Rules to Follow 
In Basic Research
  1. Your microscope should be as good as the car you dream of possessing.
  2. When you start looking into a microscope or doing some experiment, you are asking nature certain questions; therefore look and listen to only what nature has to tell you, aud not to what the head of your bacteriological department expects you to see. Forget for a while what you have learned in school. It may be wrong. After having carefully looked and listened, then compare what you have seen and what you have learned.
  3. Don't try to be smart and clever.  Be humble.
  4. Do not try being a scientific worker when you are afraid of what your neighbor might say to what you have seen. Forget your neighbor for a while.
  5. Do not try to "control" experiments. Understand them first. Then perform them faithfully according to their exact description. Never alter all experimental setup before having understood it and having become capable of handling it well. Later on any change will be fruitful, but not at the start.
  6. Trust your senses fully if you are sure of yourself. But control the results of your sense impressions by devices which are independent of your senses. First rely on your feeling of heat at the orgone accumulator's inner walls. Then use a thermometer to confirm the feeling.
  7. Never try to develop ideas about something you have never seen.
  8. Judge any thing or process from the standpoint of its own existence and functions. Never try to judge an airplane by what you know about a pressure cooker. And don't forget: A steam locomotive is much more than a wheelbarrow! You won't believe it, but it is true that some "authorities'' try to judge an alive earth bion from what they know about a gram-stained staphylococcus, or to judge the cosmic energy from what they know about "static," instead of the other way around.
  9. If you learn of a new basic function in nature, be ready to revise your well set ideas.
  10. Do not try to hide your mistakes, speak about them frankly, and be proud of knowing your mistakes. Do hot try to be perfect. Your mistakes are your most reliable signposts on your road.
  11. In research it is of paramount importance to kuow exactly what you do not know.
  12. An authority is the one who knows what he is dealing with and hot the one who has never learned what lie thinks he already knows. A bacteriologist is no authority oil bions unless lie has diligently studied bious, and a cancer researcher is not an authority on orgonomic cancer research beyond his own field un less he has diligently learned to see the development of protozoa from disintegrating tissues, T-Bacilli, etc.
          - Wilhelm Reich

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