Who is Antoine Bechamp? Why is he important, and what are microzymas, anyway?

"Nothing is lost, nothing is created ... all is transformed. Nothing is the prey of death. All is the prey of life."-- Antoine Béchamp

His research was voluminous, and his writings, both published articles and entire books, consist of thousands of pages, most of which have never been published in English.

Many of his published articles are, however, held in the archives of the French Academy of Sciences, which can be accessed here. To find which of the volumes have work by Bechamp in them, see the list on the Wikipedia page, under the heading Publications of Bechamp and Pasteur published on "Comptes rendus de l'académie des sciences". Be warned, the archives are in French!

Also for Francophiles: Centre International de Recherches Antoine Béchamp. Most of the material here is in French also. Bechamp's largest work (over 1,000 pages long), Les Microzymas, is available here. The translation of all Bechamp's writings into English would be a wonderful (but huge) project.

Bechamp's research proved, as long as 150 years ago, what the root cause of disease was, and how it could be reversed or avoided altogether using safe, natural methods. This was long before the synthetic drugs, chemotherapy, radiation, surgical removal of body parts and vaccines with which we are all so familiar today became the mainstays of mainstream medical treatment.

Bechamp's work showed that the inner condition and health of the cells (sometimes described as the "terrain" in works of the time) determined whether disease would manifest or spread in the body. He proved through rigorous scientific method and repeated experiments over many years that disease was not due to germs attacking the body from the outside, as Louis Pasteur later convinced the world. What you eat, breathe, drink, and bathe in are the primary factors that determine your body's inner condition. 'Germs' arise as a result of a diseased condition. They are a symptom, not the cause.

The details of Bechamp's science are beyond the scope of this article. To include it here would make this page a scroll-fest. If you want to see some details, try
-- an extract from the Blood and its Third Element
-- an example of Bechamp's science
-- The complete text of R. Pearson's The Dream and Lie of Louis Pasteur contains some excellent material about Bechamp's science.

While working on fermentation (the breakdown of complex molecules into organic compounds via a "ferment") Béchamp observed through his microscope a host of tiny bodies in his fermenting solutions. Even before Béchamp's time, other researchers had observed, but passed off as unexplainable, what they had described as "scintillating corpuscles" or "molecular granulations". It was Béchamp who, able to ascribe strong enzymatic reactions to them, was led to coin a new word to describe them: microzymas, or "tiny ferments".

Among these ferments' many peculiar characteristics was the fact that microzymas were abundantly present in natural calcium carbonate (common chalk), whereas they did not exist in chemically pure calcium carbonate made in a laboratory under artificial conditions. This was the reason why chalk could easily invert cane sugar solutions, while pure calcium carbonate could not. In other words, although chemically the artificial "pure" calcium carbonate is exactly the same as the natural calcium carbonate, only natural chalk has a life which allows it to interact with its environment.

Béchamp went on to study microzymas found in the bodies of animals, and came to the startling conclusion that the tiny forms were more basic to life than cells, which had long been considered to be the building blocks of all living matter. Béchamp propsed that the microzymas were fundamental elements, responsible for the activity of cells, tissues, organs -- indeed every aspect of all living organisms. He even found them present in eggs, where they were responsible for the eggs' further development while themselves undergoing significant changes.

Most incredible to Bechamp was his discovery that when there occurred an event serious enough to affect the whole of an organism, disturbing the natural balance, the microzymas within the organism would begin working to disintegrate the organism, totally converting themselves to bacteria and other microbes, in an attempt to ensure their survival. As proof of that survival, Bechamp found them in soil, swamps, chimney soot, street dust, and in air and water. These basic, and virtually indestructable, elements of which we and all our animal relatives are composed survive the death of the cells in our bodies. So seemingly indestructible were the microzymas that Béchamp could even find them in limestone dating back 60 million years. According to Bechamp, the microzymas are the seeds of life.

He demonstrated in his laboratory that by using different solutions as an environment he would grow totally different sets of "germs" in spite of the fact that all solutions had been kept in the same sterile conditions. The germs, he was convinced, could not have come from an outside source but had to be originating from within each solution itself. The microzymas, which are the same basic structures for all living material, transformed themselves according to the stimulation of the various environments in which they lived, into different life forms (in these experiments, germs) corresponding to the content of the solution itself. This changing of form -- pleomorphism -- is our next topic.

