"You Bet Your Life"

Bob Doyle Attends a Hillary Clinton Press Conference

I went down to Washington recently, for three days, for a hearing scheduled in the House. The Natural Resources Subcommittee on Indian Affairs was holding hearings, on a bill which would force distribution of monies to the Western Shoshones, effectively cutting off their land claims. There's a lot of speculation, but one of the things believed to be happening is that they've discovered glacial water under the Shoshone land, and they want to tap it and send it to Las Vegas and Los Angeles. We were waiting for a reporter outside the Longworth Building about 8:30 in the morning. I looked up and there was a group of about 60 to 80 people at the Canon office building -- there's a huge portico which is part of the foundation & support for the building, going down the hill -- and there was a preacher, ranting and waving his arms about, and this group was waving American flags, they were having a big Christian rally on their way out to talk to their Congressman for something. I was just dumbfounded by the change. I was there for the very end of Eisenhower's administration, Kennedy's, and part of Johnson's, the very beginning of Johnson's. Every time there's a new President, the whole complexion of the city changes. For example, under Eisenhower there was the Bolshoi Ballet; under Kennedy, all the military bands were revitalized, there were public concerts, there were openings of major Broadway plays -- they'd open in Boston & Philadelphia, and they started opening in Washington as part of their pre-Broadway trials. But under George W., we've got . . . Christians. We have a huge influx of Christians. There's Christians, there's nothing but crucifixes and Jesus signs, tour busses, Christian tours . . . One time I was down there with the Shoshones and there were twelve brown and white Christian tour busses on Capitol Hill.

And the security is unbelievable. They're now building a huge tourist center adjacent to the Capitol, which I assume will mean you won't be able to go into the Capitol after a while. Now you can get in, but it's like going through a double airport security. And when you get inside, every time you turn down a corridor, there's security. If you want to go to any of the places that used to be open, when I was down there -- wide open -- any of the hearing rooms or anything, you have to be accompanied by staff, you have to have special passes, the staff has tovouch for you . . . There's plainclothes security, there's uniformed security, and the result of this is that all our Congressmen are physically afraid. I think they're cowards.

[On that trip to Washington], I was watching Hillary Clinton at a press conference. There was Herself, and the Senator we were trying to reach, from Nevada; they walked out from the Senate side, and held a press conference, but there was a barricade behind them, and a fence, and anti-tank barricades in the road, and I noticed all the Congressman were driven over in SUVs with blacked-out windows and armed guards, and there were armed guards under the portico of the Capitol. A reporter approaching a Senator got within about three steps and was surrounded by six armed uniformed security guards from the Capitol. And there were all kinds of young men and women in blue blazers who obviously had weapons underneath their blazers. When the press conference was over, Hilary and one or two other people just walked freely to wherever they were going, and all these Congressmen got into the blacked-out SUVs. I said to my friend, "Jeez, they're really afraid." He said, "Bob, did it occur to you that most of those people live in gated communities?" A very interesting statistic -- How many Congressmen live in gated communities? Just as the tax laws directly affect them -- because they are in the highest tax bracket, by their salaries -- so too, they see nothing unusual about keeping the public out of public buildings, because they live in a gated community, where the public has no access. This is just one indication of how out of touch they are, as well as how totally physically cowardly some of them are.
     The whole Capitol on that trip was surrounded by ten foot sewer pipes, as truck barricades. That's what this [Bush] administration's trying to do, they're trying to make the Congressmen think they're in danger. The joke was, we had a press conference at the ACLU, and you'd think that with an administration of conservatives and neo-conservatives and the right wing and the far-right, the people who are in the most physical danger would be the ACLU. We walked over to the office for the ACLU from the Supreme Court. Across a narrow side street there's a bunch of mansions, one of them is owned by the ACLU. I went up to the door and knocked, tried the door, walked in. I asked if the press conference was there, they said "Just a minute" and they checked and said, "O yeah, we've got that scheduled. There's some coffee over there, some cookies. We'll try to get some sandwiches . . . ." We walked freely in and out. I said, "I think I'll wait outside." We all had packages. Nobody asked us . . . anything!, except, "Do you want coffee?" So as we were leaving, after the press conference, I said to one of the women who was obviously of some authority, "Aren't you people afraid?" She said, "Of what?" And I said, "Well, the whole city's under siege here." She said, "Oh, that's all nonsense, that's just propaganda. Nobody's bothering us." It's hard to keep your head, when you're not used to it. If we were more acclimated to propaganda, it wouldn't bother us so much. It's like the Victory Gardens during World War II -- all I got out of that was some mealy beans . . . You can't go anywhere in Washington without going through security, and it's all nonsense. One of my sons is in Philadelphia -- it's even worse. They have anti-tank -- actually concrete Jersey barriers -- all around the block, around the Liberty Bell. They have cruisers with heavily armed police, and special security, Federal security, because they're afraid somebody's going to blow up the liberty bell. I mean, who gives a fuck if they blow up the liberty bell? It's just a symbol, and it'd be another type of symbol, that's all -- a blown-up symbol instead of a cracked one -- who gives a fuck? Why would we care, if somebody blew up the liberty bell? I don't know . . .

