CHAPTER 1

“When the great innovation appears, it will almost certainly be in a muddled, incomplete, and confusing form … for any speculation, which does not at first glance look crazy, there is no hope.”  
Freeman Dyson, Disturbing the Universe

Early in the morning of 27 June 1989, a tall, bald French-born biologist of aristocratic mien walked into the Palais de Justice in Sherbrooke, Quèbec, to attend a hearing that was to set a date for his trial. On the front steps of the building were massed over one hundred demonstrators, who gave him an ovation as he passed by.

The demonstrators were carrying a small forest of laths onto which were glued, stapled, or thumbtacked placards and banners. The most eye-catchingly prominent among these signs read:  “Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Medical Choice, Freedom in Canada!”  “Long Live Real Medicine, Down With Medical Power!”  “Cancer and AIDS Research in Shackles While a True Discoverer is Jailed!”  “Thank you, Gaston, for having saved my life!”  And, simplest of all:  “Justice for Naessens!”

Late one afternoon, almost a month earlier, as he arrived home at his house and basement laboratory just outside the tiny hamlet of Rock Forest, Quèbec, Gaston Naessens had been disturbed to see a swarm of newsmen in his front yard. They had been alerted beforehand – possibly illegally – by officers of the Suretè, Quèbec’s provincial police force, who promptly arrived to fulfill their mission.

As television cameras whirred and cameras flashed, Naessens was hustled into a police car and driven to a Sherbrooke jail, where, pending a preliminary court hearing, he was held for twenty-four hours in a tiny cell under conditions he would later describe as the “filthiest imaginable.” Provided only with a cot begrimed with human excrement, the always elegantly dressed scientist told how his clothes were so foul smelling after his release on ten thousand dollars’ bail that, when he returned home, his wife, Françoise, burned them to ashes.

It was to that same house that I had first come in 1978, on the recommendation of Eva Reich, M.D., daughter of the controversial psychiatrist-turned-biophysicist Wilhelm Reich, M.D. A couple of years prior to my visit with Eva, I had researched the amazing case of Royal Raymond Rife, an autodidact and genius living in San Diego, California, who had developed a `Universal Microscope” in the 1920s with which he was able to see, at magnifications surpassing 30,000-fold, never-before-seen microorganisms in living blood and tissue.¹⁾

Eva Reich, who had heard Naessens give a fascinating lecture in Toronto, told me I had another “Rife” to investigate. So I drove up through Vermont to a region just north of the Canadian-American border that is known, in French, as “L’Estrie,” and, in English, as `The Eastern Townships.” And, there, in the unlikeliest of outbacks, Gaston Naessens and his Quèbec-born wife, Françoise (a hospital laboratory technician and, for more than twenty-five years, her husband’s only assistant), began opening my eyes to a world of research that bids fair to revolutionize the fields of microscopy, microbiology, immunology, clinical diagnosis, and medical treatment.

Let us have a brief look at Naessens’s discoveries in these usually separated fields to see, step by step, the research trail over which, for the last forty years – half of them in France, the other half in Canada – he has traveled to interconnect them. In the 1950s, while still in the land of his birth, Naessens, who had never heard of Rife, invented a microscope, one of a kind, and the first one since the Californian’s, capable of viewing living entities far smaller than can be seen in existing light microscopes.

In a letter of 6 September 1989, Rolf Wieland, senior microscopy expert for the world-known German optics firm Carl Zeiss, wrote from his company’s Toronto office: `What I have seen is a remarkable advancement in light microscopy. … It seems to be an avenue that should be pursued for the betterment of science.” And in another letter, dated 12 October 1989, Dr. Thomas G. Tornabene, director of the School for Applied Biology at the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech), who made a special trip to Naessens’s laboratory, where he inspected the microscope, wrote:

Naessens’s ability to directly view fresh biological samples was indeed impressive … Most exciting were the differences one could immediately observe between blood samples drawn from infected and non-infected patients, particularly AIDS patients. Naessens’s microscope and expertise should be immensely valuable to many researchers.

It would seem that this feat alone should be worthy of an international prize in science to a man who can easily be called a twentieth-century “Galileo of the microscope.”

With his exceptional instrument, Naessens next went on to discover in the blood of animals and humans – as well as in the saps of plants – a hitherto unknown, ultramicroscopic, subcellular, living and reproducing microscopic form, which he christened a somatid (tiny body). This new particle, he found, could be cultured, that is, grown, outside the bodies of its hosts (in vitro, “under glass,” as the technical term has it). And, strangely enough, this particle was seen by Naessens to develop in a pleomorphic (form-changing) cycle, the first three stages of which – somatid, spore, and double spore – are perfectly normal in healthy organisms, in fact crucial to their existence. (See Figure)

                          — The Somatid Cycle —

Even stranger, over the years the somatids were revealed to be virtually indestructible! They have resisted exposure to carbonization temperatures of 200º C and more. They have survived exposure to 50,000 rems of nuclear radiation, far more than enough to kill any living thing. They have been totally unaffected by any acid. Taken from centrifuge residues, they have been found impossible to cut with a diamond knife; so unbelievably impervious to any such attempts is their hardness.

The eerie implication is that the new minuscule life forms revealed by Naessens’s microscope are imperishable. At the death of their hosts, such as ourselves, they return to the earth, where they live on for thousands or millions, perhaps billions, of years!

This conclusion – mind-boggling on the face of it – is not one that sprang full-blown from Naessens’s mind alone. A few years ago, I came across a fascinating doctoral dissertation, published as a book, authored by a pharmacist living in France named Marie Nonclercq.

Several years in the writing, Nonclercq’s thesis delved into a long-lost chapter in the history of science that has all but been forgotten for more than a century. This chapter concerned a violent controversy between, on the one side, the illustrious Louis Pasteur, whose name, inscribed on the lintels of research institutes all over the world, is known to all schoolchildren, if only because of the pasteurized milk they drink.

On the other side was Pasteur’s nineteenth-century contemporary and adversary, Antoine Bèchamp, who first worked in Strasbourg as a professor of physics and toxicology at the Higher School of Pharmacy, later as professor of medical chemistry at the University of Montpellier, and, later still, as professor of biochemistry and dean of the faculty of medicine at the University of Lille, all in France.

While laboring on problems of fermentation, the break-down of complex molecules into organic compounds via a “ferment” – one need only think of the curdling of milk by bacteria – Bèchamp, at his microscope, far more primitive than Naessens’s own instrument, seemed to be able to descry a host of tiny bodies in his fermenting solutions. Even before Bèchamp’s time, other researchers had observed, but passed off as unexplainable, what they called “scintillating corpuscles” or “molecular granulations.” Bèchamp, who was able to ascribe strong enzymatic (catalytic change-causing) reactions to them, was led to coin a new word to describe them: microzymas (tiny ferments).

Among these ferments’ many peculiar characteristics was one showing that, whereas they did not exist in chemically pure calcium carbonate made in a laboratory under artificial conditions, they were abundantly present in natural calcium carbonate, commonly known as chalk. For this reason, the latter could, for instance, easily “invert” cane sugar solutions, while the former could not.

With the collaboration of his son, Joseph, and Alfred Estor, a Montpellier physician and surgeon, Bèchamp went on to study microzymas located in the bodies of animals and came to the startling conclusion that the tiny forms were far more basic to life than cells, long considered to be the basic building blocks of all living matter. Bèchamp thought them to be fundamental elements responsible for the activity of cells, tissues, organs, and indeed whole living organisms, from bacteria to whales, and larks to human beings. He even found them present in life-engendering eggs, where they were responsible for the eggs’ further development while themselves undergoing significant changes.

So, nearly a century before Gaston Naessens christened his somatid, his countryman, Bèchamp, had come across organisms that, as Naessens immediately recognized, seem to be “cousins,” however many times removed, of his own “tiny bodies.”

