The introduction of a book, The Lectures of Dr. Royal
Lee, Volume I compiled and edited by Mark Anderson
The Lee Philosophy:
Those who have studied the life's work of Dr. Royal Lee cannot help becoming
infected with his passion that integrated science, history, physiology,
agriculture, engineering, invention, biochemical manufacturing, politics,
education, business, and philosophy. Dr. Lee's unswerving pursuit of the truth
led inexorably into and through these avenues of knowledge. It seems much more
than a single lifetime could encompass. Amassing one of the most extensive
personal libraries in history, no field was off limits to Dr. Lee's thirst for
knowledge, which could only be slaked by pursuing a wide and wholistic
perspective. His practical solution-oriented approach to humanity's problems
gained him over seventy patents granted by the U.S. Patent office. There was
probably no field in industry - from automotive to military, food and
agriculture, and later the U.S. space program- that did not rely on some
invention by Royal Lee. Whether it was the mechanism that synchronized the
sound and picture in movie projectors, making 'talkies' possible; motor
governors that revolutionized the production of all types of precision motors
from industry to home; the key compensation tracking motor of the famed Norden
Bombsight, credited with giving America a decisive advantage in WWII;
cardiographic recording devices, or home and commercial stone-grinding electric
flour mills to preserve the germ and bran of fresh grains, Lee Engineering
badges could be found inside almost any device of advanced technology.
An interesting footnote to his long list of inventions was based on his
experience serving in the First World War. He freely gave the War Department
his invention of a vastly superior prototype field rifle that used hydrogen gas
instead of gunpowder. It had significant advantages because hydrogen, the most
abundant substance in the universe, was not subject to many problems associated
with gunpowder, which Lee considered a primitive way to hurtle a small
projectile with speed and accuracy. In army tests, it functioned
perfectly. Although his invention would have made defending freedom much
quieter, the Generals were not ready for such a drastic change in 1918. This
should have alerted Royal Lee that superiority of a method is no assurance of
its general acceptance.
The endocrine system had been his particular fascination since high school. He
began compiling a biochemistry notebook at age twelve. Though most of the
glands were hardly understood at the time, and most hormones not yet discovered
(nor were any vitamins), he believed that this system was the Master Control
Mechanism of the body and that nutritional complexes were the keys to the
ductless glands of internal secretion. In 1916, at age 21, he began developing
nutritional-complex formulas designed to promote endocrine function. He studied
all he could about animal feeding research and the work of the early
endocrinologists, particularly in the field called organotherapy. He named his
first design Catalyn, though it would be some years before he invented the
technology to manufacture it.
While at Marquette University Dental College in Milwaukee, he recoiled at the
primitive state of dental equipment and applied his engineering skills to
designing the best in the world. He deduced that sudden variations in the
drill bit speed as it struck and drilled the tooth was, in large measure,
responsible for the nerve pain it caused This led him to invent the governor
motor, which could keep the drill bit speed constant, even when drilling through
teeth. He later sold his dental equipment patents and business to a large
dental supply house in Chicago, who proceeded to "bury" his inventions. He
should have remembered his 1918 experience with the army Brass and his Lee
Rifle, when he shocked his professors at Marquette during his 1923 graduation
speech to the faculty and student body. It was entitled, The Systemic Causes
of Dental Caries". It was a bombshell hitting dental dogma. Based on
documented and available evidence, Lee Pointed to the inevitable conclusion that
teeth rotted because of the internal state of the body, which which was
controlled by its nutritional status and consequent endocrine health. He
carefully referenced his hypothesis. This radical thinking must have caused an
auditorium-sized case of TMJ disorder as jaws dropped and eyebrows raised
throughout the room. When later called upon by professors to further defend his
thesis, Lee presented the very information that was 'hidden' in dental textbooks
provided by Marquette Dental College to prove his points. The professors were
not aware of all that was in these textbooks. Before the first lecture in this
volume was delivered (to dentists) Lee would have his final proof. His friend
and dental colleague, Dr Weston A. Price, embarked on an epic round-the-world
expedition to photograph and extensively document the effects of the devitalized
"foods of commerce" (processed, packaged foods) on the health, heredity, and
mortality of indigenous people throughout the planet. Price's landmark
masterpiece published in 1938 was properly entitled, "Nutrition and Physical
Degeneration". That this treatise is not part of the corpus curricula in all
schools of the healing arts reveals a foundational gap in theory.
