Science Guardian

LA Times gives no cause of death, but HIV propagandists can’t wait

Bad luck for AIDS reformers, to add to other setbacks, though Christine’s heroism may yet prove out

Who’s bigger, Anthony Fauci or Bernie Madoff?

Perhaps the best known public activist against the HIV-causes-AIDS premise in science and medicine, Christine Maggiore has unexpectedly died at 52, the Los Angeles Times reports in a blog today (Dec 30 Tuesday).

Christine Maggiore, vocal skeptic of AIDS research, dies at 52:

Until the end, Christine Maggiore remained defiant.

On national television and in a blistering book, she denounced research showing that HIV causes AIDS. She refused to take medications to treat her own virus. She gave birth to two children and breast-fed them, denying any risk to their health. And when her 3-year-old child, Eliza Jane, died of what the coroner determined to be AIDS-related pneumonia, she protested the findings and sued the county.

On Saturday, Maggiore died at her Van Nuys home, leaving a husband, a son and many unanswered questions. She was 52.

According to officials at the Los Angeles County coroner’s office, she had been treated for pneumonia in the last six months. Because she had recently been under a doctor’s care, no autopsy will be performed unless requested by the family, they said. Her husband, Robin Scovill, could not be reached for comment.

No cause of death was stated other than lingering pneumonia, but the world’s poster girl for replacing the HIV/AIDS paradigm – beautiful, intelligent, courageous, determined and persuasive in her personal and public rejection and condemnation of the official rationale for treating AIDS as if it were caused by HIV – looks likely now to become the poster girl for the witless defenders of the HIV faith, who are already trumpeting her death as the inevitable consequence of denying their belief.

But in fact, the report of the LA Times gives them no real grounds for saying so, and nor does her life. All the facts in the news report which suggest that Maggiore died because she flouted known science and disregarded established medicine are errors. Maggiore did test positive on an HIV test many years ago, but then negative often enough for her status in this regard to be uncertain at the very least, and in fact probably negative during the many years she wisely refused any further testing. Her child, Eliza Jane, did not die of AIDS-related pneumonia, but of allergic reaction to amoxicillin. This is perfectly clear to all who are not under the superstition that all illness is caused by HIV as soon as anyone mentions AIDS as a possibility. The child died very rapidly after being medicated by a standard antibiotic which occasionally causes fatal systemic overreaction. She did not decline over months from AIDS related symptoms of any kind.

Maggiore’s friends said she underwent a holistic “cleanse” last month that left her feeling ill.

“She was telling me that she wasn’t feeling great,” Carter said, adding that he questioned whether the pneumonia was related to AIDS.

As an advocate, Maggiore counseled HIV-positive pregnant women on how to avoid pressure to use the drug AZT as a method to reduce the chances of transmission to their babies. She considered the drug toxic.

Maggoire gave birth to her son, Charlie, and his younger sister, Eliza Jane, at home and breast-fed both, although research indicates that it increases the risk of transmission. Eliza Jane Scovill died in 2005 from what the coroner ruled was AIDS-related pneumonia. Maggiore and Scovill, however, hired a pathologist who concluded that the girl died of an allergic reaction to the antibiotic amoxicillin.

After Eliza Jane’s death, Los Angeles police investigated whether Maggiore and Scovill were negligent in not testing the girl for HIV. In 2006, the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office decided not to file criminal charges against Maggiore, saying that it would have been difficult to prove criminal negligence because Maggiore had sought medical advice. Friends said that Maggiore never fully recovered after the death of her daughter and that she had trouble even sleeping and eating. Her preteen son, Charlie, has tested HIV negative.

Last year, Maggiore and Scovill sued Los Angeles County and others on behalf of their daughter’s estate, charging that the autopsy report lacked proper medical and scientific evidence for the declared cause of death. The case is pending.

Why did Christine die?

From this superficial account given in the LA Times it is not possible to get any kind of clear picture as to why Maggiore would die at such an early age, since the only relevant phrases are “According to officials at the Los Angeles County coroners office she had been treated for pneumonia in the last six months” and “Maggiore’s friends said she underwent a holistic “cleanse” last month that left her feeling ill.”

The implication of the “officials”’s comment is, of course, the fantasy that an otherwise healthy person suffers terminal PCP over time owing to the depredations of the lethal virus. Removing the superstition, all we know is that Maggiore was not very well in her last few months.

What is known is that Christine was a relative gentle soul on whom the stresses and strains of acting as a punching bag for the lunatic proselytizers of HIVcauses/AIDS ideology must have exacted a price over the years, particularly after she suffered the ultimate tragedy for a mother of losing a much loved child to a medical accident, when the viciously misguided demons from the dark corners and sewer tunnels of society emerged to hound her relentlessly, as they are now bound to do again.

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UPDATE: Jan 2 Fri

How Christine Maggiore died:

We have the following in from Celia Farber, posting on Dean’s World – Dean Esmay’s Blog , a last email a mutual friend received from Christine Maggiore on Dec 19, which gives a pretty clear picture as to how the poor woman died:
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“Regarding my health, I finally figured out what’s going on…but it got really scary. Here’s the scoop I just sent a friend: I have been through the absolute worst health nightmare ever.

The cleanse, while definitely bringing about some profound benefits, left me feeling weak and dehydrated. I lost my appetite almost completely about 10 days ago and for some weird reason could only tolerate hot tea and hot chicken broth. I had been in touch with the cleanse doc who said all was typical, uncomfortable but typical. Not one to quit, I kept going. Then I started to have trouble breathing, I was feeling winded after the most simple task like making the bed. This last Sunday, I stopped being able to sleep at all.

So finally, genius that I am, I made an appointment to see my MD who is really smart and very well versed in natural health care and not at all into the HIV paradigm. I could only get in to see her yesterday. She said I was totally dehydrated and having a reaction to the herbs in the cleanse which she thought were suspicious. I asked her to check my lungs and she said they sounded clear.

I told her I thought I should have a chest Xray anyway, just to be sure, but she was skeptical because I hadn’t had a cold, flu, cough or fever. But I insisted so she wrote me up to go to a radiology place that would give an immediate reading. By then I felt so ill I had to ask my neighbor to drive me and thank god he was there with me because I never would have made it to the radiologist without his help.

As it turned out, the Xray showed a very serious case of bi-lateral bronchial pneumonia. The doctor immediately gave me IV rehydration, IV natural cortisone, and IV antibiotic. She said if I did not improve by the next day, I would have to go to the hospital which I argued would give me worse treatment, lousy food and maybe a MRS infection as a parting gift. I went back again today, had more IV treatments and she said if I can make it through the weekend without having to go to the hospital, she will be very happy.

