Science Guardian

Has the LHC already created a baby Black Hole? Strangelets? The Japanese earthquake? New startup proceeds…

Fresh worry: will Higgs turn out to be an inflaton which will swallow CERN thru wormhole into new universe?

In theory if not in fact, all is not necessarily well at the Large Hadron Collider outside Geneva, despite CERN’s proud parental press releases to the contrary. Yet the latest news is that the LHC has started up again, ignoring the opinion of a German federal judge that a public outside review is in order.

As a matter of fact, collisions resumed on March 2, after the beams of the world’s largest machine were quietly switched on and ramped up in February, the CERN brass having decided to ignore its previous plan for shutdown for inspection and renovation next year. The media were not invited, or even alerted, presumably in case the megasized toy fell apart, as it has done twice so far when started up in previous years.

Now that renewed high energy operation is a fait accompli sans catastrophe, however, the public has been informed, but without also notifying us – the 6.8 billion other humans riding the same planet as the clever, if apparently emotionally autistic, physicists operating the LHC – of the theoretical dangers involved in opening up the throttle to ever higher beam intensities.

Expanded list of risks

As things stand, in fact, the issue of safety is quite unresolved, with top physicists brazenly placating the public with an out of date, long ago refuted safety argument, while their own supposedly more viable private rationale crumbles. As the collider moves further into unknown territory, the list of dangers unearthed by those who have, unlike most of the media, troubled to actually read what CERN has published, and compared it with the current literature, has expanded now to at least six dire possibilities: mini Black Holes which might gobble the Earth, strangelets which might turn it into strange matter a la neutron star or white dwarf, rapid hydrogen bomb sized explosions which will wreck Geneva and the world economy, magnetic monopoles (ruled out by the same specious rationale as mini Black Holes), a vacuum bubble to restart the entire universe (denied for the same reason), earthquakes of which the catastrophe in Japan may just possibly be an example (coincidence, anybody?), and finally (you heard it here first) the possibility of producing the dreaded inflaton, which may swallow CERN into a baby universe grown to the diameter of 46 Earths in the first second.

On the face of it, yes, the world’s vastest and fastest working mechanism, the celebrated – among physicists and science buffs, at least – CERN collider outside Geneva, did pass through its potentially more dangerous ALICE phase smoothly before Christmas. Instead of protons, heavy lead ions were smashed into each other from opposite directions at new and record levels of energy before the plug was pulled for the holiday without visibly creating any untoward particles, as feared by the redoubtable LHC critics who belong to what we might call the “Very ConCERNed” Brigade.

Reasons for conCERN – about a CERNCon

By the “very ConCERNed” we mean the handful of interested and fairly expert observers who, having read and reviewed what CERN has published, not merely whatever has been reported by the assiduous stenographers who go by the name science journalists these days, believe the world is now dealing with a CERN shell game where valid doubts are concealed from the public eye.

In this “CERNCon”, the propaganda wool is being pulled over the eyes of the public by the PR apologists of an organized army of egghead boffins who won’t brook any interference with their rush to penetrate the inner sanctum of Mother Nature even at the risk of universal annihilation.

Readers of Science Guardian are of course fully cognizant of this phenomenon in other areas of science where funding has trumped truth and professionalism, most secretly in the case of cancer and most blatantly in HIV/AIDS, another field where scientists have far outpaced the will or capacity of almost all journalists to catch up with the mischief they are perpetrating.

Is the Higgs really the lethal inflaton?

In the case of the LHC, according to the critics’ theories the potential consequences are infinitely vaster, up to and including the destruction of life, our planet, the solar system and even the universe itself.

Not only that, but according to some conCERNed theoretical calculations based upon the very premises on which the LHC operates, it may be too late. The immense contraption which excites CERN physicists into a paroxysm of intellectual, aesthetic and social ecstasy may have already doomed us all by invisibly creating either a mini blackhole (mBH) or a strangelet, either or both of which may have now fallen to the center of the Earth and be busy decimating the only blue and white planet on which Life is known, from the inside out.

Added to this, we now have papers in hand by British and Russian physicists which suggest that the Higgs boson, which CERN physicists are breathlessly and publicly hoping to turn up as the major prize of the current phase of tweaking Nature’s tail, may be none other than the notorious inflaton, an entity supposedly responsible, when it came into being just after the Big Bang, for inflating the universe from an invisible speck into a large football field, at least, and possibly its current, inconceivably vast size. (Now a busy field, this was initiated by F. Bezrukov, “The Standard Model Higgs Boson as the Inflaton,” Physics Letters B, 659:703-6, 2008).

Is it possible that the Higgs when it appears will immediately suck the CERN HQ though a wormhole into another, baby universe in the blink of an eye? We can only hope not. But according to what one can discern in a currently booming field treating the Higgs as an inflaton, this may be on the cards. And there does not appear to be at present any good reasoning offered to contradict this alarming possibility, judging from Brian Greene’s latest book, “Hidden Reality” (p279). Even the renowned physicist Frank Wilczek is now apparently equating the Higgs boson with the inflaton.

Derided but responsible critics

Normally, we hasten to note, we would be reluctant to join the LHC critics, the largely scorned but certainly socially and morally responsible observers who publicly, if so far ineffectively, have strenuously objected to the runaway operation of CERN’s gargantuan baby far beyond the restraining leash of public review.

These well intentioned and worry prone global citizens, however right they may be, don’t seem to respect the renowned physicists and engineers (see pic) who run the LHC as the brilliant, wise and highly competent specialists beyond ordinary ken that the general public seems to assume they are. On the contrary, they see the behavior of the LHC’s ministering echelons of physicists and engineers and their leaders as childish and irresponsible, in fact see them as thoroughly reprehensible and alarming arsonists of the planet, no better than tots armed with a box of matches and setting light to the living room curtains “to see what will happen”.

Naturally, we would not approve of this disagreeable skepticism in normal circumstances, where it would undoubtedly be the result of uninformed iconoclasm driven by Freudian patricidal impulses and unrestrained imaginative fears and not by logic and evidence, which is the pyramid on which valid science stands.

In this case, however, our long investigation behind the scenes has revealed that – Alas! – the nays have it, and the CERN-LHC affair is indeed yet another example of science out of control, and scientists getting away with (planetary, in this case) murder, so to speak, for lack of any outside reviewer in the media or the courts able to penetrate the dark veil of expertise with which they can shield their operations from outside view.

And they do have a point, in that it is now clearly established that said elite professional physicists are intent on escalating the beam energy of the LHC to higher and higher levels to explore conditions hitherto unseen since one trillionth of a second after the Big Bang, while holding off public scrutiny with a misleading camouflage of gung ho propaganda and inaccurate public statements, the latter often self contradictory, CERN evidently being a large organization where the right hand knoweth not what the left hand is up to, as we will show.

A massive review is called for, we agree

So, having read fully into both sides of the issue, which it appears very few outsiders have troubled themselves to do (though the few that have are exemplary, and we will point to them) we conclude that the situation deserves a comprehensive review by objective parties unallied to CERN on any basis. In particular, given the abject fellow traveling of the science and general interest media, reduced by James Gillies, CERN spokesman and head of communication, to the role of notetakers so bewildered by the claims of experts that their critical faculties have been entirely spiked, we step up to the plate in the hope of persuading someone in the media to investigate (Pro Publica, anyone?).

Ideally, of course, a public review board or court should be set up, as a German judge has specifically opined:

German court pleads for CERN/LHC safety conference

While the world`s largest atom smasher, CERN`s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva/Switzerland, these days is going to be restarted after a two months break, a German Court, although rejecting a claim to oblige German CERN deputies to stop LHC`s scheduled high energy running, urges the German government to convene a safety conference on collider`s potential catastrophic dangers.

“The court points out its opinion that it should be possible to let discuss the various safety aspects that have been the issue of both safety reports of 2003 and 2008, within the framework of a safety conference“ – that`show chairman Mr. Niemeyer, chief judge at the German administrative court at Cologne, logged after three hours of intensive court hearing.

… Such catastrophic scenarios are even discussed in CERN`s safety reports but there are found to be all falsified.

However, the critics still regard their serious warnings as not having been disproved. They state that safety reports would have to be reviewed for reasons of fundamental new astronomical findings that appeared for the first time in 2009, thus a year after CERN`s last safety report, and postulate a safety conference including not only CERN and CERN-related scientists but also the critics.

…”Even though the administrative court in general repeated last year`s constitutional court`s decision, it has put out a strong new signal that cannot be ignored by German government and even CERN”, summarizes Mr. Möhring.

(Source at Achtphasen.net: http://tinyurl.com/6yvmtor)

What we will do is merely point out the contradictions, insufficiencies and evasions in CERN’s various publicly available statements and accounts of its activities, and ask for clarification, in the name of the people of the various 20 nations of ordinary citizens whose taxes are paying for this adventure, not to mention the rest of humanity whose future is mortgaged to the validity of CERN’s evidently increasingly hollow safety reassurances.

However, we know that long texts on the Web are troublesome for many people to read, so we will break up our treatment into several posts, of which this is the first.

This fine piece by the inimitable Jonah Lehrer deserves memorializing, from the Dec 13 2010 issue of the New Yorker.

Lehrer asks why the results of scientific studies often fail to hold up, as they are repeated.

The big question though is whether Lehrer’s conclusion holds up:

Such anomalies demonstrate the slipperiness of empiricism. Although many scientific ideas generate conflicting results and suffer from falling effect sizes, they continue to get cited in the textbooks and drive standard medical practice. Why? Because these ideas seem true. Because they make sense. Because we can’t bear to let them go. And this is why the decline effect is so troubling. Not because it reveals the human fallibility of science, in which data are tweaked and beliefs shape perceptions. (Such shortcomings aren’t surprising, at least for scientists.) And not because it reveals that many of our most exciting theories are fleeting fads and will soon be rejected. (That idea has been around since Thomas Kuhn.) The decline effect is troubling because it reminds us how difficult it is to prove anything. We like to pretend that our experiments define the truth for us. But that’s often not the case. Just because an idea is true doesn’t mean it can be proved. And just because an idea can be proved doesn’t mean it’s true. When the experiments are done, we still have to choose what to believe.

That studies and their results are warped by human nature is hardly a generally appreciated truth, and that ruling paradigms are passing fads is also something which most science reporters, let alone the general public, seem largely unaware of.

But whether it is true that after a well done study is completed, and confirmed by subsequent well done studies, we still have to choose what to believe, is a little over the top.

You have to read the article to decide for yourself, of course..

ANNALS OF SCIENCE

The Truth Wears Off
Is there something wrong with the scientific method?
by Jonah Lehrer

On September 18, 2007, a few dozen neuroscientists, psychiatrists, and drug-company executives gathered in a hotel conference room in Brussels to hear some startling news. It had to do with a class of drugs known as atypical or second-generation antipsychotics, which came on the market in the early nineties. The drugs, sold under brand names such as Abilify, Seroquel, and Zyprexa, had been tested on schizophrenics in several large clinical trials, all of which had demonstrated a dramatic decrease in the subjects’ psychiatric symptoms. As a result, second-generation antipsychotics had become one of the fastest-growing and most profitable pharmaceutical classes. By 2001, Eli Lilly’s Zyprexa was generating more revenue than Prozac. It remains the company’s top-selling drug.
But the data presented at the Brussels meeting made it clear that something strange was happening: the therapeutic power of the drugs appeared to be steadily waning. A recent study showed an effect that was less than half of that documented in the first trials, in the early nineteen-nineties. Many researchers began to argue that the expensive pharmaceuticals weren’t any better than first-generation antipsychotics, which have been in use since the fifties. “In fact, sometimes they now look even worse,” John Davis, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Illinois at Chicago, told me.
Before the effectiveness of a drug can be confirmed, it must be tested and tested again. Different scientists in different labs need to repeat the protocols and publish their results. The test of replicability, as it’s known, is the foundation of modern research. Replicability is how the community enforces itself. It’s a safeguard for the creep of subjectivity. Most of the time, scientists know what results they want, and that can influence the results they get. The premise of replicability is that the scientific community can correct for these flaws.
But now all sorts of well-established, multiply confirmed findings have started to look increasingly uncertain. It’s as if our facts were losing their truth: claims that have been enshrined in textbooks are suddenly unprovable. This phenomenon doesn’t yet have an official name, but it’s occurring across a wide range of fields, from psychology to ecology. In the field of medicine, the phenomenon seems extremely widespread, affecting not only antipsychotics but also therapies ranging from cardiac stents to Vitamin E and antidepressants: Davis has a forthcoming analysis demonstrating that the efficacy of antidepressants has gone down as much as threefold in recent decades.
For many scientists, the effect is especially troubling because of what it exposes about the scientific process. If replication is what separates the rigor of science from the squishiness of pseudoscience, where do we put all these rigorously validated findings that can no longer be proved? Which results should we believe? Francis Bacon, the early-modern philosopher and pioneer of the scientific method, once declared that experiments were essential, because they allowed us to “put nature to the question.” But it appears that nature often gives us different answers.

