Page 135It’s true that Morris Fishbein, editor of the Journal of the AMA tried to buy into
Rife’s company Beam Ray and became very maliciously vindictive when he was
not allowed to. As a result of his actions doctors using the device were “visited”
by the AMA and told to send it back, or face loss of their license (incidentally,
Fishbein and the AMA used the same tactics against Harry Hoxsey, who
developed a successful herbal cancer cure).
But Rife’s own colleagues probably did him nearly as much damage by
producing machines which did not stick to the proper specifications and failed
to work consistently. It was even speculated that one of his key engineers was
sabotaging the program because he desired to grab the action for himself.
Regardless of all this, I think the final demise of the machine was much simpler
to explain and far less dramatic.
Rife came to the market with his machine in the 1930s. It cost $7,000 which in
those days was a very considerable investment, even for an MD. No matter, he
sold a number of them.
But also in the 1930s, by a twist of fate, sulfonamide antibiotics swept over
the horizon, followed rapidly by penicillin, and this new class of drugs soon
overran the therapeutic picture at a fast gallop. When it was possible to knock
out virtually any pathogen with a drug costing just a few dollars, quickly, safely
and simply (according to perceptions of the day), who would want to invest in
a costly machine that was inconveniently large, expensive to run and difficult to
operate?
It was the same bad luck with his advanced microscopes. They were the very
best of the day, precise and advanced, but very costly.
Unfortunately for Rife, the electron microscope was just around the corner
(1931) and optical microscopes, no matter how powerful, were doomed to be
eclipsed. Of course electron microscopes can only ever look at dead tissue; but
that’s the fashion in so-called science. Nobody, it seems, wants to do anything so
corny as look at real living organisms!
There is another factor little talked about, which is that the authentic Rife
machines were super-regenerative RF transmitters. Without going into the
technical details, that meant they ultimately fell foul of Federal Communications
Commission regulations.