About the Author

James DeMeo, PhD, formally studied the Earth, Atmospheric, and Environmental Sciences at Florida International University and later at the University of Kansas, where he earned his PhD in 1986. At KU, he openly undertook the first graduate-level natural scientific research specifically focused upon Wilhelm Reich's controversial discoveries, subjecting those ideas to rigorous testing, with positive verification of the original findings. DeMeo subsequently undertook field research in the arid American Southwest, Egypt, Israel, sub-Saharan Eritrea, and Namibia, Africa. His work on the Saharasia question constituted the most ambitious global cross-cultural research study to date, on the subjects of human behavior, family and sexual life around the world. His published works include dozens of articles and compendiums, and several books, including Saharasia, The Orgone Accumulator Handbook, and In Defense of Wilhelm Reich. He was editor of On Wilhelm Reich and Orgonomy and Heretics' Notebook, and of the journal Pulse of the Planet, and co-editor for the German-language compendium Nach Reich: Neue Forschung zur Orgonomie. DeMeo served on the faculty of Geography at the University of Kansas, Illinois State University, University of Miami and University of Northern Iowa. In 1978, he founded the Orgone Biophysical Research Lab (OBRL), where he continues as Director. In 1994 the OBRL Greenspring Center was established, a high-altitude research facility in the Siskiyou Mountains near to Ashland, Oregon, exhibiting optimal conditions for sensitive orgone energy experiments. At the new OBRL facility, he continues with experimental work and writing, and hosts the occasional seminar. Eva Reich, MD, worked with her father Wilhelm Reich MD, over many years in treatments of patients with the orgone energy accumulator, and participated in many of his experimental efforts in the USA. After his death, she travelled the world lecturing about her father's discoveries, and promoting her own methods of natural baby massage, or "Butterfly touch" as she called it. She and author DeMeo met at a Conference on Wilhelm Reich in Berlin, with a shared interest in the orgone energy accumulator.