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