Most incredible to Bèchamp was the fact that, when an event serious enough to affect the whole of an organism occurred, the microzymas within it began working to disintegrate it totally, while at the same time continuing to survive. As proof of such survival, Bèchamp found these microzymas in soil, swamps, chimney soot, street dust, even in air and water. These basic and apparently eternal elements of which we and all our animal relatives are composed survive the remnants of living cells in our bodies that disappear at our death. So seemingly indestructible were the microzymas that Bèchamp could even find them in limestone dating to the Tertiary, the first part of the Cenozoic Era, a period going back sixty million years, during which mammals began to make their appearance on earth.

And it could be that they are older still, far older. Professor Edouard Boureau, a French paleontologist, writes in his book Terre: Mère de la Vie (Earth: Mother of Life), concerning problems of evolution, that he had studied thin sections of rock, over three billion years old, taken from the heart of the Sahara Desert. These sections contained tiny round coccoid forms, which Boureau placed at the base of the whole of the evolutionary chain, a chain that he considers might possibly have developed in one of three alternative ways. What these tiny coccoid forms could possibly be, Boureau does not actually know, but, from long study, he is sure about the fact they were around that long ago.

When I brought the book to Naessens’s attention, he told me, ingenuously and forthrightly: “I’d sure like to have a few samples of moon rocks to section and examine at my microscope. Who knows, we might find somatid forms in them, the same traces of primitive life that exist on earth!”

Over years of careful microscopic observation and laboratory experimentation, Naessens went on to discover that if and when the immune system of an animal or human being becomes weakened or destabilized, the normal three-stage cycle of the somatid goes through thirteen more successive growth stages to make up a total of sixteen separate forms, each evolving into the next. (See diagram of the somatid cycle).

All of these forms have been revealed clearly and in detail by motion pictures, and by stop-frame still photography, at Naessens’s microscope. Naessens attributes this weakening, as did Bèchamp, to trauma, brought on by a host of reasons, ranging from exposure to various forms of radiation or chemical pollution to accidents, shocks, depressed psychological states, and many more.

By studying the somatid cycle as revealed in the blood of human beings suffering from various degenerative diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, lupus, cancer, and, most recently, AIDS, Naessens has been able to associate the development of the forms in the sixteen-stage pathological cycle with all of these diseases. A videocassette showing these new microbiological phenomena is available. Among other things, it shows that when blood is washed to remove all somatids external to the bloods red ceils, then heated, somatids latently present in a liquid state within the red blood cells themselves take concrete form and go on to develop into the sixteen-stage cycle. “This,” says Naessens, “is what happens when there is immune system disequilibrium.” It is not yet known exactly how or why or from what the somatids take shape. Of the some 140 proteins in red blood cells, many may play a role in the process. The appearance of somatids inside red blood cells is thus an enigma as puzzling as the origin of life itself. I once asked Naessens, “If there were no somatids, would there be no life!” “That’s what I believe,” he replied.

Even more importantly, Naessens has been able to predict the eventual onset of such diseases long before any clinical signs of them have put in an appearance. In other words, he can “prediagnose” them. And he has come to demonstrate that such afflictions have a common functional principle, or basis, and therefore must not be considered as separate, unrelated phenomena as they have for so long been considered in orthodox medical circles.

Having established the somatid cycle in all its fullness, Naessens was able, in a parallel series of brilliant research steps, to develop a treatment for strengthening the immune system. The product he developed is derived from camphor, a natural substance produced by an East Asian tree of the same name. Unlike many medicinals, it is injected into the body, not intramuscularly or intravenously, but intralymphatically – into the lymph system, via a lymph node, or ganglion, in the groin.

In fact, one of the main reasons the medical fraternity holds the whole of Naessens’s approach to be bogus is its assertion that intralymphatic injection is impossible! Yet the fact remains that such injection is not only possible, but simple, for most people to accomplish, once they are properly instructed in how to find the node. While most doctors are never taught this technique in medical school, it is so easy that laypeople have been taught to inject, and even to self-inject, the camphor-derived product within a few hours.

The camphor-derived product is named “714-X” – the 7 and the 14 refer to the seventh letter “G” and the fourteenth letter “N” of the alphabet, the first letters of the inventor’s first and last names, and the X refers to the twenty-fourth letter of the alphabet, which denotes the year of Naessens’s birth, 1924. When skillfully injected, 714-X has, in over seventy-five percent of cases, restabilized, strengthened, or otherwise enhanced the powers of the immune system, which then goes about its normal business of ridding the body of disease.

Let us for a moment return to the work and revelations of Antoine Bèchamp. As already noted, with the fairly primitive microscopic technology available in Bèchamp’s day, it was almost incredible that he was seemingly able to make microbiological discoveries closely paralleling, if not completely matching, those of Naessens nearly a hundred years later. We have already alluded to the fact that the microzymas in traumatized animals did not remain passive, as before, but, on the contrary, became highly active and began to destroy the bodies of their hosts, converting themselves to bacteria and other microbes in order to carry out that function.

While the terminology is not exactly one that Gaston Naessens would use today, the principles of trauma and of destruction of the body are shared in common by the two researchers. Had Bèchamp had access to Naessens’s microscope, he, too, might have established the somatid cycle in all the detail worked out by Naessens.

So what happened to Bèchamp and his twentieth-century discoveries made in the middle of the nineteenth century? The sad fact is that, because he was modest and retiring – just like Gaston Naessens- his work was overshadowed by that of his rival. All of Pasteur’s biographies make clear that he was, above all, a master of the art of self-promotion. But, odd as it seems, the same biographies do not reveal any hint of his battle with Bèchamp, many of whose findings Pasteur, in fact, plagiarized.

Even more significant is that while Bèchamp, as we have seen, championed the idea that the cause of disease lay within the body, Pasteur, by enouncing his famous “germ theory,” held that the cause came from without. In those days, little was known about the functioning of the immune system, but what else can explain, for instance, why some people survived the Black Plague of the Middle Ages, while countless others died like flies? And one may add that Royal Raymond Rife’s microscope, like that of Naessens, allowed him to state unequivocally that “germs arc not the cause but the result of disease!” Naessens independently adopted this view as a result of his biological detective work. The opposite view, which won the day in Pasteur’s time, has dominated medical philosophy for over a century, and what amounted to the creation of a whole new worldview in the life sciences is still regarded as heretical!

Yet the plain fact is that, based on Naessens’s medical philosophy as foreshadowed by Bèchamp and Rife, up to the present time, Naessens’s treatment has arrested and reversed the progress of disease in over one thousand cases of cancer (many of them considered terminal), as well as in several dozen cases of AIDS, a disease for which the world medical community sadly states that it has as yet no solution what-so-ever. Suffering patients of each sex, and of ages ranging from the teens to beyond the seventies, have been returned to an optimal feeling of well-being and health.

A layperson having no idea of the scope of Naessens’s discoveries, or their full meaning and basic implications, might best be introduced to them through Naessens’s explanation to a visiting journalist. “You see,” began Naessens, “I’ve been able to establish a life cycle of forms in the blood that add up to no less than a brand new understanding for the very basis of life. What we’re talking about is an entirely new biology, one out of which has fortunately sprung practical applications of benefit to sick people, even before all of its many theoretical aspects have been sorted out.” At this point, Naessens threw in a statement that would startle any biologist, particularly a geneticist: “The somatids, one can say, are precursors of DNA. Which means that they some-how supply a `missing link’ to an understanding of that remarkable molecule that up to now has been considered as an all but irreducible building block in the life process.” ²⁾ 

If somatids were a “missing link” between the living and the nonliving, then what, I wondered aloud in one of my meetings with Françoise Naessens, would be the difference between them and viruses, a long debate about the animate or inanimate nature of which has been going on for years?

