Dr. Mary’s Monkey

by Edward T Haslam

  Developing a vaccine against a spectrum of cancer-causing monkey viruses already inoculated into millions of people in the polio vaccine was at best a long shot. But there was some evidence that anti-cancer vaccines were possible. Quoting Time magazine:

  Stewart and Eddy have gone a vital step farther... and made a vaccine that protects a big majority of normally susceptible animals against the polyoma virus’s effects.34

  The odds of success were slim, but the stakes were enormous: millions of Americans with cancer. They had to do something. They had to try. And they might get lucky. They might have serendipity. In a word, they were desperate.

  Eddy may have underestimated the government, or she may have understood them better than any of us. Either way, it looks as if the government did spring into action, at least by bureaucratic standards, but the statistics suggest that they failed to produce a solution in time.35

  If a vaccine were to be developed in time to prevent an epidemic of cancer in America, the research would need to be done quickly, quietly, and privately. And it would have to be directed by a competent professional. Someone with courage. Someone with resources. Someone with a reason. Someone willing to take a risk. Perhaps then, a vaccine might arrive in time to prevent a horrible and unprecedented wave of cancer among the American people.

  If they succeeded, they would be national heroes, praised by the press, welcomed by a grateful public, rewarded financially and socially for demonstrating that our beloved can-do spirit of privateering really is an innate American asset, capable of triumphing even in the mysterious realms of science. And if it did not, at least no participants would have publicly stuck their necks out.

  FERRIE AND THE ANGRY CUBAN EXILES may have been willing to develop a biological weapon to kill Castro, but I personally had not thought that Dr. Mary Sherman (or the other doctors) would have knowingly been party to the secret development of a biological weapon. I did, however, think that she might have been willing to be part of a covert effort to prevent an epidemic of cancer! Especially, if competent cancer researchers whom she personally knew and trusted thought it was possible, and if she believed that bureaucratic politics or procedures were hampering the process at the national level. The key words are “knew and trusted.”

  Just what were the connections between Mary Sherman (and the people around her) and the key viral researchers at NIH & NCI between 1959 and 1964? And are these connections strong enough to explain how an internal treatise on viral cancer research from NCI or NIH might have found its way to David Ferrie’s apartment? And were they strong enough to support the idea that Mary Sherman (and others) may have been asked by people at NCI or NIH to be part of a covert effort to develop a vaccine to prevent a cancer epidemic caused by monkey viruses in the polio vaccine?

  The most important connection between NIH and New Orleans is directly between Mary Sherman and Sarah Stewart. Both women entered the medical school of the University of Chicago as freshman graduate students in 1936. Mary, 23, had just completed her Master’s at Northwestern and was working toward her M.D. Sarah, 30, had come most recently from Colorado and was pursuing a Ph.D. in Bacteriology. When Sarah received her Ph.D. in 1939, she moved to the Washington area for a job at the National Institutes of Health. Mary received her M.D. in 1941 and stayed in the Chicago area practicing orthopedic surgery until 1952, when she relocated to New Orleans.

  Mary Sherman and Sarah Stewart were friends and classmates in Chicago for three years. I believe that Sarah Stewart is probably the author of the treatise found in David Ferrie’s apartment, and that she may well have sent a copy of her cancer treatise to Mary Sherman.

  Mary Sherman also knew Ruth Kirschstein at NIH. Kirschstein, who was thirteen years younger than Sherman, was an instructor at Tulane Medical School in 1954 and 1955. During these years Mary was an Associate Professor in Tulane’s Department of Orthopedic Surgery, and that department’s specialist in pathology. Sherman and Kirschstein had common interests in both pathology and cancer and taught in the same medical school. It is reasonable to assume they knew each other well. In 1957, immediately following the polio shake-up, Kirschstein went to the National Institutes of Health, where she stayed for the rest of her career.

  At NIH Kirschstein began working as a pathologist in the Biologics division where Bernice Eddy worked. Her specialties were listed in the medical directories as virology, polio, and oncology.36 But since Kirschstein was barely out of medical school when Sherman, Stewart and Eddy were already nationally recognized authorities, I do not consider their direct contact to have been very extensive. However, there are a few things about Kirschstein that should be kept in mind.

