> Before that he was a scientific genius, and then, almost from that moment, he seems to descend into madness

I'm not sure. With Reich, everyone picks the point at which they get off the train—almost no one is willing to ride all the way to the end with him. But people pick different points at which to bail.

For some it is when he broke with Freud around the libido theory (no one cares about that any more but it was a big deal at the time). For some it is when he went into radical politics. For some it is his advocacy for adolescent sexuality—there his views (though still radical) no longer seem nearly as extreme as they used to—but it is society that changed, not Reich. For a long time that was by far the biggest black mark against him in public.

For some, it is when he broke the taboo against touch in psychotherapy. That one's hard to appreciate now because in retrospect, it was a breakthrough, leading to all the somatic therapies that came later, including the trauma work that is currently fashionable.

For most people nowadays, the breaking point with Reich is when he claims to discover orgone energy—that's what splits him off from the current mainstream. In this view, Reich is a genius when he invents body-oriented psychotherapy and analyzes the psychology of fascism, but goes mad when he starts doing laboratory science and making grandiose claims in biology and physics.

Then there are some who stick with Reich through that, but when he starts manipulating weather with his cloudbuster (dramatized by Kate Bush! [1]), that's too much—that's when he becomes a nut. A few stick with him even past that, but when he starts going on about UFOs, they're out. There are even a few diehards who can handle Reich all the way through the UFOs but feel like he loses it when defending himself at trial. It's like a customer retention funnel!

My point is that "He was ok up to $X but went crazy at $Y" has always been the template of responses to Reich. How we fill in $X and $Y probably says more about us than it does about him. I hadn't heard the radiation theory before, though—that's an interesting one.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pllRW9wETzw - with Donald Sutherland playing Reich!