Wilhelm Reich’s The Bion Experiments on the Cancer Problem appeared in 1939 under his own Sexpol-Verlag, issued from Rotterdam, Oslo, and Copenhagen as the seventh number of the clinical and experimental reports of his Institute for Sexual-Economic Life Research. It is not a treatise but a laboratory record: abstracts of a lecture Reich gave to the Norwegian Society of Medical Students in Oslo in June 1938, illustrated with thirty-eight micro-photographs, followed by a research report on rubber and the electroscope and a set of institutional notices. The book argues a single, audacious case—that the boundary between living and non-living matter is porous, and that cancer may be understood through the same vesicular organisation Reich claims to observe in boiled earth, charred blood, and disintegrating moss.
“T-Bacilli are found in cancerous and sarcomatous lissues obtained by operation under sterile conditions, and in the blood of apparently healthy individuals.”
From Sterilised Earth to Moving Vesicles
Reich opens with a procedure and a claim. Take inorganic material—crystals, coke, soot, charred blood—soak it in equal parts bouillon and potassium chloride solution, boil it, autoclave it, and it disintegrates into electrically charged vesicles he calls Bions. White-hot heating, he reports, furthers this vesicular disintegration and even cultivability; lava and cast iron filings show the structure. Photographs illustrate crystals from common earth autoclaved at 120°C, potassium cyanide, a cast iron fitting, and iron filings in the bouillon-KCl mixture forming electromagnetic-like figures that proved cultivable after about eight days on egg medium. Organic material behaves the same way: tissues, muscle, and moss autoclaved in the same solution break down into vesicles and moving masses of vesicles, with moss on lava or stone showing vesicles arranged in rows.
From there Reich describes a sequence he watched at 400 to 4000x magnification in infusions of dried autumn moss or grass: vesicular disintegration, vesicles separating out as cocci, then concentrating and organising along a membranous margin into monocellular protists of vesicular structure—work he says is set out more fully in his Die Bione of 1938. The leap he then makes is the heart of the book. Just as protists develop from swollen, disintegrated moss, he argues, cancer cells organise in bubble-shaped disintegrated animal and human tissue: swelling, bubble-like structuring, spindle-shaped organisms, strongly light-breaking and biologically colourable bubble-heaps, and finally mobile amoeboid “mature” cancer cells. In mice he observed this maturation between eight and fourteen months. Photographs contrast healthy muscle with cancer of the uterus, skin, and fibula.
The experiments pursued two questions: which combination best allows the organisation and cultivation of superheated carbon, and what influence Bions exert on proteins, blood, and animal tissue—a question grounded in the known fact that soot and tar substances distilled above 1000°C stimulate cancer formation, as in tar-cancer in mice and chimney-sweep cancer.
The Recipes and the Cultures
The book is nothing if not procedural. Reich sets out his media in full: Egg Medium e, with Ringer’s solution, KCl, red gelatine, charred blood-dust, lezithin, and a whole sterile egg, adjusted to pH 7.4 and sterilised in stages; Egg Medium IV, with peeled and hashed potatoes, bouillon, potato flour, peptone, KCl, lezithin, Ringer’s solution, glycerin, and sterile eggs, filtered through gauze and hardened in the hot air steriliser. The detail matters to him because reproducibility is his answer to scepticism.
He then reports the cultures obtained. Type PA—Packet-Amoeboid—Bion cultures from autoclaved human blood: two or three drops from an arm vein shaken in the bouillon-KCl mixture and autoclaved at 120–130°C immediately produce contractile, amoeboid Blood-Bions, cultivable on the egg media in roughly 60 to 70 percent of cases across twenty-one experiments. Cultures from a woman of 41 and a man of 34, treated half an hour in the autoclave, are as a rule blue; the microbes are of unequal size, about 2 to 6 μ long, and grow at 47°C. Kept inadequately, they degenerate into cocci resembling pus-staphylococci, blackish instead of bluish, and can be regenerated by rhythmical electrical charges and quick inoculation on egg medium IV.
