"Dr. Mary's Monkey"

[Adele Edisen]

Chapter 15 of Me and Lee [page 280-281] recounts the meeting on Saturday, May 11, 1963 between Dr. Mary Sherman, the author Judith Vary Baker, Lee Harvey Oswald, and David Ferrie. [In reverse order, the four players in this vignette are: the wandering bishop noted in Peter Levenda's "Sinister Forces"; the alleged "lone nut" patsied by the security state he worked for and killed on live television by Jacob Rubenstein, better known as Jack "Sparky" Ruby; the author (a youthful savant in cancer research); and an expert on bone tumors whose own strange un-investigated murder was the focus of a cover-up.

After the meetings and greetings, the finger sandwiches and fruit compote, "Dave said, "Listen to this... Dr. Heath tells new technique. Electrical impulses sent deep into brain… (a patient)… had tiny wires implanted into precise spots in his brain. The wires were attached to a self-stimulator box, which was equipped at a push of a button to deliver a tiny, electrical impulse to the brain…" Dave paused to let what he was reading sink in. "I wonder how many brains Heath went through before he had success with these two? How long did it take to find those "precise spots" in their brains with his hot little wires?"

"Dr. Ochsner would never do such a thing," Dr. Mary said, pouring me some tea.

"It sounds like science fiction," Dave said. "Who knows what kind of mind control could be exerted over brain, 20 or 30 years from now?" [But see "Controlling the Human Mind - The Technologies of Political Control or Tools for Peak Performance" by Nick Begich, Jr., the son of the Congressman killed with Hale Boggs, the most vocal critic among the Warren Commission members, in an Alaskan plane crash.]

"I doubt John Q. Public will ever have a clue," Dr. Mary replied. "They certainly have no idea they were getting cancer-causing monkey viruses in their polio vaccines," she added bitterly. Seeing my expression of shock, Dr. Mary went on to explain that she and a few others had privately protested the marketing of the SV 40-contaminated polio vaccine, but to no avail. The government continued to allow the distribution of millions of doses of the contaminated vaccine in America and abroad.

She said she was told that the new batches of the vaccine would be free of the cancerous virus, but privately she doubted it, noting that the huge stockpile of vaccines she knew were contaminated had not been recalled. To recall them would damage the public's public's confidence, she explained....."

The essentials of my concern about this account are as follows:

i) Robert G Heath was a genuine "doctor" performing electronic stimulation of brains in his department at Tulane. Heath was an MK-ULTRA contractor. I have personally interviewed several adults who claimed that Heath experimented on them as children. They have no documentary proof of this claim. However, they provided certain circumstantial details which are intriguing and provocative. Fundamentally, though, Heath's attempts to control the human brain through electronic stimulation administered within a Behaviourist and Pavlovian framework FAILED;

ii) 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:

The discovery of SV40 was reported in 1960 as a contaminant present in polio vaccine stocks.1 At this time, polio vaccine was being produced in primary kidney cells and tissue harvested from rhesus and cynomolgus macaques. Safety testing of vaccine preparations on cultures of African green monkey kidney cells uncovered the presence of SV40, a "vacuolating agent," that induced a cytopathic effect in some cultures.1 SV40 was detected in preparations of both the inactivated, or Salk, poliovirus vaccine and the live attenuated, or Sabin, poliovirus vaccine. In the United States, the Salk inactivated poliovirus vaccine (IPV) was used to inoculate 98 million children and adults between 1955 and 1963, whereas about 10,000 people received the Sabin oral polio vaccine (OPV) through clinical trials between 1959 and 1961.2,3 Because OPV was not licensed in the United States until 1963, after the establishment of government regulations requiring all poliovirus vaccine to be free of SV40, vaccination with IPV from 1955 to 1963 is thought to be the primary source of human exposure to SV40 in the United States. An adenovirus vaccine developed by the United States military and used to vaccinate Army recruits during this period was also found to be highly contaminated with SV40.4 However, because of its limited distribution, this vaccine is not thought to have posed a significant risk for exposure of SV40 into the general population.

Both the Salk and Sabin vaccines, including poliovirus stocks, cell cultures, and the methodologies necessary to generate the vaccine, were distributed to many countries throughout the world. In at least some instances, vaccines produced in other countries were also contaminated with SV40 virus. A recent report provides evidence that some polio vaccines prepared by an Eastern European vaccine manufacturer were contaminated with SV40 and used in the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics as late as 1978.5

So, the quotes attributed to David Ferrie and Dr Mary Sherman are potentially possible.