There was something, was there not, about the somatid that related to its non-reliance and non-dependence upon any surrounding milieu needed by the virus, if it were to thrive.

“Yes,” agreed Françoise, “to continue its existence, the virus needs a supportive milieu, say, an artificially created test-tube culture, or something natural, like an egg. If the virus needs this kind of support for growth, either in vivo or in vitro, a `helping hand,’ as it were, the somatid is able to live autonomously, either in a `living body,’ or `glass-enclosed.’ This has something to do with the fact that, while the virus is a particle of DNA, a piece of it, the somatid is, as we’ve already said, a ‘precursor’ of DNA, something that leads to its creation.”

To try to get to the bottom of this seemingly revolutionary pronouncement, I later asked Françoise to set down on paper some further exposition of it. She wrote:

We have come to the conclusion that the somatid is no less than what could be termed a concretization of energy. One could say that this particle, one that is “initially differentiated,” or materialized in the life process, possesses genetic properties transmissible to living organisms, animal or vegetal. Underlying that conclusion is our finding that, in the absence of the normal three-stage cycle, no cellular division can occur! Why not? Because it is the normal cycle that produces a special growth hormone that permits such division. We believe that hormone to be closely related, if not identical, to the one discovered years ago by the French Nobel Laureate Alexis Carrel, who called it a trephone.

The best experimental proof backing up this astounding disclosure, Françoise went on, begins with a cube of fresh meat no different from those impaled on shish kebab skewers. After being injected with somatids taken from an in vitro culture, the meat cube is placed in a sealed vessel in which a vacuum is created. With the cube now protected from any contamination from the ambient atmosphere, and anything that atmosphere might contain that could act to putrefy the meat, the vessel is subsequently exposed during the day to natural light by setting it, for instance, next to a window.

Harboring the living, indestructible somatids as it does, the meat cube in the vessel will, thenceforth, not rot, as it surely would have rotted had it not received the injection. Retaining its healthy-looking color, it not only remains as fresh as when inserted into the vessel, but progressively increases in size, that is, it continues to grow, just as if it were part of a living organism.

Could a meat cube, animated by somatids, if somehow also electrically stimulated, keep on growing to revive the steer or hog from which it had been cut out? The thought flashed inanely through my mind. Maybe there was something electrical about the somatid? Before I could ask that question of her, Françoise seemed to have already anticipated it.

“The `tiny bodies’ discovered by Naessens,” she went on, “are fundamentally electrical in nature. In a liquid milieu, such as blood plasma, one can observe their electrical charge and its effects. For the nuclei of these particles are positively charged, while the membranes, coating their exteriors, are negatively charged. Thus, when they come near one another, they are automatically mutually repulsed just as if they were the negative poles of two bar magnets that resist any manual attempt to hold them together.”

“Well,” I asked, “isn’t that the same as for cells, whose nuclei and membranes are, respectively, considered to have plus, and minus, electrical charges?”

“Certainly,” she replied, “with the difference that, in the case of the somatids, the energetic release is very much larger. Somatids are actually tiny living condensers of energy, the smallest ever found.”

I was thunderstruck. What, I mused, would the great Hungarian scientist Albert Szent-Györgyi, winner of the Nobel Prize for his discovery of ascorbic acid (vitamin C) and many other awards, have had to say had he, before his recent death, been aware of Naessens’s discoveries? For it was Szent-Györgyi who, abandoning early attempts to get at the “secret of life” at the level of the molecule, had predicted, prior to World War II, when still living and working in Hungary, that such a secret would eventually be discovered at the level of the electron, or other electrically related atomic particles!³⁾

Probing further into the world of the somatid and its link to life’s basis and hereditary characteristics, I asked Françoise if Naessens had done any experiments to show how somatids might produce genetic effects on living organisms.

“I’ll tell you, now, about one experiment we have repeated many times,” she answered, “whose results are hard for any orthodox biologist to swallow. Before describing it, let me add that it is our belief-as it was also Antoine Bèchamp’s – that each of our bodily organs possesses somatids of varying, as yet indescribable, natures that are specific to it alone. But the whole ensemble, the `family’ of these varying forms, collectively circulates, either in the circulatory or the lymph system. On the basis of this experiment, we hold that, as a group, they contain the hereditary characteristics of each and every individual being.”

As described by Françoise, the experiment begins by extracting somatids from the blood of a rabbit with white fur. A solution containing them is then injected, at a dose of one cubic centimeter per day, into the bloodstream of a rabbit with black fur, for a period of two weeks running. Within approximately one month, the fur of the black rabbit begins to turn a grayish color, half of the hairs of which it is composed having turned white. In a reverse process, the fur of a white rabbit, injected with somatids from a black one, also begins to turn gray.

Astonishing as this result, with its “genetic engineering” implications, might be, the effect of such “somatid transfer” from one organism to another also, said Françoise, produces another result offering great insight into the role played by the somatid in the immunological system. “When a patch of skin,” she continued, “is cut from the white rabbit and grafted onto the empty space left after cutting a patch of similar size from the black rabbit, the graft shows none of the signs of rejection that normally take place in the absence of somatid transfer.” What this might bode for the whole technique of organ transplant, attempts at which have been bedeviled by the “rejection syndrome,” we shall let readers – especially medically trained readers – ponder.

CHAPTER 2

“Is it not living in a continual mistake to look upon diseases, as we do now, as separate entities, which must exist, like cats und dogs, instead of looking at them as conditions, like a dirty and a clean condition, and just as much under our control; or rather as the reactions of a kindly nature, against the conditions in which we have placed ourselves?”

Florence Nightingale, 1860 (seventeen years before Pasteur announced his germ theory), cited in Pasteur: The Germ Theory Exploded by R. B. Pearson

Even a single discovery as striking as those made by Naessens in the five interlinked areas detailed in the previous chapter could, by itself, justifiably be held remarkable. That Naessens was able to make all five discoveries, each in what can be termed its own discipline, might seem to be a feat taken from the annals of science fiction.

And that is exactly the point of view adopted by the medical authorities of the province of Quèbec. Worse still, those same authorities have branded Naessens an out-and-out charlatan, calling his camphor-derived 7 14-X product fraudulent and the whole of his theory about the origin of degenerative disease and the practice of its treatment, not to add the rest of his “New biology,” no more than “quackery.”

Spearheading the attack was Augustin Roy, a doctor of medicine, but one who – like Morris Fishbein, M.D., for many years “Tsar” of the American Medical Association -actually practiced medicine for only a brief period of his life.

How did a researcher such as Gaston Naessens, endowed with genius, come to land in so dire a situation? Let us briefly review some of the story of his life and work, about which, during repeated trips to Rock Forest from the United States, I came to learn more and more.

Gaston Naessens was born on 16 March 1924, in Roubaix, in northern France, near the provincial capital of Lille, the youngest child of a banker who died when his son was only eleven years old. In very early childhood, Gaston was already showing precocity as an inventor. At the age of five, he built a little moving automobile-type vehicle out of a “Mechano” set and powered it with a spring from an old alarm clock.

Continuing to exhibit unusual manual dexterity, a few years later Gaston constructed his own home-built motorcycle, then went on to fashion a mini-airplane large enough to carry him aloft. It never flew, for his mother, worried he would come to grief, secretly burned it on the eve of its destined takeoff.

After graduation from the Collège Universitaire de Marcen Baroeul, a leading prep school, Gaston began an intensive course in physics, chemistry, and biology at the University of Lille. When France was attacked and occupied by Nazi forces during World War II, young Gaston together with other fellow students was evacuated to southern France, where, in exile near Nice, he had the highly unusual opportunity to receive the equivalent of a full university education at the hands of professors also displaced from Lille.