She also said I’m pretty tough to have had such severe pneumonia and keep going. I have three natural cortisone treatments I am to take everyday, and today I started with another antibiotic called Z pack which is different from the one used in the IV. It’s a little scary because she asked me if I am allergic to the antibiotics she’s giving me but I’ve never taken them, so I don’t know. She stayed next to me during the IV antibiotic to make sure I was not going into reaction which sort of made me feel like I might be having a reaction!

But I didn’t and I slept for the first time since Sunday last night. My appetite is getting back to normal and I am on total bed rest for two weeks. I can’t imagine doing otherwise.

Christine
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It may look as if the coroner “official” was accurate in saying she must have suffered from some pneumonia for a while, and for some reason it got a hold, and her “cleansing” exacerbated the matter and her bodily resistance was overcome, although she claimed her mental fortitude was as strong as ever. But the congestion detected may simply have been produced by dehydration caused by the “cleansing” purgatively toxic herbs she swallowed in what may have been an inappropriate treatment.

As far as we understand it, everyday health is a miracle of so many coordinated inner processes that it is rather incredible we have so much of it for so long, except that there are many redundant and repair processes built in. However, the body’s functioning is highly dependent on the intake of necessary nutrients and water and once the system is weakened beyond a certain point, resident threats like tb or pneumonia can take hold and if the extra energy required to overcome them is not available, and better nutrition or artificial assistance with drugs is not sufficient, the final slippery slope is not too far away. Pneumonia in particular can be rapidly lethal, However, in this case it sounds more like dehydration, which produces congestion in the lungs and difficulty in breathing, and can itself kill in a matter of days unless remedied rapidly.

The additional stress is what makes the smear and rejection tactics of the HIV/AIDS crazies, from positions high and low in science and society, so morally revolting, because as group animals the energy we draw from others is normally one pillar of our health, and if this support is flipped from love to hate our inner resources are drained needlessly and a normally small injury or easily remedied mistreatment can be life threatening.

It is not too imaginative to say that the responsibility for Maggiore’s death lies in some measure with the way she was treated by these cretins.

One thing is certain. Anyone familiar with the science knows that it had nothing to do with HIV, except indirectly through the superstition fostered by irresponsible scientists such as Robert Gallo and John Moore and their champion Anthony Fauci of NIAID for their own purposes, and the lynch mob mentality they whip up to divert attention from their nefarious misleading of government and public.
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Disputing the HIV paradigm is an unlucky cause

This tragedy is a very unfortunate turn of events for AIDS reformers in their endless public battle against those who deny them a voice, ie the true denialists in AIDS, the scientists, officials and activists who deal with the blatantly unanswered scientific review and condemnation of HIV as the supposed cause by evading, avoiding and dismissing a critique they are evidently unable to answer effectively at the peer reviewed level in the proper journals.

The history of the last few years has been one where every victory achieved by the reformers in bringing the attention of the public to the validity of questioning the conventional wisdom has been answered by the gods with a setback which has dissipated their small successes.

In the death of Yale’s Serge Lang they lost one of the most determined and impressive reformers of academic and media hypocrisy and claptrap at the highest levels.

Politics burdens truth at Harpers

The extraordinary breakthrough of the Harpers piece, Out of Control, published two years ago by Celia Farber was a remarkable success which in normal circumstances would probably have proved a tipping point in media attention to the HIV Is/Is Not AIDS issue.

But breaking events had to be included and changed the nature and delayed the completion of the watershed article, and its momentum dissipated when it was finally published just at the time Lewis Lapham, the long time editor of Harpers who had originally responded to her talent and conviction and asked her to do the piece, chose to hand over the reins to a new and younger man.

The new editor by virtue of his new circumstances could not afford to rise above the political difficulties involved, as the soon to retire Lapham would have done, though he (the new editor) was entirely taken with the intellectual merit of her work and heavily involved in shepherding it to publication in its final polished and perfected form (contrary to the impression opponents tried to create in the letters column, there was only one proven error, which was trivial and beside the point, since it had to do with cuckoo clocks).

Bernie, meet Anthony, who did it first

Still, someone once said that any publicity is good publicity and if we have entered a new age of iconoclasm where in finance and economics the mighty are fallen and the gods are found to have feet of clay, it may be that the spirit of questioning has spread so far and wide that one of the issues that will be reviewed by the new administration may be the vexed issue of whether all the money being spent on HIV/AIDS is going down the right rat hole.

After all, now that people have wised up the fact that even the greatest insider investment opportunity of the last decade turns out to be nothing but a giant Ponzi scheme – in fact, that much of Wall Street in the last decade or two has turned out to be nothing but a giant Ponzi scheme – it is not entirely unlikely that their scepticism might turn to wondering if scientists can be trusted any more than Wall St wizards not to abuse their responsibilities to the general public.

If Christine Maggiore’s tragically early death can serve to keep her role in questioning science at the forefront of the public mind, aided and abetted by the self defeating efforts of the mindless HIV defenders to abuse her even in the afterlife, then its heroism may yet help to achieve what she long fought for, a pubic review of what we may now call not the Enron of science or even the WorldCom of science, but the Bernia Madoff Ponzi Scheme of Science, equally global and worth over $50 billion.

In other words, on the one hand we have Bernie Madoff, the $50 billion man. On the other, Anthony Fauci of the NIH, even bigger, having run off with even more of the public’s money in a scheme to which officials and leaders world wide have lent their name and which has caused considerably more deaths than the one suicide registered so far in the wake of Bernie’s arrest.

Calm, thoughtful, and a first class manager, is our Hawaiian Savior too elevated to achieve change outside the box in science?

In matter of HIV/AIDS, current likelihood of “change” seems zero

Why HIV debunkers who give up may be realistic, though we admire those who still fight on

Alongside this magnificent photo by Alex Brandon (AP) of his long armed body surfing style, Obama’s secret source of celestial calm was revealed in the Times’ Christmas Eve edition as drawing on the long perspective and communal spirit of Oahu, one of the Hawaiian islands where our Savior was born and partly raised

Our new leader’s mix of human irritability and divine poise is further evidence in our opinion of the Christlike semi-divinity of Mr Obama, as some of the article’s vocabulary made clear (to us, at least, as well perhaps to the normally sober reporter Jeff Zeleny). Note the reference to “divine and spiritual power”, “spirit” and the phenomenon attested to by Representative Abercrombie that even via television Mr Obama is able to exert magic powers which lower “the national pulse about 10 points.”