  First, once at NIH, Kirschstein dated and later married Alan Rabson, who was Sarah Stewart’s supervisor.37 Therefore, she was in a position to know things about both Stewart and Eddy’s research that she might not have known otherwise. And secondly, Kirschstein credits much of her professional success to the personal support and professional guidance of Tulane Medical School’s Chief of Surgery, Dr. Alton Ochsner,38 who is known to have enjoyed using his considerable contacts to help Tulane medical graduates find good professional positions.39

  Before their careers were over, Ruth Kirschstein and Alan Rabson basically ran both NIH and NCI. The 2001 NIH telephone directory (which a friend brought me) listed Ruth Kirschstein as the Acting Director for all of NIH and the Chairperson for the Committee of the Directors from all of the various institutes of NIH. Meanwhile, her husband Dr. Alan Rabson, was Deputy Director of NCI. Do you find it interesting that a person who was so close to Sarah Stewart and knowledgeable of her research into cancer-causing virus, and who gratefully acknowledged Alton Ochsner for pivotal moves in her career, wound up in the position to control all research funding from NIH decades after Mary Sherman’s death? Or that her husband, Alan Rabson, who was Sarah Stewart’s supervisor wound up as the number-two person at NCI at the same time?

  One can only wonder: Were these intentional moves to make sure that unwelcome research about cancer-causing viruses or the contamination of the polio vaccine did not get funded, conducted, or published?

  Did Kirschstein keep Ochsner informed about the research activities at NIH and NCI? It would be hard to criticize her for keeping her mentor informed about the progress of cancer research at the national labs, especially since he was the former president of the American Cancer Society and held many important positions in the world of medicine. Additionally, as an expert in polio who lived in New Orleans in 1955, Kirschstein would also have been keenly aware of the problems that Dr. Ochsner faced after injecting his grandchildren with Salk’s polio vaccine. When Eddy and Hilleman broke the news about the cancer-causing monkey virus in the polio vaccine, it would not have been unreasonable for Kirschstein to notify Ochsner about the danger his granddaughter faced.

  Noting the coincidence of the time frame, we ask the question: Did the “Sensitive Position” that Dr. Ochsner was cleared for in October 1959 have anything to do with a secret attempt to develop a cancer vaccine to protect the American public from an epidemic of cancer?

  And there were other connections between NIH and New Orleans. Of particular interest was Jose Rivera, M.D., Ph.D., who sat on the NIH Board of Directors in the 1960s. We will note that Dr. Rivera was really Col. Jose A. Rivera, one of the U.S. Army’s top experts in biological warfare, and that in the summer of 1963 he was in New Orleans handing out research grants from NIH (its Institute for Neurological Diseases and Blindness) to Tulane Medical School, LSU Medical School, and the Ochsner Clinic.

  IT IS NOT MY OBJECTIVE to pin Ferrie’s possession of the treatise on any one particular person; I am trying to show that there were numerous connections between NCI and New Orleans, any one of which might explain how Mary Sherman and/or David Ferrie wound up with an internal document from NIH or NCI.

  Therefore, the names contained in Mary Sherman’s address books, which were confiscated from her apartment by the New Orleans Police Department, could be very
helpful in understanding the exact nature of her activities.

  To formalize our question: Did Sarah Stewart (or someone close to her) alert Mary Sherman (or someone close to her) to the potential of an approaching epidemic of cancer caused by monkey viruses in the polio vaccine ... and persuade her to try to develop a vaccine to prevent it?

  If so, then the original objective of Mary Sherman’s secret medical research was to develop a vaccine to neutralize the monkey viruses in the polio vaccine, not to develop a biological weapon.

  So how does one develop a vaccine? There are two basic strategies. You can kill it or weaken it. The larger the virus is, the easier it is to kill. Large viruses can be poisoned with chemicals like formaldehyde. For example, the common flu vaccine is a virus grown on the yokes of chicken eggs and then poisoned with formaldehyde. But poisons are not very effective on smaller viruses like SV-40. Killing these smaller viruses was better done with radiation.40 We are now at the heart of the matter.

  Our question: Was Mary Sherman using radiation to kill or weaken the monkey viruses found in the polio vaccine?