By the war’s end, Gaston had been awarded a rare diploma from the Union Nationale Scientifique Française, the quasi-official institution under whose roof the displaced students pursued their intensive curriculum. Unfortunately, in an over-sight that has cost him dearly over the years, Naessens did not bother to seek an “equivalence” from the new republican government set up by General Charles de Gaulle. He thus, ever since, has been accused of never having received an academic diploma of any kind.

Inspired by his teachers, and of singular innovative bent, Gaston, eschewing further formal education – “bagage universitaire” as he calls it – set forth on his own to develop his microscope and begin his research into the nature of disease. In this determination, he was blessed by having what in French is called a jeunesse dorèe, a gilded childhood – “born with a silver spoon in his mouth,” as the English equivalent has it. His mother afforded him all that was needed to equip his own postwar laboratory at the parental home.

His disillusion in working in an ordinary laboratory for blood analysis spurred Gaston into deciding to go free-lance as a researcher. Even his mother was worried about Gaston’s unorthodox leanings. She clearly understood that her son was unhappy with all he had read and been taught. As he was to put it: “She told me what any mother would tell her son: `It’s not you who will make any earth-shaking discoveries, for there have been many, many researchers working along the same lines for decades. ‘But she never discouraged me, never prevented me from following my own course, and she helped me generously, financially speaking.”

Gaston Naessens knew that there was something in the blood that eluded definition. It had been described in the literature as crasse sanguine (dross in the blood], and Naessens had been able to descry it, if only in a blurry way, in the microscopic instruments up to then available to him. What was needed was a brand new microscope, one that could see “farther.” He thought he knew how to build one and, at twenty-one, he determined to set about doing so.

In the design of the instrument that would open a vista onto a new biological world, Naessens was able to enjoin the technical assistance of German artisans in the village of Wetzlar, in Germany, where the well-known German optical company Leitz had been located before the war. The artisans were particularly helpful in checking Naessens’s original ideas on the arrangement of lenses and mirrors. The electronic manipulation of the light source itself, however, was entirely of Gaston’s own private devising. When all aspects of the problem seemed to have been solved, Naessens was able to get the body of his new instrument constructed by Barbier-Bernard et Turenne, technical specialists and military contractors near Paris.

Readers may fairly ask why Naessens’s “Twenty-first-century” instrument, which has been called a “somatoscope” due to its ability to reveal the somatid, has never been patented and manufactured for wide use. To understand the difficulty, we should “fast forward” to 1964, the year Naessens arrived in Canada. Hardly having found his footing on Canadian soil, he received a handwritten letter, dated 3 May, from one of the province’s most distinguished physicists, Antoine Aumont, who worked in the Division for Industrial Hygiene of the Quèbec Ministry of Health.

Aumont, who had read about Naessens’s special microscope in the press, had taken the initiative of visiting Naessens in his small apartment in Duvernay, near Montreal, to see, and see through, the instrument with his own eyes. Aumont wrote:

Many thanks for having accorded me an interview that impressed me far more than I can possibly describe.

I have explained to you why my personal opinions must not be considered as official declarations. But, after thinking over all that you showed, and told me, during my recent visit, I have come to unequivocal conclusions on the physical value of the instrumentation you are using to pursue your research.

As I told you, if my knowledge of physics and mathematics can be of service to you, I would be very glad to put them at your disposition.

It can be deduced that Aumont’s enthusiasm for what he had seen caused a stir in the Quèbec Ministry of Health, for, on 17 July, Naessens received an official letter from that office stating that the minister was eager to have his microscope “officially examined” if its inventor would “furnish in writing details concerning this apparatus, including all its optical, and other, particularities, as well as its powers of magnification, so that experts to be named by the minister can evaluate its unique properties.”

In reply to this letter, Naessens’s lawyer sent a list of details as requested and stated: “You will, of course, understand that it is impossible for Monsieur Naessens to furnish you, in correspondence, the complete description of a highly novel microscope which is, moreover, unprotected by any patent.” Then, to explain why no patent had yet been granted, he added a key phrase: “since its mathematical constants have, up to the present, not been elucidated in spite of a great deal of tiresome work performed in that regard.” In other words, it seemed that Aumont and his colleagues had been unable to explain the superiority of the microscope in terms of all the known laws of optics and it still seems that, so far, no one else has been able to do so.

There have been interesting recent reports on new microscopes being developed that apparently rival the magnification powers of Naessens’s somatoscope. It would seem, however, that the 150 angstroms of resolution achieved by Naessens’s instrument has not yet been matched.

The Los Angeles based World Research Foundation’s flyer, presenting its autumn (1990) conference “New Directions for Medicine … Focusing on Solutions,” announces the development of an Ergonom – 400 microscope, used by a German Heilpraktiker, or healer, Bernhard Muschlien, who paid a visit to Naessens’s laboratory in 1985. While his microscope is apparently capable of achieving 25,000-fold magnification, its stated resolution is 100 nanometers (1000 angstroms), or several orders of magnitude less than the 150 angstroms developed with the somatoscope.*

*One nanometer is one-billionth of a meter; one angstrom is ten-billionths of a meter, or one-tenth of a nanometer.

In the July 1990 issue of Popular Science, an article, “Super Scopes,” refers to an extraordinary new technology in microscopy engineered at Cornell University under the direction of Professor Michael Isaacson, and also in Israel. The technology uses not lenses but apertures smaller than the wavelengths of visible light to achieve high magnification. Isaacson is quoted as saying: “Right now, we can get about 40 nanometers (400 angstroms) of resolution,” though he hopes to heighten that “power” to 100 angstroms “down the road.” The 150 angstroms capacity built into Naessens’s microscope over forty years ago still seems to lead the field.

Returning to the biography of Naessens, during the 1940s, the precocious young biologist began to develop novel anti-cancer products that had exciting new positive effects. The first was a confection he named “GN-24” for the initial letters of his first and last names, and for 1924, the year of his birth. Because official medicine had long considered cancerous cells to be basically “fermentative”, in nature, reproducing by a process that, while crucial to malting good wine from grape juice, produces no such salutary effect in the human body, Naessens’s new product incorporated an “antifermentative” property. The train of his thinking, biologically or bio-chemically speaking, will not be here elaborated lest this account become too much of a “scientific treatise.” What can be mentioned is that the new product, GN-24, sold in Swiss pharmacies, had excellent results when administered by doctors to patients with various forms of cancer.

As but one example of these results, Naessens cited to me the case of his own brother-in-law, on the executive staff of the famed Paris subway system, the Mètropolitain. In 1949, this relative, the husband of a now ex-wife’s sister, was suffering through the terminal phase of stomach cancer and had been forced into early retirement. After complete recuperation from his affliction, he returned to work. Only recently, Naessens, who had lost contact with him for years, was informed that he was alive and well.

Another 1949 case was that of Germaine Laruelle, who was stricken with breast cancer plus metastases to her liver. A ghastly lesion that had gouged out the whole of the left section of her chest had caused her to go into coma when her family beseeched Naessens to begin his treatment. After recovering her health, fifteen years later, she voluntarily came to testify on behalf of Naessens, who, as we shall presently see, had been put under investigation by the French Ordre des Mèdecins (Medical Association). She also allowed press photographers to take pictures of the scars on the left side of her breast-denuded chest. In 1969, twenty years after her initial treatment, she died of a heart attack.

Seeking a more imposing weapon against cancer, Naessens next turned in the direction of a serum. This he achieved by hyper-immunizing a large draft horse as a result of injecting the animal with cancer-cell cultures, thus forcing it to produce antibodies in almost industrial quantities. Blood withdrawn from the horse’s veins containing these antibodies, when purified, was capable of fighting the ravages of cancer. It proved to have therapeutic action far more extensive than that obtained by GN-24, and led to a restraint or reversal of the cancerous process, not only in cases of tumors but also with various forms of leukemia. Many patients clandestinely treated by their doctors with the new serum, called Anablast (Ana, “without,” and blast, “cancerous cells”), were returned to good health.

