L. Ron Hubbard:
Founder of Dianetics and Scientology

Returning to the United States in 1933, Mr. Hubbard embarked upon the literary career for which he was best known through the next two decades. His primary outlets were those now-fabled pulp fiction magazines that helped launch the likes of Raymond Chandler, Edgar Rice Burroughs and Dashiell Hammett. Although primarily celebrated for his adventure stories, much of them drawn, incidentally, from actual travels, Mr. Hubbard was nothing if not versatile. Indeed, his work through the 1930s and 1940s spanned all genres: western, aviation, mystery, high seas adventure, fantasy and science fiction. All told, his output between 1934 and 1950 included more than 2006novels, stories and screenplays.

Although science fiction comprised only 17 percent of his published works, he is rightly credited with helping to reshape that genre, along with such greats as Isaac Asimov, L. Sprague DeCamp, Robert Heinlein and John W. Campbell, Jr.

Lest the point be missed, however, Mr. Hubbard's literary career was actually but a means to another end: his continuing research into what he now spoke of in terms of the “common denominator of life.”

Along that track, the late 1930s saw much laboratory experimentation concerning cellular memory retention and memory transmission to later generations. Mr. Hubbard's conclusion (eventually to be reconfirmed through similar experimentation at the French Institute of Health and Medical Research) held that some unknown factor was capable of recording and transmitting the memory of a single event from one cellular generation to the next.

In 1938, the first summary of these and other findings appeared in his unpublished manuscript, “Excalibur.” In brief, that work proposed that the dynamic thrust of all life is the urge to survive. That life was so directed was, of course, not a new idea. But that life was only surviving, and that all else may be seen in terms of this common denominator, had never before been so stated.

Thereafter, Mr. Hubbard's research continued along two broad veins: to further confirm his theories on survival as life's single dynamic thrust, and to determine what internal mechanism within the human mind tended to inhibit that thrust. This research consumed the better part of 1940 and 1941. Given the extent of his ethnological work, 1940 also marked the year he became a member of the famed Explorers Club and the year he received the first of two Master Mariner licenses.

With the outbreak of World War II, Mr. Hubbard was commissioned a lieutenant (junior grade) in the United States Navy. He saw service in the South Pacific and Atlantic. By 1945, he had received 29 medals and palms, and had seen action in five theatres. He was also, by this point, adjudged partially blind from injured optic nerves and lame from hip and back injuries. He was thus admitted to Oak Knoll Naval Hospital in San Francisco for treatment.

It was at Oak Knoll that Mr. Hubbard began his first concerted test of therapeutic techniques he had developed. His subjects were drawn from former prisoners of Japanese internment camps, and particularly those with a mysterious inability to assimilate protein in spite of hormone treatments. Utilizing an early version of Dianetics, Mr. Hubbard proceeded to determine if there were not some sort of “mental block” inhibiting normal recovery. What he found was precisely that. Thought did indeed regulate endocrinological function and not, as then commonly held, the reverse. Utilizing these same techniques, Mr. Hubbard was eventually able to fully restore his own health.