Here are a few quotes from the article, Obama’s Zen State, Well, It’s Hawaiian – President-elect Barack Obama, in August in Hawaii, where he spent formative years, has no plans to stop vacationing there. By JEFF ZELENY New York Times Published: December 24, 2008:

The mood of Mr. Obama, to many observers here in Hawaii, embodies the Aloha Spirit, a peaceful state of mind and a friendly attitude of acceptance of a variety of ideas and cultures. More than simply a laid-back vibe, many Hawaiians believe in a divine and spiritual power that provides a sustaining life energy.

“When Obama gets on television, the national pulse goes down about 10 points,” said Representative Neil Abercrombie, Democrat of Hawaii, who was close friends with Mr. Obama’s parents. “He has this incredibly calming effect. There’s no question in my mind it comes from Hawaii.”…

Mr. Obama is spending Christmas secluded in a compound of rental houses that he and his family are sharing with a group of friends from Chicago along the handsome beaches of Kailua, on the windward coast of Oahu. It seems a world away from the hustle of Honolulu, which is the face of Hawaii for many residents of the continental United States who have never traveled to this part of the world.

“He has more Hawaii in him than Chicago; he’s laid-back, cool and collected,” said Neil Kent, a professor of ethnic studies at the University of Hawaii at Manoa who has lived on the island for three decades. “It’s hard to express anger here. It’s a very small, enclosed environment in which you have to live with other people.”…

That is not to say, of course, that Mr. Obama did not occasionally grow agitated at his advisers, grimace when he was asked to sign one more autograph or openly scowl at reporters who sought to ask him questions during the campaign.

Even on the first full day of his Hawaiian vacation, as he walked onto a golf course in Waimanalo, he turned to a group of photographers and declared: “O.K. guys, come on. How many shots do you need?” The next day, aides said he was furious when paparazzi took a shot with a long zoom lens, showing the president-elect’s buff pectorals….

This summer, as Mr. Obama visited in London with David Cameron, the head of the British Conservative Party, he was overheard talking about how leaders need to take time away to think. Without downtime, Mr. Obama said, “you start making mistakes or you lose the big picture.”

So Mr. Obama intends to be here until Jan. 1, recharging the Aloha Spirit.

Anyone who still denies that the sudden appearance of the hitherto obscure Mr Obama in US and international politics smacks of divine intervention is swimming upstream toward Niagara Falls as far as we are concerned.

But is Obama too spiritually elevated?

Concern that spiritual purity may be a defect in the new President to be mounts in our offices, though. Is it possible that Mr Obama may be simply too good a man to catch up with the extreme extent of monetary corruption which has crept into various corners of our system over the last few decades?

Obviously the nuclear implosion of Wall Street as a hitherto expanding sector must have taught Obama just as well as everyone else less haloed that greed unleashed can be catastrophic in the realm of finance and in the economy at large, but is it possible that our new Leader can ever catch up with the sorry fact that vast infusions of monetary gain have achieved sizable distortions in the realm of science also, as in the particularly horrendous example of HIV/AIDS and its dysfunctional paradigm?

Judging by the alacrity with which Obama was drawn into posturing as enlightened prophet leading the way to HIV testing for all in Kenya when he visited there, when both he and Michelle were tested for HIV test positivity and luckily for them scored negative for what is mostly if not entirely an inherited status in the US (positivity is mostly transmitted mother to baby here), we reckon that even the thoughtful Obama is likely to be suckered into the political machinations of Anthony Fauci of NIAID, and continue to believe in the medical and political virtue of the entirely unreasonable current belief that HIV causes AIDS, as effectively as Bill Gates, Bill Clinton and George Bush and their staff advisers, who are so often drawn from the officials of the field.

We hope this is not true, We hope that Obama is clever enough to realize what is obvious in principle, which is that scientists are as likely as any other human group to lie and cheat their way to success unless their professional standards are properly enforced.

Why HIV critics won’t succeed, anyway, judging from Harpers experience

But then, what chances remain anyway of this godawful and damaging paradigm will be curbed by political means outside the field, let alone in it? Very little judging from what has happened so far. Celia Farber managed to cap her exemplary performance in this arena of stifled reporting over the last two decades by publishing an excellent article in Harpers two years ago, which laid out the situation very clearly for anyone who bothered to read it (see all references by searching our roll in the right hand margin).

Unfortunately nothing came of it, after Robert Gallo and his cohorts in the portion of the gay activist community who are too busy profiting from the situation to want to rescue their colleagues from self-immolation mounted a counter attack with a storm of letters and phone calls into Harpers mainly from Gallo to defend the indefensible belief by obscuring the science which shows it is faulty to the point of inanity if judged by reason and evidence.

The problem was that just at that point the august literary publication was handed over by Lewis Lapham the long time editor who had encouraged the contribution from the obdurate truth reporter Farber to a younger and presumably politically unseasoned editor who was apparently at first very keen on the piece and helped deliver it to term as an almost unchallengeable masterpiece wherein almost no fact could be gainsayed.

Punching feathers

Unfortunately the general tenor of the times in regard to HIV/AIDS and its concomitant attitudes and beliefs among the media as well as the gay community made the high level of reason and research projected by the article have no more effect than punching a huge pile of feathers.

Even worse, the completely ill-based general disapproval of any critique of the thinking and behavior of people involved in HIV/AIDS rescue resulted in such political stress on the young editor that he appears to have entirely abandoned support of his author and her work after briefly appearing on the radio about it. During the same year Harpers won praise for other work and in competing for prizes the HIV/AIDS stance was a liability that had to be set aside, one gathered.

Whatever the truth in that analysis, the fact is that Harpers did nothing in the end to stand by its seminal piece, which could have changed the political landscape of this festering issue and even led to the ultimate downfall of Anthony Fauci, Robert Gallo, David Baltimore, John Moore and others who falsely and presumably knowingly continue to promulgate a paradigm which cause illness and sometimes death rather than cures it.

The Aussies were even less help

The second indication that no success is likely for critics of HIV/AIDS was the remarkable court case in Adelaide where the unfortunate Chad Paranzee appealed against his conviction of endangering women by sleeping with them when he was HIV positive and did not tell them so.

Despite the fact that Robert Gallo appeared at the trial as a long distance witness enabled by Skype or the equivalent, and made a complete fool of himself and his science and the paradigm itself in the eyes of anyone who knew anything much about the field, nothing came of the hopes of HIV debunkers that finally a court of law would force confrontation with the absurd and long discredited paradigm and show the world of objective onlookers how hollow and poorly based the belief that HIV is the cause of immune dysfunction really is.

That is to say, how AIDS is nothing more than the relabeling of other complaints in the framework of a false belief that they are all “HIV/AIDS” caused by HIV, which in reality is nothing more than one example among many of a flimsy type of virus (a retrovirus) that has never been shown to cause any harm to anybody.