JJonathan Schooler was a young graduate student at the University of Washington in the nineteen-eighties when he discovered a surprising new fact about language and memory. At the time, it was widely believed that the act of describing our memories improved them. But, in a series of clever experiments, Schooler demonstrated that subjects shown a face and asked to describe it were much less likely to recognize the face when shown it later than those who had simply looked at it. Schooler called the phenomenon “verbal overshadowing.”
The study turned him into an academic star. Since its initial publication, in 1990, it has been cited more than four hundred times. Before long, Schooler had extended the model to a variety of other tasks, such as remembering the taste of a wine, identifying the best strawberry jam, and solving difficult creative puzzles. In each instance, asking people to put their perceptions into words led to dramatic decreases in performance.
But while Schooler was publishing these results in highly reputable journals, a secret worry gnawed at him: it was proving difficult to replicate his earlier findings. “I’d often still see an effect, but the effect just wouldn’t be as strong,” he told me. “It was as if verbal overshadowing, my big new idea, was getting weaker.” At first, he assumed that he’d made an error in experimental design or a statistical miscalculation. But he couldn’t find anything wrong with his research. He then concluded that his initial batch of research subjects must have been unusually susceptible to verbal overshadowing. (John Davis, similarly, has speculated that part of the drop-off in the effectiveness of antipsychotics can be attributed to using subjects who suffer from milder forms of psychosis which are less likely to show dramatic improvement.) “It wasn’t a very satisfying explanation,” Schooler says. “One of my mentors told me that my real mistake was trying to replicate my work. He told me doing that was just setting myself up for disappointment.”
Schooler tried to put the problem out of his mind; his colleagues assured him that such things happened all the time. Over the next few years, he found new research questions, got married and had kids. But his replication problem kept on getting worse. His first attempt at replicating the 1990 study, in 1995, resulted in an effect that was thirty per cent smaller. The next year, the size of the effect shrank another thirty per cent. When other labs repeated Schooler’s experiments, they got a similar spread of data, with a distinct downward trend. “This was profoundly frustrating,” he says. “It was as if nature gave me this great result and then tried to take it back.” In private, Schooler began referring to the problem as “cosmic habituation,” by analogy to the decrease in response that occurs when individuals habituate to particular stimuli. “Habituation is why you don’t notice the stuff that’s always there,” Schooler says. “It’s an inevitable process of adjustment, a ratcheting down of excitement. I started joking that it was like the cosmos was habituating to my ideas. I took it very personally.”
Schooler is now a tenured professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara. He has curly black hair, pale-green eyes, and the relaxed demeanor of someone who lives five minutes away from his favorite beach. When he speaks, he tends to get distracted by his own digressions. He might begin with a point about memory, which reminds him of a favorite William James quote, which inspires a long soliloquy on the importance of introspection. Before long, we’re looking at pictures from Burning Man on his iPhone, which leads us back to the fragile nature of memory.
Although verbal overshadowing remains a widely accepted theory—it’s often invoked in the context of eyewitness testimony, for instance—Schooler is still a little peeved at the cosmos. “I know I should just move on already,” he says. “I really should stop talking about this. But I can’t.” That’s because he is convinced that he has stumbled on a serious problem, one that afflicts many of the most exciting new ideas in psychology.
One of the first demonstrations of this mysterious phenomenon came in the early nineteen-thirties. Joseph Banks Rhine, a psychologist at Duke, had developed an interest in the possibility of extrasensory perception, or E.S.P. Rhine devised an experiment featuring Zener cards, a special deck of twenty-five cards printed with one of five different symbols: a card was drawn from the deck and the subject was asked to guess the symbol. Most of Rhine’s subjects guessed about twenty per cent of the cards correctly, as you’d expect, but an undergraduate named Adam Linzmayer averaged nearly fifty per cent during his initial sessions, and pulled off several uncanny streaks, such as guessing nine cards in a row. The odds of this happening by chance are about one in two million. Linzmayer did it three times.
Rhine documented these stunning results in his notebook and prepared several papers for publication. But then, just as he began to believe in the possibility of extrasensory perception, the student lost his spooky talent. Between 1931 and 1933, Linzmayer guessed at the identity of another several thousand cards, but his success rate was now barely above chance. Rhine was forced to conclude that the student’s “extra-sensory perception ability has gone through a marked decline.” And Linzmayer wasn’t the only subject to experience such a drop-off: in nearly every case in which Rhine and others documented E.S.P. the effect dramatically diminished over time. Rhine called this trend the “decline effect.”
Schooler was fascinated by Rhine’s experimental struggles. Here was a scientist who had repeatedly documented the decline of his data; he seemed to have a talent for finding results that fell apart. In 2004, Schooler embarked on an ironic imitation of Rhine’s research: he tried to replicate this failure to replicate. In homage to Rhine’s interests, he decided to test for a parapsychological phenomenon known as precognition. The experiment itself was straightforward: he flashed a set of images to a subject and asked him or her to identify each one. Most of the time, the response was negative—the images were displayed too quickly to register. Then Schooler randomly selected half of the images to be shown again. What he wanted to know was whether the images that got a second showing were more likely to have been identified the first time around. Could subsequent exposure have somehow influenced the initial results? Could the effect become the cause?
The craziness of the hypothesis was the point: Schooler knows that precognition lacks a scientific explanation. But he wasn’t testing extrasensory powers; he was testing the decline effect. “At first, the data looked amazing, just as we’d expected,” Schooler says. “I couldn’t believe the amount of precognition we were finding. But then, as we kept on running subjects, the effect size”—a standard statistical measure—“kept on getting smaller and smaller.” The scientists eventually tested more than two thousand undergraduates. “In the end, our results looked just like Rhine’s,” Schooler said. “We found this strong paranormal effect, but it disappeared on us.”
The most likely explanation for the decline is an obvious one: regression to the mean. As the experiment is repeated, that is, an early statistical fluke gets cancelled out. The extrasensory powers of Schooler’s subjects didn’t decline—they were simply an illusion that vanished over time. And yet Schooler has noticed that many of the data sets that end up declining seem statistically solid—that is, they contain enough data that any regression to the mean shouldn’t be dramatic. “These are the results that pass all the tests,” he says. “The odds of them being random are typically quite remote, like one in a million. This means that the decline effect should almost never happen. But it happens all the time! Hell, it’s happened to me multiple times.” And this is why Schooler believes that the decline effect deserves more attention: its ubiquity seems to violate the laws of statistics. “Whenever I start talking about this, scientists get very nervous,” he says. “But I still want to know what happened to my results. Like most scientists, I assumed that it would get easier to document my effect over time. I’d get better at doing the experiments, at zeroing in on the conditions that produce verbal overshadowing. So why did the opposite happen? I’m convinced that we can use the tools of science to figure this out. First, though, we have to admit that we’ve got a problem.”
In 1991, the Danish zoologist Anders Møller, at Uppsala University, in Sweden, made a remarkable discovery about sex, barn swallows, and symmetry. It had long been known that the asymmetrical appearance of a creature was directly linked to the amount of mutation in its genome, so that more mutations led to more “fluctuating asymmetry.” (An easy way to measure asymmetry in humans is to compare the length of the fingers on each hand.) What Møller discovered is that female barn swallows were far more likely to mate with male birds that had long, symmetrical feathers. This suggested that the picky females were using symmetry as a proxy for the quality of male genes. Møller’s paper, which was published in Nature, set off a frenzy of research. Here was an easily measured, widely applicable indicator of genetic quality, and females could be shown to gravitate toward it. Aesthetics was really about genetics.
In the three years following, there were ten independent tests of the role of fluctuating asymmetry in sexual selection, and nine of them found a relationship between symmetry and male reproductive success. It didn’t matter if scientists were looking at the hairs on fruit flies or replicating the swallow studies—females seemed to prefer males with mirrored halves. Before long, the theory was applied to humans. Researchers found, for instance, that women preferred the smell of symmetrical men, but only during the fertile phase of the menstrual cycle. Other studies claimed that females had more orgasms when their partners were symmetrical, while a paper by anthropologists at Rutgers analyzed forty Jamaican dance routines and discovered that symmetrical men were consistently rated as better dancers.
Then the theory started to fall apart. In 1994, there were fourteen published tests of symmetry and sexual selection, and only eight found a correlation. In 1995, there were eight papers on the subject, and only four got a positive result. By 1998, when there were twelve additional investigations of fluctuating asymmetry, only a third of them confirmed the theory. Worse still, even the studies that yielded some positive result showed a steadily declining effect size. Between 1992 and 1997, the average effect size shrank by eighty per cent.
And it’s not just fluctuating asymmetry. In 2001, Michael Jennions, a biologist at the Australian National University, set out to analyze “temporal trends” across a wide range of subjects in ecology and evolutionary biology. He looked at hundreds of papers and forty-four meta-analyses (that is, statistical syntheses of related studies), and discovered a consistent decline effect over time, as many of the theories seemed to fade into irrelevance. In fact, even when numerous variables were controlled for—Jennions knew, for instance, that the same author might publish several critical papers, which could distort his analysis—there was still a significant decrease in the validity of the hypothesis, often within a year of publication. Jennions admits that his findings are troubling, but expresses a reluctance to talk about them publicly. “This is a very sensitive issue for scientists,” he says. “You know, we’re supposed to be dealing with hard facts, the stuff that’s supposed to stand the test of time. But when you see these trends you become a little more skeptical of things.”
What happened? Leigh Simmons, a biologist at the University of Western Australia, suggested one explanation when he told me about his initial enthusiasm for the theory: “I was really excited by fluctuating asymmetry. The early studies made the effect look very robust.” He decided to conduct a few experiments of his own, investigating symmetry in male horned beetles. “Unfortunately, I couldn’t find the effect,” he said. “But the worst part was that when I submitted these null results I had difficulty getting them published. The journals only wanted confirming data. It was too exciting an idea to disprove, at least back then.” For Simmons, the steep rise and slow fall of fluctuating asymmetry is a clear example of a scientific paradigm, one of those intellectual fads that both guide and constrain research: after a new paradigm is proposed, the peer-review process is tilted toward positive results. But then, after a few years, the academic incentives shift—the paradigm has become entrenched—so that the most notable results are now those that disprove the theory.
Jennions, similarly, argues that the decline effect is largely a product of publication bias, or the tendency of scientists and scientific journals to prefer positive data over null results, which is what happens when no effect is found. The bias was first identified by the statistician Theodore Sterling, in 1959, after he noticed that ninety-seven per cent of all published psychological studies with statistically significant data found the effect they were looking for. A “significant” result is defined as any data point that would be produced by chance less than five per cent of the time. This ubiquitous test was invented in 1922 by the English mathematician Ronald Fisher, who picked five per cent as the boundary line, somewhat arbitrarily, because it made pencil and slide-rule calculations easier. Sterling saw that if ninety-seven per cent of psychology studies were proving their hypotheses, either psychologists were extraordinarily lucky or they published only the outcomes of successful experiments. In recent years, publication bias has mostly been seen as a problem for clinical trials, since pharmaceutical companies are less interested in publishing results that aren’t favorable. But it’s becoming increasingly clear that publication bias also produces major distortions in fields without large corporate incentives, such as psychology and ecology.
While publication bias almost certainly plays a role in the decline effect, it remains an incomplete explanation. For one thing, it fails to account for the initial prevalence of positive results among studies that never even get submitted to journals. It also fails to explain the experience of people like Schooler, who have been unable to replicate their initial data despite their best efforts. Richard Palmer, a biologist at the University of Alberta, who has studied the problems surrounding fluctuating asymmetry, suspects that an equally significant issue is the selective reporting of results—the data that scientists choose to document in the first place. Palmer’s most convincing evidence relies on a statistical tool known as a funnel graph. When a large number of studies have been done on a single subject, the data should follow a pattern: studies with a large sample size should all cluster around a common value—the true result—whereas those with a smaller sample size should exhibit a random scattering, since they’re subject to greater sampling error. This pattern gives the graph its name, since the distribution resembles a funnel.
The funnel graph visually captures the distortions of selective reporting. For instance, after Palmer plotted every study of fluctuating asymmetry, he noticed that the distribution of results with smaller sample sizes wasn’t random at all but instead skewed heavily toward positive results. Palmer has since documented a similar problem in several other contested subject areas. “Once I realized that selective reporting is everywhere in science, I got quite depressed,” Palmer told me. “As a researcher, you’re always aware that there might be some nonrandom patterns, but I had no idea how widespread it is.” In a recent review article, Palmer summarized the impact of selective reporting on his field: “We cannot escape the troubling conclusion that some—perhaps many—cherished generalities are at best exaggerated in their biological significance and at worst a collective illusion nurtured by strong a-priori beliefs often repeated.”
Palmer emphasizes that selective reporting is not the same as scientific fraud. Rather, the problem seems to be one of subtle omissions and unconscious misperceptions, as researchers struggle to make sense of their results. Stephen Jay Gould referred to this as the “shoehorning” process. “A lot of scientific measurement is really hard,” Simmons told me. “If you’re talking about fluctuating asymmetry, then it’s a matter of minuscule differences between the right and left sides of an animal. It’s millimetres of a tail feather. And so maybe a researcher knows that he’s measuring a good male”—an animal that has successfully mated—“and he knows that it’s supposed to be symmetrical. Well, that act of measurement is going to be vulnerable to all sorts of perception biases. That’s not a cynical statement. That’s just the way human beings work.”
One of the classic examples of selective reporting concerns the testing of acupuncture in different countries. While acupuncture is widely accepted as a medical treatment in various Asian countries, its use is much more contested in the West. These cultural differences have profoundly influenced the results of clinical trials. Between 1966 and 1995, there were forty-seven studies of acupuncture in China, Taiwan, and Japan, and every single trial concluded that acupuncture was an effective treatment. During the same period, there were ninety-four clinical trials of acupuncture in the United States, Sweden, and the U.K., and only fifty-six per cent of these studies found any therapeutic benefits. As Palmer notes, this wide discrepancy suggests that scientists find ways to confirm their preferred hypothesis, disregarding what they don’t want to see. Our beliefs are a form of blindness.
John Ioannidis, an epidemiologist at Stanford University, argues that such distortions are a serious issue in biomedical research. “These exaggerations are why the decline has become so common,” he says. “It’d be really great if the initial studies gave us an accurate summary of things. But they don’t. And so what happens is we waste a lot of money treating millions of patients and doing lots of follow-up studies on other themes based on results that are misleading.” In 2005, Ioannidis published an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association that looked at the forty-nine most cited clinical-research studies in three major medical journals. Forty-five of these studies reported positive results, suggesting that the intervention being tested was effective. Because most of these studies were randomized controlled trials—the “gold standard” of medical evidence—they tended to have a significant impact on clinical practice, and led to the spread of treatments such as hormone replacement therapy for menopausal women and daily low-dose aspirin to prevent heart attacks and strokes. Nevertheless, the data Ioannidis found were disturbing: of the thirty-four claims that had been subject to replication, forty-one per cent had either been directly contradicted or had their effect sizes significantly downgraded.
The situation is even worse when a subject is fashionable. In recent years, for instance, there have been hundreds of studies on the various genes that control the differences in disease risk between men and women. These findings have included everything from the mutations responsible for the increased risk of schizophrenia to the genes underlying hypertension. Ioannidis and his colleagues looked at four hundred and thirty-two of these claims. They quickly discovered that the vast majority had serious flaws. But the most troubling fact emerged when he looked at the test of replication: out of four hundred and thirty-two claims, only a single one was consistently replicable. “This doesn’t mean that none of these claims will turn out to be true,” he says. “But, given that most of them were done badly, I wouldn’t hold my breath.”
According to Ioannidis, the main problem is that too many researchers engage in what he calls “significance chasing,” or finding ways to interpret the data so that it passes the statistical test of significance—the ninety-five-per-cent boundary invented by Ronald Fisher. “The scientists are so eager to pass this magical test that they start playing around with the numbers, trying to find anything that seems worthy,” Ioannidis says. In recent years, Ioannidis has become increasingly blunt about the pervasiveness of the problem. One of his most cited papers has a deliberately provocative title: “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False.”
The problem of selective reporting is rooted in a fundamental cognitive flaw, which is that we like proving ourselves right and hate being wrong. “It feels good to validate a hypothesis,” Ioannidis said. “It feels even better when you’ve got a financial interest in the idea or your career depends upon it. And that’s why, even after a claim has been systematically disproven”—he cites, for instance, the early work on hormone replacement therapy, or claims involving various vitamins—“you still see some stubborn researchers citing the first few studies that show a strong effect. They really want to believe that it’s true.”
That’s why Schooler argues that scientists need to become more rigorous about data collection before they publish. “We’re wasting too much time chasing after bad studies and underpowered experiments,” he says. The current “obsession” with replicability distracts from the real problem, which is faulty design. He notes that nobody even tries to replicate most science papers—there are simply too many. (According to Nature, a third of all studies never even get cited, let alone repeated.) “I’ve learned the hard way to be exceedingly careful,” Schooler says. “Every researcher should have to spell out, in advance, how many subjects they’re going to use, and what exactly they’re testing, and what constitutes a sufficient level of proof. We have the tools to be much more transparent about our experiments.”
In a forthcoming paper, Schooler recommends the establishment of an open-source database, in which researchers are required to outline their planned investigations and document all their results. “I think this would provide a huge increase in access to scientific work and give us a much better way to judge the quality of an experiment,” Schooler says. “It would help us finally deal with all these issues that the decline effect is exposing.”
Although such reforms would mitigate the dangers of publication bias and selective reporting, they still wouldn’t erase the decline effect. This is largely because scientific research will always be shadowed by a force that can’t be curbed, only contained: sheer randomness. Although little research has been done on the experimental dangers of chance and happenstance, the research that exists isn’t encouraging.
In the late nineteen-nineties, John Crabbe, a neuroscientist at the Oregon Health and Science University, conducted an experiment that showed how unknowable chance events can skew tests of replicability. He performed a series of experiments on mouse behavior in three different science labs: in Albany, New York; Edmonton, Alberta; and Portland, Oregon. Before he conducted the experiments, he tried to standardize every variable he could think of. The same strains of mice were used in each lab, shipped on the same day from the same supplier. The animals were raised in the same kind of enclosure, with the same brand of sawdust bedding. They had been exposed to the same amount of incandescent light, were living with the same number of littermates, and were fed the exact same type of chow pellets. When the mice were handled, it was with the same kind of surgical glove, and when they were tested it was on the same equipment, at the same time in the morning.
The premise of this test of replicability, of course, is that each of the labs should have generated the same pattern of results. “If any set of experiments should have passed the test, it should have been ours,” Crabbe says. “But that’s not the way it turned out.” In one experiment, Crabbe injected a particular strain of mouse with cocaine. In Portland the mice given the drug moved, on average, six hundred centimetres more than they normally did; in Albany they moved seven hundred and one additional centimetres. But in the Edmonton lab they moved more than five thousand additional centimetres. Similar deviations were observed in a test of anxiety. Furthermore, these inconsistencies didn’t follow any detectable pattern. In Portland one strain of mouse proved most anxious, while in Albany another strain won that distinction.
The disturbing implication of the Crabbe study is that a lot of extraordinary scientific data are nothing but noise. The hyperactivity of those coked-up Edmonton mice wasn’t an interesting new fact—it was a meaningless outlier, a by-product of invisible variables we don’t understand. The problem, of course, is that such dramatic findings are also the most likely to get published in prestigious journals, since the data are both statistically significant and entirely unexpected. Grants get written, follow-up studies are conducted. The end result is a scientific accident that can take years to unravel.
This suggests that the decline effect is actually a decline of illusion. While Karl Popper imagined falsification occurring with a single, definitive experiment—Galileo refuted Aristotelian mechanics in an afternoon—the process turns out to be much messier than that. Many scientific theories continue to be considered true even after failing numerous experimental tests. Verbal overshadowing might exhibit the decline effect, but it remains extensively relied upon within the field. The same holds for any number of phenomena, from the disappearing benefits of second-generation antipsychotics to the weak coupling ratio exhibited by decaying neutrons, which appears to have fallen by more than ten standard deviations between 1969 and 2001. Even the law of gravity hasn’t always been perfect at predicting real-world phenomena. (In one test, physicists measuring gravity by means of deep boreholes in the Nevada desert found a two-and-a-half-per-cent discrepancy between the theoretical predictions and the actual data.) Despite these findings, second-generation antipsychotics are still widely prescribed, and our model of the neutron hasn’t changed. The law of gravity remains the same.
Such anomalies demonstrate the slipperiness of empiricism. Although many scientific ideas generate conflicting results and suffer from falling effect sizes, they continue to get cited in the textbooks and drive standard medical practice. Why? Because these ideas seem true. Because they make sense. Because we can’t bear to let them go. And this is why the decline effect is so troubling. Not because it reveals the human fallibility of science, in which data are tweaked and beliefs shape perceptions. (Such shortcomings aren’t surprising, at least for scientists.) And not because it reveals that many of our most exciting theories are fleeting fads and will soon be rejected. (That idea has been around since Thomas Kuhn.) The decline effect is troubling because it reminds us how difficult it is to prove anything. We like to pretend that our experiments define the truth for us. But that’s often not the case. Just because an idea is true doesn’t mean it can be proved. And just because an idea can be proved doesn’t mean it’s true. When the experiments are done, we still have to choose what to believe. ?

