Rubik: There are quite a lot of extraordinary things. In essence, nothing is new. Scientists who do this kind of research go the route of Galileo and Copernicus- they are excommunicated from the flock. In his day, Galileo was considered a heretic by the Church. Isn't it strange that only two years ago the Pope, sitting in Rome today proclaimed that Galileo was finally, "OK"-absolved, 300 years later. It was on the news. Galileo was regarded as a heretic and excommunicated. Copernicus was excommunicated. These people defied the Church's view of the earth being at the center of the universe. They saw new evidence: Galileo saw moons moving around Jupiter, but his contemporaries refused to look through his telescope.
Even though we don't have the Catholic Church over our heads anymore, we have the "Church of Science," which is almost like the Catholic Church, you know. Those who dare to challenge the dogmas of the Church of Science find themselves essentially excommunicated. They are cut-off from their peers. Isolated. Their funding is removed. In fact, those very words "excommunication" were used to described Jacques Beuveniste, a French scientist who six years ago published a paper in the distinguished journal Nature showing that very dilute solutions-so dilute that there should be no molecules of any effective substance-could produce real biochemical effects on blood cells. Beuveniste has been subtlely silenced by the scientific community. Scientists who are treated this way find that they can no longer get grants and this means they will lose their graduate assistants, who are their arms who carry out the laboratory research They are not allowed to publish in the peer-reviewed, mainstream journals that most scientists make the time to read.
There is another example involving a very distinguished American scientist, Linus Pauling. Pauling is a double Nobel laureate -he has a Nobel prize in chemistry as well as in peace. He thinks that Vitamin C in high doses might help prevent the common cold and might also extend the lives of cancer patients, giving them quality time. Because of this, he has been unable to publish in the proceedings of the National Academy of Science, despite the fact that he is a member of the Academy. Those in power made specific rules to keep him from expressing his views, which are considered dangerous to young minds.
People with points of view that conflict with the paradigm find their research papers have been rejected based upon unreasonable logic such as, "lack of readership interest". But, it's really an unfair way of censoring the work without giving it peer review. There is no real peer review when you're challenging the paradigm. There are a lot of underhanded ways of dealing with people who have threatening points of view.
DiCarlo: Well, to read Thomas Kuhn's account of paradigm change is one thing, but to see it actually playing itself out in front of you is something altogether different.
Rubik: The sad thing is that most American scientists have not studied the history or philosophy of science. It's not part of the curriculum. You get a Doctorate in the Philosophy of Science and you've never had a single philosophy of science course! That's very peculiar, isn't it, but that's how most universities are. They simply produce trained technicians, able to conduct experiments that they then analyze using statistics. When I enrolled in a philosophy of science graduate course at the University of California at Berkeley over 20 years ago, I was laughed at by my superiors. They said, "Why are you wasting your time taking these classes?" I was dismissed as a kook.
DiCarlo: Given everything you said, do you think that a lot of the changes that will take place in the scientific community then will come from the outside rather than the inside?
Rubik: Well, Robert Becker is an example of change coming from the outside-in. Twenty years go Becker was doing research on electromagnetic fields and the regeneration of amputated limbs on animals. As a result of his work, which showed profound biological effects from weak electromagnetic fields, he became concerned about the possible health risks associated with people who live next to high voltage power lines. He found it very difficult to get money from the government to study this and the military had silenced a lot of his reports. So he wrote several popular books on the subject that activated and aroused the general public. People began openly expressing their concerns about the increased risk of cancer to their congressmen, and research monies became available soon thereafter. When consumer groups start clamoring and making noise, then change happens. I think that's a good strategy for making a paradigm shift today, whether it's in medicine or in new energy technology. The scientific community is much more conservative and hard to shake. I didn't use to believe this, by the way, but I do now.
DiCarlo: You have acknowledged that some of the ideas of alternative medicine challenge the very foundations of science. What are some of those ideas?
Rubik: For example, issues of the spirit. A human being may or may not be a spiritual believer or have some spiritual life and that could very much play a part in his or her healing response. Even one's belief about death is not taken into account by conventional medicine. Moreover, the realms of spirit are not addressed by science, that's again the 300 year old debate which can be traced back to Galileo. There is still a rift between science and spirit.
Another example is consciousness. The role of the health care provider has been that of the technician administering the techniques for the patient to get well. It would be much more powerful if the consciousness of the practitioner and the patient were aligned in a kind of partnership. In alternative medicines, there is often a much closer relationship between the patient and the practitioner. This may help facilitate the healing response. Conventional science does not pay attention to issues of consciousness because it doesn't believe consciousness can have any active consequences in physical reality, which of course would include physical health and healing.
