"Dr. Mary's Monkey"

[Ed Jewett]

... the contamination of polio vaccine with SV-40 has been known since 1960. Here's a mainstream scientific account. Full version in the Journal of Clinical Oncology here:

Well, my wife and I asked our primary school librarians to get us a copy of that journal when that article was published, but they couldn't find one. In the intervening years, of course, secondary school, college, family, employment and raising two kids to adulthood took precedence. My wife could now, as director of medical policy for a major health insuror, find a copy or ask her staff to hunt it down.

But I think I'll refrain from forwarding the link to her. :nurse:

Ed - for me the importance of that Journal of Clinical Oncology article does not lie so much in its conclusions about the role of SV40 in cancer, but in the mainstream scientific chronology that it establishes for awareness of the contamination of polio vaccine with SV40.

The article establishes that SV40 contamination was known by 1960. It does this by citing published clinical literature such as:

Sweet BH, Hilleman MR: The vacuolating virus, SV 40. Proc Soc Exp Biol Med 105:420-427, 1960

Thus, it is possible that Dr Sherman knew of the SV40 issue at the time of the supposed Ferrie/Sherman/Oswald/Baker exchanges.

However, since I've personally destroyed peer-reviewed articles published in major clinical journals (eg The Lancet), and since I have not been able to study in detail all the relevant scientific literature around mutagenicity, and the credibllity of the design of epidemiological studies, etc etc etc, I merely note the article's conclusion that "there is inadequate evidence at this time to suggest widespread SV40 infection in the population or increased tumor incidence among those individuals who received contaminated vaccine".

The language is most important. In particular the use of the phrase "inadequate evidence" which can be translated as noone really knows.

Jan, we are likely talking to some degree at cross-purposes or non-parallel interests. Of course there was inadequate evidence in 1960 because the polio vaccine wasn't begun to be administered until about 1955 or so. If you are suggesting that I am holding the medical establishment such as the NIH or the American Cancer Society responsible for my wife's recurrent cancer, you are wrong. (Since "Wild Bill" Donovan was active in there somewhere, I guess we can regard it as plausibly deniable, or at least suggest that there are a lot of victims who qualify as inadvertent collateral damage.) I have, in front of me, already transcribed, the eleven pages or so (from the Jim Marrs' book The Rise of the Fourth Reich) on modern medicine since World War II and the role of the Rockefellers even before WWII, the case of aspartame and Searle CEO Donald Rumsfeld, Marcia Angell's work on Big Pharma [The Truth about the Drug Companies: how they deceive us and what to do about it, http://www.amazon.com/Truth-About-Drug-C...0375508465 ], etc.

It seems to me that, even if Dr. Mary knew of the noted clinical and scientific articles, she had already signed on to what is accurately described as "covert medical research", thus furthering her own career, in which she utilized talent which was knowingly operating covertly or in a clandestine manner. [It was a Faustian bargain, neh? She quite obviously got burned on the deal.] As has been pointed out in many places, the media didn't summon up the cojones to follow any leads or ask any questions so the fact that there was an article in 1960 noting awareness of the contaminated polio vaccine seems to have dropped by the wayside.

I appreciate that you and perhaps others are fixated on the deeper and far more subtle issues of the JFK conspiracy and deep politics and every nuance of dialogue, good or bad, comes into play as you evaluate the controversies inherent in such things as the book "Me and Lee". I'll draw a bye on those debates and watch from the cheap seats in the waiting rooms of chemotherapy and radiation labs where nurses tell me about books like The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot, the story of "a poor African American migrant from the tobacco farms of Virginia, who died from a cruelly aggressive cancer at the age of 30 in 1951. A sample of her cancerous tissue, taken without her knowledge or consent, as was the custom then, turned out to provide one of the holy grails of mid-century biology: human cells that could survive--even thrive--in the lab. Known as HeLa cells, their stunning potency gave scientists a building block for countless breakthroughs, beginning with the cure for polio....." , and I tell her about books like Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez and On Becoming an Artist: Reinventing Yourself Through Mindful Creativity by Ellen J. Langer.

And please don't misunderstand that this is some kind of ploy for sympathy, empathy, or expressions of something-or-other. Everyone gets to play the cards that are dealt them; some people have the luck or grace to play Solitaire (or Hearts) from a deck they have learned to shuffle while remaining grounded, relaxed, aware, centered and energized, and others have to play the cards dealt them by a State overrun by "sinister forces".