The concept of pleomorphism is at the heart of Bechamp's theories. He observed that one sort of bacteria could develop spontaneously into another type, given a change in the environmental conditions. For example, it was seen that the diphtheria bacteria transformed into a coccus. (This is something that according to Pasteur's theories is impossible.)

According to Bechamp. the microzyma, which was critical in supporting the life of cells, could be triggered into pathogenic states, depending on specific changes in the state of the internal (particularly the blood) environment. Therefore, the bacteria and other micro-organisms, such as viruses and fungi, that were being blamed as the cause of disease, were viewed by Bechamp as being part of nature's 'clean-up crew', breaking down sick tissue and ultimately decomposing a no-longer-occupied body. Bechamp also viewed these micro-organisms as 'changing forms' (pleomorphic) -- from seed to bacterial, viral and fungal states, rather than being seen as discrete species unto themselves.

Once these bugs have done the job, they revert to the 'seed' stage once again, ready to support new life. The very ground we stand on is teeming with these fundamental biological units.

The consciousness of Bechamp's era, however, was, as noted, looking for a simpler, more linear explanation for disease, and as Pasteur was more of a PR man than Bechamp, he won the recognition of academia and society. Also, the simplistic notion of 'kill the bug, cure the disease' was very appealing for the emerging pharmaceutical industry, and continues to provide a major illusion in support of one of the newest 'plagues': the overuse of antibiotics.

• More on pleomorphism
• Cultivating Health: Learning and Living Your Biological Mandates by Adeha Feustel

"It is not the germ that causes disease but the terrain in which the germ is found."-- Louis Pasteur, in his private journal

Bechamp and Pasteur were both members of the French Academy of Sciences, and the papers they submitted, and their correspondance, both to each other and to other people, were all recorded. Even their verbal exchanges survive in the minutes of the meetings. Seldom has a lifetime of scientific and professional antagonism been so well and publicly documented.

Bechamp said that microzymas arose from within the body's cells because of changes occurring with the cell itself. The presence and state of the microzymas -- in other words their observed evolution to the state of being a virus or bacteria -- is therefore a symptom of disease, not the cause of it.

Pasteur, on the other hand, and as the world knows, argued that germs from the external world enter the body and cause the disease.

Instead of incorporating Béchamp's discoveries to bring about a health revolution and save countless lives, greedy and power-hungry industrialists decided to ostracize his work and put their dollars behind Louis Pasteur's 'germ theory', because it was a way for them to build a colossal and profitable pharmaceutical/medical empire. No pharmaceutical company in the world today cares one iota about curing disease. They want to control disease and focus on symptom suppression so they can make huge profits by getting you to become a lifelong user of their products. That's why they go to war against disease with all their "anti" this and "anti" that medications, and their 'wars' and campaigns against diseases, instead of addressing the inner condition of a patient and re-establishing homeostasis in the body.

Part of the removal of Antoine Béchamp from history involved giving credit for his works to others, such as Louis Pasteur.

The difference between Bechamp and Pasteur is clearly seen through examining the reports they submitted to the French Academy of Science (all of which still exist). This leads to three indisputable and striking conclusions:

1. Pasteur's reports on experiments and consequent deductions are all preceded by Béchamp's, in some cases by several years. When Pasteur proclaimed to have found the answer to a pressing question it turns out that Béchamp had already clearly answered that question.

2. The quality control on Pasteur's experiments was poor and allows for unaccounted interference (which is invariably completely ignored even when pointed out by his peers). In contrast, Béchamp had a rigid and structured approach to his experiments, which allowed him to answer his contemporaries more clearly and directly.

3. The deductions Pasteur made from his experiments were often far beyond the scope of the actual experiment and often turned out to be more speculation than science. As a consequence, Pasteur was caught out on several occasions changing his interpretation and statements so as to suit his case. Béchamp, on the other hand, never made a claim that he had not substantiated with sound scientific proof.

The reason why Béchamp was mainly ignored and Pasteur elevated to hero status is to be found in the different personalities and the lure of commercial success. Bechamp was a dedicated scientist and researcher, but he had no skills at politics and ass-kissing. Pasteur, on the other hand, was an expert at both. He ingratiated himself with the rich and powerful, and even became a favorite of French royalty. The world still works the same way today.

