Anthony Holland: Musician or Mad Scientist
By JUDITH WHITE
For Spirit of Saratoga

He’s a music professor who thinks outside the box and recognizes few limits to possibility.

He’s also a respected composer who has used his limited spare time – and income -- to study advanced scientific and laboratory techniques.

And he’s the popular conductor of the Skidmore Orchestra, the choirmaster at Bethesda Episcopal Church and is impatiently waiting to continue testing the effectiveness of using a novel technique to kill live cancer cells, using the extrapolated equivalent of a silent musical chord.

Professor Anthony Holland has a lifelong habit of following his intellectual curiosity wherever it leads him, including early study of electronic music, and the exploration of improbable physics applications. For the past few years, that has meant looking into the possibilities of a device invented in the 1930s by the late scientist Royal Rife.

"He built two things," Holland explains about Rife: "A microscope that exceeded all others until about 10 years ago, through which he photographed a living virus. Those can be seen today by electron microscopes, but those kill the virus, and then you can’t experiment to see how the virus reacts to outside stimulation."

Holland learned that Rife also built a frequency device based on electrical waves passing through a gas. That device caught Holland’s attention. Ahead of his time (and rumored to have been working for naval intelligence), Rife found he could impose wave frequencies onto electrical fields, and he filmed them shattering cells.

The groundbreaking scientist found the specific frequencies required to destroy some 40 microorganisms, including some cancers.
Fast forward to the 21st century. Holland learned that Rife had never patented his unique frequency device, but that another inventor had done so nearly a half century later.

Holland located the inventor with the patent, Dr. James Bare of Albuquerque, and with his help was able to assemble what Bare calls his "frequency therapy device" in his own home in Saratoga Springs.
"I just thought that if it was the real deal, it was important," Holland says of his interest in the device.
Working at a first-class college such as Skidmore permitted Holland to learn scientific techniques to support his fascination with the possibility of zapping cancerous cells.

Skidmore Biology Professor David Domozych took Holland into his microscopy lab and taught him how to use the microscopes and helped him understand microorganisms.
"After that, I went into the lab with the frequency device nearly every night, and I experimented with finding the frequency that would destroy an organism," Holland explains now.
There came a day that the music professor thought about using more than a single frequency in his experiment, and he used a mathematic multiple "similar to harmonics in music."
He got to the 11th harmonic of the basic wave frequency, and the organism he was working with shattered.
"I had found a frequency combination that solved the problem," Holland says. "Adding the 11th harmonic was powerful I kept trying, and I kept blowing up those cells: 50 or 60 times: a specific frequency for a specific cell or organism.
"They just kept disintegrating," he says.

What the music professor had done was to make a "chord" of sound frequency harmonics, adding the power of one frequency to the next natural progression, until the microorganism succumbed.
In music, higher level harmonic frequencies cannot really be heard. In his physics application through the frequency therapy device, Holland found that the cumulative higher harmonics have a nearly magical capability to destroy specifically targeted material.

Holland believes Rife had found similar results nearly 80 years ago, and that some of his experiments have been replicated, with documentation, in Europe and the Far East.

In 2008, Holland was invited as a scientist to give a poster session of his research at the national convention of The Bioelectromagnetics Society.

"I had no idea what a science poster involved," Holland confesses. Another Skidmore biology professor, Bernie Possidente, taught him how to prepare and design his material for presentation.
And then the next chapter in this story evolved, right on time, as if meant to be: A Skidmore alum who had been a percussionist in Holland’s orchestra 20 years before arrived for a visit.

He is Jonathan Brody, director of surgical research at Philadelphia’s Thomas Jefferson University Medical College, and his lab’s specialty is finding novel therapeutic strategies for pancreatic cancer patients. He recently won the national PanCAN-AACR Career Development award and an American Cancer Society, Research Scholar Grant for his work on HuR's role in pancreatic cancer.

Brody visited with his former music director at Skidmore and learned of Holland’s interest in using specific frequencies to kill cancer cells. Impressed with the possibilities, Brody invited Holland to use his lab and equipment at Jefferson to test Holland’s theory.

Armed with a small travel grant from Skidmore’s faculty development committee and with several cases of his own equipment, Holland took a sabbatical from Skidmore for the spring semester a year ago, trading his conductor’s podium and classroom for 12-hour nights in the medical lab at Jefferson, experimenting with "zapping" live cancer cells. During the day, when the lab was in use by the professionals, Holland slept in the medical students’ dormitory.

"This, for me, was the Holy Grail," Holland remarks now about his unique research opportunity. "It was ‘mad scientist at midnight’ work with cancer cells."

The patent-holder of the frequency therapy device redesigned his device to better suit Holland’s work, and he found the doctors and chairman of the department at Jefferson, enormously supportive.
"I gave a talk there, and the room was packed," he recalls. "After my talk, one of the doctors approached me. He said he had lung cancer and volunteered himself to test the device."

That level of research is still a long way in the future, but Holland said he is hoping to receive permission to work with live cancer cells at Skidmore, first to reproduce data that was compromised when damage was found to some of the electronic frequency devices.

"The power level was found to be just a third of what it should have been. They’ve now been refurbished, and I’m waiting for their return, and for permission to work with the live cancer cells, which are considered harmless: a bio-safety Level 1 organism."

Holland had been working at Jefferson with pancreatic cancer cells, with and without chemo, and with leukemia cells, and an aggressive form of ovarian cancer. He has video footage and more than 15,000 time-lapse exposures of the results of his work.

"Brody had me drafting a collaborative paper about our research, and that’s on hold now until we can repeat our results at the correct power levels," he explains.
"Then we’ll publish."
After that, it’s probable the device would be tested on mice, and then permission would be needed to try it on humans.

In the meantime, a colleague has invited Holland to come to her lab to investigate the frequency required to kill Lyme Disease-causing bacteria, and a physicist has developed a mathematical formula based on DNA, to help find the frequency that will work on a particular organism.
"It’s called a resonant destructive frequency," Holland reports, obviously fascinated. "The math behind it is mind-boggling, but we are closing in on a new scientific paradigm."