Reich had the wit and distance from himself to note that anyone who observed him
playing with food would only have dismissed him as “crazy.” But at the same time he makes
an argument for exactly that kind of childlike “playing” at the beginning of a research
endeavor, comparing it with the great “discoveries” of a young child^8.
When Reich put his mixture under the microscope, he thought he would be able to
distinguish the different foods that comprised the brew. However, the preparation contained
nothing but vesicles, of different sizes but the same basic type. More significantly, when he
observed the vesicles using higher magnifications (over 2000x), he noted a motility within
them, an innerexpansion and contraction. He believed that these vesicles from foodstuffs
were functionally identical with the vesicles observed in the grass infusions. And he called
them both bions.
Reich now made infusions of many different types of substances, organic and inor-
ganic. Sometimes he would simply allow the substances to disintegrate in water, sometimes
he would heat them. Sometimes the bionous development was slower or faster; but disinte-
gration was never absent, no matter what the original material.
The vesicular heaps of bions showed other lifelike characteristics besides pulsation.
They moved about. They ingested unattached vesicles—that is, they appeared to eat. At
times they divided into smaller heaps, which expanded as they took up fluid or unattached
vesicles, thus simulating reproduction and growth.
Reich’s critics would later claim that Reich believed he had “created life.” This ver-
sion suggests that Reich alleged he had developed some kind of artificial life, like Dr.
Frankenstein. Reich’s position was not that he had created artificial life, but rather that he
had succeeded in revealing experimentally the developmental living process that was contin-
ually occurring in nature. In geology, this kind of perspective has recently become dominant
under the name “uniformitarianism,” the theory that “the present is the key to the past, that
ifyou want to understand how a rock is formed you go watch it forming now.”^9 For Reich,
life was like a rock in this respect: you could go watch it forming now. This orientation con-
trasts sharply with the orthodox biological notion that life was created once in the far dis-
tant past and since then “all life has come from life.”
Three explanations have been offered for the presence of motile forms in Reich’s
preparations—the first two by his critics, the third by Reich himself.
The first is that Reich’s preparations were not completely sterile and there had been
accidental infection by “spores” or “germs” from the air. What Reich was observing and cultur-
ing were known forms of bacteria or protozoal organisms, which came “from outside.”
Alternatively, his materials contained spores in a dormant state, which were liberated in solution.
To meet this objection, Reich sterilized the substance to be placed in the infusion
as well as the solution itself. The result of the sterilization procedure was surprising: not only
did the vesicular behavior still occur, but it appeared more rapidly, and gave rise to more vig-
orous movements.
Moreover, Reich heated coal particles to incandescence (1500°C) before immersing
210 Myron SharafFury On Earth