The Fascist Dream of Control Through Electrical Implants (be it Heath or Delgado) is naturally concerning.

It is also entirely likely that any 1960s vaccine insider with knowledge of laboratory mutagenicity tests on SV40 would have been incredibly worried.

I've made films investigating and exposing Big Pharma, and the fundamental motivation of the multinationals is not the Curing or Eradication of Disease. It is the Maximisation of Profit. A certain amount of Disease is Good for Business.

However, my core fear is that, from matters which have some historical basis and should concern us all, a sugary confection has been baked.

The Lovers, Lee and Judyth, get the best lines in this screenplay:

"We've created a galloping cancer," [said Judyth Baker].… We are developing this weapon to eliminate a head of state. But what if we get Castro? Will they really just throw this stuff away?"

"It could be used as a weapon of mass distraction," [said Lee Harvey Oswald] simply.

"Yes… think I'll Hitler would have loved this, to use against the Jews in those camps. They could say a plague went through."

"Or to eliminate Negroes in Africa," Lee said with a cold tone in his voice."

Page 391, "Me and Lee"

Lines that are overblown, anachronistic, and strike me as hugely unlikely.

This is weirdo stuff for me. Judyth Vary Baker, a completely untrained, uneducated "scientist", "genius" doing cancer research??? Never happened. Very doubtful that she even really knew Dr. Mary Sherman, or Marina Oswald's husband, the 5'9" (Lee) Harvey Oswald. or David Ferrie. Didin't her husband, Robert, say that she worked at a hamburger joint, White Castle, or something like that in New Orleans? Then later as a secretary at the Reily Coffee Company? Oswald a coffee-grinder machine oiler, wasn't he, in a far-away part of their building?

I have known real virologists and cancer researchers, and believe me, they did not become scientists right after high school or a year or so of college. It takes years of intensive study and work. And, if Dr. Mary Sherman had a cancer project going, she would have hired first-rate technical and scientific staff. So would the CIA, and even Robert G. Heath.

By the way, I was at Tulane University School of Medicine in the Department of Psychiatry and Neurology, and I know a lot about that place and the people there, a lot..

This is one very sad case of a person cleverly winding herself into a real situation, and being the "star" of the movie. There are a lot of people like this out there, and a good psychiatrrist can quickly figure them out, and so can an experienced policeman/detective. Police departments are sometimes overwhelmed by people confessing to a sensationalistic murder which they did not commit, or were not involved in in any way. This is similar to the entwinement by Judyth V. Baker into the JFK assassination and into the CIA murder plots on Fidel Castro. Even though the CIA has done some really stupid things, I can't conceive that they would have decided to use cancer virus-containing materials to eliminate someone like Castro when rifles or poisons would have been so much quicker. People can live a long time with cancer, depending upon the type of cancer and their immune systems. And also, foreign animal cells, or products injected would be quickly destroyed by a human immune system.

I wonder how many have read Ed Haslam's earlier two versions of his later book. These were titled Mary, Ferrie, and the Monkey Virus. He showed the relationship between the polio vaccine and soft-tissue cancer growths, and also figured out how Dr. Mary Sherman died. For those reasons, that much of his work has real value.

Incidentally, the person who discovered the relationship between viruses being one causative agent in inducing cancer tumor growths was Dr. Peyton Rous, when a young scientist at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research (as it was called then, becoming Rockefeller University in the 1960s). I met him there in 1955 when I was a Visiting Investigator in Dr. David Lloyd's laboratory. Dr. Rous and I had lunch together one day and he told me how he had made his famous discovery, in 1911 (or so). He won his Nobel Prize for that work in 1967, I think it was.

Judyth could not have done those experiments.

Has anyone wondered if she could have been a witting, or even an unwitting, agent of distraction and/or disinformation? The JFK research community has certainly spent a lot of time and effort in dealing with her. Rich DellaRosa had her on for a time on his forum and then asked her to leave because it was a waste of time. His sister, a professor of Psychology, diagnosed her affliction as Pseudologia Fantastica (fantastic falseword), one of the factitious disorders. In other words, pathologiocal lying, possibly an ego defense mechanism in attempting to repair a shattered ego. There is no known treatment for it, according to psychiatric textbooks, and the cause seems to be unknown, although childhood abuse has been mentioned. She needs help, but JFK researchers should not be validating her fictional life story, because that is not helping her.