So modern medicine continues to ignore the facts and figures, and continues to search for outside invaders to blame for many illnesses. Western science had the opportunity right at the emergence of the germ theory dogma to refute it once and for all, but did not take the opprtunity. Ever since, personal experience as well as facts and figures on the effects of the treatments based on Pasteur's misconceptions and deceptions have, time and time again, shown its invalidity. Yet, pushed on by commercial and social rewards , modern medicine (sic) continues to ignore reality and refuses to question in real scientific terms the fundamentals on which its view of disease is based.

Pasteur himself recanted it in his private journal, writing the famous words which were revealed many decades after his death: "It is not the germ that causes disease but the terrain in which the germ is found."

These two books (ok, yes, I publish them...) are a good introduction to Bechamp and his work. Hume's Bechamp or Pasteur? is a good read, and covers all the major controversies that occurred between them. Not surprisingly, Pasteur doesn't come out of it looking too good. His plagiarisms and frauds are described in detail and well documented.

For those interested in the details of Bechamp's work straight from the source, The Blood and its Third Element is ideal, because it was the last book that Bechamp wrote, and so it can be seen as a distillation of his ideas. In any event, it's a lot shorter than Les Microzymas, and it's in English.

When I found the original manuscripts of these books -- in the editions that had been published in the 1920s or so -- they were something of a nightmare for a modern reader. For a start, written English was different in those days, and they also liked long paragraphs that could go on for a page or more (something which definitely doesn't work for a modern attention span). They also used to include quotes in the body of the text, without separating them out, as modern book layout does. All in all, ed-editing both these books was a pretty big, but totally enjoyable job. The end result is text that is readable, and not a total drag to get through, and I hope, something that the authors would approve of.

More detailed information on these books is available at Review Press.

Pasteur or Bechamp?
by Ethel Hume

Amazon blurb: This volume contains new editions of two books which have been available only sporadically in the decades since their publication.

R. Pearson's Pasteur: Plagiarist, Imposter was originally published in 1942, and is a succinct introduction to both Louis Pasteur and Antoine Bechamp, and the reasons behind the troubled relationship that they shared for their entire working lives. Whereas Pearson's work is a valuable introduction to an often complex topic, it is Ethel Douglas Hume's expansive and well-documented Bechamp or Pasteur? A Lost Chapter in the History of Biology which provides the main body of evidence. It covers the main points of contention between Bechamp and Pasteur in depth sufficient to satisfy any degree of scientific or historical scrutiny, and it contains, wherever possible, detailed references to the source material and supporting evidence. Virtually no claim in Ms Hume's book is undocumented. The reader will soon discern that neither Mr Pearson nor Ms Hume could ever be called fans of Pasteur or his 'science'. They both declare their intentions openly; that they wish to contribute to the undoing of a massive medical and scientific fraud. See it on Amazon

The Blood and its Third Element
by Professor Antoine Bechamp

Amazon blurb: This book is the last work by Professor Antoine Bechamp, a man who should, by rights, be regarded today as one of the founders of modern medicine and biology. During his long career as an academic and researcher in nineteenth century France, Bechamp was widely known and respected as both a teacher and a researcher. As a leading academic, his work was well documented in scientific circles. Few made as much use of this fact as Louis Pasteur, who based much of his career on plagiarizing and distorting Bechamp's research; in doing so, Pasteur secured for himself an undeserved place in the history of medical science. The Blood and its Third Element is Bechamp's explanation of his position, and his defense of it against Pasteur's mischief. This final major work of Bechamp's embodies the culmination of his life's research. This book contains, in detail, the elements of the microzymian theory of the organization of living organisms and organic materials. It has immediate and far reaching relevance to the fields of immunology, bacteriology, and cellular biology; and it shows that more than 100 years ago, the germ, or microbian, theory of disease was demonstrated by Bechamp to be without foundation. There is no single cause of disease. The ancients thought this, and Bechamp proved it and was written out of history for his trouble. The relevance of his work to the dilemmas that plague modern medical science remains as yet unrealized. See it on Amazon

The following are some of the many researchers who have followed in Bechamp's footsteps, consciously or not.

"Do not automatically believe in anything , especially what you are told. Convince yourself of something by observing it with your own eyes. And, after having perceived a new fact, do not lose site of it again until it is fully explained." -- Wilhelm Reich

After first making his mark in psychoanalysis as Freud's protégé and leading collaborator, Wilhelm Reich broke with the International Psychoanalytic Movement to take up an independent career. He began working with an unusual microscope equipped with special lenses that could magnify living organisms to 2 - 3000X their normal size, well over twice the magnification achievable with the ordinary microscopes of his day. Among his extraordinary discoveries were "vesicles" -- minuscule fluid containing bladder-like sacs that appeared in infusions of hay and other substances such as animal tissue, earth and coal.

