Observations placeholder

FARRELLY:  …I was introduced to Arthur Middleton Young, inventor of the Bell helicopter, who was running his Foundation for the Study of Consciousness in New York City.  I went to work for him for what I thought would be one summer and stayed over five years.  Arthur was interested in radionics but felt strongly that the results obtained with this art were a function of consciousness, that they came not from the machines themselves but from the operators.

    I had to admit that I had been successful in diagnosis even when blood samples of patients had been inadvertently left out of the instruments.  Also, I had noted that, when certain devices which usually operated on AC current were surreptitiously unplugged, the operator could still go on making successful diagnoses, even though the radio tubes and other components were not electrically activated.

CBird:  What kind of research was conducted at the foundation?

FARRELLY:  We began with experiments on plants and animals, especially with the effects of insecticides.  We sprayed fruits and vegetables with DDT and then treated them radionically to try to remove the effects of the poison.  Analytic tests run at the Laboratory of Industrial Hygiene in New York City indicated that the treated samples showed less insecticide than those untreated.

    We also wanted to see if we could counteract the effects of arsenic poisoning in mice.  We fed them nothing but a standard commercial mouse poison but none of them showed any effects from it.  Young talked to a professional vermin exterminator who maintained that the poison should have been lethal.  He gave us another poison "strong enough to kill a horse."  We gave the mice this stronger dose but, again, none of them would die.

CBird:   How did you explain this?

FARRELLY:  Arthur Young's deduction was that since I had not intended to kill the animals in the first place, the strength of my intent overrode the strength of the poison.