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/12/13/101213fa_fact_lehrer?currentPage=all

Cindi Lauper joins 500 hairdressers in promoting scientific error to increasingly inattentive world

Money tap turned tighter, promising some relief for Africa from misdirected and revolting AIDS drugs

Global AIDS propaganda reaches its annual climax today, and the ever enlarging circle of scientific authorities on this somewhat tasteless subject who are helping to make it palatable has expanded to 500 hairdressers besieging the United Nations, and pop icon “Girls Wanna Have Fun” Cindi Lauper, no less.

World AIDS Day 2010: 500 Hairdressers Unite Against AIDS by Grace Gold

Over 500 hair stylists have invaded the United Nations for a cause far more urgent than just your typical bad hair day intervention.

Today kicks off the United States launch of Hairdressers Against AIDS, a joint venture between L’Oréal and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), which urges stylists to use the often intimate, tell-all relationships they have with clients as a jumping point to educate them about AIDS prevention, testing and available treatment resources.

“The longest relationship I’ve ever had with a man has been with my hair stylist, Garren,” said Allure Editor in Chief Linda Wells, to the laughs and knowing smiles of the room filled with hairdressers who had flown in from all parts of the country to support the cause.

It’s that uniquely special and loyal relationship that often deepens over years that allows hairdressers in particular to be very effective advocates, as they can gab details surrounding sexual activity that most women won’t even share with loved ones and partners.

“Today, information is the only vaccine against HIV,” said John Tedstrom, President and CEO of the Global Business Coalition on HIV/AIDS, TB and Malaria.

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L’Oréal higher-ups, government officials and AIDS educators who addressed the crowd emphasized that blasting through the stigma surrounding HIV and creating an open atmosphere for discussion could actually save clients’ lives.

The 500 stylists will brave downpour and windy conditions to descend upon Times Square, with a goal of creating one million conversations about HIV and AIDS with New Yorkers. The effort aims to spread awareness and curb the spread of death and disease in order to honor World AIDS Day.

Celebrity stylists like Ted Gibson, Jason Backe, Tracey Cunningham and Jet Rhys will be on hand to pound the pavement for the long day of aggressive volunteer work.

“AIDS isn’t talked about because women don’t want to feel tainted or associated with disease, it can seem dirty. But we have to spark the conversation — it can save lives. And listening to the speakers made me realize that I need to talk to my own two teenage boys about it,” Rhys told StyleList.

And the HIV positive Regan Hofmann — whose long flowing blonde locks and Ivy-league upper class upbringing seems to fly in the face of the stereotypical AIDS patient — said it was also her hairstylist who was the first to comfort her in the shocking aftermath of her fatal diagnosis.

“I was scared my hairdresser wouldn’t want to touch my hair again. But after sitting down for a shampoo and feeling him run his fingers through my hair, I felt safe and comforted in a way I wasn’t able to before,” said the Editor In Chief of POZ Magazine.

And speaking of hair, check out how platinum blonde icon Cyndi Lauper is honoring World AIDS Day in her own very colorful way.

Here’s what they refer to:

Cyndi Lauper Talks AIDS Awareness, M.A.C Viva Glam Lipstick and Her Favorite Hair Color of All Time>

Cyndi Lauper gives back for World AIDS Day. Photo: Charles Eshelman/FilmMagic.com
Girls may wanna have fun, but they can change the world, too.

To honor World AIDS Day, Grammy Award-winning songstress and M.A.C Viva Glam spokesmodel Cyndi Lauper lent a helping hand at God’s Love We Deliver, a nonprofit that serves nutritious meals to people in New York and New Jersey who are suffering from serious illnesses like AIDS.

And in M.A.C’s most successful Viva Glam campaign ever, Lauper has campaigned alongside Lady Gaga to sell the $14.50 pop of coral lipstick. All funds are donated to the M.A.C AIDS Fund, which supports programs for AIDS patients, who often struggle with the poverty, pain and shame the disease can leave in its wake.

As of today, the campaign has raised $32 million in the over 74 countries in which the lipstick is sold, with retail partners like Nordstrom and Macy’s forgoing their usual cut in favor of donating the product’s full retail value to the fund.

“The biggest misconception people have about AIDS is they think they won’t get it,” a brilliantly platinum-blond Lauper tells StyleList, from the back kitchen at the God’s Love We Deliver home station in Soho, New York.

“I’ve had friends who have had it, and that’s why I campaign. People need the awareness. They need to realize that AIDS is 100 percent preventable, but 0 percent curable. And it’s not an easy life. If the disease don’t get you, the medicine will,” adds Lauper, shaking her head.

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The rate of new infections has increased in recent years, and AIDS is now the leading cause of death for African-American women between the ages of 18 and 34, according to MAC AIDS Fund Executive Director Nancy Mahon.

“Factors like domestic violence, financial dependence and lack of self-esteem lead many women to not protect themselves against HIV,” says Mahon. “The beauty of using rock stars like Cyndi Lauper and Lady Gaga is that women of all ages listen to stars in a way they won’t listen to the surgeon general.”

While the sexy campaign photos show Lauper and Gaga clad in lingerie and smoky eyes peppered with hot-colored lips, Lauper says gifting the girly tube to an important woman in your life is the also the perfect time to remind her about AIDS prevention.

“Tell them, ‘Have fun, it’s a great color, make yourself pretty, enjoy your life — but be safe, because you’re valuable to me.’ Give it to your sister. Give it to your mother — yes, tell your mother about AIDS. There’s a high rate of infection among women in my age bracket, 39 to 60, because they don’t think they can get it. AIDS doesn’t discriminate,” says the 57-year-old singer.

Lauper says the conversation is even more important to have with your kids — which she has done with her own 13-year-old son, Declyn, by her husband of nearly 20 years, David Thornton.

“I tell my son, ‘You’re gonna have fun when you get older — safe sex. Anybody can get it. Don’t think you’re immune, no one is.’”

And while we had the ’80s icon, who was workin’ a red God’s Love We Deliver tee under a sheer body-hugging black lace suit, we couldn’t help but ask about her most distinctive feature — that constantly changing head of hair.

We wanted to know: What color of the literally hundreds she has worn over her life has felt the most authentically like Cyndi?

“You know, I loved that canary-yellow color I wore in 1994,” said Lauper, hardly skipping a beat to remember. “That felt really comfortable. You have to go with what makes you feel good. But honestly, bleach does destroy your hair. You’ve got to watch the bleach.”