After much experimentation during which he noted a marked increase in the number of vesicles that could be cultured when the preparations containing them were boiled, he concluded that the strange forms he had discovered were 'transitional', lying midway between the realms of the animate and the inert. To these unrecognized elementary stages of life, he gave the name bions. He had, of course, rediscovered Bechamp's microzymas.

When Reich poured some of his boiled preparations onto nutrient culture media, the cultures began to generate peculiar looking bacteria and amoebae. There was, of course, the possibility that the newly generated animacules (as Leuwenhock, inventor of the microscope called them) could have invaded the cultures from the surrounding atmosphere, or that they could have appeared because the culture media had been improperly sterilized. To rule these possibilities out, Reich superheated his bion cultures, to find that the ostensibly sterile mixtures continued to give rise to the higher microbic forms. This led him to the further conclusion that bions, as preliminary stages of life, were embodiments of an indestructible life force that defied death. Reich christened this life force orgone.

His claims were already so heretical as to alarm orthodox science, but Reich wasn't finished. He claimed that bion structures could also be detected in, and cultured from, human blood, which, then as now, was considered to be sterile, an unchanging doctrine still taught in medical schools. This next led him to examine blood samples taken from persons suffering from cancer in which he saw extremely tiny bacterial forms that he connected to that lethal disease process. He labelled them T-bacilli, the T standing for Tod which in Reich's native German means "death."

It seemed to Reich that there was something unaccountable going on in the bodies of the cancer-afflicted, a degeneration causing healthy life-promoting bions to develop into a death-dealing T-bacilli. Since he had also found these "death bacteria" in the excreta of healthy people, he assumed that these individuals were able to dispose of cancer causing particles, and that disposition to cancer was determined by a level of biological resistance.

A question naturally arises at this point: Could germs appearing in the body be the result, rather than the cause, of afflictions, if not always, at least often?

Reich's life ended tragically. He was submitted to virulent attacks for questioning sacred dogmas of medical science in general, and the cancer industry in particular. The story of this contraversial, often cantankerous, scientist ended when he was brought to trial and sentenced to a term in a U.S. prison where, in 1964, he died. The US government also ordered that all of Reich's publications on which they could lay their hands -- including a privately printed journal, Journal of Orgonomy -- be incinerated. That order was carried out less than 20 years after the Nazi government in Germany had ordered all of Reich's then existing publications burned. (Spot the difference -- I can't.)

Working as a bacteriologist in a military hospital on the Baltic Sea, German zoologist Guenther Endedein, in 1917 finished a manuscript that opened a new door onto the world of microbes. It revealed many different pleomorphic developmental phases of bacteria, and showed that diseases and their healing processes are bound to precise cyclical and morphological laws. The manuscript was published as a book, Bakterien Cyclogenie, (The Life Cycle of Bacteria) in 1925, shortly after its author's appointment as curator of the Zoological Museum in Berlin.

For inspiring his work, Enderlein gives great credit to Antoine Bechamp as well as several Germans who took up where Bechamp left off, including zoologist Robert Leuckart, founder of the science of parisitology, and Otto Schmidt, who first reported parasites in the blood of cancer patients as far back as 1901.

Using a darkfield microscope, Enderlein discovered that microorganisms go through a form-changing cycle that, in his view, could take on countless variations, leading him to label the phenomenon a "1000-headed monster." He asserted that while different types of microorganisms normally live within the body in a mutually beneficial symbiotic relationship, with severe deterioration of the body's environment they can develop into disease-producing forms, to create what he called dysbiosis, or "a fault in the life process." Their action, according to Enderlein, was not due to any perverse intent on the microbes part to harm the host, but to their urge to survive at its expense. In their early developmental phases, they lived in the blood to perform functions beneficial to health, while in the later phases, they abandoned that role to assure their preservation.'