The unfortunate prisoner and victim of the HIV/AIDS version of a witchhunt saw his appeal fail and he is now languishing unjustly in jail, as innocent of actual wrongdoing as as any of the 220 or so US prisoners released to date by the Innocence Project.

Meanwhile the critics of HIV/AIDS soldier on in a hopeless cause, once again having lost a battle in a war which would have been won long ago in any science uncompromised by the vicious politics of HIV/AIDS and its distortions.

Obama probably too new to the game to pick up on science politics, other than the failure of Mbeki

What is the likelihood that our new political Savior who comes to rescue us from ideological claptrap and narrowminded poltical bias, Barack Obama, will be led to see what is going on in HIV/AIDS and do or want to do anything about it?

Even if he is in his wonky way led to detect what is wrong, it seems to us that he will have the discouraging example of the only other major political leader to steer him away from picking up this red hot political potato. Thabo Mbeki, the South African leader, took an interest in the allegations of a journalist to look into the situation at the turn of this century and was so impressed with the writings of Berkeley’s Peter Duesberg and his supporters in fighting this appalling hijacking of all kinds of diseases and moving then under the umbrella of a fantasy HIV/AIDS syndrome that he convened a special panel of HIV proponents and their critics before the AIDS Conference was held in Durban in 2000.

The outcome of the panel deliberations – which were not so much deliberate as farcical, as the empty handed defenders of the paradigm often literally slept their way through the proceedings – was clearly that HIV/AIDS could not effectively defend itself against its critics. But the proponents of this scientifically ridiculous belief mounted again another political counter attack, centered around a prima facie absurd statement of faith in the paradigm published over a full page of signatories in the New York Times.

This evidence of science conducted on the basis of faith against reason in the manner of the Vatican was in itself an admission that the paradigm was faulty, but since the field was run by politicians, activists and politicians among scientists and not by scientists pure and simple, the outside world did not get this clear implied message and Mbeki had to abandon his stance in the end, beset by gay activists in South Africa and any other enemies who wished to exploit this weakness in his political armory. Even on his deposing recently from the presidency of South Africa the coverage played up his resistance to Western convention in AIDS as the chief flaw in his political makeup, and a baffling flight from reason and good sense in an otherwise formidable politician.

With these examples in front of him, we confidently expect Barack Obama to do nothing at all to right the situation in AIDS and free it from the scientifically outrageous and politically and medically extremely harmful belief that its cause has anything to do with retroviruses, aside from the dangerous medications that are posited by this blatant scientific charade.

Indeed we expect him to continue the push for universal HIV testing according to the urging of Dr Fauci and the CDC, serving the interests of the AIDS research, medication and fund raising community which otherwise is presumably worried that in an age where deficits are soaring to stratospheric heights they might run short of customers and be further cut off from the federal trough as more people realize how wildly lop sided their emphasis on this disease really is (deaths supposedly from AIDS annually in the US, 18,000, against 829,000 from heart attacks and strokes and 565,000 from cancer, or 7.5 million worldwide), even if HIV had been proven or even reliably shown to cause AIDS, which it manifestly has not.

Daschle seals our prediction

The choice of Senate Majority leader Tom Daschle, consultant and semi-lobbyist to health care and pharmaceutical interests including Abbott Laboratories, Mylan Labs and the Generic Pharmaceutical Association, a trade group, for Obama’s Secretary of Health and Human Services places a heavy concrete slab on the grave of any hopeful expectations:

He was an advocate for the Foreign Operations Appropriations Bill for FY 2004 (S. 1426) which substantially increased funding for the Peace Corps and foreign assistance to combat HIV/AIDS.

In 2002 President Bush first proposed a program that would provide $500 million to fight HIV and AIDS around the world. As a Senator at that time, Daschle requested Bush considered increasing the funding amount saying $500 million was “too little too late.”

As a Senator, Daschle co-sponsored Senate Resolution 119 (S. Res 119) emphasizing the growth of HIV/AIDS and the responsibility of the U.S. and other developed nations to act in the fight against the disease.

It is unclear if Daschle will oppose any increase in funding for abstinence-only programs. Experts feel that if any progress is to be made in HIV prevention, the Bush Administration’s policy of abstinence only must be overturned. The hope is that Daschle will play a big role in reversing that policy in favor of risk reduction. (AP)

Since Daschle did once sponsor a bill to expand accessibility to alternative medical approaches there is a glimmer of hope, perhaps, but we doubt it.

Educating people to understand what is really going on in HIV/AIDS, where very fine professional reviews in leading journals have long eviscerated the unproven paradigm on which conventional belief is based, and have never been effectively answered by rebuttal on the same level of peer review, is a rather long process. It not only involves reviewing a complex political situation, as well as many false scientific, official, media and Web rebuttals to the reviews, but also runs counter to an ingrained mainstream assumption which has had a quarter century to occupy virtually all discussion about AIDS.

HIV critics retiring from the fray

All in all, we completely understand those who up till now have battled courageously and determinedly for a public policy review of HIV/AIDS truthiness and its supposed scientific foundation, but who now have decided to place their energies elsewhere and admit political defeat.

The honor roll includes several of the wittiest and hitherto fiercest and most penetrating debunkers who are simply tired of having their names dragged through the mud of ignorance and poisonous character and job assassination practiced by HIV proponents in lieu of scientific argument:

Harvey Bialy, author of the enduringly brilliant Oncogenes, Aneuploidy and AIDS: A Scientific Life & Times of Peter H. Duesberg (North Atlantic, 2004), nothing less than a classic which, without compromising the highest standards of accuracy in stating scientific truths, exposed pages of equally precise anecdote which tells any laymen all they need to know about how rotten is the state of Denmark in both the AIDS and cancer paradigms and their politics.

Celia Farber, author of whose definitive analysis “Out Of Control: AIDS and the corruption of medical science” in Harper’s Magazine of March 2006 capped twenty years of relentless pursuit of the inconsistencies and absurdities – and ultimately catastrophic tragedy – of the HIV/AIDS paradigm and its advocates funded by misdirected public money and pharmaceutical companies, whose only reward so far for her exemplary investigative journalism has been political poison, rather than the Pulitzer, Peabody and Polk prizes she fully deserves.

A certain lawyer who for a time wrote one of the earliest and most witty blogs exposing the rascally and venal crowd of paradigm defenders inside science and out as either wolves or donkeys, before deciding that the welfare of his family was more important than trying to rescue the victims of HIV/AIDS thinking, especially since the group most decimated by the murderous misleading of the public in this regard are American gays who should know better without being told, but who with few exceptions remain blind to all the signs and deaf to all the reasons.

These reformist players and others in what is surely the scandal of the century in science have decided that in general they have said their piece, and no longer wish to encounter the stink extruded from the scientific and activist skunks in this field when they try to kick them out of the way of honest scientific thinking and sound public policy in their richly funded but grossly ill founded field of HIV/AIDS, are not in any way cowardly, but simply realistic.