Against this juggernaut, HIV skeptics don’t stand a chance

What must informed observers of the HIV-AIDS debacle over 27 years think of these new recruits to the 21st Century Grand Illusion? Sad to say, that it is a great waste of the talent and goodwill of these fine people that they should be so devoted to a scientific error of such grand proportions that it now has taken over the entire world, like some new religion.

Contemplating these news items, one shudders at the sheer hopelessness of countering this modern day version of the Children’s Crusade. Suggesting to Cyndi and the hairdressers that the basic premise of their cogitations on this scientific fairy tale happens to be plain wrong, and revealed to be so in the scientific literature which they are unable to read, wrapped as it is in the enigmatic curtain of self protective HIV-AIDS technical jargon, – ie that HIV does not cause HIV-AIDS and that the vicious drugs given for it are entirely misdirected – has about as much chance of gaining a hearing, we would estimate, as standing in the path of a stampeding herd of gazelles and trying to direct traffic.

The few brave enough to try this trick seem to be dwindling over the years, though there are some white knights still astride their horses and standing their ground, most prominent the tireless and indomitable HIV-AIDS critic David Crowe at http://aras.ab.ca/news.html. While we admire his and others’ courage and stamina, we are not sure that their waving their lances above the tumult has had much effect to date, or will ever have.

After more than five years of translating the sometimes supremely intelligent science of those who contradict the ruling paradigm of HIV-AIDS, and the usually supremely uninformed science of those who promote and defend the paradigm, into lay language, we would assess the influence of this, our own site, as roughly zero.

In fact, we would say that for twenty three years, HIV-AIDS “skeptics” and “doubters” have made virtually no progress whatsoever in changing the minds of the vast squirming pyramid of passengers on the cruise liner to nowhere, the good ship SS HIV, that is to say, all the officials in governments and scientific institutions, the “activists”, the unread MDs, the AIDS news reporters from the New Yorker on down, the expensively suited pharma executives and salespersons, and many other people of goodwill in the field whose sole scientific expertise in HIV-AIDS is that “my friend/colleague/official/reporters/actisists/everybody tells me so.”

Time for HIV critics to give up?

No wonder one of our latest emails from that front is from an at least temporarily retired leader in HIV-AIDS skeptical reporting who says she was chatting with another celebrated mythbuster (mythbusting as in writing doggedly over years about the evidence and reasoning that HIV does not and never could cause what is labeled “HIV-AIDS”) and agreed that they had got precisely nowhere in placing their fingers in the dyke of misinformation and religious zealotry that burst long ago to flood the world and drown any dissent.

The truth is that whistleblowing even by investigative reporters
who are also that rare breed, “science critic” (of which there are about five on the planet apart from the leading examples proudly featured on this site) is a mug’s game in every endeavor of human life in the modern era of vast institutions and international social groups, and science is no exception. Large groups by nature punish those that try to review and reassess their basic beliefs, as churches have shown us over the centuries, and modern science is no exception. While in corporate life there are now a few who have survived the firing, ostracism and public humiliation of their vocation to reap tens and even hundreds of millions of dollars as ultimate reward for their willingness to step out of line and into the line of fire, there are none in science that we know of who have thus triumphed. In fact, the best and the bravest tend to be completely defeated in their idealistic efforts in the public interest, unless and until they win the Nobel.

Indeed all the Nobel prize winners that we have talked to, who typically began their careers by making discoveries which threatened to topple the previous paradigm, all say they suffered devilish evasions and rejections when they first tried to publish their revolutionary theories and findings – the very papers which eventually won them science’s biggest prize.

Funding continues to be squeezed

In the field of HIV-AIDS, interest in the alternative interpretation of what is going on, seems to have dwindled to negligible levels now. Indeed, even the mainstream assessment of the threat, dire as ever, is having a hard time gaining attention, today’s World AIDS Day seems to show.

The teacher’s pets who rush to stand up for and promote the status quo in the face of growing apathy on the part of even the New York Times, from today’s edition of which there is a noticeable absence of the usual cheerleading for AIDS funding seen every year in the past when World AIDS Day rolls around – there is only one piece in the paper on AIDS today and it does not mention World AIDS Day.

Nor is there any Op Ed piece by John Moore of Cornell Weill Medical Center castigating dissenters from HIV=AIDS as deserving to be socially and possibly literally hung, drawn and quartered for “endangering lives”. No piece by Anthony Fauci of NIAID, either, urging ever higher funding for anything in the cause of battling the spread of HIV around the world. As if HIV has ever spread. As anyone who attends to the nightly newscasts on TV knows, the spread of HIV in the US ever since the blameless but globally condemned microbe was detected in Paris, and then (re)discovered in 1984 in the suspect lab work of Robert “Bob” Gallo, then at the NIH, has been precisely zero, according to the official numbers. The same proportion of the population – 1 in 300 – is infected in 2011, as two decades earlier. Year after year, from the late eighties, the CDC has announced and the tv news readers have faithfully repeated that the number of people in the US who are “HIV positive” is 1 million.

Since the death rate has stuck at about 17,000 a year according to the same unquestioned authority, the CDC, this means that newly detected infections are stable at about 17,000 a year. Since this is roughly the number of children born every year with HIV, the only route of infection is clearly perinatal ie from mother in the womb or during or after birth. Thus, there is no heterosexual epidemic and never has been – HIV is, as Nancy Pelose proved in a very embarrassing but inarguable study, the largest of its kind ever, HIV is simply virtually non-infectious among heterosexuals.

And how about the steady rate of AIDS deaths in the US, now 17,000 a year (according to the CDC; according to the WHO it may be 24,000 a year)? If this is so, what happened to the life saving aspect of antiviral drugs? Clearly, they kill most patients in the end as reliably as before when the extremely nasty AZT was the only drug dispensed. The newer, milder drugs just take longer – long enough for most of the press and other observers to stop watching. Instead, they repeat the myth than the drugs are life saving, and enable patients to live a normal life.

Media propaganda lowers pitch

This evening, there was little or nothing on most of the major news sources, though DW_TV from Germany ran a segment about an unconquered HIV positive gay man whose work colleagues were confident he would not infect them (actually the least likely belief voiced in the segment, in our opinion, since those who take the “meds” tend to suffer from weakened immune systems as a result, and carry all kinds of germs that they would easily overcome if they weren’t taking the deleterious drugs).

According to the DW-TV segment, one Dirk Stoeger has been manfully taking these dreadful concoctions for some years now even though when he first was given the medication, “I was so crippled after taking the tablets I couldn’t walk. I had diarrhea, couldn’t sleep and even the sight of the tablets made made me throw up.” With the AZT share in the cocktail of drugs dwindling over the years from 100 per cent before 1995 to being completely absent from recommended prescriptions since 2006, the newer drugs have been less damaging and caused fewer side effects. This has allowed the unfortunate Dirk to survive longer than the typical patient 20 years ago, and conveniently for the orthodoxy bolsters the myth that they hold back the depredations of HIV, and thus “prove” that HIV is the cause of AIDS symptoms.

In fact, it is clear from the literature (if read without paradigm blinkers) that HIV does not cause AIDS, and HIV-AIDS resulted from drug intake in the US, either recreational or medical, and is simply other diseases relabeled HIV-AIDS in Africa – particularly a rather severe TB now rampant on the Dark Continent. The inability of the professionals who work in the field to see this is the prime example of how even in science large groups these days run amok with false ideas if they attract funding.

Quite how one would ever explain this to Cindi Lauper is beyond us to imagine, especially when the world of expertise ordains otherwise. To attend to and absorb such a complete rewriting of your world view in any arena, you have to have an unusually open mind and and an unusual capacity for independent thought, not to mention an appetite for translating technical jargon from scientific journals into the King’s English. While we respect the intelligence of women in general as equal to that of men in general, we doubt that Cindi, a celebrated leader in the art of musical show business, would have the interest, patience or ability even to fathom the above paragraphs.

In fact proselytizing any patient who is HIV positive and has fallen into the hands of the great devouring dragon of the HIV-AIDS medical profession is a lost cause, in our opinion, even if they are smart and able to handle scientific topics, unlike most arts graduates. Once made vulnerable by being told they are HIV positive, they are typically incapable emotionally of placing their trust in anybody but their chosen physician.

Nor is it any good approaching the great and influential of the world. Like almost every scientist or doctor these days, even in the field of HIV-AIDS, they or their staff have no time to spare to study up on the alternative view of one of the many mainstream premises they take for granted in advancing themselves. In medicine they barely have time to read more than the headlines of JAMA and the NEJ. Their research into any topic outside their immediate office work typically amounts to little more than “asking John” for his opinion, or whoever they know who is supposed to know the answer.

Militant but naive recruits fight for fantasy

In other words, any whistleblowing in HIV-AIDS is stymied from the start, while going along is encouraged at every turn. Thus the Times piece today announces that College Campuses Are Producing a New Kind of AIDS Activist. How marvelous it is that the purveyors of a dangerously misleading claim can find an army of enthusiastic soldiers on the very campuses where truth seeking is the professed goal of all and where critical thinking is supposedly the main lesson!

Roughly a quarter-century after gay men rose up to demand better access to H.I.V. medicines, a new breed of AIDS advocate is growing up on college campuses. Unlike the first generation of patient-activists, this latest crop is composed of budding public health scholars. They are mostly heterosexual. Rare is the one who has lost friends or family members to the disease. Rather, studying under some of the world’s most prominent health intellectuals, they have witnessed the epidemic’s toll during summers or semesters abroad, in AIDS-ravaged nations like Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda.

College activism, and AIDS activism in particular, is nothing new. On Wednesday, World AIDS Day, students across the nation will participate in speeches, fund-raisers and the like. But a loose-knit band of about two dozen Ivy Leaguers, mostly from Harvard and Yale, is using more confrontational tactics, as well as some high-powered connections, to wangle encounters with top White House officials in a determined, and seemingly successful, effort to get under Mr. Obama’s skin.

Their protests — which have drawn a sharp rebuke from the president (not to mention some disapproving parents) — come as many in the AIDS advocacy community are wondering aloud whether Mr. Obama is as devoted to their cause as his immediate predecessor, George W. Bush. In 2003, Mr. Bush began vastly increasing spending on lifesaving antiretroviral medicines for AIDS patients in impoverished nations; the number receiving the drugs has shot up from 50,000 to more than five million today. Yet the World Health Organization says as many as 10 million lack needed therapy.

As they say, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. All those who appreciate what is really going on can only hope that Obama’s foot dragging will continue, so that the health of those ten million can be rescued from the depredations of a scheme which is planning to expand their number to include every man, woman and child on the planet, if the current trend to test everyone in sight with or without their knowledge continues.

Railroaded onto Devil’s Island, Dreyfus was without doubt an innocent patriot

Modern science twisted by like irrationalities, especially in HIVnot/AIDS

Anyone who thinks the Dreyfus Affair is an irrelevant episode which has no bearing on modern life should read today’s well executed summary of this shameful story in the New York Times Book review, where Leo Damrosch boils down Ruth Harris’s new tome, Dreyfus: Politics, Emotion and the Scandal of the Century to its essence.

An entirely innocent man was convicted of espionage and suffered four years of hell on earth on the notorious Devil’s Island before his brother enlisted Emile Zola and other intellectuals to reverse the monstrous injustice, with the Army and conservatives resisting all the way with lies, manufactured evidence and persecuting the whistleblower who discovered the real culprit, not to mention attacking Zola for libel and hounding him out of the country. Even then a zealot nearly killed Dreyfus with a pistol after he was freed.

Sound familiar? There are parallels in every facet of the appalling story of how HIV(not)/AIDS zealots who believe that HIV causes AIDS have managed to maintain their entirely irrational paradigm in the face of an avalanche of books, articles, contrary scientific papers and critics of all stripes, from both inside and outside the system – in this case, Big Science, rather than the French Army.

Nothing could be more obvious than the innocence of this harmless wisp of retroviral RNA of all charges of harming humans brought against it, yet the bulk of the world’s population has been led to believe it a very damaging and ultimately fatal threat to their health, and that the antibodies they form to it which repel it from their bodies in short order somehow much later will ruin their immune system and kill them, and anyone they have miraculously transferred those antibodies to, in a sequence of reasoning which is irrational in every step and which contradicts the basic premises of infectious disease as demonstrated throughout the rest of medicine and its science.

Have a look at Damrosch’s review and you will get a very clear picture of what happened to Dreyfus, and how human behavior in the leading civilizations of this planet has not changed one iota from over a century ago.

July 15, 2010
At War With Itself
By LEO DAMROSCH
DREYFUS
Politics, Emotion, and the Scandal of the Century
By Ruth Harris
Illustrated. 542 pp. Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt & Company. $35
The scandal known as the Dreyfus Affair still resonates after more than a century, though it has been blurred for most Americans by time and distance. It is the goal of the Oxford historian Ruth Harris to extricate the story from the myths it has generated, on both the left and the right, and to trace its tortuous evolution from 1894 to 1906 in all of its human complexity. Combining an even-tempered tone with generosity of imagination, she has achieved that goal, charting a steady course through the voluminous literature that the affair inspired and exploring the reactions of scores of soldiers, politicians, journalists, salonnières and ordinary citizens. A helpful “Dramatis Personae” at the end of the book lists nearly 150 people, all of whom are given substantial treatment during the course of the narrative.

Alfred Dreyfus grew up in a wealthy Jewish family in Alsace, a disputed eastern territory that many French people regarded as covertly German. He was 10 years old at the time of the Prussian invasion in 1870, when the French Army suffered a humiliating defeat, and he remained fiercely patriotic ever after, which motivated his choice of a military career. Intent on improving its leadership, the army began to promote officers on the basis of success in examinations rather than through the old-boy network, and Dreyfus was one of those selected for special training. The old-boy network was predictably resentful, especially when beneficiaries of the new policy were Jews, who numbered fewer than 100,000 in a nation of 38 million and were regarded by many as an insidious “enemy within.”