• Elements of Comparative Morphology of Bacteria, by Guenther Enderlein
• A summary of Enderlein's life and work

The electron microscope which is commonly used today, while capable of attaining magnifications surpassing 500,000X at excellent resolution, is incapable of examining living things. Basic Histology, Junqueira & Carneiro, 1980, outlines the limitations of using electron microscopes:

"These conditions preclude the use of living material ... the electron beam on an object can damage it and produce unwanted changes in tissue structures. They take a living, changing scene (the blood), and disorganize it, by staining the blood sample. They then take a snapshot of this disorganized situation and interpret it as the entire story. During the study and interpretation of stained tissue sections in microscope preparations, the observed product is the end result of a series of processes that considerably distort the image observable in the living tissue, mainly through shrinking and retraction. It has been suggested in the past that the electron-microscopic specks identified as viruses could, more than likely, be nothing more than particles of lifeless, degraded protein--disintegrated peptides from cellular death--catabolic residues of cytoplasm, or repair proteins produced by the cells in response to the imbalanced biological terrain."

Royal Rife was arguably one of the greatest scientific minds of the twentieth century. His instrument (pictured below), which he designed and manufactured himself, was able to view living matter at unheard of magnifications of up to 60,000X, also at excellent resolution. With this extraordinary device, Rife identified microbes in the blood of sick people which seemingly miraculously transformed, under various conditions, one into the other, in classic pleomorphist fashion. He saw sixteen stages in all -- the same number in Gaston Naessens' somatid cycle.

Rife was able to observe and prove the reality of pleomorphism. He was able to do this partly because of his advancements with optics, but also because he used light frequencies to highlight his samples, rather than chemical dyes. Using dyes kills the specimen, so tissues cannot be viewed in the natural living state; and studying dead samples to understand living processes is as useless as studying cadavers.

Rife was also able to isolate the particular viral form involved in all forms of cancer, and -- most astonishing of all -- he discovered a particular frequency that would neutralize it.

Maurice Fishbein, representing the AMA at the time, wanted to 'buy into' Rife's discovery for personal gain. When Rife rejected Fishbein's offer, the once-supportive AMA establishment proceeded to vilify him in print, and his discoveries were driven underground. Government goon squads attempted to physically destroy all the evidence of Rife's work. (There are a handful of Rife's Universal Microscopes in existence, but none of them are complete and functional. Instead, mainstream science uses the electron microscope, which kills the sample with radiation in the process of viewing the sample. Various projects around the world are working on reconsctructing Rife's technology.

As a result of his discoveries, Rife came to the independent conclusion -- to which others had come independently both before and after him -- that, depending on its inner state, germs arose within the the body itself, and that these germs were not the cause, but the result of disease states. This single conclusion completely overturns everything that modern mainstream medical theory is based on.

How was it that the electron microscope, able to see only inert, inanimate matter has been universally adopted in the world's laboratories, while Rife's machine, able to view animate organisms as they live and move, went into universal limbo? What agenda is at work here? And what is it about the "politics of science" that has led innovators, scientists such as Bechamp, Enderlein, Naessens and Rife, to be brought to trial, and condemned to ridicule and obscurity?

• More information on Royal Rife...
  
• and more...
  
• and even more...
  
• Technical details about Rife's microscope
  
• Rife.org, a source of much original Rife material, but has not been updated for some time.
• Essential viewing: rifevideos.com

Using a microscope that he designed himself, Canadian Gaston Naessens discovered ultramicroscopic, subcellular, living and reproducing microscopic forms which he called a somatid. This particle could be cultured outside the bodies of the host. Naessens also observed that the particle had a pleomorphic sixteen-stage life cycle.

According to Naessens, only the first three stages of the somatid life cycle are normal. He maintains that when the immune system is weakened or disrupted, the somatids evolve through the other thirteen stages. The weakening of the immune system could be caused by such things as chemical pollution, ionising radiation, electric fields, diet, accidents, shock, depression, and other factors.

Naessens' research has resulted in the association of degenerative diseases (rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, lupus, cancer and AIDS) with the development of forms in the sixteen-stage pathological cycle. The ability to associate the disease with specific stages has enabled Naessens to 'prediagnose' conditions in advance of when they clinically appear. This discovery puts Gaston Naessens at odds with orthodox medicine, which has embraced Pasteur's germ theory wholeheartedly.

His work is repeatable. The ability to culture somatids is a call to the rewriting of microbiology. Naessens has stated: "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 of the 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."

• More information on Gaston Naessens

We fast-forward now to modern times. In 1996, a geologist studying sandstone core examples from an oil exploration project off the West Australian coast made a dramatic discovery -- one that seems to fit hand-in-glove with the work of Bechamp, Enderlein, Reich, Naessens, and Rife.