One patient, successfully so treated, was to play a key role in Naessens’s life. This was Suzanne Montjoint, then just past forty years of age, who, in 1960, developed a lump the size of a pigeon’s egg in her left breast, which, over the next year, grew to become as large as a grapefruit. After the breast itself was surgically removed, Montjoint underwent a fifty-four-day course of radiation that caused horrible third-degree bums all over her chest. Within six months, she began to experience severe pain in her lower back.

Chemical examination revealed that the original cancer had spread to her fifth lumbar vertebra. More radiation not only could not alleviate the now excruciating pain, but caused a blockage in the functioning of her kidneys and bladder. When doctors told her husband she had only a week or so to live, Suzanne said to him, “I still have strength left to kill myself … but, tomorrow, I may not have it anymore.”

Summoned by the husband, one of whose friends had told him about the biologist, Naessens began treating Madame Montjoint, who, by then, had lapsed into a semicoma. Within four days, all her pains disappeared and she had regained clarity of mind. By April 1962, after an examination of her blood at his microscope, Naessens declared that the somatid cycle in Suzanne Montjoint’s blood had returned to normal. As she later told press reporters, “My recovery was no less than a resurrection!”

When these successful treatments, plus many others, came to the attention of French medical authorities, Naessens was twice brought before the bar of justice, first for the “illegal practice of medicine,” next for the “illegal practice of pharmacy.” On both occasions, he was heavily fined, his laboratory sealed, and most of its equipment confiscated, though, happily, he was able to preserve his precious microscope.

With all the harassment he was undergoing, while at the same time saving the lives of patients whose doctors could afford them little, or no, hope for recovery, Gaston Naessens was almost ready to emigrate from his mother country and find a more congenial atmosphere in which to pursue his work, with the privacy and anonymity that he had always cherished and still longs for. An opportunity to do so came when he was invited by doctors in a community that, if it was not a foreign country, might, like Quèbec in North America, seem to be one. The locale in question was the Mediterranean Island of Corsica, whose inhabitants speak a dialect more akin to Italian than to French. With a long history of occupation by various invaders before it actually became part of the French Republic, its population has ever since been possessed of a revolutionary streak that, on occasion, fuels an urge toward secession from the “motherland.”

In Corsica, Naessens established a small research laboratory in the village of Prunette, on the southwest tip of the island. What happened next, in all its full fury, cannot be told here. Reported in two consecutive issues of the leading Parisian illustrated weekly Paris-Match, the story would require, for any adequate telling, two or more chapters in a much longer book.

Suffice it to say that, having developed a cure for various forms of degenerative disease, Naessens saw his ivory tower invaded by desperate patients from all over the world who had learned of his treatment when a Scots Freemason, after hearing about it during a Corsican meeting with international members of his order, leaked them to the press in Edinburgh. Within a week, hundreds of potential patients were flying into Ajaccio, the island’s capital, some of them from as far away as Czechoslovakia and Argentina.

The deluge immediately unleashed upon Naessens the wrath of the French medical authorities, who began a long investigation in the form of what is known in France as an Instruction – called in Quèbec an Enquête prèliminaire – a kind of “investigative trial” before a more formal one.

All the “ins and outs” of this long jurisprudential process, thousands of pages of transcripts about which still repose in official Parisian archives, must, however regretfully, be left out of this narrative. Its denouement was that Gaston Naessens, together with key components of his microscope preserved on his person, left his native land in 1964 to fly to Canada, a country whose medical authorities he believed to be far more open to new medical approaches and horizons than those in France. His abrupt departure from the land of his birth was facilitated by a high-ranking member of France’s top police organ, the Suretè Nationale, whose wife, Suzanne Montjoint, Naessens had successfully treated.

Hardly had Naessens set foot on Canadian soil than he was faced with difficulties, in fact a “scandal,” almost as, if not just as, serious as the one he had just left behind. During the French Instruction proceedings in 1964, one Renè Guynemer, a Canadian “war hero” of uncertain origin and profession, had accosted Naessens in his Paris domicile to beg him to come to Canada in order to treat his little three-year-old son, Renè Junior, who was dying of leukemia.

Though puzzled about a certain lack of “straightforwardness” in the supplicant, Naessens, ever willing to help anyone in distress, and with the approbation and assistance of the Canadian ambassador to France, immediately flew to Montrèal, where he hoped, as agreed by Guynemer père, to be able to treat fils in complete discretion. Upon his arrival at Montrèal’s Dorval Airport, however, Naessens was aghast to see a horde of representatives of both the printed and visual media, creating, in anticipation of his arrival, what amounted to a virtual mob scene.

The Quèbec “Medical College” had, at the time, agreed, for “humanitarian” reasons, to allow the treatment of the Guynemer child, in spite of the fact that Anablast had not been licensed for use in Canada. Various tests, lasting for several weeks, were made on the product at Montrèal’s well-known microbiological Institut Armand Frappier to confirm the presence of gamma globulin in it, the presence of which purportedly thorough French examinations had failed to detect.

Virtually at death’s door, the Guynemer child was said to have been given nine injections of Anablast. Naessens himself was never given official confirmation that the injections had actually been administered. Nor was he permitted to make any examination of the little patient’s blood at his microscope, or even to meet him face to face. After the little boy succumbed, the Quèbec press exploded with stories that, in their luridness, matched the ones that had been appearing all over France after the Corsican “debacle.”

Some of the mysteries of the “Guynemer connection” will likely never come to light. Only later did it become clear that the true name of the leukemic child’s father was actually Lamer, a man who had claimed that, in past years, he had been an officer in the Royal Canadian Air Force and a “secret agent” attached to the French “underground” during World War II. To the Naessenses, the question has always remained: If he was an “agent,” then for whom, or for what?

In the spring of 1965, Naessens journeyed to France for his trial. When he returned to Quèbec in the autumn of that year, he retired from the public scene to live incognito in Oka, a Montrèal suburb, with a newfound friend, Hubert Lamontagne, owner of a business selling up-to-date electronic devices, whom he had met while looking for electrical components for his microscope in 1964. As a person skilled in electronics, Naessens was able to be of great assistance to his host, who also operated a large “repair shop” throughout the winter and the following summer, when, on tour with a troop of comedians, he was put in charge of solving all the acoustical problems in the many provincial cabarets and theaters hosting the troop’s performances. Deprived, for several years, of any support to pursue his life goals, Naessens was constrained to utilize his skills as a “Mr. Fixit,” able to repair almost anything from automobile engines to rectifiers.

In 1971, Naessens had a stroke of luck, perhaps the most important of his career, when, through another friend, he was introduced to, and came under the protective wing of, an “angel” who saw in Naessens the kind of genius he had for a long time been waiting to back.

That “angel” was the late David Stewart, head of Montreal’s prestigious MacDonald-Stewart Foundation, which for many years had funded, as it still continues to fund, orthodox cancer research. Despondent about the recent death from cancer of a close friend, and in serious doubt that any of the cancer research he had so long supported would ever produce any solution, Stewart’s guiding precept and motto was “In the search for a remedy for cancer, we shall leave no stone unturned.” The philanthropist therefore decided personally to back Naessens’s research. But after setting up a laboratory for the biologist on the Ontario Street premises of the well-known MacDonald Tobacco Company, which Stewart’s father had inherited from its founder, tobacco magnate Sir William MacDonald, David Stewart came under such violent criticism by leaders of orthodox cancerology that he advised Naessens to move his research to a low-profile provincial retreat.