That said, however, we have nothing but admiration for the many equally brave souls who soldier on regardless in a spirit of self sacrifice and truth seeking that as far as we are concerned, represents the best in human makeup. The honor roll includes:

David Crowe and his Alberta Reappraising AIDS Society site which carries the best ongoing news roll on the topic of the 22 year, always ongoing debate which the mainstream media resolutely ignore, as well as the latest books by leading critics in the field both scientific and lay, and an extensive library of journal and news articles.

Henry Bauer, professor and author of The Origin, Persistence and Failings of HIV/AIDS Theory”, and his blog, HIV/AIDS Skepticism:
Pointing to evidence that HIV is not the necessary and sufficient cause of AIDS, on which extensive discussion of the details of the bad science that underlies and emerges from the paradigm HIV=AIDS is conducted with contributions from Darin Brown, the mathematician who runs the AIDS Wiki.

Michael Geiger, a gay activist and board member of San Diego HEAL who has published fiery letters, reviews and reporting on the sins of HIV proponents, including a two page ad ““Gays, Straights, Blacks, Whites, Science, Medicine, Media: Have We All Been Deceived?”” in the July 17, 2008 edition of the San Diego Gay & Lesbian Times, and helped support the laboratory research of Peter Duesberg, the eminent biologist who first reviewed in elite journals and rejected the blatantly unconvincing 1984 proposal by Robert Gallo that HIV was a “probable” cause of the AIDS syndrome, for which professionalism Duesberg lost all support from colleagues for his research proposals at the NIH which till then had always been accepted (Geiger is also one of the three exemplary readers of this journal who have made a monetary contribution to its continuance).

Christine Maggiore, the strong minded mother who eventually resisted all attempts to browbeat her with HIV/AIDS thinking when she registered positive on an HIV test, though later not on others, who wrote a first rate account of the lack of credibility of the paradigm, her self-published ““What If Everything You Thought You Knew about AIDS Was Wrong?” , and who raised two healthy children entirely preserved from the HIV/AIDS superstition until one tragically suffered a fatal allergic reaction to the amoxicillin prescribed for an ear infection, when she was embroiled further in the poisonous counterattacks of lay, media and official paradigm promoters.

There are many others who deserve to be put on this honor roll also, for their courage to stand up for honest science in the face of public ignominy and ostracism, and sometimes the loss of their positions (there are three prominent cases of this disgraceful outcome). This is why today’s Science Guardian choice of quotation for the heading of the blog is as follows:

“Men truly pious and philosophical are led by their reasons to honor and love only what is true, and refuse to follow traditional opinions, when they are false.” – Justin the Christian martyr (scourged and beheaded for refusing to sacrifice to the gods, by command of Emperor Marcus Aurelius).

NOTE: Anyone who wishes to add their voice to urging President-elect Obama to take a new look at HIV/AIDS and its supposed scientific foundation on which its funding and drug medication are based should go to Change.

Front page story on Summers winning Obama slot quietly vindicates him

Women colleagues admire Summers, who never said women were inferior at math or science, just wondered what research would find

Let’s hope Times survives current crisis to continue as standard bearer of truth in PC battles, finally reversing its HIV/AIDS bias

A front page Times story yesterday (Sun Dec 7 2008), A Harvard Lightning Rod Finds Path to Renewal was surprising in tone, since it was full of quiet assertions that the misunderstood Lawrence Summers was never guilty of underestimating women, just as we pointed out during the Harvard onslaught this distinguished economist suffered from the oversensitive and paranoid PC battalion in the faculty and elsewhere.

CAMBRIDGE — The president of Harvard University, Lawrence H. Summers, sparked an uproar at an academic conference Friday when he said that innate differences between men and women might be one reason fewer women succeed in science and math careers. Summers also questioned how much of a role discrimination plays in the dearth of female professors in science and engineering at elite universities.

Nancy Hopkins, a biologist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, walked out on Summers’ talk, saying later that if she hadn’t left, ”I would’ve either blacked out or thrown up.” Five other participants reached by the Globe, including Denice D. Denton, chancellor designate of the University of California, Santa Cruz, also said they were deeply offended, while four other attendees said they were not.

Summers said he was only putting forward hypotheses based on the scholarly work assembled for the conference, not expressing his own judgments — in fact, he said, more research needs to be done on these issues. The organizer of the conference at the National Bureau of Economic Research said Summers was asked to be provocative, and that he was invited as a top economist, not as a Harvard official….

Summers spoke during a working lunch. He declined to provide a tape or transcript of his remarks, but the description he gave in an interview was generally in keeping with what 10 participants recalled. He said he was synthesizing the scholarship that the organizers had asked him to discuss, and that in his talk he repeated several times: ”I’m going to provoke you.”

He offered three possible explanations, in declining order of importance, for the small number of women in high-level positions in science and engineering. The first was the reluctance or inability of women who have children to work 80-hour weeks.

The second point was that fewer girls than boys have top scores on science and math tests in late high school years. ”I said no one really understands why this is, and it’s an area of ferment in social science,” Summers said in an interview Saturday. ”Research in behavioral genetics is showing that things people previously attributed to socialization weren’t” due to socialization after all.

This was the point that most angered some of the listeners, several of whom said Summers said that women do not have the same ”innate ability” or ”natural ability” as men in some fields.

Asked about this, Summers said, ”It’s possible I made some reference to innate differences. . . I did say that you have to be careful in attributing things to socialization. . . That’s what we would prefer to believe, but these are things that need to be studied.”

Summers said cutting-edge research has shown that genetics are more important than previously thought, compared with environment or upbringing. As an example, he mentioned autism, once believed to be a result of parenting but now widely seen to have a genetic basis.

In his talk, according to several participants, Summers also used as an example one of his daughters, who as a child was given two trucks in an effort at gender-neutral parenting. Yet she treated them almost like dolls, naming one of them ”daddy truck,” and one ”baby truck.” (Boston Globe, Jan 17, 2005)

So much for free speech and free enquiry, in an arena where as we pointed out in a previous post research has now shown that probably the only difference between the general intelligences of the two sexes is that there are more geniuses and fools among men than women, as might be expected.

However, whether little girls and boys behave differently with trucks is another question altogether. We recall one study years ago which found that among tots on a beach who sat in the sand, the boys would throw sand away from them, then move and throw sand away from another position, while girls tended to sit in just one place and gather sand towards them.