By the height of the Great Depression, Lee's engineering royalties earned him
enormous wealth. Being a man of simple tastes, he poured resources from his Lee
Engineering Company into his first love: human and animal nutrition. Medical
researchers were spending public millions searching for the causes of disease
while Dr. Lee spent his own money researching and discovering the causes of
health. He founded the Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research, the Vitamin
Products Company (1929), and Standard Process Laboratories. He received $1 per
year from each throughout his life. In the early 1930's, he purchased large
farms in the fertile glacial moraines of Wisconsin, where he had grown up on a
farm. On these organically maintained farms he built a laboratory, and custom
designed unique equipment to concentrate and preserve the full nutrient complex
from all manner of botanicals. Based on exhaustive research, which included
having foreign science journals translated into English, he designed hundreds of
nutritional formulas and invented the Cold Processing method to capture and
protect the botanical-nutrient-complexes of the foods he grew. From his studies
of physics, he applied the axiom of holism the "the whole is greater than the
sum of its parts." He eschewed the Cartesian model of breaking down the whole
into fragmented parts. Common sense, the rarest of all senses, informed him
that the whole was a functioning mechanism that had characteristics well beyond
the chemical components. After all, why does H2O not burn though its
composition is only two highly combustible elements? The whole expresses
characteristics antithetical to the parts. To make this point to his
chemically-minded critics, he often posed the question: "What part of a watch
keeps time?" No part does. Only the complete set of the synergistically
combined parts will yield the function that transcends any of the parts. He
understood the nature of food to be a biological living whole, capable of
absorbing the energy of teh sun, something that only living plants can
accomplish, and that no single part of the plant can. Humans and animals must
obtain the sun's life-giving energy through the whole plant, and thus obtain
vital new compounds through the transformation that occurs in the body under the
influence of the endocrine system. Biology, he taught, differs greatly from
chemistry when considering the whole. Lee spent an adult lifetime mocking the
attempts of chemists to make a functioning mechanism or create living action out
of synthetic chemicals, when only whole food could provide the life force. The
vitamin principle is one of life force. Chemical drugs like chemical 'vitamins'
are the opposite side of that principle. Royal Lee said this bes when he
described the consequences of the non-application of this life principle during
a lecture in January 12, 1951:
"One of the biggest tragedies of human civilization is the precedents of
chemical therapy over nutrition. It's a substitution of
artificial therapy over natural, of poisons over food, in which we are
feeding people poisons in trying to correct the reactions of starvation."
Reading Dr. Lee's manuscripts and especially perusing his massive library, it
emerges that he had three great heroes whose lives inspired his own, and whose
traits mightily shaped his character. They were Galileo Galilei, Benjamin
Franklin and Dr. Harvey W. Wiley. For those of you who do not know of Dr.
Wiley, you soon will as you read the following lectures. Royal Lee had
Galileo's sense of exploration and his willingness to follow the scientific
truth wherever it led and to accept the truth even when it led to facts that
stood in contradistinction to what the most esteemed contemporaries
professed. The desire for acceptance and popularity among peers is perhaps the
most dangerous fault to which a scientist can fall prey. Galileo suffered
persecution, humiliation , and imprisonment at the hands of the Vatican and the
Inquisition for defending his discoveries. In Lee's case the commercial
interests, whose security was disrupted by his discoveries and the advancement
of his theories, relentlessly pursued Lee. At their behest, government agencies
were assigned to destroy him by any means; their specialty was character
assassination at the hands of bought experts, and perpetual legal
prosecutions. But he never gave in, not even close. Lee hated lies and he
hated feigned expertise. Hi love of liberty and the true spirit of America were
holy to him. Totalitarianism, in all forms, government, scientific, and
commercial, were often the target of his writings. He loved the very idea of
America, where truth could be told and human progress made real. That, no doubt,
is why he loved Benjamin Franklin. He had Franklin's inventiveness and keen
common sense, which helped him navigate the treacherous waters of a society
built upon the commercial entrenchment of false scientific models. In
Franklin's spirit, Lee felt that inherent rightness could overcome the inertia
of entrapped ideas and entrenched models. But any who knew Lee will tell you
that he also had the spit and vinegar and dogged single-eyed vision of Dr. Wiley
who, after decades of struggle through the end of the 19th Century, brought
America its first Pure Food and Drug Law in 1906. And Wiley was determined to
enforce it by driving adulterated counterfeit foods and drugs out of this
country. But when he went after the interstate commerce of white bleached
flour, Coca-Cola, and sickening chemicals of all kinds that were added to foods
(to help the manufacturer and grocer) he found that commercial interests tightly
controlled the politicians. In 1912 he was fired. The American people loved
Dr. Wiley, but that was not enough for President Taft (who lost re-election that
year). Wiley's 1930 self-published book (Macmillan "lost" the original and
only manuscript), "The History of a Crime Against the Food and Drug Law" (see
page 141), was a handbook for Dr. Lee to prove his case that the health and
welfare of the American people had been, as he put it, "...sold down the river
by government and medical authorities to the purveyors of cheap
counterfeits." (Read "Recent Conclusions in Malnutrition p.12, and the
attachments, as an example). He loathed seeing a hundred million of his
countrymen being used as a 10th Century colony of guinea pigs fed devitalized
foods, and responding to the damage with drugs. In a 1957 preface to Dr.
Harrower's 1932 classic, "Practical Endocrinology", Lee wrote "...illnesses of a
people who are trying out the mass experiment of starving their endocrine glands
by the use of foods depleted of essential minerals and vitamins through
processing, refining and the progressive depletion of soils." No doubt, Dr.
Lee's personal heroes would think well of their protege. The reader will
readily observe in these lectures that Lee's courageous character reflects his
mentors.