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Bob Doyle was born, in 1937, at Northampton, Massachusetts. He attended public schools and graduated from Holy Cross College (1959), and obtained his law degree from Georgetown (1963). He served in the U.S. Navy from 1959 to 1961, mostly at the Pentagon on the staff of the Chief of Naval Operations. He has practiced law in Northampton from 1963 to the present and has been active in Democratic politics ("it seems forever"). He lives in the foothills of the Berkshires. With his friend and colleague, Peter D'Errico, he has for the past decade represented, among others, traditional native peoples and nations. He is married to Poppy McCluskey and they have eight children.

Views from the Mysterious Eastern Front: A Formula for Business

It has been observed that successful business is not so much about identifying a need as creating it. Once created, it is not so much about fulfilling the need as stimulating it to the point of dependence. Once achieved, dependence must be perpetuated to ensure future profits.   

Does this business model explain the HIV - formula milk scandal: the immeasurable abomination unto nature and common sense committed in the war on breastfeeding in Africa? 

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when the increasingly powerful 'modern medicine' sought to eradicate the approaches now termed 'traditional' or 'alternative', one of the paramount battlegrounds was the female body by virtue of its reproductive function. If women could be convinced that pregnancy was a medical condition and childbirth best dealt with in the hospital, modern medicine would have acquired a never ending supply of dependent customers, all seeking the fatherly aid and advice of the physician when they were most vulnerable. Even the healthiest of women - especially the healthiest - would have to surrender her body and her most intimate wishes to the institution of the almost exclusively male medical doctor at least once in her life. [1]

The victory over the traditional midwives has been sweeping and continues to pay incalculable dividends to this day. For instance, the grotesquely distorted HIV statistics from South Africa and other places are conveniently based on pregnant women coming to the maternity clinics for check ups and childbirth. Here they are further taught that the triple acts of conceiving, giving birth to and breastfeeding their children are all dangerous.

But where did the last idea come from? Not the 'hodge podge' of studies produced by the hyper-advanced, super-abundantly funded AIDS Inc. research machine, and presented at the recent World AIDS Conference in Toronto:

"...there were over one hundred presentations on infant feeding (mostly posters) -- but if there was any unifying theme in the hodge podge of studies, it was the recognition that safer infant feeding is a growing dilemma in desperate need of a solution. Misconceptions about safer infant feeding practices were common in many of the poster presentations, while frustration surrounding how best to counsel HIV-positive mothers was nearly universal." [2]

That was 2006, but at least as early as 1999 a study in the Lancet concluded:

"After adjustment for potential confounders (maternal CD4-cell/CD8-cell ratio, syphilis screening test results, and preterm delivery), exclusive breastfeeding carried a significantly lower risk of HIV-1 transmission than mixed feeding (hazard ratio 0.52 [0.28-0.98]) and a similar risk to no breastfeeding (0.85 [0.51-1.42])" [3]

Further studies [4] have shown similar results. But HIV transmission may not be the biggest problem. Several studies, including the ones discussed here from Botswana, which has a well functioning formula feeding program according to WHO standards, indicate that increasing infant mortality from malnutrition and infections other than HIV are directly related to the practices of formula feeding and early weaning.