Having, by that time, established a “liaison” with his bride-to-be, Françoise Bonin, whose parents lived in Sherbrooke, Naessens was, by 1972, able to take over the elder Bonin’s summerhouse on the banks of the Magog River in Rock Forest, “winterize” it, and establish a well-equipped laboratory in its basement. And there, the Naessenses, who were married in 1976, have ever since been located. Of his wife, Naessens has said to me, “She was persuaded from the very start about the intrinsic value of my research and at once saw the truth of it. Just as then, so now, years later, she continues her loyal assistance to get this truth out. Some ask if it’s moral support. Yes, it could be called that. We have the same kind of attitudes about things. Both of us, for instance, believe that if something new produces good results, it’s got to be pursued to the bitter end. This is not ambition, but moral honesty. When one gets to know her, one realizes that she doesn’t just repeat the things I think and say, but is convinced about them because of what she has seen and experienced.”

Because legal restrictions applying to foundations and their grants prevented David Stewart from transmitting monies directly to Naessens, the foundation director arranged for them to be funneled via the Hôtel Dieu – a leading hospital affiliated with the Universitè de Montreal that specializes in orthodox cancer treatment and research. Accused by Augustin Roy as a “quack,” Naessens has consequently had his work modestly funded by checks made out by a hospital at the heart of one of Canada’s cancer establishment’s most prestigious fund-granting institutions. No more anomalous a situation exists anywhere in the worldwide multibillion-dollar cancer industry.

Given the importance of the foundation’s assistance, it is all the more curious that Augustin Roy had not made the slightest mention of the foundation’s loyal support of the biologist over the years. Instead, at a press conference held after Naessens’s arrest to present traditional medicine’s case against Naessens, Roy, perhaps unknowingly, demonstrated the “Catch-22” that any “alternative” medical, research, or “frontier” scientist faces. Roy stated that if Naessens were a “true” scientist he would have long since submitted his results to proper authorities for check, but when asked by journalists whether the Quèbec medical community had thoroughly investigated the biologist’s claims, Roy inscrutably replied, “That’s not our job.” In answer to another reporter’s query about the assertions of many cancer patients that the Naessens treatment had completely cured their affliction, Roy added, “I just can’t understand the naivety and imbecility of some people.”

To get a more complete idea of the full impact of Roy’s attitude with respect to a brand new treatment and patients benefiting from it, we here excerpt some of his additional statements made during an interview on McGill University’s Radio Station in the summer of 1989.

When, to open the interview, Roy was asked his opinion about what the interviewer termed a “remarkable new anticancer product, 714-X,” the medical administrator replied, “I have been aware of Monsieur Naessens for twenty-five years. In 1964, he arrived from France with a so-called cancer treatment, Anablast, the very same medicinal he’s now using under another name – 714-X.”

That anyone in a position as elevated as Roy’s could publicly propagate so obvious an error is surprising. For Anablast, which, as we have seen, is a serum, has nothing to do with 714-X, a biochemical product. Yet here was the head of the Quebec medical establishment falsely stating that 714-X, developed over thirteen years in Canada, was nothing but the older French product bearing a new name, a statement tirelessly, and erroneously, repeated by journalists in the press.

As for Naessens himself, Roy told his radio audience: “That man’s professional knowledge is equal to zero! You should know that he has, behind him, in France, an imposing, even `heavy,’ past involving serious judicial procedures and condemnations.” It seems truly amazing that a doctor who, over a quarter of a century, had never met Naessens, or once visited his laboratory, or taken the trouble to investigate why hundreds of cancer patients had survived because of his new treatment, could so peremptorily reduce the biologist’s knowledge to nil.

Was Roy really being impartial when he said, “I’ve got to be a bit careful because Naessens is currently under legal prosecution. … But the fact remains that he was in serious trouble with the French legal authorities. Let’s just say he’s a ‘slick talker,’ one who knows how to address an audience. But, I ask you, why is it that he’s been working in secret for so long?” In asking this question, Roy was obviously not in the least ashamed to be adding a second error to the one he had already propagated. For the truth was, and is, that Naessens, far from having worked “in secret,” has at all times – as I have repeatedly witnessed over the years – kept his laboratory open to “all comers” and has stood ready to discuss his research with any of them. “It’s so obvious,” Roy disparagingly continued, “that all this man’s affirmations and allegations just don’t have a leg to stand on. …”

“But,” ingenuously interrupted his young interviewer, “haven’t there been several people who have testified in writing, or on TV, that they’ve been cured by 714-X?”

Roy’s unhesitating answer was breathtakingly categoric: “No one’s personal testimony has any value whatsoever! All such testimonies are purely suggestive and anecdotal. Let’s show a little common sense, after all !  Common sense indicates that if Naessens had a real treatment for a malady such as cancer, it would have been criminal not to put it at the disposition of the whole world! I don’t understand what he’s up to, and I have even less understanding of those who go about publicizing his reputed treatment, which is pure quackery.” Given the hyperbole on Roy’s part, one could well wonder what hope there might be for any kind of new discovery in the health field ever to become authorized, or even known. For years, Naessens had been assiduously, but unsuccessfully, trying to “put his discovery at the world’s disposition.”

Unabashed by the weight of her interviewee’s authority, the interviewer was not loath to press in on Roy again: “There have, however, been certain doctors who have been most surprised at how terminal patients have been brought back to good physical shape with 714-X. Would that not make anyone eager to verify the facts with respect to those recovered patients?”

“Not at all!” Roy’s rejoinder was a virtual explosion. “It’s not my job, or that of the Medical Corporation, to check on pseudocures of that kind! So what, if two, three, four, or half a dozen doctors, in their isolation, have something good to say in support of it? No matter where they come from, their statements are worthless!”

To get a countervailing idea of what Naessens might have said in rebuttal in Roy’s presence, we shall next excerpt part of an interview with the biologist, by the same interviewer on the same radio station a few days later.

Interviewer:  “Gaston Naessens,” she began, “is your 714-X really effective?”

Naessens:  Absolutely! It builds up the immune system so that all the body’s natural defenses can regain the upper hand. I don’t make the claim in a void, because there are a lot of people around who were gravely ill with cancer who can now state they have gotten well due to my treatment.

Interviewer:  If your product really works, why hasn’t Dr. Roy been interested in doing an in-depth study of it? Does he know you at all?

Naessens:  Many people have asked me both those questions. If you ask him the latter question, he will pull out a thick file on me and hell tap it, and say, “Sure, I’ve known him since 1964.” But the fact is he has never met me in person, never visited my lab, and never investigated my work!

So, he is absolutely incapable of making any judgment whatsoever on whether that work has a solid foundation, or not!

In his lengthy reply, uninterrupted by the fascinated interviewer, Naessens, after a brief pause, began to reveal the essence of the difficult situation in which he had been placed over the years:

Naessens:  Let’s get to the heart of this matter! The medical community, on the one hand, and I, on the other, speak completely different languages. That anomaly connects to the important fact that all approved anticancer therapies are focused only on cancer tumors and cancerous cells. The reigning philosophy, medically speaking, is that a cytolitic (cell-killing) method must be used to destroy all cancer cells in a body stricken with that disease.

But I, on the contrary, have developed a therapy based on what has been called the body’s whole terrain! To understand that, you have to realize that, every day, our bodies produce cancerous cells in no great amount. It’s our healthy immune system that gets rid of them. My 714-X allows a weakened, or hampered, immune system to come back to full strength, so that it can do its proper job!

If medical “experts” pronounce my product worthless, it might even be admitted that, in terms of their own scientific philosophy, they are making some sense. This is largely because, when they examine my product for any cytotoxic effect it might have, they find none!

Interviewer:  Is the Medical Corporation interested in sitting down and talking with you, or running tests to verify your product?

Naessens:  No! Because they firmly believe that any success it might have is due to some kind of “psychological” effect, and they say that the product itself contains nothing that could possibly be of benefit.

Interviewer:  Where did they get that idea?

