Charles Richet

Charles Robert Richet (1850–1935) was a French physiologist at the Collège de France and a pioneer of immunology who won the 1913 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work on anaphylaxis. A scientist of the first rank, he devoted decades of parallel effort to the careful study of psychic phenomena, a field he named metapsychics (“métapsychique”).

In 1894 he coined the term ectoplasm for the substance mediums purportedly exuded, and his major synthesis, the Traité de métapsychique (1922), appeared in English as Thirty Years of Psychical Research (1923).

Richet matters to the mind-power lineage precisely because of his hard-headed ambivalence. He concluded, after exhaustive experiment, that certain anomalous phenomena—telepathy, clairvoyance, premonition, and physical mediumship—were real and demanded scientific explanation; yet, materialist by training, he rejected the spiritualist interpretation and explicitly did not accept survival of the personality after death.

He saw ectoplasm as a biological projection of the medium, not evidence of spirits. He thus represents the rigorous-researcher pole of the survival debate: a Nobel laureate willing to grant that consciousness reaches beyond the ordinary sensory channels, while refusing the further inference his spiritualist contemporaries drew.

That combination—psi accepted, survival withheld—makes him a crucial, sceptical anchor for the parapsychology-survival cluster. (Tradition tagged quantum consciousness as the closest controlled fit for a consciousness-beyond-the-senses researcher; his temperament was strongly sceptical.)