with cosmology, and he showed that organisms through photosynthesis and metabolism are converting solar energy, light and heat, to structure.
First they turn carbon dioxide and water to sugar and then the sugar is processed through the cells and eventually you get an organism which has this energy flowing through it. And the more intense the flow, the more hysteresis is writing changes in the structure and capturing some of the energy in the form of complexity. And Vernadsky described the tendency of any system in terms of the French person describing a disturbed system that readjusts to minimize the disturbance, le châtelier. Vernadsky simply applied that to the cosmos and showed that solar energy being absorbed
on the earth complexifies and generates structure. And that the structure tends to maximize the flow of energy through itself. And in the case of plants this leads to very, very big sequoia trees and such. In the case of animals you get elephants and especially the brain, there's a tendency, the brain is part of the complexifying of the organism so that you can get more complex structures of all sorts as well as a greater complexity of energy processing right in the brain.
So the biggest brain is projected to come in the future as the energy supply becomes greater. And so he saw life as being driven rather than as being an accidental accumulation that somehow at its essence was random. For him the whole process from the bottom up is driven and tending to a maximum of complexity. The idea that it's the flow of energy through the whole system that constitutes us and that all of our functions and purposes are energy exchanges. So in our very being we represent the history of energy flowing and everything we do involves
consciousness. I think the essential way to grasp consciousness is that it's what happens when you have a very complex flow of information through stuff. If you simply heat a rock on one side, energy is flowing through it and it's creating some coherent processes. But when you get a nervous system and all of the complex juices surrounding the nerves and the electrical fields interacting, then the flow of energy through a system, essentially what's happening when you heat a rock but in an infinitely more complex way. And the substance participates in guiding and intensifying that.
So our goals and functions are in a way as inclined to a certain kind of direction as the development of large-brained big organisms is simply because it's being driven. And as participants in this energy flow, the optimization of energy flow or of consciousness involves certain ways of interacting between people and atmosphere and light and so on. And so the nature of our each little behavior has this context in which we're trying to reach a higher energy level and in effect a better resonance between the components of the system.
The idea of resonance in substance is very applicable to what's going on in our organism. If you have methane in the atmosphere and some oxygen and you ignite it, the first thing that happens isn't that you get carbon dioxide and water. The first thing that is likely to happen is you get a lot of soot. And soot consists of graphite-like systems in which you get polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. And those are highly organized resonant systems. And stability guides the chemical reactions. So it's more stable to be in this complex system and so more favorable energetically.
And when our brains resonate with the environment in a certain way, they are improved by finding the niche in which they can resonate and find a higher functioning. So it's as if we're relaxing into a more intense consciousness. The high energy resting state is what I call the individual cell attitude or state. But it also applies to the brain itself. In the very high energy resting state, we get resonance and so things are more meaningful. And so the consciousness is more intense, more coherent, luminous, and so on. Excellent. Yeah. Amazing. All right.
That's going to take a little while to sink in. Yeah. We'll cut there. Thank you. [END OF TRANSCRIPT] Thank you.