On Oct. 14, 1894, a few days after his 35th birthday, Captain Dreyfus spent the evening in his Paris apartment with his wife, Lucie, and their two young children. The next morning he was summoned unexpectedly to headquarters, subjected to a bewildering interrogation and placed under arrest. During the star-chamber trial that followed, he was never permitted to know the actual charges against him, which were based entirely on a torn-up bordereau, or memorandum, that a cleaning woman had retrieved from the wastebasket of the German military attaché. It was clear that someone was offering to sell low-level secrets to the Germans, and a chain of flimsy circumstantial evidence was said to point to Dreyfus. He wasn’t short of money and wasn’t entangled with women, two of the most frequent motives for espionage at the time, but his superiors decided that the handwriting on the bordereau was his, and an Alsatian-Jewish scapegoat was convenient.

Early in 1895 Dreyfus stood at attention in the courtyard of the École Militaire while an officer publicly broke his sword in two (Harris mentions that it had been broken and soldered together in advance to preclude any embarrassing difficulty). He was then condemned to solitary confinement in the ferocious tropical heat of Devil’s Island in French Guiana. He spent four appalling years there, forbidden to speak with his guards and with no knowledge of what was happening in France. As Harris comments, “Dreyfus, in fact, was one of the few French alive who knew nothing of the Dreyfus Affair.”

Alfred’s brother Mathieu, tireless in support despite constant threats, managed increasingly to attract the attention of politicians and journalists who suspected that in its zeal to defend its honor, the army had perpetrated a monstrous injustice. The “Dreyfusards” appealed to Enlightenment ideals of truth and justice, while conservatives, with the support of the Roman Catholic Church, argued for nationalist traditions that the army was held to embody. As Harris shows, allegiances were often complicated and illogical. Some important Dreyfusards were personally anti-Semitic, and some conservatives who believed that Dreyfus was innocent nonetheless were convinced that defending the army, and hence its persecution of Dreyfus, was more important than justice.

The case against Dreyfus, such as it was, began to unravel when Lt. Col. Marie-Georges Picquart stumbled on evidence that the real spy was Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy, a commandant whose handwriting did indeed match that of the bordereau, and who did indeed need money to cover huge debts. In the tragedy of errors that followed, paranoid army leaders punished the whistle-blower Picquart and did everything in their power to protect Esterhazy. They even abetted the forging of a letter by a commandant, Hubert Joseph Henry, that allegedly confirmed Dreyfus’s guilt. Amazingly, after the forgery was exposed, the anti-Dreyfus press claimed that Henry had acted out of patriotism to defend his nation’s honor, and when he slit his throat in prison they proclaimed him a martyr.

In fact, the forces of reaction proved impervious to argument and evidence. The novelist Émile Zola became fascinated by the case and ignited a huge protest by analyzing its details in “J’Accuse,” a celebrated open letter to the president of the Republic. Zola was thereupon convicted of libel in a trial whose judge ruled nearly all the relevant evidence inadmissible and was forced to go into exile in England.

Dreyfus himself was brought back to France in 1899, a broken man after four years on Devil’s Island, and put on trial once more. His prosecutors claimed, as more recent governments have done, that national security forbade them to reveal secret evidence that would have been decisive if known, and he was convicted all over again. To forestall further controversy he was immediately granted an official pardon, which did nothing to clear his name. It was not until 1906 that a court finally declared him innocent. In 1908, after he had retired from the army, a would-be assassin wounded him slightly with a pistol; the attacker was tried and acquitted. Dreyfus died in 1935.

The story is clearly a very rich one, exposing the determination of military and political leaders to cover up their errors at all costs and, still more profoundly, the bigotry that foreshadowed the genocidal horrors of the 20th century. It was apparently at this time, too, that the word “intellectual” assumed its modern connotations, with writers and thinkers acquiring a prestige in public debate that they have retained in France to this day.

In the splendidly terse “Why the Dreyfus Affair Matters” (2009), Louis Begley brought a lawyer-novelist’s insight to untangling the deceptions through which Dreyfus was framed, and he suggests explicit parallels with post-9/11 legal abuses by the United States. More spacious, and also more densely detailed, is Frederick Brown’s “For the Soul of France: Culture Wars in the Age of Dreyfus” (2010), which traces the development of racist nationalism and reactionary Catholicism from the mid-19th century onward until they culminated in the Dreyfus Affair.

For readers who want a concise account of what Harris calls “the most famous cause célèbre in French history,” Begley’s book and Brown’s chapter will appeal. For the story in depth they should turn to Harris’s excellent “Dreyfus,” which deserves a wide audience for its patient, fair-minded exploration of human ideals, delusions, prejudices, hatreds and follies.

Leo Damrosch’s most recent books are “Tocqueville’s Discovery of America” and “Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Restless Genius.”

Anyone who remains innocently skeptical that today’s leaders of science and society and their unthinking followers can behave like braying asses in intellectual matters should read “Dreyfus” through for a good understanding of human folly, and how easy it is to mislead the faithful, even in science, when it turns political, and fights over its truths in the media rather than in peer reviewed journals.

Our not so modern era

What makes the Affair resonate so strongly even today, in this supposedly more enlightened Information Age, is that its exhibition of so many facets of crowd behavior in all its foolishness is still matched today in great issues ranging from the Iraq war to the nonscience of HIV/AIDS. For example, the US military adventures in Vietnam and Iraq were also initiated with deceptions and lies, with the Tonkin Gulf incident as imaginary as Saddam Hussein’s possession of “weapons of mass destruction.” Just as with the unfortunate Dreyfus, these false facts nevertheless became catalysts of huge waves of public feeling and misapprehension, with political responses from leaders in every social realm, and the truth of the matter quite irrelevant to the psychological forces called into action.

Likewise, the simple scientific misdirection published in Science in 1984 by Robert Gallo of the NIH that he had demonstrated that a retrovirus was the primary cause of AIDS (the key phrases being “strong evidence of a causative involvement of the virus in AIDS” and the “data suggest that HTLV-III is the primary cause of AIDS”), despite finding it in all too few AIDS patients (around a third) and despite finding the said virus thrived like Topsy in cultures of the very T-cells it was supposed to decimate, catalyzed a scientific boondoggle which is now the Worldcom of science, an enterprise whose essential bankruptcy is as yet unexposed behind the screening cloud of emotions and political and financial exploitation that has surrounded it for 26 years.

Whether Dreyfus’s sorry tale is worth going through page by unhappy page to see all the parallels with these modern debacles is probably dependent on how sophisticated the reader is in his/her perceptions of what is going on today, since the naive will probably feel it is all anachronistic old hat, now that we are free of all the problems such as anti-Semitism, blind trust in authority, belief that the law courts seek and find the truth, raging rumor mills and the tendency of a large national system such as the French Army to protect itself at the expense of justice for the individual, which France suffered then and which we don’t have any more.

If you do want to read up on this primer on mob politics and misdirection, however, we recommend the earlier book by Jean-Denis Bredin, “The Affair: The Case of Alfred Dreyfus”, which has all the important details knit together in a more effective, even novelistic dramatic structure, as against the comprehensive but rather plodding academic style of the current effort, which doesn’t add any updates which make any difference to the moral of the tale.

“Does it matter that Dreyfus was innocent? At Rennes, did Commander Merle, who wept while listening to Demange,, and Commandant Beauvais, who hesitated, it was said, until the last moment, believe that Dreyfus was innocent? It is not improbable, but his innocence was not enough to make them change their judgment. “I am convinced of Dreyfus’s innocence,” a French officer said to Emile Duclaux, “but if his verdict were up to me, I would convict him, again for the honor of the Army.” (Bredin, p.536)

The social principle that politics trumps truth in a court of law is one of the hardest lessons for the young idealist to learn. That it extends even into the heart of science is even more difficult to conceive, until one opens the Pandora’s box of skepticism about the claims of the generals of that Grand Armee, especially those in HIV/AIDS.

Greg Mortenson teaching Army new tactics of winning hearts and minds as both lose on the ground

UPDATE: Wikileaks sends heat missile into US policymaking

The NYTimes sees fit today (Jul 18 Sun) to carry on the top left front page of its presumably well read Sunday edition a story by Elizabeth Bumiller on an Unlikely Tutor Giving Military Afghan Advice.

Turns out the tutor is Greg Mortenson, author of “Three Cups of Tea”, and builder of more than 130 mostly girl schools in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and the US Army under McChrystal has been paying a lot of attention to his ideas for the past year. The story gives the impression that “Three Cups of Tea” is now the unofficial army manual on how to achieve victory in Afghanistan ie how to leave it to the Afghanis without the Taliban taking over again. Mortenson’s answer, as we noted in an earlier post, is to educate the better half of Afghanistan, its women. And who is the group behind this sudden enlightenment after eight years of floundering in a military quicksand which has swallowed every other conqueror in history? Army wives:

“We will move through this and if I’m not involved in the years ahead, will take tremendous comfort in knowing people like you are helping Afghans build a future,” General McChrystal wrote to Mr. Mortenson in an e-mail message, as he traveled from Kabul to Washington. The note landed in Mr. Mortenson’s inbox shortly after 1 a.m. Eastern time on June 23. Nine hours later, the general walked into the Oval Office to be fired by President Obama.

The e-mail message was in response to a note of support from Mr. Mortenson. It reflected his broad and deepening relationship with the United States military, whose leaders have increasingly turned to Mr. Mortenson, once a shaggy mountaineer, to help translate the theory of counterinsurgency into tribal realities on the ground.

In the past year, Mr. Mortenson and his Central Asia Institute, responsible for the construction of more than 130 schools in Afghanistan and Pakistan, mostly for girls, have set up some three dozen meetings between General McChrystal or his senior staff members and village elders across Afghanistan.

The collaboration, which grew in part out of the popularity of “Three Cups of Tea” among military wives who told their husbands to read it, extends to the office of Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Last summer, Admiral Mullen attended the opening of one of Mr. Mortenson’s schools in Pushghar, a remote village in Afghanistan’s Hindu Kush mountains.

Cont:

Mr. Mortenson — who for a time lived out of his car in Berkeley, Calif. — has also spoken at dozens of military bases, seen his book go on required reading lists for senior American military commanders and had lunch with Gen. David H. Petraeus, General McChrystal’s replacement. On Friday he was in Tampa to meet with Adm. Eric T. Olson, the officer in charge of the United States Special Operations Command.

Mr. Mortenson, 52, thinks there is no military solution in Afghanistan — he says the education of girls is the real long-term fix — so he has been startled by the Defense Department’s embrace.

“I never, ever expected it,” Mr. Mortenson, a former Army medic, said in a telephone interview last week from Florida, where he had paused between military briefings, book talks for a sequel, “Stones into Schools,” and fund-raising appearances for his institute.

Mr. Mortenson, who said he had accepted no money from the military and had no contractual relationship with the Defense Department, was initially critical of the armed forces in the days after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks as “laptop warriors” who appeared, he said, indifferent to the civilian casualties inflicted by the American bombardment of Afghanistan.

In its early days “Three Cups of Tea,” the story of Mr. Mortenson’s efforts to build schools in Pakistan, was largely ignored by the military, and for that matter by most everyone else. Written with a journalist, David Oliver Relin, and published in hardcover by Viking in March 2006, the book had only modest sales. Most major newspapers, including this one, did not review it.

But the book’s message of the importance of girls’ education caught on when women’s book clubs, church groups and high schools began snapping up the less expensive paperback published in January 2007.

Sales to date are at four million copies in 41 countries, and the book’s yarn is well known: disoriented after a 1993 failed attempt on Pakistan’s K2, the second-highest mountain in the world, Mr. Mortenson took a wrong turn into the village of Korphe, was nursed back to health by the villagers and, in gratitude, vowed to build them a school.

He returned to Pakistan a year later with a $12,000 donation from a Silicon Valley benefactor and spent most of it on school construction materials in the city of Rawalpindi — only to be told he could not get his cargo to Korphe without first building a bridge.

The story of that bridge, Mr. Mortenson’s relationships with Pakistanis, and the schools that followed appealed so much to one military spouse that in the fall of 2007 she sent the book to her husband, Christopher D. Kolenda, at that time a lieutenant colonel commanding 700 American soldiers on the Pakistan border.

Colonel Kolenda knew well the instructions about building relationships with elders that were in the Army and Marine Corps’ new counterinsurgency manual, which had been released in late 2006. But “Three Cups of Tea” brought the lessons to life.

“It was practical, and it told real stories of real people,” said Colonel Kolenda, now a top adviser at the Kabul headquarters for the International Security Assistance Force, in an interview at the Pentagon last week.

Colonel Kolenda was among the first in the military to reach out to Mr. Mortenson, and by June 2008 the Central Asia Institute had built a school near Colonel Kolenda’s base. By the summer of 2009, Mr. Mortenson was in meetings in Kabul with Colonel Kolenda, village elders and at times President Obama’s new commander, General McChrystal. (By then at least two more military wives — Deborah Mullen and Holly Petraeus — had told their husbands to read “Three Cups of Tea.”)

As Colonel Kolenda tells it, Mr. Mortenson and his Afghan partner on the ground, Wakil Karimi, were the American high command’s primary conduits for reaching out to elders outside the “Kabul bubble.”

As Mr. Mortenson tells it, the Afghan elders were often blunt with General McChrystal, as in a meeting last October when one of them said that he had traveled all the way from his province because he needed weapons, not conversation.