Naessens:  It seems that, with officialdom, it’s always a case of misinformation, or of bad faith. If this whole affair were limited to patients I’ve successfully treated, patients who might have remained silent, I would still have small hope that my research will one day be recognized. But, now, a crucial turning point has been reached. I’m back in the international limelight. My arrest, incarceration, and indictment are important if only because, immediately following them, people “in the know” have begun to take action on my behalf. That being so, the medical community’s negative reaction is no longer the only, or the dominant, one! It may be too bad that all this has to be thrashed out not in a scientific forum, but in a court of law. But that’s the way it is. In my upcoming trial, many of my patients’ cases will be examined, one by one, and exposed in full detail, in the courtroom! So the medical “authorities” will no longer be the sole judges.

After continuing on with this theme for several minutes longer, Naessens came to a firm conclusion: “I wouldn’t want you to think that I’m even trying to boast when I say that my work represents a brand new horizon in biology! I have found a successful way of adjusting a delicate biological mechanism. I have no pretensions beyond that! If I can be of service to anyone, my laboratory is always open.”    ( More about 714-X )

CHAPTER 3

“Whatever the judgment of the courts in the case of biologist Gaston Naessens, the affair cannot but raise fundamental issues about health care that ultimately society itself must resolve. Is it reasonable that the medical establishment continues to exercise a monopoly in the field of health care?”

Ed Bantey, columnist,
The Montréal Gazette, 2 July 1989

Some of the deeper, and broader, issues behind the trial, as brought out by the two McGill University radio interviews, were concisely summed up, and bolstered, on 2 July 1989, when The Gazette, Montréal’s leading English-language newspaper, ran one of the many Beau Dimanche (Beautiful Sunday) columns written by Ed Bantey, a veteran commentator on important social issues. Far from pulling any punches, the article’s title, both a challenge and an accusation, was as direct as a prize fighter’s roundhouse right to the jaw: “It’s Time to Look at the Medical Establishment’s Monopoly.”

Bantey asked many pertinent and probing questions, among them: “Should we give orthodox medicine carte blanche to block recourse to alternative therapies that offer even limited promise?” “Given its inflexibly adamant stand against women’s pleas to allow midwives, rather than male obstetricians, to birth their babies,” the Gazette columnist continued, “it is obvious that vested interests, who view their privileges as threatened, are mainly concerned to resist any change in the status quo.”

All of Bantey’s declarative and interrogative statements were brought into sharp focus when, on 27 June, the demonstrators, some of the “naive imbeciles” to whom Roy had referred and their friends and relatives, trooped downhill from the courthouse to the Wellington Hôtel, where a newly formed “Committee for the Defense of Gaston Naessens” hosted its first press conference.

The event opened with committee president Ralph (Raoul) Ireland outlining what would be presented. A native Québecer, fluent in French and English, Ireland, no braggart, did not make known his own interesting background. Great grandson of James Redmond, founder of the Irish Republican Army (IRA); son of a distinguished Canadian engineer; one of the “unofficial,” but actual, founders of the world-known Greenpeace movement that fights for causes as disparate as the rights of rivers to be free of pollution and the right of dolphins and whales to be free of massacre by humans; speaker of the Cant (Irish Gypsy) language—Ralph Ireland, in early 1989, raised money and opened Canada’s only quartz crystal mine in Bonsecours, a spot on the road a little over thirty kilometers northwest of Sherbrooke.

Explaining to the press that some dozen former cancer patients, treated by Naessens after their doctors had given them little or no hope of recovery, would tell their stories, Ireland added, “Everything they say can be meticulously documented by their medical records.”

For two hours, the patients, young and old, offered their stories to the assembled representatives of the press, radio, and television. Among the most poignant was that of sixty-four-year-old Roland Caty, who, while in charge of the construction of a new university in the tiny African country of Rwanda, was diagnosed as having an adenosarcoma—a particularly lethal tumor that develops rapidly— in his prostate. After his doctors advised him to have all of his sexual organs ablated, Caty, knowing that so horrible an operation would be unlikely to preserve what was left of his body, refused the dictum. His surgeon, bluntly and coldly, told him he was “crazy” and that, without such an operation, he would be dead within three months.

“Well, I knew damn well that, if I submitted to that butchery,” Caty told the press conference, “I wouldn’t last much longer than three months! I was fortunate to know Gaston Naessens, learn of his 714-X treatment, and become one of the first, if not the first, to take it. Because I had to go back to my job in Africa, I also learned how to make the injections myself, into the lymph node in my groin. And here I am testifying to you eleven years after I got well!”

Caty’s testimony was followed by that of Belgian-born JeanHubert Eggerman, who had had an operation for intestinal cancer only to find the affliction had metastasized into his liver. “I began the Naessens treatments on February 14th of this year [1989],” he declared, “and now I feel fine. Before that, I was exposed to chemotherapy, even though the doctors who prescribed it gave me no hope of cure whatsoever. The ‘chemo’ made me sick as a dog! I could go into all the gory details of it, but I won’t. I told my wife, ‘I just can’t stand it anymore! Let things take their course!’ I decided to quit . . . to give up . . . to die! Then I was introduced to Naessens.” Eggerman and other witnesses described how they had been harassed by undercover investigative agents employed by the Medical Corporation, who had invaded their privacy either by incessantly telephoning to try to pry information out of them, or actually invading their homes, without search warrants, to rifle through desk drawers and closets in search of Naessens’s vials of 714-X and other evidence. “How come this kind of harassment is permitted and condoned?” Eggerman was almost shouting. “How the hell did these ‘goons’ get my name or my confidential medical file? We’re not living in Stalinist Russia or Nazi Germany here! We’re in Canada! When the hell is all this going to stop? When am I and the rest of us going to win the right to be treated as we see fit?” All of which, like Ed Bantey’s article, pretty much got to the very  heart of the true nature of what the “Naessens Affair,” as it had come to be called, was all about.

Another particularly moving affidavit was that of Raoul Poissant, whose tongue and larynx had been surgically excised. Left to die by his doctors, he was introduced by friends to Naessens and recovered after 714-X treatment. Poissant was forced to write his testimony onto a legal pad while another younger recovered cancer patient read it aloud word for word as the ink was pouring from his pen.

Next on the microphone was Bernard Baril, a thirty-three-yearold Québec-born restaurant and catering consultant, who, when working in Paris, had been tested positive for HIV (Human Immunodeficiency Virus), the prime vector in AIDS. Almost breaking down, Baril described how, after cancerous growths began to fill his mouth and attack his palate, doctors at the Montréal General Hospital had told him he was so far gone as to not be worth treating.

Almost unable to take nourishment, Baril lay in his bed, his weight declining from 155 to 115 pounds, until, in April 1988, a friend introduced him to Naessens. Within three months, Baril began witnessing the miraculous disappearance of his lesions. Choking back a sob, he told the press conference, “Look at me! I now weigh 170 pounds! I feel entirely fit! Don’t I look in the pink of health?”

It was only in the summer of 1990 that the full facts taken from the dossier of Bernard Baril were finally made available. They reveal that this AIDS-afflicted patient had, on 3 March 1988, been diagnosed as having a cancerous growth, Karposi’s sarcoma, on his palate, together with cancerous invasions of his lymphatic system. A biopsy consisting of a piece of tissue measuring 1 x 1 x 0.2 cm. was submitted in toto, meaning that the whole of a cancerous growth was cut out. Another piece of tissue measuring 0.5 x 0.2 x 0.3 cm. was also submitted in toto. The tumor received a IV-D, or “extremely advanced,” classification.

Baril refused all conventional treatment. When he finally began 714-X treatment, his weight had dropped from a normal 165 pounds to 115 pounds! This treatment began on 3 June 1988. Three days later, the tumor on the palate had reappeared and, by 22 June,
measured 0.8 x 0.2 x 0.3 cm. Baril was a little discouraged.