The excellent liveliness of Larry

Now Summers has made a full social comeback, the Times explains why in an even handed and complimentary piece which expands upon the immediate reason, which is that Larry Summers gives very, very good summaries of the current economic situation when these are needed by the new master of the political universe, Barack Obama:

Now, Mr. Summers will have a job as the top White House economic adviser to Barack Obama. American economic policy will be spearheaded in what many call the worst environment since the Great Depression in part by a man whose last full-time role ended in forced resignation.

The two men, who have forged their relationship in the tumult of the financial crisis, share a lot: Harvard, a love of debate and firm convictions, like agreement on the need to narrow the gap between America’s most fortunate and everyone else….

Starting last summer, as economics came to the forefront of the presidential campaign, Mr. Obama faced constant decisions on the subject. Mr. Summers’s allies in the campaign put Mr. Summers on the phone, giving him a key task: to synthesize the developments for Mr. Obama. Mr. Summers made himself into an essential guide, Obama aides say, and earned a place in the administration.

Of course, it would have been an even nicer tribute to Summers if it hadn’t been used as an opportunity by the photo editor to print once again the image of Summers lurking with shifty gaze behind Obama’s shoulder. (Click Charles Dharapak of AP’s image to enlarge) Presumably the photo editor was unable to read the article him/herself in time, and choose a more suitable portrait. Or perhaps he/she felt differently. Or maybe the intent of the whole piece was a little backhanded:

“Barack thinks with his mind open,” said Charles Ogletree, a law professor at Harvard. “Larry thinks with his mouth open.”

But most of the piece was positive:

From the moment he stepped down, Mr. Summers, advised by powerful supporters who said he had been unfairly maligned, worked hard at repairing his reputation. He defended his time at Harvard but admitted mistakes; wrote a column that repositioned him politically and predicted the coming trauma; helped build a research group that supplied Mr. Obama with economic ideas and aides; and strengthened ties to women who helped dispel the accusation — stemming from a 2005 talk in which Mr. Summers wondered out loud about a relative lack of women in top academic science and engineering posts — that he thought poorly of their scientific abilities. He helped practically anyone who asked for advice, like undergraduates, economists and candidates.

This small effort to make amends for the petty extremism of others is worthy of the Times, even as it shows how careful its reporting has to be not to offend the Precious Contingent and stir up more trouble for Summers. For clearly the shamefully repressive affair still has repercussions, since one reason given for Summers’ appointment as the top economic adviser to Obama, head of the National Economic Council, rather than the Treasury Cabinet post he once filled that went to one of his mentorees, Timothy F. Geithner, is that no one wants to suffer the kind of hearings that the overzealous defenders of female impregnability on the status front might visit upon us.

Obama advisers name several reasons for the job assignments: Mr. Geithner is a fresh face. Mr. Summers’s job gives him a broader policy arena and a chance to do what he does best: debate ideas. He also avoids confirmation hearings, which could dredge up unpleasantness related to his Harvard tenure.

Summers’ sins don’t sound so bad to us, either; they seem to amount to nothing more than impatience with those too lazy or weakminded to think about a topic thoroughly enough to earn listening time:

“He’s going to have to ensure that he does not stifle debate or intimidate people,” said Roger Porter, a colleague at the Harvard Kennedy School and a former adviser to three presidents, who is otherwise confident about Mr. Summers’s performance.

Are there slower thinkers at Harvard?

Perhaps Larry’s mistake was to assume that Harvard doesn’t contain people who are so subjectively inclined that one should be kind to them to let them save face. This is probably an error, we suspect, judging from the fact that long ago we remember British graduate students laughing at the plodding mediocrity of a Harvard thesis on the shipbuilding industry. Not everyone in the nation’s highest academic tower had a wide perspective, it suggested.

Possibly Harvard has raised its standards in the last four decades as it became the hot ticket to financial success outside the academy. But there are at least two recent hints that it hasn’t, however. Harvard just lost a large chunk of its endowment in a housing and credit crisis that even Harpers magazine, hardly a redoubt for economic experts, foresaw, and that Marxist commentators like the inimitable Jack Barnes predicted and described accurately years ago.

Also, the School of Public Health is currently embarrassed by the efforts of Max Essex to propagandize on behalf of the failed HIV/AIDS paradigm with a “study” that “found” that 350,000 lives have been lost in South Africa through withholding dangerous and often lethal ARV drugs from people who certainly did better without them, at least according to peer reviewed medical literature by other, more trustworthy authors (Max Essex’s cat AIDS virus is a lesser known variation on the HIV theme).

A lively mind

Anyhow, getting back to Larry, he apparently doesn’t suffer fools gladly:

David Gergen, also a Harvard Kennedy School professor and White House veteran, asked: “Will it all be tea and cookies in there with Larry?” Of course not, but it shouldn’t be.”

But he has had excellent relations with many high powered women:

Mr. Summers counseled Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the highest-ranking woman in elected office in American history, who drew him into economic advisory meetings. From the end of his presidency, the many women among his friends fanned out to defend his name.

“Quite a number of us who are women and relished working with Larry” thought he had been given a “bum rap,” said Elena Kagan, whom Mr. Summers had appointed as law school dean.

Among other examples of how well Summers works with others, and how helpful he is:

Around the time Mr. Summers resigned, Mr. Rubin started a small research group called the Hamilton Project and housed at the Brookings Institution, to foster new economic policy ideas. Mr. Summers threw himself into it. Asked to review papers by outside authors, he would return them with extensive comments, said Jason Furman, the former project director and chief economic adviser in the Obama campaign. “He didn’t just want to sit on the board and speak at the event,” said Mr. Furman, who served in the Clinton administration when Mr. Summers was Treasury secretary.

For someone said to be poor at reading others, Mr. Summers has often displayed keen political instincts; after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, he had urged Harvard students to support the government and spoke out in support of its embattled R.O.T.C. chapter. Now, struck by the harsh consequences of globalization and income stagnation even among college graduates, Mr. Summers, known as a centrist as Treasury secretary, moved left, and in a very public forum.

Chrystia Freeland, a former student who had become editor at the Financial Times, asked him to write a monthly column that became such an attraction that the paper soon promoted it with his picture atop the front page. Mr. Summers offered prescriptions for the deepening economic trouble including huge fiscal stimulus and measures to prevent unnecessary foreclosures. A primary theme of his column was that too many people were falling behind, a point he cast in political as well as economic terms.

All in all, it seems that Larry’s only sin is to enjoy lively debate with a delight that speaks well for his love of new ideas, open mindedness and Obama-like ability to handle strength of mind in others, which in recent years has resulted in a productive shift in his own position from center to the left in his appreciation of how free trade is just as much in need of some steering and regulation as free competition in finance or production, in order judiciously to limit human exploitation without killing the golden goose of profit.