“He said, ‘Are you going to give them to me or am I going to sit here and listen to you talk?’ ” Mr. Mortenson recalled. The high command replied, Mr. Mortenson said, that they were making an assessment of what he needed. “And he said, ‘Well, you’ve already been here eight years, ” Mr. Mortenson recalled.

Despite the rough edges, Colonel Kolenda said the meetings helped the American high command settle on central parts of its strategy — the imperative to avoid civilian casualties, in particular, which the elders consistently and angrily denounced during the sessions — and also smoothed relations between the elders and commanders.

For Mr. Mortenson’s part, his growing relationship with the military convinced him that it had learned the importance of understanding Afghan culture and of developing ties with elders across the country, and was willing to admit past mistakes.

At the end of this month, Mr. Mortenson, who lives in Bozeman, Mont., with his wife, Tara Bishop, and two children, is going back for the rest of the summer to Afghanistan, where to maintain credibility he now has to make it clear to Afghans and a number of aid organizations that he has no formal connection to the American military.

Mr. Mortenson acknowledges that his solution in Afghanistan, girls’ education, will take a generation and more. “But Al Qaeda and the Taliban are looking at it long range over generations,” he said. “And we’re looking at it in terms of annual fiscal cycles and presidential elections.”

To turn the US Army in a new direction after eight years is quite a feat, and here we learn it was achieved by the wives atop the Army power structure ie the spouses of Christopher D. Kolenda, then commanding 700 American soldiers on the Pakistan border, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen and General David H. Petraeus, now the Army commander in Afghanistan. Note that the actual first names of only the last two, Deborah and Holly, are mentioned by the Times female reporter, which seems odd.

Why doesn’t Mrs Kolenda deserve respect as the initiator of a vast expansion of US Army objectives in Afghanistan? Colonel Kolenda certainly took her point, judging from his piece in the Weekly Standard in October, 2008, How to Win in Afghanistan:It’s time to adjust the strategy.. At least, he included a reference to “Local governments desperately need to draw on the expertise of civilian partners from the international community to develop durable systems relevant to everyday life” amid his hard nosed assessment of spoiler factors in “winning” in Afghanistan including a dysfunctional timber trade and tax system.

The $200 billion pork barrel

How to win the war in Afghanistan is none of the business of this blog, of course, though we celebrate any advance in releasing the energies of the better half of the population of the world, which Greg Mortenson’s school building is part of.

But the influence of money on the behavior of large systems is our business, in that the influx of money into science from the post World War II federal funding of scientific research to the Wall Street exploitation of breakthroughs in biotechnology and medicine seem to us to account for much of the misbehavior we witness today in scientific leadership, since funding has become the first order of business in almost every field.

How does Afghanistan look from this point of view? A lost cause, we would say, unless things change. According to David Samuels in Harpers August issue, Barack and Hamid’s Excellent Adventure: Afghanistan’s president visits the White House , gigantic sums are being pocketed and dispensed as the powers involved cooperate in a clandestine game that has little to do with the headline stories we read in New York:

“Is your brother a CIA agent?”

The question refers to Hamid Karzai’s half brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, who is regularly portrayed in the American press as a corrupt drug lord who charges huge fees for allowing trucks full of opium to cross the bridges over the Helmand River to Kandahar. Last fall, President Obama duly warned that he expected Karzai to establish tough new anti-corruption laws and remove his brother from the government of a country into which the United States would soon be sending 30,000 additional troops. Never mind that Afghanistan produces an estimated 90 percent of the world’s supply of opium; and that the Taliban pays Wali Karzai to ship opium through the territories he governs; and that the U.S. Army, under the ill-fated General Stanley McChrystal, relies on Wali Karzai for logistical support and subcontracts special tasks, which include killing people, to gunmen under his direct control; and that as a courtesy we no longer destroy the poppy crop; and that Wali Karzai happens to be the CIA’s landlord in Kandahar, renting them Taliban leader Mullah Omar’s old villa. After a few months of back-and-forth, the message got through, and on March 30 the New York Times reported that “Afghan and American officials have decided that the president’s brother will be allowed to stay in place,” quoting a senior NATO official as saying that Wali Karzai could be a big help to the ongoing American reconstruction effort. “One thing, he is a successful businessman,” the official said. “He can create jobs.”….

…an interview with former U.S. diplomat Peter Galbraith, an arrogant creep who was forced out of his job as deputy U.N. envoy to Afghanistan and chose to express his unvarnished opinion of Karzai. “He can be very emotional, act impulsively,” said Galbraith, who repeated the word “emotional” three times in the course of the interview. In case viewers didn’t get the gossip-page code, Galbraith explained that “some of the palace insiders say that he has a certain fondness for some of Afghanistan’s most profitable exports,” leading a reporter to ask State Department spokesman Philip Crowley the next morning whether the United States had any reason to believe that Karzai was “like, hiding out in the basement of the palace doing bong hits, or something worse.” …

Eikenberry, a tall man in a good suit who used to be a lieutenant general, was opposed to the surge, because the Afghan government—whose ministers he knows better than any other American in the room does—was corrupt and unable to run the country effectively. Having spent more than twenty hours on a plane with Karzai and his ministers circumnavigating clouds of volcanic ash, Eikenberry is now even better equipped to evaluate the men in whose pockets much of America’s $276-billion investment in Afghanistan now resides. Appearing at a news conference in the White House briefing room on Monday, Eikenberry was asked whether his opinion of Karzai had changed. “President Karzai is the—he’s the elected president of Afghanistan,” Eikenberry said, falling back on the military man’s necessary obeisance to the idiocy of legal authority….
The fact that Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence directorate has been supplying the Taliban and even helping to plan attacks on Afghan and American forces is another inconvenient fact of the war that the leader of the free world would prefer not to deal with….

Yet there can be little doubt that a major source of money for the insurgency comes from payments made by elected Afghan officials and Wardak’s army, meaning that America is funding both sides in what is very clearly an Afghan civil war.

Cont. (much more)
A case in point is a recent scandal involving the defense minister’s own son, Hamed Wardak, a Rhodes scholar and class valedictorian at Georgetown University; his transportation company, NCL Holdings, won a $360-million Pentagon contract despite the fact that it wasn’t registered with the Afghan government and didn’t own any trucks. “Those accusations are without merit,” the defense minister responds, adding, correctly, that his son’s company has received the highest possible marks from the Pentagon.

I ask the minister about whether, in general terms, the logistics systems shared by the U.S. Army and the ANA might be susceptible to some form of graft. I note that Watan Risk Management and Compass Security, the two major companies that escort supply convoys across the country, are known to pay large bribes to the Taliban and even to stage attacks on convoys in order to raise their rates. Although the fee varies according to the number of trucks and what they are carrying, the average bribe required not to get shot at is reportedly somewhere around $800 per truck. Both companies are owned by relatives of President Karzai. A report published last year by the Center on International Cooperation at New York University estimated that the United States and its allies spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year on payments to private security and trucking companies.

“We have a very good logistics system,” Wardak answers. “It works exceptionally well. There is proper institutional control. Accusations to the contrary are without any merit.”

To make him feel better, I ask whether girls’ schools are still being burned down in Afghanistan. “That does happen very regularly,” he assures me. Over the past year, he says, there have been approximately 600 attacks on schools that have resulted in the partial or complete destruction of their facilities.

The interior minister, Haneef Atmar, a tall, ascetic-looking man who walks with a cane and is known as one of the few competent ministers in Karzai’s cabinet, tells me that although corruption is indeed a problem, he has instituted a “zero-tolerance” policy for payments from contractors to the Taliban. He gives me his email address so we can talk further and then introduces me to a no-nonsense-looking military type named Kevin. “Kevin is my adviser,” he says. It turns out that every member of the Afghan cabinet has a minder who “controls” that minister, a locution that the minders not only do not avoid but in fact seem eager to stress, as in, “I control the minister of mines.” I ask Atmar when this meeting was planned, and he tells me, “About three weeks ago,” confirming my impression that this visit was more or less arranged on the fly, after someone in the administration determined that Karzai had outfoxed them. As it turns out, Atmar’s announcement of a zero-tolerance policy on payments to the Taliban is premature: he will be unceremoniously fired by President Karzai shortly after the cabinet returns to Kabul.

The State Department desk man for Afghanistan informs me that if I want a meeting with the minister of mines, Wahidullah Shahrani, he will be appearing later at the Chamber of Commerce. Huge deposits of minerals including iron, copper, and lithium have been found in Afghanistan over the past few years. Last year, a contract for the Aynak copper deposit, thought to be worth some $88 billion, was awarded to a Chinese company in exchange for what American intelligence officials told the Washington Post was a $30-million bribe paid to Shahrani’s predecessor, Mohammed Ibrahim Adel, who was reported to be a close friend of Mohammed Karzai, one of the president’s brothers.

The problem with building anything in Afghanistan, the men tell me, is ensuring a consistent supply of fuel. There’s an eleven-inch pipeline that the Red Army built, and everything else needs to be trucked in, which means payoffs to the security companies and the local police, who are worse than the Taliban. I talk to a young American-born Afghan who grew up in Virginia and is now working in Afghanistan for an organization called SEIF, which was set up by CARE with funding from USAID. His job is to help small and mid-level entrepreneurs build packing plants in the countryside for dried fruit and nuts. I ask him how he thinks the war is going. “People in the rural areas are not happy with the last five or six years,” he explains. “They see billions of dollars being pledged for the reconstruction of Afghanistan. They don’t understand why they don’t see any of that money, why they don’t have roads, they don’t have schools, why they are still living in a mud hut.”…

I ask Ambassador Wayne how it is possible for the Chinese to pick up an $88-billion copper mine in the middle of a country in which America has spent more than $200 billion to no apparent purpose. “First is that the package that was put together was very massive,” he says, arching his eyebrows again. “Speaking frankly, there are all sorts of rumors about what else was happening.”

After the meeting, I ride with Minister Shahrani to the Willard Hotel, where we sit on pale yellow chintz-covered armchairs in a far corner of the lobby. In addition to the copper mine, he says, Afghanistan has the largest undeveloped iron-ore deposit in the world, for which bidding will soon ensue. “Everything will be done in the most transparent way possible,” he assures me. “We’re not Nigeria or the Democratic Republic of the Congo.”

I try to imagine how that conversation goes. “So, you have already stolen billions of dollars, and you’ve deposited it in Geneva,” I say out loud, playing the role of Shahrani. “Be content with what you’ve stolen already. Please don’t steal more or the international community will be mad at us.” Shahrani smiles. The State Department minder—who has been sitting three feet away while pretending not to listen to us—looks up, but the minister waves him off. “No, let him ask questions,” he says. “All contracts will be made perfectly transparent,” he repeats, before launching into a long disquisition on the procedures and the road show for the iron-ore contracts, which will happen sometime this fall. The total worth of the additional unexploited mineral resources in Afghanistan may be between $1 trillion and $5 trillion. Whatever the real number is, it will provide plenty of incentive to keep fighting.

Ann Gearan of the AP, who has covered the State Department for years in the old-fashioned way, stands up to ask the Afghan president a final question. Is it really appropriate for the United States to be launching a major operation in Kandahar when the president is unable to remove his brother from office? Karzai nods politely. “Fortunately, officials who are elected by the people cannot be removed by the president,” he explains. The issues raised by the American press have now been understood better, he concludes, before stating firmly, “the issue is resolved.” Hillary Clinton turns her face toward the bright, shining lights. “I have nothing to add,” she says. The vision is real and ineluctable. America will win the hearts of the Afghan people by defeating the Taliban and educating women to go to the moon, and our president will be reelected at a cost of $6 billion per month and tens of thousands more lives, Afghan and American.

Sobering stuff. Also, somewhat disillusioning to all those that wish Greg Mortenson and his girls schools well.

After all, he built no fewer than 130 schools over several years in Pakistan and Afghanistan, but the Taliban and other fighters have burnt down or crippled 600 in Afghanistan in the past year alone, so it would seem that the imagined transformation of Afghan society in support of the US Army might take a great deal longer than even a generation. Are the US Army prepared to stay the course? one might ask Colonel Kalenda.

Barack’s bedtime reading

So while we originally read the Times story as a heartening indication that perhaps our advice to the HIV/AIDS mythbusters to get to Michele somehow and let her insist that President Obama adjust US policy on AIDS in the right direction was not too wacky, we now realize that it may more difficult than it seems to actually change policy whatever success Michele has in getting Barack to make Peter Duesberg’s “Inventing the AIDS Virus” his bedtime reading.

After all, the amount invested so far in the totally spurious idea that HIV causes AIDS, a idea that is so scientifically silly it should be quickly rejected by any 14 year old who reads up on the topic, is calculated by some to exceed $400 billion, though the usual figure claimed in Vienna is half that.

UPDATE

WikiLeaks shoots heat seeking missile into Pentagon

Today (Jul 26 Mon) the Wikileaks release of 92,000 Army records, more than 200,000 pages of detailed description of battle events from January 2004 through December 2009, delivered a body blow to current Afghanistan war policy possibly equivalent to the Pentagon papers undermining of Vietnam, though the documents are not as secret. The texts make clear that the war has not been going even as well as claimed by the White House, and why after $300 billion spent by the US the Taliban are stronger than ever.

They confirm the corruption and incompetence of the Afghan government, its army and its police, probable Pakistani ISI (Interservices Intelligence) support for the Taliban, at least until recently, that insurgents of all kinds have continually multiplied beyond official estimates and are now apparently using heat seeking missiles (Manpads, not Stingers) successfully against US helicopters, as they did against the Soviets, police cruelty to civilians sometimes as sadistic as the Taliban, and Army disregard of the lives of civilians who may be in a target zone without any hope of fleeing.