Daily microscopic observation shows carbon and blood Bions penetrating one another, forming vesicular microbes and round cells with nuclei, with a bluish glimmer under the apochromatic objective. Inoculation is strong from the eighth day, after which the media go into the thermostat at 37°C. Thirty-five experiments yielded 80 percent positive results. Blood agar passed over egg medium usually showed blue-grey growth—microscopically, contractile heaps of large vesicles that sometimes flowed together and showed cell formation. Several strains of the BLUKO-Bion cultures produced BLUKO-cells after weeks in unopened test tubes, growing quickly at room temperature by division, creamy in gray-white, salmon-red, or yellow-brown, and reacting to Gram and Eosin-Huematoxylin stain.
Animal experiments were not yet concluded. Subcutaneous injection produced cell-masses after four to twelve months, with metastasis-like deposits in the peritoneum, liver, and elsewhere; in some mice, Bions from white-heated coal alone produced similar microstructures at the injection site and infiltrating cellular growth in kidneys, glands, and liver.
The T-Bacilli and the Mouse Counts
The fourth section turns to the T-Bacilli, which arise from the degeneration of certain Bion cultures and from the experimental degeneration of certain proteins. Reich names them T for Tod, death, because of their origin and their deadly effect on mice. They are short rods of about 0.25 to 0.6 μ, grow turflike on light agar at 37°C, colour bouillon bluish, and carry a sharp acid-ammonia smell. Large doses kill mice within twenty-four hours; light doses produce infiltrating, destructive growths and tumours over eight to fifteen months, and the bacilli can be recultivated from cardiac blood and reproduce the same pathological changes. Potassium cyanide does not kill them but strengthens them—Reich calls them Cyanide-T-Proof. They are found in cancerous and sarcomatous tissue and in the blood of apparently healthy people, always gram negative; cultivated from fifteen sources, five produced cancerous growths in mice. Tumours from BLUKO cells also yielded T-Bacilli in cardiac blood. Crucially, T-Bacilli are killed both by rhythmical electric charges and by PA-type Bions, and mice pretreated with PA Bions do not sicken after T-Bacilli, or only after large doses.
The statistics run to the end of January 1939. Of 178 mice observed, 84 were injected only with T-Bacilli: 30 died within the first eight days, another 30 within fifteen months, the rest fell ill; of those 30, 25 were investigated, 14 showed cancerous cell-formations and infiltrations in stomach, intestines, throat glands, and genitals, and 7 contained amoeboid cancer cells. Of 40 mice first injected with PA-type Bion cultures and then T-Bacilli, 36 remained healthy and died within ten months. Forty injected only with PA-Bions showed no illness. Of 10 first injected with T-Bacilli and then PA-Bions, 8 died within fifteen months and 2 were killed because of abscesses. The longer the chronic T-Bacilli sickness continued, Reich notes, the more the carcinoma matured and the more the infiltrating cells resembled the amoeba type. He insists this is only a preliminary report.
The Synopsis, the Rubber, and the Institute
The closing matter widens the frame. A synopsis dated Oslo, July 1939, notes that the communication was largely sent to the French Academy in November 1938, with detailed publication in preparation. On possible air infection, Reich argues that Bions appear immediately after preparation and sterilisation and their organisation can be watched microscopically; media exposed to laboratory air showed staphylococci and forms of B. subtilis but never PA- or BLUKO-type structures. Vesicular disintegration of glowing material, he suggests, means airborne spores may originate from suspended carbon crystals and organic particles. The synopsis restates the case: sterilised carbon with protein substances is cultivable; the formation of small nucleated cells in the BLUKO preparation that produced cancerous growths in mice discloses the process of Bion formation and penetration where soot and tar lead to growth in animal tissue; the PA type is a biological antibody against T-Bacilli and cancer cells, shown in vitro and in animal experiment. He concedes that animal experiments require statistical confirmation. The Bion experiment, he writes, does not claim to “create” new organisms, only to disclose a process of organisation inherent in nature; the spontaneous organisation of protozoa in disintegrated moss is the key to understanding cancer cells organising themselves out of vesicles in disintegrated tissue.
