In addition, I studied the latest literature and kept my ears open for any other positions.
Over the years, many people in and out of science have asked me how the people involved could have let this happen.
The simplest answer I can give them is that it’s all about money needed for career advancement.
Most scientists will justify any action that provides them access to research funds. Unfortunately, scientific research has a lot of bad actors, petty tyrants, and mediocrities who are desperate for funds. The convergence of the SVCP and Nixon’s “War on Cancer” meant that an unprecedented amount of research money was available, without the traditional controls. That allowed for the development of many enormous empires masquerading as independent scientific research laboratories; when in reality, they danced to the tune of the chief scientist.
In the early 1980s, Gallo’s lab consisted of fifty scientists and had an annual budget of thirteen million dollars. (In 2021 dollars, that’s equal to about thirty-six million dollars.) Naturally, every overseer, such as the secretary of Health and Human Services, would chant the mantra that “the Gallo lab is doing cutting-edge research,” in order to justify the vast amount of money being spent. It was like admirals and generals showing up to testify in front of Congress that the money was being spent to “protect the homeland,” and all the spineless Congressional members couldn’t open the public checkbook fast enough.
The growth of these mega-labs continues to be a problem today. In 2012, Ian Lipkin, a professor at Columbia, told me that with sixty-five people in his lab he could not compete with other labs. Sixty-five researchers and you don’t feel like you can compete? Like the robber barons of old, competition to these scientists is the absence of competition.
Another key issue was the vindictiveness of certain individuals, especially toward those who might criticize them. When Science magazine published a history of the Special Cancer Viral Program, a footnote explained that most refused to have their names published for fear of reprisal.2
Since people are afraid of the consequences of telling the truth, only the fairy tale praise of the sycophants makes it into the history books. Media pundits, with no idea of how paradigm-changing work in science is accomplished—the teamwork and enormous work necessary—only make matters worse by their hero worship of unworthy individuals like Gallo and Fauci who claim credit for the hard work of others. Except when that work reveals inconvenient truths of the damage wrought by the scientific establishment. Then the misogynists resort to the traditional cowardice of blaming the messenger, especially if that scientist is a woman.
Furthermore, the unremitting servitude of the students and postdoctoral fellows allows the established principal investigators like Robert Gallo, Anthony Fauci, and Ian Lipkin to take credit for the work of their underlings like the masters of a vast, intellectual plantation. Post-doctoral fellows are keenly aware that if they don’t leave places like the NCI, Harvard, or wherever they do their work, in the good graces of the powerful, their career has no chance of survival. It is extremely difficult to be an honest person in this type of environment, especially when such honesty is often likely to get you a one-way trip out of your chosen field.
Finally, empire-building fosters the development of huge bibliographies, usually of the principal scientist in charge, to justify the enormous budget. The claims of some of these scientists rival the honors all-powerful dictators often give themselves, such as single-handedly diverting the course of mighty rivers. Gallo now claims to have more than twelve hundred publications to his name.
If we assume Gallo had a forty-year productive career, that means he published a new paper every twelve days. It’s preposterous to pretend that anybody can design, conduct, and publish that many important or original papers. Many of his “publications” are simply opinions or commentaries, not much better than a typical blog post, which he used to deflect, deny, or spin the truth to his advantage.
In early 1983, the Biological Response Modifiers Program (BRMP) published an ad that it was going to advertise for the positions which had been eliminated the previous September. (Remember, nothing ever dies in a bureaucracy, but it can be put into a deep sleep.) Figuring I had nothing left to lose, I put my application in again.
One day I received a call from a more senior scientist, Dr. Joost J. Oppenheim, who had applied for a section chief position. Joost was an immunologist at the Dental Institute and invited me to lunch. He’d heard stories of the vindictiveness of the leaders of the NCI and knew they did not look kindly on the Biological Response Modifiers Program.
I told him that the Fort Detrick facility in Frederick, Maryland was looked upon by the NCI powerful elite as akin to being transferred to Siberia, and they might leave a researcher in relative peace to do some actual science. I suggested that as a new institution, the political divisions and turf battles might not be as severe as in a more established facility.
The lunch was a turning point in my life because Joost got the section chief job, then hired me to work in the BRMP, just as I’d hoped to do the previous September.
Years later I asked Joost if Gallo ever harassed him for hiring me.
He replied that Gallo called him repeatedly and threatened him not to hire me.
When I asked why he didn’t give in to the pressure, Joost laughed.
“Because I couldn’t find anybody cheaper!” was his response.
And besides, an acquaintance of Joost’s, Steve Gillis, later founder of a successful biotech company called Immunex, told him, “Give Ruscetti a hundred thousand dollars, lock him in a lab, and he’ll discover something!”
At that time, a hundred thousand dollars was cheap for producing ground-breaking science. I always felt that was a nice compliment about the quality of my work and dedication.
Joost Oppenheim was a male Anne Frank, forced as a child to hide in Holland from the Nazis during the Holocaust. I think that experience made him the kind of person who didn’t have trouble standing up to a bully like Gallo. As a sign of our friendship, a group of us, headed by Howard Young, gave Joost a copy of the diary he kept during those years, translated into English. I shall be forever thankful for Jo’s generosity and integrity.