It has always been well known that formula feeding is not, to put it euphemistically, a good alternative to breastfeeding. On its corporate homepage, Nestle quotes its founder, Henri Nestle, as saying, "Breastfeeding is best for babies", before assuring us of  the company's support to "WHO's public health recommendation calling for exclusive breastfeeding for six months", as well as its "encouragement of continued breastfeeding up to 2 years or more". [5]

So where did the idea come from that breastfeeding is dangerous? Partly, one supposes, from the entranced focus on the Virus to the exclusion of all other health considerations. Doubtless it is also related to the same sex and blood fantasy that abhors every reproductively related fluid and prescribes symbolic castration in form of (African) male circumcision. But perhaps most remarkably it follows the long tradition in 'modern medicine', duly continued in AIDS science, of prescribing the death one claims to prevent - to wit, AZT, which causes AIDS [6], microbicides which increase the risk of 'HIV transmission' [7], and now formula milk which likewise increases the risk of 'HIV transmission', along with real, deadly infections cynically called "paediatric AIDS".

As such, the war on breastfeeding is perhaps best understood as a part of the medical establishment's proven formula for future profits.

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Claus Jensen is a Dane living in Thailand where he is able to eke out a meager but sustainable existence as a martial arts instructor primarily because he is much taller than the average Thai, and can overpower most ordinarily accomplished Thai boxing teachers provided they are half his size and twice his age.

Michael Geiger: Gay Psychology and AIDS in the 21st C.

What is life like for young gays after 25 years of the Age of AIDS? How do they perceive the HIV/AIDS paradigm in their own lives?

First of all, young gays, like all young people everywhere, see themselves as somewhat invincible. Death is something that happens to old people or others, not themselves. And overall, this view is not incorrect. How does HIV/AIDS affect their lives and their thinking? Many do live in paranoiac fear of it, but quite a few are seeking the thrills of extreme experience - facing the life and death fear factor that is an inherent part of gay sex in a world that believes in HIV/AIDS. Believing that one could so pleasurably, even orgasmically lose one's life with each act of uncontained male to male sex, makes every encounter that much more exciting.

To view it from such a vantage increases the inherent sexual excitement, as it is really quite a high to join with another and stare death orgasmically in the face when one is young. Consider it to be a bit like reaching orgasm just as you jump out of a plane not knowing if your chute will open or not. Quite a rush! And quite addictive! Yet very few deal with anything other than common STDs unless they have run their bodies down in self destructive fits of drug taking or other forms of self abuse.

But often, especially when they are dealing with extreme emotional pain, many young gays seek escape seeking love in usually all of the wrong places and with all the wrong faces. The bars or the company of other young gays experiencing similar lives is where many are able to feel at ease and be themselves. The quest for the next eternal love wards off feelings of rejection, low self esteem, shame, guilt, and fear of the majority. Others still pursue the emotional escape that is temporarily found in alcohol, drugs, or sexcapades. The life of a young gay male is often exciting, fun, and very hedonistic, yet for those that suffer the most extreme inner pain, death by AIDS becomes an unconfessed though desirable way out.

Gay culture is, and always was, primarily a youth obsessed one. It is based on living a lifestyle that is usually dependent on one's youthful sexual attractiveness. But alas, almost all young gay males do get older. With aging comes the body changes, graying or balding hair, wrinkling skin from too many days at the beach or park, and pouches where a six pack used to be, loss of their teeth from drug abuse or lack of care is not uncommon for those who overindulged in such. And some gay men do not age willingly or gracefully, and age is often fought off tooth and nail by laser treatments or gym workouts by those who can afford them.