  Did Mary Sherman have access to high energy radiation equipment? We should note what equipment was being put into medical facilities at the time. In 1959 Time ran a cover article titled, “Te New War on Cancer via Virus Research & Chemotherapy.” In it, we read, “Almost daily, ways are found to give bigger radiation doses more safely to hard-to-reach parts of the body.” The list of techniques included radioisotopes (cobalt-60, iridium-192, and yttrium-90), higher-powered x-ray machines and linear particle accelerators.41 Was there a linear particle accelerator at one of the facilities where Mary Sherman worked? And if so, did she have access to it?

  The real problem here is that the smallest viruses like SIV (and now HIV) are so small that they are even hard to kill with ionizing radiation.42 So what happens if you hit one, but don’t kill it? What happens if you merely wound it with a stream of sub-atomic particles ripping through its strands of genetic information, mangling its molecules and scrambling its sequence? If you do, and if it is still capable of breeding, you now have a mutant. A new virus. One that behaves differently from the one you just mangled.

  It may be more virulent; it may be less. It may even behave differently from all other known viruses, since they evolved naturally and this new virus did not. This is the real danger. The moment you place a test tube full of viruses in front of a linear-particle accelerator, you enter a brave new world. And you become part of the biological history of our planet.

  Was Mary Sherman using a linear particle accelerator to kill or weaken monkey viruses as part of a desperate attempt to develop an anti-cancer vaccine? Was she testing the results of those experiments in live animals in Ferrie’s underground medical laboratory? Perhaps this is how good science goes bad.

  ~~~~~~~~~~

  1 Garrison, Jim, “Playboy Interview,” Playboy, October 1967, p. 59; and Garrison, A Heritage of Stone (New York, 1970), p. 121.

  2 Dr. John Gregory was a Senior Instructor of Pathology at Johns Hopkins Medical School, and later an Associate Professor at Bowman-Gray Medical School.

  3 Shorter, Edward The Health Century (New York, 1987), from the PBS television series, p. 64

  4 Ibid., p. 67.

  5 Ibid., p. 68.

  6 Ibid., p. 69. This infamous polio disaster is known as the Cutter Incident, after Cutter Laboratories of Berkeley, California, which produced the faulty batch of Salk’s polio vaccine. Dr. Alton Ochsner was a major stockholder in Cutter at the time. When Ochsner’s son sued Cutter Labs over the death of his son, he was, in essence, suing his father, who had, after all, administered the lethal dose. He eventually dropped the suit.

  7 Ibid.

  8 Ibid., p. 197.

  9 Ibid.

  10 Ibid.

  11 Ibid., p. 198.

  12 Ibid.

  13 Ibid., p. 201.

  14 Ibid., p. 200.

  15 Ibid., p. 203.

  16 Congressional Record, U.S. Senate, Consumer Safety Act of 1972, Committee on Government Operations, Subcommittee on Executive Reorganization and Government Research, April 20-May 4, 1972, Title I and II of S.3419, page 520.

  17 Bookchin, Debbie and Jim Schumacher, The Virus and the Vaccine: The True Story of a Cancer Causing Monkey Virus, Contaminated Polio Vaccine, and the Millions of Americans Exposed, (New York 2004), p.83

  18 Ibid., p. 201, quoted from Ruth Kirschstein of NIH.

  19 Ibid., p. 202.

  20 Ibid., p. 203.

  21 Wechsler, Pat, “Shot in the Dark,” New York magazine, November 1996.

  22 Shorter, The Health Century, p. 202-03

  23 Leslie Miller, “Boomers’ cancer risk tops grandparents,” USA Today, April 9, 1994, p. 1.

  24 Ibid.

  25 Marshall, Eliot “Breast Cancer: Stalemate in the War on Cancer,” Science, December 20, 1991, p. 1719.

  26 Ibid.

  27 Ibid.: Marshall quotes the scholar-in-residence at the National Academy of Sciences as saying that only 30% of breast cancer cases are due to “identifiable causes,” mostly having to do with factors, like genes or diet, which are relatively constant in any population from year to year. If we subtracted that 30% (18 points) from the annual incidence rate to exclude the identifiable causes, the remaining “unknown cause” breast cancer statistics are nearly identical to the 60% increase in prostate cancer.

  28 Ibid., p. 1719.

  29 “SV-40 like Sequences in Human Bone Tumors,” by M. Carbone et al., Oncogene, August 1, 1996, pp. 527-35; “Evidence for and Implications of SV40-like Sequences in Human Mesotheliomas”, by H. Pass, R. Kennedy, and M. Carbone, from Important Advances in Oncology: 1996, edited by DeVita, Hellman, and Rosenberg (Philadelphia: Lippincott-Raven Publishers); and “Natural Simian Virus 40 strains are present in human choroid plexus and ependymoma tumors,” by J.A. Lednicky, R.L Garcea, DJ. Bergsagel, and J.S. Butel, Virology, Oct. 1, 1995, pp. 710.

  30 “SV-40 Contamination of Poliovirus Vaccine,” by John Martin, M.D., Ph.D., 1997, Center for Complex Infectious Diseases, 3328 Stevens Ave., Rosemead, CA, 91770, article available on-line at http://www.sonic.net/daltons/melissa/sv-40.html.

  31 Kuska, Bob, “SV-40: Working the Bugs Out of the Polio Vaccine,” Journal of the National Cancer Institute, Vol. 89, No. 4, February 19, 1997, pp. 283-284. This article reported that “none of the agencies (of the National Institutes of Health) yet have new initiatives in the pipeline to bolster their current work on SV40...”

  32 Time, “The New War on Cancer via Virus Research & Chemotherapy,” July 27, 1959, p. 54.

  33 Waldholz, Michael, “Reason for Hope,” Wall Street Journal, March 16, 1995, s. 1 p.1. Destroying the “off” switch would have the same effect.

  34 Time, “The New War on Cancer via Virus Research & Chemotherapy,” p. 53.

  35 The U.S. government did launch a massive research program in 1962 concerning cancer-causing monkey viruses. The project injected over 2,000 monkeys with cancer-causing and immunosuppressing viruses. See Richard Hatch, “Cancer Warfare,” Covert Action, Winter 1991-92, p. 17. Was the Ferrie-Sherman lab racing the government labs, hoping to develop an anti-cancer vaccine in time to stop Eddy’s epidemic?

  36 American Men of Science, 10th edition, 1960; s.v. Ruth Kirschstein.

  37 Shorter, p. 201.

  38 Comment made to Edward Shorter by Ruth Kirschstein during the tape-recorded interviews conducted for the PBS series, The Health Century. The quote is not in Shorter’s book; source: Dr. John Roberts.

  39 Wilds and Harkey, Alton Ochsner.

  40 Knight, David C, Viruses: Life’s Smallest Enemies (New York, 1981), p 109. The extremely small retroviruses are hard to kill, even with radiation. A blood cell is 100,000 times larger than SIV or HIV.

  41 Time, “The New War on Cancer via Virus Research & Chemotherapy,” p. 54.

  42 Knight, Viruses, p. 109. said the National Academy of Science was working on this problem at the time.