PC used to curb free debate in HIV non-science

The Summers incident is not the only one which serves to show how powerful this kind of constraint on free speech and freely undertaken research can be (another was Jim Watson’s fiery expiration as the grand old comet of scientific outspokenness). As far as those interested in science politics are concerned, all this is also reminiscent of the vexed arena of HIV/AIDS, equally twisted by interests that use PC posturing to stifle debate or engender belief.

As Nietsche remarked,

“Every man has his price.” This is not true. But for every man there exists a bait which he cannot resist swallowing. To win over certain people to something, it is only necessary to give it a gloss of love of humanity, nobility, gentleness, self-sacrifice – and there is nothing you cannot get them to swallow. To their souls, these are the icing, the tidbit; other kinds of souls have others.

But PC politics in HIV/AIDS is mostly manipulated to protect the absurdly irrational paradigm fro review. The alarm that the narcissistic feminists among the Harvard faculty showed at the very notion that science should be allowed to evaluate what if any genetic bias away from math and science genius woman might contain is very similar in its style and repressive effect to the forceful hostility in HIV/AIDS toward any research initiative that might seek to evaluate the current 100% unlikely belief that HIV causes AIDS or any other symptoms.

Normally people who express horror and alarm at the very idea that their fond beliefs should be double checked are taken to be signaling how uncertain they really are about whether their faith would stand up to investigation, much as unfaithful husbands express shock and horror that their wives should not take their word that they have been entirely faithful and are then reasonably judged guilty by their spouses.

In the case of HIV/AIDS however this Excessive Denial syndrome is taken at face value by everyone including the otherwise often alert Times editors, for some reason possibly to do with vested interests preventing the proper functioning of medical correspondent Larry Altman’s brain ever since he attended the CDC school in reporting on infectious diseases.

Let’s hope that this brief flourish of higher values by the Great Lady of Times Square is not her last huzzah, since the current newspaper implosion is so cataclysmic that observers see the only way out for the Times from its $400 million debt repayment problem in May this year which otherwise threatens to put it out of business has to be that Google be allowed to take it over, not unlikely in our opinion unless the now fallen fruit of the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, or Miami Herald tempt Google first.

Let the Times reign on – reformed in one aspect, please

Would that be a good thing? In one way it might be a blessing if it influences Times editors to understand that the Web now contains authoritative material which corrects conventional wisdom even in science, such as that found here at Science Guardian.

It might even remove the Times from its current myopic position as chief promoter of the most obviously incorrect paradigm in the history of medical science.

Meanwhile, Summers may be in for an even bigger job if he is all the Times says he is now:

As a participant in debates of the National Economic Council in the 1990s, “he was a great team player, he was loved and was very respectful of the back and forth,” said Gene Sperling, who led the council under Bill Clinton.

The term of Ben S. Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve, expires in January 2010, and some members of the Obama team predict that if Mr. Summers performs well, the job could be his. It requires confirmation, but with every passing day, say friends, Cambridge recedes further into the distance.

Fox on guard at the henhouse?

Needless to say, some will carp that this is all yet another example of how Obama has misfired in appointing the very man most responsible for dismantling regulatory oversight of the banking sector’s derivatives which as a result built up to a massive pyramid of unfathomable and interlocking debt instruments of nearly $50 trillion, which is now toppling and threatening to bury us all in a credit strangled international economic collapse where no one is willing to lend anybody anything. But we understand that Larry has explained all that and how his moves to deregulate are not responsible, and though we have not read it, we are sure it will lay concern to rest.

After all, as we have already posted we have complete trust in Barack Obama as a semi-divine intervention who transcends the petty ideologies that bias ordinary mortals in their decisions by listening to all sides and making a pragmatic determination of the best path forward in the light of the ultimate goals of peace, prosperity and freedom from fear and prejudice that we all share.

Here’s the full text of the Times piece, A Harvard Lightning Rod Finds Path to Renewal:
December 7, 2008
A Harvard Lightning Rod Finds Path to Renewal

By JODI KANTOR and JAVIER C. HERNANDEZ
One quiet Friday in June 2006, Lawrence H. Summers ended his turbulent tenure as president of Harvard University. Few of the undergraduates for whom Mr. Summers, a former Treasury secretary, used to sign dollar bills were around. Most of his staff, including his driver, had been reassigned. Soon, even the burger with his name was off the menu at Mr. Bartley’s in Harvard Square.

Now, Mr. Summers will have a job as the top White House economic adviser to Barack Obama. American economic policy will be spearheaded in what many call the worst environment since the Great Depression in part by a man whose last full-time role ended in forced resignation.

The two men, who have forged their relationship in the tumult of the financial crisis, share a lot: Harvard, a love of debate and firm convictions, like agreement on the need to narrow the gap between America’s most fortunate and everyone else. But they are also an odd couple: the serene, slender politician who seems to win people over effortlessly and the impatient, acerbic bear of a man who seems to offend them just as easily.

“Barack thinks with his mind open,” said Charles Ogletree, a law professor at Harvard. “Larry thinks with his mouth open.”

Aides to President-elect Obama say a top administration role for Mr. Summers once would have seemed to be a remote possibility because of his controversial tenure at Harvard, during which he angered women and members of the faculty.

From the moment he stepped down, Mr. Summers, advised by powerful supporters who said he had been unfairly maligned, worked hard at repairing his reputation. He defended his time at Harvard but admitted mistakes; wrote a column that repositioned him politically and predicted the coming trauma; helped build a research group that supplied Mr. Obama with economic ideas and aides; and strengthened ties to women who helped dispel the accusation — stemming from a 2005 talk in which Mr. Summers wondered out loud about a relative lack of women in top academic science and engineering posts — that he thought poorly of their scientific abilities. He helped practically anyone who asked for advice, like undergraduates, economists and candidates.

But it was the financial crisis, or a series of phone calls about it, that almost instantly resuscitated Mr. Summers’s career.

Starting last summer, as economics came to the forefront of the presidential campaign, Mr. Obama faced constant decisions on the subject. Mr. Summers’s allies in the campaign put Mr. Summers on the phone, giving him a key task: to synthesize the developments for Mr. Obama. Mr. Summers made himself into an essential guide, Obama aides say, and earned a place in the administration.

As the head of the National Economic Council, he will play two roles: counseling the president and nurturing the proposals of others. Few doubt that Mr. Summers will excel in the first; Democrats and Republicans call him one of the top economic minds in the country, with a résumé that may make him overqualified for the job.

Even Mr. Summers’s allies, though, acknowledge worries about the second part of his role. Mr. Summers, in an interview, said a crucial part of the job was exposing the president “to all possible views, developed as strongly and rigorously as they can be.”

But at Harvard, numerous faculty members and administrators say, Mr. Summers’s downfall resulted chiefly from his tendency to impose rather than persuade, to appear to have little regard for the views of others.