At the time of writing the Pentagon is fuming that this must have been the work of Bradley Manning, the 22 year old intelligence analyst they have in custody for releasing the video of the helicopter attack in which the Reuters correspondent got shot (see previous post, Bullets vs books: Greg Mortenson and the un-infowars), but Wikipedia isn’t saying, of course.

The fundamental lesson for science here may be that what is needed for systematic scientific outrages such as the maintenance of the HIV/AIDS paradigm two decades after its expert debunking in top journals is a whistle blower who can expose internal memos and other correspondence which can give the game away to the public.

Unfortunately the only instance we know of where such a text was exposed was the incriminating memo written by some functionary at HHS asking why Peter Duesberg’s Cancer Research article in 1987, the one which first shot down the prima facie absurd HIV=AIDS claim, was not headed off at the pass ie not stopped before publication by intervention from the NIH or its agents.

Shortly after the Cancer Research paper appeared, a memo was sent from the office of the secretary of Health and Human Services, (HHS) with the words “MEDIA ALERT” that castigated the NIH for allowing the paper to have been published in the first place. “The article apparently went through the normal pre-publication process and should have been flagged at NIH,” it read. “This obviously has the potential to raise a lot of controversy…. I have already asked NIH public affairs to start digging into this.” The memo listed the few media outlets that had covered Duesberg’s review – primarily the New York Native, a gay weekly that has since gone out of business – and cited a few journalists by name it promised to check up on.

The notion that the NIH expects to vet every scientific paper in every cancer journal is surprising to people who think of science in the old fashioned, soft-fuzzy way. But to anybody who knows the system it is no surprise at all. The NIH exerts a militaristic control over the ideas that emanate from US government science, and the control extends to the media, who are rewarded and punished in accordance with their suspension of curiosity.
The NIH and all its branches are not only part of the “government,” they are part of the US military. Public Health has its roots in the military; the NIH began during World War I as an organization that solely focused on the health of soldiers. This remained its core mandate through World War II, after which it expanded to a more sweeping public health institution. Still, top NIH scientists hold military rank – the only openly stated one being the Surgeon General.
The NIH, UC Berkeley, the respectable science press, and needless to say the world’s many thousands of AIDS organizations choked on Duesberg like a bone lodged sideways in its throat. Ironically though, his achievements and reputation had lodged him deep in the system and it would take a while for them to expel him. (Celia Farber, The Passion of Peter Duesberg, at AIDS Wiki.)

Despite the fact that this notorious page has been displayed or at least quoted on the Web for years it seems to have made no difference at all to the success of HIV propagandists in selling the world on their lucrative idea, and that any challenge to it must be “dangerous” to the welfare of the public.

What is needed is 90,000 pages of such admissions but Alas there seems no chance of that. Although perhaps we should get in touch with Julian, just in case. He is reportedly miffed, however, that the copter killing video didn’t enough of a dent in the politics of Afghanistan’s civil war – for that is what it is now exposed to be – and that is why he released the current material, which is only part of the total, he states.

Meanwhile BradAss87 faces 52 years in prison.

From Huffington Post:

Jon Stewart Mocks Media for Wikileaks Reaction (Video) Watch for the final shot of Afghan soldiers smoking hits of opium before going on patrol with American soldiers one of whom complains it is impossible to get them to stop giggling.

From the Guardian:
Biting column by Simon Jenkins, A history of folly, from the Trojan horse to Afghanistan – By recording failure in meticulous detail, the leaked war logs bear devastating witness to our incompetence

HIV mythbusters precede Global AIDS Confab with truthseeking pow wow

Naive Obama is no help at all, and John P. Moore is still well funded

The world’s greatest HIV/AIDS gathering will cram Vienna next week, bonding over the latest ways attendees have worked out to milk the greatest funding cow any of them have ever encountered.

None other than Ambassador Eric Goosby, the US Global AIDS Coordinator, will lead the US delegation to the XVIII International AIDS Conference to join 25,000 other HIV/AIDS dogmatists “to discuss efforts to stop AIDS.”

From July 18 to 23, Ambassador Eric Goosby, U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator, will lead the U.S. delegation to the XVIII International AIDS Conference in Vienna, Austria. The conference brings together an estimated 25,000 participants, including scientists, health care providers, political, community and business leaders, government, non-governmental and multilateral organization representatives, and people living with HIV/AIDS, to discuss efforts to stop HIV/AIDS. Reflecting America’s leadership in the fight against global AIDS through the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), the U.S. will use this opportunity to share data, best practices, and lessons learned from PEPFAR-supported programs with the global community of HIV/AIDS program implementers.

Truth on the sidelines

The only fly in the ointment will be the rather smaller, but more truthful AIDS Knowledge and Dogma – Discerning the Difference: Conditions for the Emergence and Decline of Scientific Theories, Congress, July 16/17 2010, Vienna, Austria running today (Jul 16 Fri) and tomorrow in the same city, announcing in innumerable ways that the whole basis for their work, the supposed science of HIV/AIDS, is hollow at the core, which is one reason why it has got nowhere in 26 years in explaining how AIDS works or curing it. (HIV/AIDS patients treated with the standard drugs in the US are dying at the same rate as ever, 20,000 a year, give or take three thousand (the CDC and the WHO estimates vary)).

Unlike the gargantuan main fair, the AIDS Knowledge and Dogma conference will be an excellent source of accurate information on HIV/AIDS. One might view it as nothing less than a celebration of truth and good science, as verified by the published record in the highest peer reviewed journals. Its basic theme – that HIV does not cause AIDS, and HIV/AIDS is not infectious – has been sounded since 1987 and 1989 in comprehensive reviews which have never been challenged in the same publications, Cancer Research and the Proceedings of the National Academy, let alone refuted there or anywhere else, contrary to the propaganda of all those living off the current dogma.

But will its message calling for a return to good science in AIDS penetrate the noisy ramparts of the celebration of the status quo? The sorry tale of how politics and propaganda have trumped the best published science over the last quarter century in HIV/AIDS bodes ill for the prospects of turning the direction in which the vast crowd of lemmings at the other gathering is running, which is over the cliff of destruction and into the sea of despair, albeit well funded despair.

Can truth prevail in the numbers game?

It really is quite extraordinary how successful the promoters of the established paradigm have been in protecting it from debunkers led by the best man in the field, which is what Peter Duesberg of Berkeley was and is, even now, despite the Nobels given to less deserving rivals which have been used to (a)ward off his critiques.

Remarkable, indeed, given that there are so many books out now, well over thirty at last count, describing this scandal in detail, books by very acute minds with a perfect understanding of the issue, such as Peter Duesberg himself (“Inventing the AIDS Virus, 1996″) the science editor Harvey Bialy (“Oncogenes, Aneuploidy and AIDS: A Scientific Life and Times of Peter H. Duesberg , 2004″), science critic Henry Bauer (“The Origin, Persistence and Failings of HIV/AIDS Theory, 2007″ ) and the mathematician Rebecca Culshaw (“Science Sold Out, 2007″), two of whom (Duesberg and Bauer) will be speaking in Vienna.

Other distinguished speakers in the program include the worldly ex-Sunday Times investigative science and medicine journalist and author Neville Hodgkinson (AIDS: The Failure of Contemporary Science (Fourth Estate, 1996)), the sharp minded market researcher, author and drug critic John Lauritsen (Death Rush: Poppers and AIDS, “Poison by Prescription: The AZT Story (1990), and The AIDS War” and others), gynaecologist, obstetrician and AIDS in Africa expert Christian Fiala (author of “Do We Love Dangerously? – A Doctor in Search of the Facts and Background to AIDS”), the virus structure electron microscope researcher Etienne de Harven who has just published “Ten Lies About AIDS”, internal medicine specialist and co-author of “Virus Mania: How the Medical Industry Continually Invents Epidemics, Making Billion-Dollar Profits At Our Expense” Claus Kohnlein (video in French), molecular biologist and radiologist Marco Ruggiero (video) (site), and award winning British science and medicine documentary maker (“AIDS—The Unheard Voices”) Joan Shenton, author of “Positively False: Exposing the myths around HIV and AIDS”. The excellent full length 2009 documentary expose of the rot at the core of the HIV paradigm, “House of Numbers” will be shown, along with a shorter German film from 1996, “AIDS – die grossen Zweifel (AIDS -the huge doubts)”.

But is anyone else listening?

All this material is quite enough to convince anybody listening there in Vienna (or who follows the links above, and reads the fine page of abstracts of the HIV truth conference) that HIV is the Worldcom of science, but the likelihood of it being heard by anyone from the main AIDS event seems remote. For twenty six years the response of everyone in the vast world of HIV/AIDS has been to turn a blind eye to anything which might threaten the central place of HIV in their scheme, and the funding that flows from that idea. As Upton Sinclair once remarked, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

Though the ruling idea that HIV causes AIDS is as vulnerable to debunking as a sucked egg is to a sharp stick, all the king’s horses and all the king’s men of reason and disproof have so far failed to dislodge the Humpty Dumpty of HIV from atop his wall, because none of them can get anywhere near him. No one who matters in the system will discuss the topic.

Of course, the naivete of Presidents, officials, editors, charity celebrities, health workers and the general public when it comes to paradigm battles within science is not helpful. Or perhaps it is not naivete. After all, what recourse do people even in high position normally have to a second opinion in scientific matters, which are beyond their own understanding?

Like even scientists expert in other fields, they have to ask Joe, or Bill, or whomever they know or trust, in the established ranks, and this chain of collegial agreement extends outwards from a very small group of insiders in the know. The number of people in HIV/AIDS who are fully aware of its ramshackle, unbolted theoretical underpinnings can probably be numbered on both hands, and half of them probably refuse to admit even to themselves the weakness of believing that HIV causes AIDS. And as Peter Medawar observed in Advice to a Young Scientist, “a scientist who habitually deceives himself is well on the way toward deceiving others”.

Where is the candidate for change?

In such conditions it is probably unfair to blame even President Obama for going along with this appalling boondoggle, although a case could be made for expecting more from a sophisticated politician. After all, it was not beyond South Africa’s Thabo Mbeki to realize that if such highly qualified scientists still disagreed over the issue. something must be going on, and to demand open public discussion, if not reconciliation of views. Having examined the issue for himself, it seems clear that he concluded like every other intelligent and objective outsider who comes upon it that there is no reason to believe in the unique absurdities of HIV/AIDS, which are legion.

Not to mention the stark giveaway that in established circles reexamination of the HIV faith is verboten, which is why HIV mythbusters have to hold their conference separately in Vienna, in the Imperial court stables, or Hoffstallungen.

For as any child should be able to see, censoring disapproval of questioning of a belief in science is the mark of vested interests anxious lest the paradigm they are living off get toppled, and a signal of its weakness. The lethal degree of counterattack on anyone who raises doubts in HIV/AIDS is notorious, and the most obvious flag that a can of worms will be exposed if it is opened.

A world where no one reads the science

In a modern world where no one has time to read beyond the headlines of journal articles, and even expert reporters are not paid to do any investigation in scientific disputes, the general public rarely tries to read up on a scientific topic hiding behind mounds of jargon on all sides, and so we have a world where a scientific paradigm can be maintained forever floating on general opinion, maintained by censorship and propaganda and the enthusiastic fellow traveling of activists, and the enormous momentum of tens of thousands of organizations and their need for funding.

The Web, which was meant to save us from institutions and systems which might conceal the truth, has now been exposed as ineffective, despite the growing pile of video clips and now even films on You Tube. The number of attendees tells the story: 25,000 versus probably more than a hundred times less. The chance of change at the grass roots level now seems remoter than ever.

But then, truth is not a numbers game, and science is not a democracy. When will a truth seeking leader look into the matter, and rescue the situation?

Calling Mr Goosby

Will Mr Goosby pass by the Imperial Court Stables, where the AIDS-Knowledge and Dogma congress is being held, despite the not very promising name of this venue, and grasp the baton? Will he report back to President Obama that things may be amiss? Will Michele take an interest, and be put in charge of a new White House AIDS Investigative Unit?

Perhaps the current trend led by New York State surreptitiously to test everyone on the country for HIV will turn up a positive somewhere in the White House power structure, perhaps Mr Goosby himself. Certainly that would provide a personal motivation to reexamine HIV skepticism on his part, at least, if he has heard of it at all.

Certainly if he ever troubled to read Peter Duesberg’s book or site, or Rebecca Culshaw’s slim but powerful book, Goosby would be privately persuaded, we feel. But who in this Blackberry era has time to read any book? And who in a world of overwhelming consensus would think that contrarian views are worth reading, especially one atop the pyramid of power, privilege and pay generated by that consensus for 26 years? Probably not Mr Goosby, even if his alternative was the drug regime that increasingly is used to attack the health of blacks here and in Africa.

Moore pipes down

Meanwhile, we note that lately John P. Moore of Weill Medical College at Cornell, the lead propagandist in HIV/AIDS science notorious for attacking HIV skeptics as viciously as he possibly can (by his own account), has kept out of the limelight, so we doubt that he will be in Vienna hosting a panel on why the media should be censored of any mention of doubts about HIV, as he did in Toronto.

After all, the NIH listing of grants in 2009 in HIV/AIDS has him busy as the grantee of some eight projects amounting to $2,171,570 (click on PIName heading, then seek page 14).

All of them seem to be related to microbicides, where his last major result was that his microbicide actually assisted the passage of HIV, as we recall.

We doubt that the funding of the alternative AIDS – Knowledge and Dogma conference amounts to anywhere near this sum. Were we in charge at NIAID, however, we would allocate $2 million to it, and $20 million immediately to Duesberg, whose line of research in cancer seems more promising that the entire oncogene industry put together.