Philippa Uwins called the entities she observed nanobes. She wasn't looking for the smallest bacteria known to science when she aimed her electron microscope at a chunk of rock extracted from thousands of metres below the Australian seabed, but she found something very interesting; tiny filaments that looked suspiciously like bacterial or fungal colonies, growing on the Triassic and Jurassic sandstone.

Even so, Uwins, then a geologist from the University of Queensland, didn't jump to any conclusions. It's not unheard of for bacteria to live far below the Earth's surface, but Uwins's nanobes seemed to adapt surprisingly easily to the totally different conditions of an above-ground lab. Most importantly, the organisms were incredibly small -- some no more than 20 nanometres (20 billionths of a metre) in diameter. That was a problem, because creatures that small aren't meant to exist, according to conventional microbiology. Viruses can be that tiny because they rely on host cells to reproduce, but any free-living organism needs to have a diameter of at least 100 to 250 nanometres (depending on whose calculations you read), just to cram in the machinery necessary for life.

This initial discovery was curious enough, but when the team found that containers and equipment in their laboratory were being 'colonised' by these structures, they realised that whatever they had found was growing. Samples were collected from petri dishes and examined in a powerful SEM (Scanning Electron Microscope).

Uwins became convinced that her team had found an organism that breaks all the rules. Over the course of two years, she grew numerous nanobe colonies in her lab. And, with her University of Queensland colleagues, microbiologists Anthony Taylor and Richard Webb, Uwins says she has used three different stains for detecting DNA, with positive results, and made ultrathin sections of the organisms to reveal what appear to be cell walls -- findings that are consistent with these being living creatures, not an inorganic process masquerading as bacterial colonies.

Many will have a hard time believing that a free-living organism can be only 20 nanometres across -- after all, even a ribosome is roughly 20 nanometres long. "Finding out how these very small nanobes 'live' will be something we will be following up," she said. Her team then set about analysing the organism's genes, in the hope of demonstrating that it has a unique genome. Such genetic scrutiny would also reveal where the organisms are perched on the tree of life.

Detractors of Uwins' work argue that these tiny structures were formed by geological processes, not biological ones, stating that there is no evidence for life forms smaller than known microbes. However, there are other scientists and researchers who strongly claim that numerous examples of nanobacteria exist. One of the leading advocates is Dr Robert Folk of the University of Texas, whose work involved studying mineral deposits near volcanoes. He has claimed to have identified bacteria very much smaller than any previously discovered. He believes such bacteria form the bulk of living things on Earth and may be responsible for the rusting of metal and the "greening" of copper but the tiny organisms have eluded conventional tools and avenues of research.

Dr. Uwins, along with Richard Webb and Anthony Taylor, published their findings in the November/December 1998 issue of American Mineralogist. After an initial flurry of exposure and media coverage, Dr Uwins has disappeared, it seems, from public view. There are no accounts online of any further work by her. Which, going by what she and her colleagues began with, is a great pity.

Even though Dr Uwins and her team never addressed the point of pleomorphism, it is obvious that the nanobes could well be the same class of entities that have previously been labelled microzymas, bions, and somatids.

• A brief overview: Nanobes on Wikipedia
  
• A further discussion on nanobes
• Description of nanobes, with good high-res images

Olavi Kajander and Neva Ciftcioglu, while working at the University of Kuopio in Finland, also found 'mini-bacteria', alive and kicking in kidney stones. Kajander was searching with an electron microscope for a contaminant that was stopping laboratory cell cultures growing well when he found what appeared to be a white film of tiny bacteria. Culturing the strange microorganisms was difficult, because they had a remarkably slow metabolism -- about 10,000 times slower than normal. And although most of the spherical bacteria ranged in diameter from between 200 and 500 nanometres, "huge numbers" of them were between a mere 50 to 80 nanometres.

That slow metabolism helps to explain how the bacteria can get by with so little space inside for the bare necessities of life, says Kajander. But he also suggests a far more radical explanation for their minuscule size. Each of the smaller forms could be a single piece of a whole nanobacterium -- a part of its genome would be stored in one "cell", and a ribosome or two in another. These fragments could then link up, using molecules on their surfaces to create a complete organism that would be seen under the microscope as one of the larger cells in the population.

One form they described is 20-100 nanometers in size with a unique cell membrane structure. This form secretes a calcific biofilm "gooey slime" around itself that provides protection as well as allowing for multiple nanobacteria to connect, collaborate and somehow function together as a unit or colony. This calcific biofilm allows the nanobacteria to act like "slime molds" that can expand, contract and move.