The emotional aspects of coping with one's homosexuality have never been easy when one is living in a predominantly heterosexually based society and world. Although the majority are fairly well adjusted, particularly as society becomes more and more accepting of gays, many do still have problems dealing with aging. As some gay men reach their mid 30s to mid 40s, they can find themselves living very unfulfilled and often times lonely lives. By the mid 40s, a lot of gay men begin to feel sexually isolated. Between 1991 and 1996, the number of new "AIDS cases" rose twice as fast in persons 50 and older. [Older heterosexual adults dealing with illness also have more severe disease courses and a shorter survival time. They also often no longer feel *attractive* and can feel that their life is not worth living.]  They are not invited to the parties. Some are still working dead end or minimum wage jobs. Their love life has often produced disappointment. Some have buried their lovers if they did have one. Often, they have no spouse, nor wife nor children to live for. Only a few are involved in giving to the larger community, or giving of themselves to a cause, which can give a person a sense of purpose or reason to live. They often have no outside interest in anything other than the bars or the gay *scene*, which is no longer so friendly. Those who have been immersed in a hedonistic lifestyle sometimes (even often) become very self-centered. The hedonistic life does take a toll. For those who have not successfully integrated their lives, the result is often an internal death wish from seeing life as quite meaningless and empty.

A lot of gay men actually do have an internal death wish which gets louder as they age. Ask and you shall receive goes the saying. HIV/AIDS becomes the way out of a seemingly meaningless and empty life. Often, with the pity and care that is received from those closest to the diagnosed,  it is the first time that some felt truly loved or cared about.

Back in the 80s, as gays came painfully out of their middle American closets, the emotional pain and rejection of their family and friends and churches was often too much to bear and many wanted to quickly get off of the planet and out of the pain. HIV/AIDS diagnoses with the immediate prescription of deadly poisonous AZT often provided them the means. For those wishing to exit the planet quickly today, the modern AIDS drugs do not kill quick enough. It is not the same today as it was with the AZT monotherapy of 12 years ago. With the AZT monotherapy, the side effects were usually immediate and drastic, and the patient would live for an average of 8 months to 1-1/2 years. Today, with HAART drugs, it takes much more time to damage livers or kidneys or cause neuropathy or lypodystrophy for those who have chosen this course.

For the panicked HIV positives that do not want to go quite yet, taking the drugs does alleviate a lot of the panic and fear factor of quick death, as they feel they are doing something to ward off death yet keep the promise of desired death near in hand. And believe it or not, lessening the fear factor of inevitable death most likely does keep the immune system from shutting down and staying shut down as happens when someone is living in a fully panicked state of mind of quick and imminent death by HIV/AIDS.

The cost of taking the HIV drugs these days is usually long term, instead of short term. As many of these guys age, their hearts, livers, and kidneys just cannot take the beatings from the harsh HAART drugs that their bodies could withstand when they were in their 20s to 30s. Often, the effects (they are not side effects) are gradual. They also seems to depend on factors like drug abuse, and many other forms of emotional and chemical stress. Those that live relaxed, relatively "clean" lifestyles generally fare well until the national median mortality age and sometimes even longer. But then, and just ask around, who, in a predominantly straight and youth based society, wants to be an old, tired, lonely, gay man anyway?

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Michael Geiger is a member of the board of directors of HEAL San Diego. The image, "Ambiguities of the Olive Branch" is from this gallery.

Donald W. Miller, Jr.: The Government Grant System - Inhibitor of Truth and Innovation?

Flush with success in creating an atom bomb, the U.S. federal government decided it should start funding nonmilitary scientific research. A government report entitled “Science, the Endless Frontier” provides the justification for doing this. It makes the case that “science is the responsibility of government because new scientific knowledge vitally affects our health, our jobs, and our national security” (Bush, 1945). Accordingly, the government established a Research Grants Office in January 1946 to award grants for research in the biomedical and physical sciences. It received 800 grant applications that year. The Research Grants Office is now known as the Center for Scientific Review (CSR), and it processes applications submitted  to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and other agencies in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). In 2005, CSR received 80,000 grant applications.

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The System

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Twenty-six federal granting agencies now manage 1,000 grant programs. Even clinical trials of drugs, vaccines, and devices, where industry may profit from the outcome, have come under the purview of government. Zarin and colleagues (2005) reviewed ClinicalTrials.gov records and found that the federal government currently funds 9,796 (51%) of the 19,355 interventional trials being conducted. Industry sponsors 4,734 (24%); and universities, foundations, and other organizations, 4,825 (25%). Under the current system scientists are expected to spend time drafting, writing, and refining unsolicited R01 grant applications, despite a less than one in ten chance of success.