UPDATE: Russian English speaking TV has run segments featuring HIV Mythbusters during the week – see AIDS: questions remain unanswered – Jul 18 story with 8 video clips embedded. . (Thanks Carter and Questioning AIDS Forum where a couple more videos will be found of Neville Hodgkinson on YouTube from Russia Today and CrossTalk on the AIDS Industry – a TV news segment panel including Peter Duesberg.

Duesberg wins crossfire panel: The last one – Cross Talk – is a must see with Duesberg in a Crossfire type discussion where two stalwart defenders of the faith one from UNAIDS and one from the pharma side are pitted against Duesberg, who they try to repel as “dangerous” and a “murderer” 25 years out of date with his valid (they admit) complaints about AZT killing all the patients, but he is given adequate time to counter them by pointing out that his complaints are drawn from JAMA and the NEJ in the last few years where half (of the 17,000 (CDC) to 21,000 (UN) dying annually) AIDS victims in the US are now dying of symptoms not of AIDS but of drug toxicity, and is given the last victorious word on the topic with that unanswerable point.

A creditable performance by the news host, who did his research beforehand, it is clear, unlike almost all well paid interviewers and producers in the country which spawned this outrage to science, medicine and common sense.

Riveting documentary exposes official misbehavior in suppressing cancer pioneer

Patients sob at their lucky escape from the forces which hold back progress

The fine, illusion busting, investigative cancer documentary “Burzynski”, whose limited, one week Oscar-qualifying run just ended at New York’s Cinema Village and in LA, is a must see for any intelligent observer of the politics of medicine in the US.

Readers should by no means credit the irresponsible reviews it suffered at the New York Times from freelancer Jeannette Catsoulis, the familiar Times’ pit bull for movies on unorthodox medicine or science, tho’ here able to complain only of the “visual aridity” of the documents presented which “destroy the film” and “trample the eyes”, while acknowledging that “director Eric Merola, presents Dr. Burzynski as a stoic victim of patent fraud, government harassment and scientific sabotage. No one appears to contest the efficacy of his treatment; the problem, the film suggests, is a pharmaceutical industry with nothing to gain — and much to lose — from the introduction of a highly successful, nontoxic competitor to chemotherapy and radiation”, or the Village Voice where Ella Taylor, evidently a tyro fresh to the vicious politics faced by alternative medicine pioneers, which is the topic of the movie, is so inattentive, seeing “no credible proof of the drug’s success” in this “conspiratorial rubbish”, that she had to edit her piece after publication, and raised a serious question as to whether negative reviewers actually sit through much of the movie.

More attentive takes listed at Movie Review Intelligence include Kevin Thomas at the Los Angeles Times and Ronnie Scheib at Variety, though we would choose James Van Maanen’s review and interview at TrustMovies as the best and brightest so far.

Reflex repression

Such flat dismissals of “Burzynski” are specimens of the same uninformed and possibly venal teacher’s pet hostility to novelty from outsiders that forms roadblocks to progress in every field, but especially medicine, where the media has a very bad track record in unfairly damning news of progress outside the dominant institutions – for example, the powerful expose of shoddy and unproven AIDS science in House of Numbers.

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All the major elements of what is wrong with modern medicine are present – the overwhelming official prejudice against novelty from outside the system, the distrust of independent unorthodox practitioners and the heartfelt testimony of their patients, the devotion of power to the defense of current treatment even though it achieves little and imposes its own horrendous torment on patients, and the immense influence of pharma on regulating officials who tend to end up with jobs in industry after they serve in government.
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This kind of unthinking resistance and counterattack is the theme of “Burzynski”, which exposes the irrational antagonism of FDA officials towards a successful maverick who has at the very least found a frequent cure for hitherto uniformly and rapidly fatal brain cancers.

Too many documents? The well arranged document-ary lives up to its description and proves its shocking and exhilarating case with documents more than personal interviews, it is true, and leaves out “balance” ie the standard defensive sources at the NCI and elsewhere. But this is either because those who stood up for him in the past wouldn’t talk any more (Petronas) or because Merola was discreetly avoiding the kind of vicious counterattack suffered by its hero by not alerting the vast and powerful opposition before his film could be released.

For “Burzynski” tells the tale of one of the most distinguished and successful pioneers of alternative medicine in cancer treatment, Stanislaw Burzynski MD PhD, his clinic, and the trials and tribulations faced by this sturdy optimist in fighting the vindictive, reflex hostility of FDA officials, self serving “quackbusters” paid by the insurance companies and other mindless servants of the status quo for over three decades.

Burzynski’s bright idea

The Polish born, West Houston based Burzynski had a bright idea early in his career, when he noticed that certain harmless peptides are seen in the blood and urine of cancer patients at less than normal levels, and wondered whether they might be involved in the body’s natural defenses against cancer.

The result, as covered in his over 200 articles in predominantly peer reviewed journals, is that he has been treating cancer in patients since 1977 with a novel protocol based on boosting these constituents (now about twenty varieties of small peptides and amino acid derivatives, synthesized since the early eighties and called antineoplastons by Burzynski) with signal success, judging from his carefully kept records, voluminous publications on his lab work which shows they interfere with cancer cells, and the fervent testimony of his patients cured of different tumors, and their families.

As the film spends its first half hour demonstrating, his results are promising enough to deserve the opposite of the political and legal attacks that have dogged him every step of the way to the Phase III trials now finally in view. The egregious assaults on his work (and it seems clear, the lives of his patients) have included confiscation of his entire records for 14 years, costly prosecutions by local authorities with a view to jailing him for several lifetimes, luckily all in vain, and a blatant attempt on the part of NCI staff (including a woman who earlier served as his consultant) to rob him of his patents by supplanting them with their own.

Fair and lovely, and not dead

The grand claim made at the start, that this MD, PhD physician and biochemist has “discovered the genetic mechanism that can cure most cancers,” may be over reaching, but one thing is certain: Burzynski’s potions serve notoriously deadly and untreatable brain tumor patients better than the standard expensive and medieval regime of radiation, surgery and chemotherapy with its horrendous side effects which do little except delay death by a few months, if that. The horrors visited upon children with brain tumors without hope of real benefit by the orthodox priesthood in cancer are vividly described by parents who turned to Burzynski in the hope, quite often realized, that he could do better with his non toxic remedies.

Some of the examples of his success are startling, with those diagnosed with fatal disease but lucky enough to come under the kind doctor’s care telling of their escape from the tortures of the damned years later, having won total remission and now flourishing in youth and beauty. When the current image of one condemned boy, now a handsome 18 year old, reached the screen the audience at the crowded penultimate showing at the Cinema Village burst out in applause.

The humorous twinkle in the stoic Burzynski’s eyes as he recounts the irrational but costly attacks of his enemies must reflect his utter certainty that he is on the right track, a confidence presumably bolstered when the official at NCI in charge of Phase II trials of his discovery, who went to the FDA (Michael Friedman), together with a consultant Burzynski once hired (Dvorit Samid) and a drug company which had offered to partner him (Elan Pharmaceuticals), paid him the compliment of trying to supplant his patents. Dvorit Samid was a believer in the promise of Burzynski’s method, but was banned by the NCI from mentioning Burzynski in her publications on the breakthrough, even as a reference.

An approach which makes sense

However unorthodox it may sound to the naive (and extracting useful products from urine is not as unusual as Ella Taylor the Voice reviewer seems to think – women all over have taken Premarin, an extract from horse urine, for years, for relief from symptoms of menopause) his protocol is officially recognized as promising both in these NCI patent applications and in the establishment of FDA approved Phase II and now soon (when the requisite millions are raised) Phase III trials.

The principle is prima facie sensible and the proposed mechanism makes sense, and the results seem now well established. According to his careful records of FDA licensed patient treatment and outcome, it typically results in permanent remission in about a quarter of his cases compared with zero remission for orthodox treatment, if separate studies on the outcome of each approach are compared. The urgent public need, clearly, is for Phase III trials to be done as soon as possible.

Exactly how his urine extracts (can you say “antineoplastons”? its last syllable should be short, though in the film it is emphasized in the French manner) work their wonders is not fully detailed, but is generally supposed to be action against cancer gene expression. What is made crystal clear is the mechanism by which progress in medical science is stultified. Unless you have the ideal lawyer as Burzynski does in Richard Jaffe, who has a degree from Stanford in the Philosophy of Science, and whose Congressional testimony is featured on camera, you will be shot down by the FDA and put out of business.

If you are outside the great institutions it is almost impossible anyway to get the entrenched old guard to look open mindedly at your novelty in medicine, however good your results. In fact, they will naturally treat it as a threat to their present style of life, and counter attack (the HIV/AIDS establishment is a perfect example of this attitude, even though after 25 years there is no mechanism for the reigning and unproven claim). The FDA acts as the palace guard keeping newcomers outside, the media act as their barking dogs, and all the while Big Pharma bankrolls the status quo.

Dining on the public grave

In carefully exploring how Burzynski himself is mistreated, the well developed expose takes the lid off what is nothing more than a disgusting can of political and mercenary worms dining off the corpse of the public interest in cancer.

All the major elements of what is wrong with modern medicine are present – the overwhelming official prejudice against novelty from outside the system, the distrust of independent unorthodox practitioners and the heartfelt testimony of their patients, the devotion of power to the defense of current treatment even though it achieves little and imposes its own horrendous torment on patients, and the immense influence of pharma on regulating officials who tend to end up with jobs in industry after they serve in government.

Such complaints have been widespread for many years but this film’s account is exceptional in its clear exposition of just how unjustified and automated are the official attacks on independents such as Burzynski. He is five times taken before grand juries even though they not only refuse to indict but jury members join in demonstrating with protesters in subsequent cases.

Abuse of power

The Texas authorities go after him at the bidding of the national office of FDA even though no law forbids his treatments locally (until 1995, when they changed the law), and eventually after losses in court the FDA begins to approve his work. Even so, his records remain confiscated for twelve years, preventing him from easily treating patients without laboriously Xeroxing his own records at the offices where they are held, which on the basis of past experience costs some patients their lives. A useless NCI trial conducted by the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota and Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center uses its own protocol, diluting the medication 170 times and evidently costing the nine patients their lives, according to Burzynski’s ignored protests. And why did it use patients who were so far advanced in their deterioration, that Burzinski’s medicine was unlikely to do much good? Was the renowned Mayo Clinic trying to sabotage his work?

All along the legal complaints do not suggest that his treatments are anything but harmless and beneficial (”the efficacy of antineoplastons in the treatment of human cancers is not of issue in these proceedings” – Texas State Board of Medical Examiners). In fact, by 1995 it is quite apparent and acknowledged by an expert at the Cleveland Clinic in the movie and other other establishment reviewers that the Burzynski treatment is both safe and evidently often stunningly beneficial, and will produce complete remissions in many more patients if they are not irradiated and drugged under the standard regimen beforehand, a regimen whose awful effects in at least one case produce a death even after Burzynski had erased the tumor completely.

Trail of stunning documents

A documentary maker cannot shoot film inside the minds of the actors in his drama, of course, but New York filmmaker Eric Merola powerfully suggests that money is at the root of all this evil as he takes filmgoers on a tour of the documents that expose all these horrid truths , bolstered with interviews mainly with Burzynski and Julian Whitaker MD, of the Whitaker Wellness Institute in Newport Beach, California. Nicholas Patronas MD who was chief of neuroradiology at the NCI is featured not on camera but in Congressional testimony being highly supportive, as well as in a report on Burzynski’s cases.

Only the most cynical will find the journey dull. It is high drama, with lives at stake. Merola uses an effective technique to clarify and dramatize written material which is usually safely fenced off from prying public eyes by medical and official jargon. He reads judiciously selected phrases out loud as the camera jumps from one to the next, leaving out the obfuscating Latin, but ensuring the audience gets it from the horse’s mouth, not from a voiceover summary.

The real criminality

The bottom line is that the film portrays an endemic vice of the current medical culture, the unthinking, lethal prejudice against potential cures which are Not Invented Here which motivates attempts to kill the messenger at the same time as appropriating the gifts he bears. Burzynski seems a sterling character who can see the absurdity of the criminally irresponsible tactics of his opponents even as he points out that his own experience indicates they are costing patients their lives.

But for public servants to admit on the one hand that his ministrations are effective against deadly cancers immune to current regimens, and on the other try to railroad him into jail and take him out as a leading competitor in the medical Olympics of curing cancer, as the film documents, is self evidently crooked.

At least one lawyer is telling the filmmaker that the miscreants in his case deserve jail, and has offered to put them there (see James van Maanen’s excellent review and interview at TrustMovies: Seek out BURZYNSKI (maybe its doctor, too) in Eric Merola’s new documentary; Interview with the filmmaker

In summary, no one who is touched by cancer should fail to look into Burzynski for themselves, and obtain the DVD immediately from Eric Merola’s movie website, Burzynski the movie, which also features upcoming showings, such as the ones in Asbury Park, New Jersey, June 23-26, where Merola will appear for a post film panel discussion and a current breast cancer patient of Burzynski’s.

Best good news in cancer for years

For the first time for many people, they will see that alternative medicine has been offering better treatments for cancer as in other diseases for thirty years, unremarked in the media except for special mention usually accompanied by disparagement, and enthusiastically repressed by the saviors of the status quo. In this case, however, Burzynski and his workers have overcome the counter army and achieved buildings that cover two city blocks, FDA permission to proceed with Phase III trials, and a growing population of sick made well from the deadliest of tumors.

Let’s hope that this thorough expose of both the bad news and the best good news in cancer in years is on its way to an Oscar, since its story should be disseminated as widely as possible.