Then comes a report of a different kind: “Experiments with Rubber on the Static Electroscope.” Fresh intact SAND-BION culture plates are placed with thin rubber gloves or soft rubber in a metal cassette for hours. Rubber controls exposed to fresh moving air in shade give no electroscope deflection, while SAPA-influenced rubber gives more or less strong deflection at a distance and on touching the plate; swapping the rubbers reverses the result, and immersion in water abolishes the effect. Reich concludes that SAPA-Bions give off to rubber an energy acting on the electroscope like friction electricity. Soft thin rubber left in bright sun until deflection occurs behaves the same way, with controls in shady moving air or water giving none—so the sun, like Bions from glowing sand, gives off such an energy. Rubber placed on a subject’s abdominal skin or genitals for five to ten minutes then deflects on contact and approach, while control rubber does not; persons with poor breathing and low vegetative excitability react weakly or not at all, and teaching poor reactors to breathe well occasionally enables reaction, while strongly excitable persons react quickly and strongly. The organism too, Reich concludes, if not vegetatively rigid, gives off to rubber an energy acting like friction electricity. He reserves the interpretation—a bio-energetic radiation—and detailed presentation for elsewhere.
The book ends with institutional housekeeping: Reich’s election as honorary member of the International Society for Plasmogony in Mexico; Dr. Bonnet’s statement that he had not controlled Dr. du Teil’s earlier Paris experiments because he did not know the technique, correcting claims made during the 1938 Norwegian press campaign in Dagbladet; the move of Sexpol-Verlag to Rotterdam and of the Institute’s biological laboratory to New York; a list of member addresses from Copenhagen, Oslo, and Gaustad; and a pointed note that the announced Norwegian authorisation of psychoanalysts does not affect the organisation—authorisation for character-analytic vegetotherapy can come only from the Institute, and responsibility for therapeutic work rests solely with the Fachorganisation der sexualökonomischen Therapeuten und Pädagogen. A list of the Institute’s publications, with prices in Norwegian kroner, closes the volume.
What the Book Is Arguing
Strip away the media recipes and the mouse counts and a coherent, heretical position remains. Reich denies a sharp line between the inorganic and the organic: boiled earth, charred blood, and disintegrating moss all yield the same vesicular structures, and high temperature, which kills living organisms, here facilitates the organisation of dead matter. Cancer, on this account, is not an invader but a regression—tissue swelling, breaking into vesicles, and reorganising into amoeboid cells, exactly as moss reorganises into protists. The T-Bacilli give the theory its agent of death, a degenerate product of protein breakdown that appears even in the healthy and that PA-type Bions can neutralise like an antibody. The rubber experiments extend the same logic outward: if Bions, sunlight, and living bodies all impart to rubber an energy resembling friction electricity, then the biological and the physical are continuous. Reich knows he is exposed, and the book’s insistence on exact protocols, percentages, and controls is the rhetoric of a man anticipating disbelief—as is the defensive institutional apparatus at the end, which reads as a boundary drawn around a besieged school.
The Book’s Afterlife
The Bion experiments belong to the period of Reich’s life when his laboratory work in Oslo was already pulling him away from psychoanalysis and toward the vitalist physics that would consume his later career. The book’s own claims—that it does not create life but discloses nature’s inherent organisation—were contested by contemporaries and have not entered mainstream biology; the T-Bacilli and the orgone radiation that followed are remembered chiefly as episodes in the history of scientific heterodoxy. What survives as historical interest is the document itself: a snapshot of a brilliant and increasingly isolated researcher staking everything on the microscope, publishing his raw protocols and his mouse tallies, and building an institute around a theory of life that the scientific world would not accept.