This biofilm-phase of nanobacterial life appears to be present when the nanobacteria are chemically attacked, physiologically stressed, environmentally attacked, and when they are working together or reproducing. The calcific biofilm that is secreted by the nanobacteria is a potent endotoxin and mediator (cause) of inflammation and swelling. In other words, our bodies react aggressively in response to the presence of this nanobacteria-secreted biofilm with swelling and irritation, the release of cytokines, interleukins, leukocytes, mast cells, collagenase, matrix metalloproteinases, etc. Our bodies react by trying to wall off the area of nanobacterial infection. When nanobacteria are in an enclosed area, they cause chronic inflammation and swelling. Most of the commonly known medical "markers of inflammation" (C Reactive Protein, MMP's, MPO, Interleukins, etc.) are found to be elevated in response to the endotoxin in the nanobacterial biofilm.

A note on kidney stones. Much revolves around the nanobacteria's ability to build protective "castles" around themselves, apparently by precipitating carbonate apatite, the same substance that makes up most kidney stones. These 'castles', according to Kajander, could act in the kidneys like grains of sand in a pearl-producing oyster, triggering the growth of stones. Using electron microscopy, Kajander and Ciftcioglu identified nanobacteria in kidney stones from 72 patients. Antibody staining confirmed that result, but the pièce de résistance was when they cultured living nanobacteria from the stones. And when they injected nanobacteria into the blood of rabbits, they later appeared in the kidneys and damaged the part of the organ where stones typically form. To kidney specialists, the idea that a bacterium can cause kidney stones doesn't seem so bizarre. Although the cause of most kidney stones has been a mystery, bacterial infections are known to cause a rarer kind of stone, the bacterium in question making urine more acidic, encouraging mineral precipitation.

• Nanobac is a scientific research company run by Olavi Kajander and Neva Ciftcioglu
  
• An interview which includes work by Olavi Kajander and Neva Ciftcioglu
  
• Article: What are Nanobacteria? by NanobacLabs

What Antoine Bechamp started has been continued over the decades by many researchers -- there are others, of course, in addition to the ones listed here. If pleomorphic organisms are a reality, and there seems to be ample evidence that they are, we have an explanation as to why millions of people have immune deficiency symptoms, and why such discoveries as a link between cancer and fungal infections are being made. It will also explain why an annually increasing number of our children are being born with genetic and allergy problems, not to mention the great tide of disease which is flooding the Western system of medicine.

How long has the 'war on cancer' being going on? From being a rare disease a few decades ago, cancer is now going to effect between one in three and one in two of the population (depending on whose figures you use).

When children are born with, or acquire an allergy to their environment -- to such substances as pollen, peanuts and animal hair, etc -- then that is unnatural. Our food chain has become heavily contaminated with man-made noxious chemicals, all of which place an intolerable strain upon our already overworked immune systems. Genetic manipulation of food crops and livestock is adding to the mess, in ways that we can't at this point even imagine.

It thus becomes of paramount importance that we understand exactly how the immune system really works, what microscopic organisms actually are, and where they come from. How can we address the problems that confront us when much of the current mindset is formed on an yielding adherence to the germ theory?

Many people that work in the life sciences are aware that we have a serious problem. But they, like most of us, have families to feed and mortgages to pay. To raise their voice in protest is to commit economic suicide. There are many dissenting voices in science and medicine that have been silenced in this manner, and the careers of some who have spoken out have been cut short or cast under a cloud. The forces that power the 'health' industry are powerful. The response of the pharmaceutical/chemical industry and the institutionalized medical profession has been to pour millions of dollars into political lobby groups and to saturate the media with advertising, 'news' releases, and product placements.

The implications of Béchamp's ideas, and the case his discoveries make for lifestyle changes such as wholesome nutrition and environmental, hygienic cleanliness have been ignored, in favor of the brain-dead easiness of the germ theory -- a convenience that profits industry and requires "heroic" and expensive medical interventions. The problem with the pleomorphic model of cell biology and medicine is that is can't support a huge drug and disease industry. Its promise? The same.

• How You Rot and Rust from biomedx.com
  
• The Curse of Louis Pasteur by Nancy Appleton
• The The Cancer Cure That Worked by Barry Lynes
• The Life and Trials of Gaston Naessens by Christopher Bird
• The Body Electric by Robert Becker
• Take Control of Your Health by Elaine Hollingsworth