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R-5-78


invention itself and the nature of its biologically active output.  Impressions and private conversations bearing on these matters will be mentioned when they add, reliably or otherwise, to the total picture.

BIOLOGICAL OBSERVATIONS

         There is a pre-history of verbal recollection and gossip connected with the Priore invention.  Priore himself is said (3) to have become interested in possible medical applications of electromagnetic waves upon observing that fruit and vegetables could be preserved by exposure to ultra-high frequency fields.  A machine was built from US Army surplus and at some stage sick persons were placed in the field generated (3). According to a US scientist who has been interested in repeating some of the Priore experiments, a politically well-connected lady who was cured in this way of cancer after receiving a prognosis of early death is still enjoying perfect health in Bordeaux.

          The first experiments on cancerous animals were done by Delmon and Biraben who withheld their results from publication after receiving an unfavorable report from a committee, and because of a fear that publication would prejudice the candidature of one of them for admission to a fellowship (aggrégation) (7).  They used (8) rats implanted subcutaneously with a well-characterized uterine carcinoma, the so-called T8 (Guérin), having previously studied the effects of x-rays and of pulsed magnetic fields upon these animals without finding anything particularly noteworthy: The magnetic fields had no effect on tumor growth or on the occurrence of lymph node metastases, while the remission produced by x-rays was only transient. After exposure to the window of Priore's machine, on the other hand, tumor growth could be stopped  for as long as three months afterwards. The animals recovered good general health, and lymph node metastases were seldom seen.

          The T8 tumor in rats was also used by Rivière and colleagues (9)  from Guérin's laboratory in the cancer institute at Villejuif.  They  found macroscopic regression of the tumors and of metastases after treatment and observed no relapses up to three months thereafter.  Their publication anticipated that of Delmon and Biraben.

           Rivière and colleagues then worked with rats implanted with a lymphoblastic lymphosarcoma which when untreated invariably proved fatal within 11 to 15 days, with generalized colonization of the nodes and  a leukemic syndrome. Treatment under the Priore machine led to total regression of the graft and of the accompanying metastatic and leukemic phenomena (10).  Certain of these experiments were done with animals  from Courrier's laboratory under the constant supervision of his as assistant Madame Colonge. The results were the same, and Courrier reported them in an addendum to a further paper by Rivière et al (11) describing comparable results with a mouse lymphosarcoma.  Further studies with the rat (12) yielded the discovery that treated rats clinically free of the lymphosarcoma were able to resorb a second transplant of the isologous tumor while succumbing to an homologous tumor of a histologically different type.

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