But, by 11 July, he began to become encouraged when the tumor, beginning to decrease in size, measured 0.6 x 0.2 x 0.3 cm. During the next six months, it completely disappeared. On 29 March 1990, a revaluation by Dr. Tyler, the same physician who had first seen Baril, indicated that “there was no tumor present but only a discolored zone measuring 1.0 x 0.5 cm. A blood test revealed that Baril’s blood parameters were normal.” In the summer of 1990, Baril was, to quote him, “at the top of his form,” and had no symptoms of cancer whatsoever.

After the press conference disbanded at the Wellington, a crowd, now swelled to more than two hundred people, gathered in the same Hôtel’s “Flamingo Room,” a nightclub with a raised dancing floor that had suddenly become the site of a daytime reception and rally.

Defense Committee President Ireland rose again to consolidate the fighting spirit of the demonstrators. “We count on every one of you to help in presenting the truth about an avatar of medicine, true medicine,” his voice boomed out in Québec-accented French. “It’s doers, not thinkers, who really accomplish something in life, and get things to change. Naessens is one of those doers! So what about the rest of us? As for me, I am not afraid to speak out against the injustice of medical monopoly. We’re supposed to be living in a free country and it’s to be hoped that our beloved Canada will remain free from every point of view, that no gates into freedom’s city, medical or otherwise, will ever be locked in our nation!”

Because the 27 June court hearing had merely postponed any judicial opinion as to the furtherance of Naessens’s trial date until 14 July, when that date arrived a second demonstration and press conference were held in Sherbrooke.

This time, as reported by veteran court reporter Jacques Lemoine, in a Sherbrooke Tribune front-page story, it appeared that Naessens was garnering impressive judicial, medical, and international support in his battle against the Québec Medical Corporation.

In front of a throng of more than two hundred people, Naessens’s attorney, Conrad Chapdelaine, a diminutive man of no more than five feet six inches in height, but with a visage that calmly suggested a personage of great inner stature, took the microphone to announce that, during the brief court session, the presiding judge had ruled that previous strictures imposed on Naessens would be lifted, to allow him to regain the same freedom of action he had enjoyed before charges had been brought against him. “This represents a real victory,” Chapdelaine cheered his audience of Naessens’s supporters, but he also cautioned that the really important, and crucial, battle would be trial before a jury to take place some time in late October or early November.

Seated under klieg lights at the press conference was a panel of notables who, one by one, asserted that Naessens, far from being a know-nothing or a quack, was a first-rank, if hardly known, pioneer of brand new medical research.

Among them was Florianne Piers, M.D., a Belgian, who said she had taken the time to come over to the rally because she had, over a four-month period, begun to treat seven cancer patients with Naessens’s 714-X. “The product prolonged the lives, and eased the deaths, of two terminally afflicted patients,” announced Piers, “and has allowed the other five, who came to me with seriously advanced cancerous states, to see every one of their symptoms disappear and to take up their lives as if they had never incurred the disease.” Asked whether Belgian medical authorities might not impose sanctions against her for using an “unapproved” medicinal, such as  revoking her hospital privileges, Piers boldly answered that, if that turned out to be the case, she would treat her patients at home.

Next to take the microphone on Naessens’s behalf was a softspoken general practitioner, Raymond Keith Brown, M.D., from New York City, where, for some time, he had worked on problems of cancer research at the world-famous Sloan-Kettering Institute. Brown was author of a book entitled AIDS, Cancer and the Medical Establishment (New York: Robert Speller, 1986), the first publication to print micrographs of what Naessens had discovered.

In a soft Virginian drawl, Brown declared that he was truly convinced that Naessens, whose work he had been following since 1975, was a genius. He specifically referred to the case of one of his own patients, whom he had most successfully treated with 714-X for a cancer of the pancreas that had proved unamenable to any other form of treatment. Though it should not be thought of as a “panacea,” Brown added, 714-X certainly deserved to take its place in the armory of weapons available to official medicine.

As trenchant as were Brown’s supportive words, it was left to Walter Clifford, who, before founding his own research firm in Colorado Springs, Colorado, had worked for many years as a bacteriological expert for the U.S. Army, to tell the central, hidden, and utter truth about what was really transpiring behind the scenes in Naessens’s struggle with the “Medical College.” Commenting on the general unwillingness of the mainstream medical industry to support alternative research, Clifford courageously averred: “Sad as it is, my scientific colleagues and I have found to our bitter dismay that, if you don’t ‘toe the company line,’ medical pundits don’t even want to know about your discoveries, whatever they might be!” As the patients’ press conference was going on, Naessens was also gaining support of a different kind. Among many letters in Naessens’s defense that were pouring in to the Route de l’Église office of Gil Rémillard, Québec’s minister of justice, was one signed by Renaud Vignal, who, before his 1987 appointment as French ambassador to the Seychelles, had served for three years as his country’s consul general in Québec. Vignal wrote that he had been profoundly shocked to learn that “a man whom my wife, Anne, and I hold in highest esteem,” had been detained and was under criminal investigation.

Vignal explained to Remillard that, in 1984, his wife had undergone an examination to determine why she had not been able to have a baby. To her horror, the exam revealed that she was afflicted with a form of leukemia so lethal that doctors in three countries (Canada, France, and the United States) had given her not more than three to five years to live. Other than “maintenance” chemotherapy, they could recommend no treatment to save her life except bone-marrow grafts for which there was no compatible donor.

Vignal wrote that, in their despair, he and his wife had the luck to meet Naessens. Anne underwent treatment with 714-X by  intralymphatic injection. As to the result, the ambassador stated in his letter:

My wife is alive five years after her initial diagnosis and, in spite of the fact that a host of physicians told her she never could have a child—due to protracted and uninterrupted chemotherapy—we have just had a magnificent little healthy son in a birth that, lying outside any “medical” explanation not to be considered a “miracle,” we can only attribute to the gentle administrations of our dear friend, Gaston Naessens.

The Vignalses’ son is named Gaspard, the first three letters of his name intentionally chosen to match the first three letters of Gaston’s.

Supporting Vignal’s letter was another from Gaston Mialaret, professor of education at the Université de Caen, in Normandy, who had also taught at the Université du Québec in Trois-Rivières, served as director for international education at UNESCO in Geneva, Switzerland, and been awarded honorary doctorates by the universities of Sherbrooke (Québec), Ghent (Belgium), and Lisbon (Portugal).

“I have known Gaston Naessens for over twenty years,” wrote Mialaret to Rémillard.

There comes a time when friendship must be publicly expressed, especially when it’s a case of a man’s honor. I know that his research findings are upsetting certain ideas normally accepted in the world of medicine and science. Whether he is right or not, scientifically speaking, he is an unquestionably honest man whose only aim is to help and cure the ills of humanity.

My conscience cannot accept, without revulsion, that he be treated as a swindler and a charlatan: an affirmation that dishonors those who make it and reveals their hatred or lack of objectivity. I have confidence in your country’s justice and am therefore convinced that not alone the letter, but the spirit, of its laws will take into account the many positive aspects of Naessens’s work.

Finally, Gaston Naessens himself addressed the assembly. His gray jacket bedecked with a spray of white carnations, he spoke with quiet confidence and humility, which all who have interacted with him have come, like Ambassador Vignal, to recognize as two of his chief character traits. “As I go over in my mind the events of the last forty years,” he told his loyal supporters, “I believe I can, without boast-fulness, and looking you all straight in the eye, say: mission accomplished.” Even with the difficult legal battles still to come, Naessens expressed no regrets: ‘Tor if there were in this room, or anywhere, a single patient whose life was extended for one, two, five, or ten years due to my treatment,” he concluded, “I  would be prepared to go on the long and difficult trek I have made all over again.”