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Ethics of Writing Grant Proposals

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Ethics in science and society “describe appropriate behavior according to contemporary standards” (Friedman, 1996). Two standards that scientists follow for writing grant proposals are 1) Keep it safe and survive, and 2) Don’t lie if you don’t have to. Pollack (2005) addresses the first ethic, noting that the paramount motivational factor for scientists today is the competition to survive. A scientist’s most pressing need, which supersedes the scientific pursuit of truth, is to get her grant funded—to pay her salary and that of her staff, to pay department bills, and to obtain academic promotion. The safest way to generate grants is to avoid any dissent from orthodoxy. Grant-review study sections whose members’ expertise and status are tied to the prevailing view do not welcome any challenge to it. A scientist who writes a grant proposal that dissents from the ruling paradigm will be left without a grant. Speaking for his fellow scientists Pollack writes, “We have evolved into a culture of obedient sycophants, bowing politely to the high priests of orthodoxy.”

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Apollonian Research

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The grant system fosters an Apollonian approach to research. The investigator does not question the foundation concepts of biomedical and physical scientific knowledge. He sticks to the widely held belief that the trunks and limbs of the trees of knowledge, in, for example, cell physiology and on AIDS, are solid. The Apollonian researcher focuses on the peripheral branches and twigs and develops established lines of knowledge to perfection. He sees clearly what course his research should take and writes grants that his peers are willing to fund. Forced by the existing grant system to follow such an approach, Pollack (2005) argues that scientists have defaulted into becoming a culture of believers without rethinking the fundamentals.

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Unassailable Paradigms

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Peer review enforces state-sanctioned paradigms. Pollack (2005) likens it to a trial where the defendant judges the plaintiff. Grant review panels defending the orthodox view control the grant lifeline and can sentence a challenger to “no grant.” Deprived of funds the plaintiff-challenger is forced to shut down her lab and withdraw. Conlan (1976) characterizes the  peer-review grant system as an “incestuous ‘buddy system’ that stifles new ideas and scientific breakthroughs.” Science is self-correcting and, in time, errors are eliminated, or so we are  taught. But now with a centralized bureaucracy controlling science, perhaps this rhetoric is “just wishful thinking” (Hillman, 1996, p.102). Freedom to dissent is an essential ingredient of   societal health. Braben (2004) contends that suppressing challenges to established orthodoxy sets a society on a path to its doom.

Science in Service to the State

Over the last 60 years a new power structure, the state, has taken control of information. It uses federal tax money to fund and control research through the peer-review grant system. It forms mutually advantageous partnerships with industry and the academic community, which do its bidding. The state holds sway over education. And to round out its control of information,  an increasingly powerful centralized government bureaucracy has persuaded the mainstream media to accept and espouse state-approved ideas. The Western tradition of information ethics dating from ancient Greece to the 20th century, characterized by freedom of speech and inquiry, has been co-opted by government. Knowledge advances by questioning accepted paradigms (Hillman, 1995). The state thwarts this and requires its tax-funded scientists to conform to the official establishment view on such things as global warming and HIV/AIDS. Government-sponsored scientific research reflects the biases, preferences, and priorities of its leaders (Moran, 1998). The state uses science to further its social and political purposes. Its actions follow Lang’s First Law of Sociodynamics, where “The power structure does what they want, when they want; then they try to find reasons to justify it. If this does not work, they stonewall it (Lang, 1998, p. 797).

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Grant Reform

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One alternative to the competitive peer review grant system that the NIH and NSF might consider for funding specific research projects is DARPA, the Defense Advance Research  Projects Agency. This agency manages and directs selected research for the Department of Defense. At least up until now it has been “an entrepreneurial technical organization unfettered  by tradition or conventional thinking” within one of the world’s most entrenched bureaucracies (Van Atta et al., 2003). Eighty project managers, who each handle $10–50 million, are given free reign to foster advanced technologies and systems that create “revolutionary” advantages for the U.S. military. Managers, not subject to peer review or top-down management, provide grants to investigators whom they think can challenge existing approaches to fighting wars. As long as the state controls funding for research, managers like this might help break the logjam of innovation in the biomedical and physical sciences. Science under the government grant system has failed and new kinds of funding, with less government control, are sorely needed.