“He’s going to have to ensure that he does not stifle debate or intimidate people,” said Roger Porter, a colleague at the Harvard Kennedy School and a former adviser to three presidents, who is otherwise confident about Mr. Summers’s performance.

David Gergen, also a Harvard Kennedy School professor and White House veteran, asked: “Will it all be tea and cookies in there with Larry?” Of course not, but it shouldn’t be.”

After his five-year Harvard presidency, Mr. Summers at first seemed to have trouble letting go, colleagues and staff members say. He was on sabbatical but still roamed campus, especially the residential houses and pizza parties of undergraduates, who adored him so much they gave him a standing ovation at the next year’s graduation. He tried to fashion himself into an authority on reform of higher education, starting a book and giving blistering talks that amounted to a defense of his leadership.

Mr. Summers had recently married Elisa New, an English professor, and he bought a 6,500-square foot house and took up golf. “I had been in positions for 15 years when I had a full schedule for every day and a briefing book,” he said, “and I wanted for some interval to have a flexible and freer life.”

Friends, including Mr. Gergen, who had deployed his crisis management skills to try to save Mr. Summers’s presidency, and Robert E. Rubin, Mr. Summers’s predecessor as Treasury secretary and a longtime champion, told him he still had a big contribution to make. Return to your first love, economics, some recalled saying. Forget education reform. And make sure people know you are no misogynist.

Mr. Summers counseled Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the highest-ranking woman in elected office in American history, who drew him into economic advisory meetings. From the end of his presidency, the many women among his friends fanned out to defend his name.

“Quite a number of us who are women and relished working with Larry” thought he had been given a “bum rap,” said Elena Kagan, whom Mr. Summers had appointed as law school dean.

As he took on projects, collaborators enjoyed the very qualities that had made the Harvard faculty seethe: for instance, his eagerness to delve into matters that seemed small for someone of his stature.

He became a co-editor of the Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, helping revive the once-vibrant journal. He took on a lucrative part-time role at D. E. Shaw & Company, a investment firm, spending a day or two a week in New York. He joined the board of Teach for America, which promotes equality in education. In interviews, people from all three organizations marveled at Mr. Summers’s capacity for involvement even in minor affairs.

“The small strategic decisions add up to the whole ballgame,” said Wendy Kopp, founder of Teach for America.

Around the time Mr. Summers resigned, Mr. Rubin started a small research group called the Hamilton Project and housed at the Brookings Institution, to foster new economic policy ideas. Mr. Summers threw himself into it. Asked to review papers by outside authors, he would return them with extensive comments, said Jason Furman, the former project director and chief economic adviser in the Obama campaign. “He didn’t just want to sit on the board and speak at the event,” said Mr. Furman, who served in the Clinton administration when Mr. Summers was Treasury secretary.

For someone said to be poor at reading others, Mr. Summers has often displayed keen political instincts; after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, he had urged Harvard students to support the government and spoke out in support of its embattled R.O.T.C. chapter. Now, struck by the harsh consequences of globalization and income stagnation even among college graduates, Mr. Summers, known as a centrist as Treasury secretary, moved left, and in a very public forum.

Chrystia Freeland, a former student who had become editor at the Financial Times, asked him to write a monthly column that became such an attraction that the paper soon promoted it with his picture atop the front page. Mr. Summers offered prescriptions for the deepening economic trouble including huge fiscal stimulus and measures to prevent unnecessary foreclosures. A primary theme of his column was that too many people were falling behind, a point he cast in political as well as economic terms.

“In order to keep public support for open markets, you had to do more for the disadvantaged and the losers in globalization,” as Stuart E. Eizenstat, Mr. Summers’s former deputy at the Treasury Department, put it.

Three years ago, Mr. Summers could hardly pronounce Barack Obama’s name.

Introducing Mr. Obama at a reunion for black alumni of Harvard Law School, Mr. Summers drew chuckles as he stumbled through several iterations, finally settling on “BARE-ack.” The two men, intrigued by each other, stole away to talk privately, Mr. Ogletree said.

In the presidential primaries, most Clinton veterans stuck with their home team candidate, but Mr. Summers stayed neutral. Later, as the Obama campaign swallowed people and ideas from the Hamilton Project, he became involved, too, impressing aides with his willingness to do anything they asked, whether editing policy proposal or making television appearances.

As the financial crisis bloomed, Mr. Furman gave Mr. Summers a crucial task: introducing Mr. Obama’s internal conference calls on the economy by quickly summarizing the developments. The results were masterpieces of synthesis and concision, several participants said.

“I could tell, just being on the call,” Mr. Rubin said, “Obama got used to Larry bringing it all together.”

Mr. Obama sometimes asked questions other advisers struggled to answer, but Mr. Summers always seemed to provide new detail or analysis, making gracious references to the points of others.

Asked before Election Day if Mr. Summers would consider an administration role, friends joked that he had already bought airline tickets for his job interview.

For the position of Treasury secretary, the transition team had two finalists: Mr. Summers and Timothy F. Geithner, who had worked under him at the Treasury Department. “Either way it would have made sense,” Mr. Rubin said.

Obama advisers name several reasons for the job assignments: Mr. Geithner is a fresh face. Mr. Summers’s job gives him a broader policy arena and a chance to do what he does best: debate ideas. He also avoids confirmation hearings, which could dredge up unpleasantness related to his Harvard tenure.

When the jobs were announced, economists speculated on what the relationship between Mr. Summers and Mr. Geithner would be, now that the latter has the more prestigious title.

But in recent transition meetings, as in the Clinton administration, the two have seemed to trust and enjoy wrangling with each other, one aide said. Mr. Rubin said of Mr. Summers that in general he was “very aware of the criticism and very focused on making sure it works.”

And some predict that Mr. Obama’s style could mellow that of Mr. Summers.

Laurence Tribe, a Harvard law professor, said Mr. Obama’s “affability and inclusiveness might help nurture those same qualities in Larry, even though those haven’t been among Larry’s notable strengths.”

He may be better matched with fellow economists than he was with Harvard’s faculty, say colleagues, and with an advisory role rather than an executive one. As a participant in debates of the National Economic Council in the 1990s, “he was a great team player, he was loved and was very respectful of the back and forth,” said Gene Sperling, who led the council under Bill Clinton.

The term of Ben S. Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve, expires in January 2010, and some members of the Obama team predict that if Mr. Summers performs well, the job could be his. It requires confirmation, but with every passing day, say friends, Cambridge recedes further into the distance.

“Now, who talks about Harvard?” Mr. Eizenstat, the former deputy Treasury secretary, said. “It’s a thing of the past, a little blip on the radar screen.”

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