  ~~~~~~~~~~

>   CHAPTER 10

  The Fire

  SOMETHING DIDN’T MAKE SENSE. The explanations of Mary Sherman’s murder didn’t add up. The press coverage focused on an “intruder,” yet there was no forced entry. The police investigation failed to determine any identifiable motive, but the Homicide Report strained to imply a sexual one. And why did they not want to say where the victim worked?

  The crime scene was also bizarre. How could anyone inflict such massive destruction on another person in the still of the night in a flimsy apartment complex filled with other people, and not have anyone even hear anything.

  As I thought about these questions, I realized the single point that I was most uncomfortable about was the fire. Compared to the 40-foot fames of the Rault Center fire, Mary Sherman’s fire was noticeably unimpressive. Other than the smoky mattress, a pile of half-burned clothes and some incidental furniture, the fire in Mary’s apartment did not really burn anything. Yes, there was a lot of smoke and soot, but no one even reported seeing a flame. There was no structural damage to the wood-framed building. The curtains in the bedroom where her body was found did not catch fire. Even the clothes which had been piled on top of her body as fuel for the fire had not burned completely.

  What about this fire? What was the temperature inside her apartment? And just how badly burned was Mary Sherman’s body? My central question: Could the fire in her apartment really explain the damage to her body?

  The newspapers were of no help on this. Other than generally describing her body as “charred,” all the press ever said about the damage to Dr. Sherman’s body was in one short line which appeared on the last day of the 1964 press coverage:

  The fire smoldered for some time — long enough to denude an innerspring mattress and burn away the flesh from one of the doctor’s arms.

  It is interesting to consider that this was the only detail the public heard about the actual damage done to the victim’s body until the police reports were released, nearly thirty years later.