[Read the complete paper, as published in the Spring 2007 issue of The Journal of Information Ethics]

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Donald W. Miller, Jr., is a professor of surgery at the University of Washington School of Medicine, University of Washington, Seattle, WA. He received his M.D. degree from Harvard and did his cardiothoracic surgery residency at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center. He has written two books on heart surgery and one, Heart in Hand, on the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer, films of Woody Allen, and his life as a heart surgeon. He also writes articles for LewRockwell. com, which includes pieces on the importance of integrative medicine for maintaining optimum health.

US Senator, Brother Barak Osama Obama Has a Message for Africa

YBYL Has a Message for Everyone:
"AIDS" in Africa / Made in the USA Tee-Shirt

Remember Jeremy Rifkin?

Or at least he used to be. In the years since the above appeared, he appears to have smartened up. International AIDS activists are of the same breed that Jeremy was -- except, they are real fanatics of an extremely dangerous variety.

Charles Stein: Welcome to the Kali Yuga

It is a project to imagine when it began. The thought of the Black Time. Eliade and the many self-styled “historians of religions,” for all their self-styled generosity, think that spiritual practices may degenerate generically, so that Kali cults that assume a Tantric ideology (and Aghoris and Naths and whoever take it seriously that any manifest cosmos is the body of the god and that there can be no exception to the attribute of the Holy)—surely “go too far.” Time, says Blake and Godel, is not a possibility. Time annihilates and generates and modulates, and in the form of Mahakala, “Great Time,” performs these ministrations upon her own conditioning. So the Kali Yuga (assuming that Kali is Kala—that the Black One is Time Herself): The Kali Yuga is the time at last when Time is Not. NOT the Time of Furthest Degradation as generally supposed.

Every ideology ultimately requires for the quiet of its own conscience, that it be  “pushed”, like they say, to the Extreme. Most noticeably, geometers, physicists and logicians know this. Hence the matter of Riemann’s and Weierstrass’s famous “pathological functions”; hence Godel’s prodding of formalism with undecidable cases; hence Quantum Theory’s disreputable “infinities” that demand “renormalization” and General Relativity’s ugly extremity that eventually produces Black Holes. In the spiritual “sphere” there are also cases that embarrass the pantheist. The point is, normal science and normal religion wish to hold the extremities at bay, but it is the folks that refuse to do this that keep the spirit soaring: Godel’s “incompleteness theorem” forced Plato back onto the stage of the ontology of mathematics; Cantor’s transfinites were required to accommodate Riemann’s pathologies; the jury is out on renormalization; and Behold: Black Holes are there for all to see! The mother of all extremities is of course Parmenides’ denial of being to all beings but Being, and at present I count myself among the invisible few who hold with Black Athena (if that’s who she is) and entertain this.

The radical pantheists of Northern India and Nepal would eat the flesh of corpses to secure the conviction that they make no exception to the sacredness of all that seems to be. Holy Holy Holy Holy etcetera writes Holy Allen. It is interesting that the orthodoctrines that see pantheism itself as fiendish, rarely attack this matter of the extremities—perhaps because the valor of corpse-eaters is not even to be contemplated in the breach. But the mildest Vedantist must confess to the same universality.

The only viable alternative to extremism is another extremism that denies all ideology whole cloth—the famous Madhyamika of the Mahayana, with its affinities with the favorite dogmas of late western philosophy: various species of pragmatism, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Derrida—all venues where metaphysics is verbotten.

There is no color in the Timeless Time, when neither Generation, nor Annihilation, nor Modulation have a leg to stand on. Rather they have two. And like Nuit in To Megatherion’s Egyptian figure, they arch the gemmed azure as a cosmic woman in flagrante. But here all the frequencies have been absorbed beforehand in white noise or black light. I mean white light or black noise. No matter. Tiny eyes wheeze. The B&W of the print confesses that the principle of inversion itself may have been pushed too far.