Royal Lee gave many hundreds of lectures to audiences throughout the U.S. Most
often these were to groups of doctors, from every branch of the healing
arts. Before the fashionableness of the term "holistic", Dr. Lee reached across
multidisciplinary lines, believing as such, that nutritional therapeutics must
be at the foundation of any healing discipline. But as you will read in the
following lectures, with his knowledge of sustainable agriculture and the
irreplaceable value of topsoil, he lectured at farming conferences. He spoke to
lay groups and church groups. Some of those lectures are herewith
included. The Lee Foundation offered many hundreds of reprints, books and
booklets, transcribed lectures, and articles. The reprints and articles were
bound into three separate portfolios specifically relevant for 1) the doctor 2)
the homemaker and 3) the farmer and agriculturist. This incredibly
informative corpus of knowledge was sold at less than the cost of printing to
anyone who contacted The Foundation. These portfolios enlightened tens of
thousands around the nation. The average price of a booklet or reprint was one
to five cents. This was the beginning and spearhead of the natural healing
movement in the U.S. For over 30 years, doctors received the latest word in
nutritional therapeutics contained monthly in Vitamin News. As the
editor and chief writer, Lee gave the naturalist physician real tools with which
to counter the symptoms of starvation.
The Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research no longer exists. Following Dr.
Lee's death in 1967, (when, we are told by a prominent attorney, cheers went up
in a certain government building in Washington) The Foundation survived under
his wife Evelyn, eventually closing in the mid 1980's. It had accomplished much
in awakening those who were alert enough to understand its message and inspired
the work of a generation of doctors. Mrs. Lee, his dearest companion since the
early 1920's, bravely took over and ran his enterprises until retiring in her
early 90's. She passed away at age 105. The closing of The Foundation will no
doubt be frustrating to the reader of these lectures because in the are hundreds
of reference materials noted as being available. However, for research
scholars, the stately Lee Memorial Library at Standard Process in Palmyra,
Wisconsin, houses originals and copies.
Dr. Lee emoted a personal and humble charm and a dry wit that grows out of
someone close to the land. As you will read in The Bostonian magazine
article from 1943 entitled "The Amazing Royal Lee" (page 26), "You probably
wouldn't notice him walking down the street, nor pay any particular attention to
his voice, if you heard it. His looks, like his voice are plain. That
simplicity is infectious, however."
It was often said by many doctors that Royal Lee was consistently forty years
ahead of his time. About many things, yes. But the record shows that he was
well over fifty yeas ahead of his time in many areas of human physiology,
immunity, genetics, and biochemistry. Very early on, in the mid-1930's and
more focused in the 1940's, he first described the phenomenon of autoimmune
disease, for which a medical term did not even exist. He was convinced that one
of the inevitable degenerative reactions to starvation was in immune response
that caused antibodies to form against the host's own (degenerating)
tissues. His correspondence shows that by 1946 he was writing letters to
physicians to warn them that natural tissue antibodies (autoantibodies)
formed against the joints of patients with rheumatoid arthritis as well as to
other organs in different diseases. At that time, rheumatoid arthritis was
considered by the medical establishment to be a bacterial disease. In the
1970's is was known to be caused by a virus. In the 1980's it was known to be
caused by genetics. Finally in the last few years it has been recognized to be
and officially classified as an autoimmune disease. To arrest this process of
degeneration, Lee developed the protomorphogen. He had clues from an earlier
generation of endocrinologists who practiced organotherapy, particularly Henry
Harrower, M.D. He advanced their work by developing a patented method for
extracting the cell's protein nucleus from animal organs. These were not mere
organ desiccates. The DNA/RNA complexes were naturally found in this
nucleoprotein extract. Although DNA had not yet been discovered, though the
nucleus' control over growth and repair was known, Lee instinctively named this
nucleoprotein-concentrate a protomorphogen, or cytotrophic extract (proto
meaning primary and morphogen meaning structure or form). In 1947 he published
his book, "Protomorphology: The Principles of Cell Autoregulation". Lees
protomorphogens eweree only part of his strategy to correct the autoimmune
process. Nutritional therapeutics were to be provided simultaneously. He
taught that all degenerative disease, at some point in the downward spiral,
developed an autoimmune process. The latest biochemical research (over fifty
years later) is discovering that he was absolutely 100% correct. In 1947, JAMA
(Journal of the American Medical Association) reviewed and roundly criticized
this book.
Here again, he followed his research, he believed what his research revealed,
and developed a strategy to correct the problems that the research
uncovered. He did not await government money, or bureaucratic institutes, or
for the 'consensus of medical opinion' to form. He researched, discovered, and
solved. In his 1972 book, "A New Breed of Doctor", orthodox-turned-naturalist
medical physician Alan Nittler described Lee as "...the best informed person on
nutrition in America and perhaps even the world." And today, the constant
media headlines of current breakthroughs in nutritional science with regard to
our most common and dreaded diseases and birth defects seem like ancient TV
reruns to people who had learned the exact same facts and much more, forty or
fifty years earlier from the Lee Foundation. Silently, we reply to the news,
"You are just figuring this out?"
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