If we are going to take issues of spirit and consciousness into account in order to study the full efficacy of alternative medicine, then how do we do it using a science in which they have no importance? Furthermore, there is no scientific foundation at all on which to study the nonmaterial realm.
Before we do all of these experiments we need to bring this up front and discuss it. Ethnomedicines that are non-Western have very different assumptions underlying them which do not fit in with Western scientific assumptions. For example, in Chinese medicine, the mind and body is one. There are serious philosophical discrepencies between Western science and these different ethnomedical systems.
Western science is not a universal system of truth testing. It really is bound by its own cultural context, its own system of values and its own hidden assumptions. We need to extend science so that we can accommodate other ethnomedicine systems in their fullness in order to study them. We need to recognize that these are really complete systems on their own, with different assumptions. If we try to test them, we need to give full respect to their depth and their differences.
DiCarlo: I see what you mean. It has always struck me that when Western science studies acupuncture, let's say, we try to explain its effects in terms of neurotransmitters and bodily produced chemicals, which fall within the realm of traditional science-chemistry and biology. In Eastern culture there's a whole different explanation as to why acupuncture might work.
Rubik: That's exactly right . I was asked once to give a lecture to American Academy of Medical Acupuncture on that very topic. In the talk I stated, "Who are we to think that a 300 year old system of thinking is vastly superior to a 4,000 year old way of practicing medicine and thinking about the body? Who are we to have such arrogance?" I don't see one-to-one correspondences between Western science and Chinese philosophy. We find, for example, that when acupuncture needles are inserted to diminish pain, natural pain-killing endorphins which have been produced by the body can be found at the site of the needles, in the spinal cord and even in the brain. But that doesn't mean that all of the effects of acupuncture are explainable in terms of ordinary Western science concepts. Maybe in the long run they will be, but certainly not now. We have no way of explaining why stimulating the crown of the head is helpful in treating hemorrhoids. We have no way of explaining that kind of nonlocal interconnectedness of the body. Western science has no explanation at all, and we shouldn't fool ourselves into believing that we do.
DiCarlo: These Eastern traditions oftentimes speak in terms of fields of energy. Do you think that's a metaphor or do you think there is an element of truth to that?
Rubik: I think there's an element of reality to that. You can experience that if you do some Qi Gong or T'ai Chi exercises. You can easily experience the sensation of energy between your hands. If you move your hands slowly together then apart for about 5 minutes, you will feel a ball of energy between them. It's like bringing two North poles of a magnet together and feeling the resistance. Everybody experiences that, yet the Westerner will say , "Am I imagining this, or is is it really in my body?" And that's a question only a Westerner would ask because in the East they don't distinguish between your mind and your body. Right away, we slip into our Cartesian duality and try to explain it, "Well, it's just a mental thing. It's not real."
But actually, I think there are some parallels between, let's say, the physical fields that we know in physics and acupuncture. One of the things about acupuncture points is that they conduct electricity more than the surrounding tissues. That's how people who are not good at acupuncture find the points. They have what is called a point finder, an electrical device that they move around until they find a place of low resistance or high electrical conductivity, and that's where they insert the needle. There's no way of looking at the body and knowing. Of course, the real master of acupuncture in China can feel the energy and its blocks and knows where to put the needle. They don't have to use a point finder. So it seems that there is some relation between electromagnetic fields and acupuncture but the exact nature of that relationship is not well understood yet.
DiCarlo: Has there been any good scientific work done to demonstrate the existence of the human energy field?
Rubik: I'm intrigued by some work done in Germany. In fact I've gone over there to work with Dr. Fritz-Albert Popp. This involves extremely low level light that the body and all organisms emit which might be called an aura. However, I don't know if it's the same aura that people who are psychic claim to see, because this is a real physically measurable energy. Though it's visible light, it's not something that you can see easily with the naked eye. Popp uses very sensitive detectors that can count the photons, the particles of light coming out of the body. I think that this may be one of the manifestations of the energy dynamics of life. For example, in the Popp laboratory they have demonstrated that the light to a large extent is coherent like a laser. That means that the light probably has a capacity for carrying information, unlike incoherent light. If that's the case, it's probably not some junk radiation, which is the mainstream opinion. I think that the light, if it's coherent, may be involved in both an internal communication system as well as an external one that conveys signals between living things.
It's interesting that in studying the cancer tissues of patients, they have found losses of coherence in the light. Perhaps the light has lost informational value and cannot communicate with the other cells and that's why the tissues grow abnormally.