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Charles Stein is a poet, scholar and translator. His recent book, "Persephone Unveiled", is described by Peter Manchester ("The Syntax of Time") as "the most auhoritative (he) has ever read on the nature and consequence of divine revelation". The image is from a multimedia collaboration between Drs. Stein and Bialy entitled "Symmetries of The Dark Lord".

Lee Evans: The Fastest Woman in The World Is a Young Nigerian

Last weekend at the 98th Annual Drake Relays in Des Moines, Iowa, Ajoke Odumosu ran the fastest time in the world this year in the 400m hurdles [1]. Two weeks earlier, in blustery conditions, she set the world's fastest time in the 400m. [2] I do not know of any athlete, male or female, who has ever performed at this level in both of those demanding events.

Ajoke turned up with a friend at a recruiting camp I was holding in Lagos in 2002. She was 15 and ran a 61 second 400 hurdles - not an exceptional time, but close, and she seemed very determined and exceptionally bright, so I offered her a scholarship. On Sunday she ran 55.37 seconds, and this Saturday she will graduate with a degree in business administration.

This is not too shabby for a young woman who comes from Ijebu-Ode, a small city in Ogun State, whose hospitals are overcrowded, and have almost none of the most ordinary medicines that are so easily available to us. They could have been used by Diane Sawyer or Oprah, or Obama on one of their bogus television programs about how AIDS is filling the hospitals of Africa.

I remember when AIDS was called GRIDS (Gay Related Immunodeficiency Syndrome), and like everyone else in America I knew that the name was quickly changed for mostly political reasons. I also remember when it became pretty obvious that there was no heterosexual epidemic of HIV/AIDS in America, or any other G-7 country -- a fact demonstrated clearly here last week -- that it was also politically expedient, as they say, to switch the "blame" for AIDS to Africa. And this time, there was not a single voice of protest over this cynical and racist maneuver.

Just the opposite happened. It became fashionable to side with the government propaganda. Why? I think every American, whatever racial mixture they might be, should be asking themselves this question, especially now as we watch the mess of government deceptions and mistakes in Iraq on the same televisions that brought us an HIV/AIDS epidemic in the United States that never was, and an epidemic in Africa that is only another name for poverty.

Peace & Love

Lee Evans

A new biography, by noted sport's writer Frank Murphy, The Last Protest: Lee Evans in Mexico City, contains the only account of that unforgettable olympics Lee vouches for as accurate. Mr. Evans is currently the head track and field coach at The Univesity of South Alabama in Mobile, and one of his recruits, Vincent Rono (from Kenya) captured the gold in the men's 1500 m. final of the NCAA games held in Sacramento in June 2006. Almost nobody knew this because the TV commenters thought the real story was in interviewing the second place finisher from Florida.  Even though he lost, his team (the favorite) still took first, and the TV people wanted to make sure he did not feel really badly about being beaten by some African from a no name university who was coached by the still unmentionable Lee Evans, who told Avery Brundidge and the entire racist Olympic establishment where to shove it 40 years ago. And since he never recanted, he has never been forgiven. I don't have to say how many national medals the UofSouthA won before his arrival four short years ago, but it would be the same as the number of AIDS patients cured in more than 25. An instructive discourse on the African origins of AIDS is located here. [Ed.]

George L. Gabor Miklos and Phillip J. Baird: "Curing Cancer - Running on Vapor"

 Genetic Engineering News, May 2007

 Point of View

Remedy: More Brainpower, Less Hype

George L. Gabor Miklos, Ph.D., is director of Secure Genetics, Sydney. Web: www.securegenetics.com. Phillip J. Baird, M.D., Ph.D., is principle pathologist and CEO of Integrated Diagnostic Pathology, Sydney. For more information, visit: "You Bet Your Life".

It’s easy to tell when an area has run out of ideas. The hype becomes extreme, and technology substitutes for brainpower. The cancer research area has reached this sorry state. The tiniest increase in the survival time of drug treated cancer patients or median time to progression is touted as a cure, and wildly unrealistic claims about personalized cancer medicine emanate from the highest governmental and academic sources. In contrast, Andy Grove, the former Chairman and CEO of Intel, who has tried to shake this dysfunctional cancer mindset. “In cancer, everybody plays his individual part to perfection, everybody does what’s right by his own life, and the total just doesn’t work.”

How have we reached this low point where a generation of young scientists, biotechnologists, and the massive resources of big pharma are basically running on vapor? The answers are not hard to find. First, understanding some basic clinical facts is a good place to start. Second, clinically irrelevant research avenues need to be jettisoned—pronto. Resources and intellectual horsepower need to flow into areas that have clinical impact. Broadly speaking, cancers come in two forms, solid tumors, which make up 90% of cancers, and liquid tumors, such as leukemias. Most cancer patients do not die from the primary tumor; 90% die as a result of metastasis, which causes organs to shut down over a number of years. The rogue cells that leave home are genomically different than those that remain, a finding based on clinical data from single-cell analyses of breast cancer patients by Riethmuller and Klein. Furthermore, primary tumors are highly heterogeneous. Samples taken from different regions of the same tumor have cancer cells that differ enormously at the genomic and transcriptomic levels. In addition, treating any cancer with drugs unavoidably selects for those cells that are, or can become, drug-resistant. Thus when drug treatment is stopped, the cancer returns in a more dangerous drug-resistant form.

A recent, in-depth analysis by members of Amgen and Novartis on why cancer drug discovery is so difficult shows that there have only been incremental improvements in treatment outcomes. Oncology is close to having the worst record for investigational drugs in clinical development, with a success rate three times lower than cardiology. Meanwhile, the price tag for front-line cancer therapy has become astronomical. The clinical reality for metastatic colorectal cancer is that the FDA-approved combination regimen of IFL (irinotecan, bolus fluorouracil, and leucovorin) plus Avastin increases median overall survival by 4.7 months. This small increase comes with a host of side effects, which impinge upon quality of life, as well as placing a burden on the patient and the healthcare system. While this small increase is hailed by the FDA as being impressive, the clinical reality is that there is no cure for metastatic colorectal cancer. The much vaunted blockbuster drug Avastin is simply an antibody supplement incorporated into an already complex chemotherapeutic drug regimen that may slow down the cancer process depending on the genetic constitution of that individual. The cost of drugs for metastatic colorectal cancer alone would exceed $1.5 billion per year if all the patients in the U.S. received treatment.

The clinical reality for metastatic breast cancer is similar.The latest treatment with Herceptin followed by lapatinib and capecitabine only increased the median time to progression from 4.4 to 8.4 months. Furthermore, 70% of patients do not respond to Herceptin, and resistance develops in virtually all patients. Of these two big killers, both remain incurable, and this sobering fact contrasts with the glowing reports on Avastin and Herceptin emanating from the financial and tabloid media. The much touted success of Gleevec for the rare liquid cancer Chronic Myelogenous Leukemia (CML) is not generalizable to solid tumors; resistance to Gleevec in CML develops rapidly, as does resistance to nearly every tested cancer drug. Many of the initial responders to Gleevec in blast crisis relapse within months, and the growing consensus is that Gleevec is an exception, rather than a new paradigm. The Gleevec case should be seen in its proper clinical perspective, namely a treatment that largely involves single cells amenable to attack because of their presence in the circulation. Metastatic tumors, which cause 90% of all deaths, by contrast have hundreds to thousands of surgically inaccessible growths dispersed throughout an organ; they cannot be attacked out in the open as is the case with tumor cells in the circulation. There is little point in singing the praises of Gleevec and pretending that it is a proof of principle for solid tumors.

So what are the responses of government agencies and academic institutions to this clinical reality? They are simplistic: well, yes, progress is slow, it’s a complex problem, but we are moving in the right direction. If billions of dollars are poured into DNA sequencing of primary tumors, then we hope to find the critical mutations that cause cancer and then make drugs to them, so that each patient can have a unique treatment. And lets not forget, the Human Genome Project was such an outstanding success that we can simply do the same thing for cancer by hyping a Cancer Genome Project. The public will love it, the scientists will love it, and the taxpayer will assuredly fund it. [Continued]