It was a wonderful relief to stay in the area, because Sandy had also gotten a job at the NCI, and she was having great success in her research highlighting the pathogenic changes to cells caused by retroviral surface (envelope) proteins, which in some viruses included spike proteins.
As the spring of 1983 dawned, I was well-aware that there were many villains in science, but was discovering that there were several heroes as well.
CHAPTER FIVE
The Mischief Behind the Discovery of HIV and the Rise of Anthony Fauci
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
—Aldous Huxley1
Be innocent of the knowledge, dearest chuck; TILL thou applaud the deed.
—William Shakespeare2
Sandy and I were delighted that my new job allowed us to stay in our condominium in Washington, DC. Her commute to the main NIH campus in Bethesda, Maryland for her job wasn’t more than ten minutes, while I had to travel another thirty-seven miles down the road to the Fort Detrick army base in Frederick, Maryland, which was then being referred to as the Frederick Cancer Research Facility (FCRF).
Sandy had joined a genetics laboratory supervised by Michael Potter, one of the most humble and unaffected scientists I’d ever met, who was also very accomplished in his field. He restored my faith in a good man doing great science. Sandy’s group was the first to demonstrate that the expression of a retroviral protein envelope alone could cause cancer in mice.3 This envelope protein was part of a defective virus called “spleen-focus-forming-virus,” a virus which had to be delivered to cells via another, infectious virus. In other words, in order to cause damage, the defective envelope had to be delivered to the target cell.
One should understand a virus is usually divided up into two parts
, the so-called lipo-protein envelope “shell” and the interior of the virus which contains the genetic information, along with structural proteins. Researchers have long believed the “shell” of the virus was secondary to any disease process, claiming only the interior of the virus carried any disease-causing factors.
Sandy’s research was turning that belief on its head, suggesting the shell of the virus might also be dangerous to living things. This was especially important in terms of the reigning dogma, then and now, that only infectious transmissible viruses can cause harm to an organism. I strongly believe that so-called “defective viruses,” meaning they only have part of the full genetic code of the virus (possibly just a few hundred base pairs from the shell), can cause significant harm.
It can be difficult to visualize what I mean with our frame of reference, because when we see an organism, like a dog or a cat, we see the entire animal. We don’t just see a tail, an ear, or a stray leg, making its way down the street. However, in the viral world, you might get merely a segment of the genetic code replicating. In the past, this would cause researchers to label that a “defective” virus or “partial viral strand,” and they’d categorize it as harmless. Personally, our hypothesis is that some of today’s chronic diseases may be exacerbated by these “defective viruses” that we actually see expressed aberrantly from what we call the endogenous virome (a group of viruses present in the animals), but do not classify as being of any pathologic importance.
In April 1983 when I started work at the Fort Detrick facility in Frederick, it had been nearly two years since I’d had the opportunity to engage in any meaningful research, and I was anxious to get started. The level of funding I’d receive was still uncertain, but I was given permission to hire one technician.
Of all the laboratories in the world, Judy Mikovits had to walk into mine.
***
Franklin Roosevelt once famously said “I ask you to judge me by the enemies I have made.”
The fact that Judy’s enemies and my enemies are usually the same people means you should probably judge us similarly, despite any differences we might have in personality, temperament, or even interpretation of the data.
As a woman in science, Judy has been fighting against sexism and misogyny since her high school science classes in ways that often stagger my imagination. I cannot fathom the behavior of some men. But Judy has never backed down.
After declining her acceptance to Princeton University for financial reasons, Judy attended the University of Virginia and graduated in 1980. It’s worth noting that when Judy entered the School of Arts and Sciences in 1976, it was only the second class of women admitted in the 152 years since Thomas Jefferson had founded the University. Many of the professors were not supportive of women at the university and had little hesitation expressing their opinion. Judy learned as I had, years before, that professors and administrators often discharged their duties without regard to merit, but by whichever course of action was politically easier.
Less than a month after her graduation in May 1980, Judy was hired as a chemist technician for the Fermentation Chemistry Program at the Frederick Cancer Research Facility. Her first project was purifying interferon-alpha (IFN-a), which at the time was being investigated as a highly potent anti-cancer and anti-viral therapy. (Interferons are small proteins created by cells, primarily in response to viruses and bacteria, that can positively modulate the activity of the immune system.)
Both IFN-a and, later, IL-2 were inflicted with the same exaggerated expectations every new therapy receives. First, the new therapies are believed to be cures for multiple conditions. When they are used without application of knowledge and fail to be the magic bullet cure-all for these multiple conditions, they become unwanted dog shit, and struggle to find their useful therapeutic niche.
In 1982, the fermentation chemistry team for which Judy was working was assigned a project, taking her off the interferon-alpha project. Gallo wanted the contractor team to provide his lab with thirty grams of IL-2 and HTLV-1 virus from a two-hundred-liter (about fifty-two gallons) culture of Hut-102 cells, using a procedure developed by me and Bernie Poiesz. In order to extract the thirty grams of HTLV-1, the protocol required an open-air centrifuge, known as a K-centrifuge.
A centrifuge changed my life once before by getting me transferred from the Air Force to the space program.
Now, a centrifuge was going to bring Judy and I together.
Mark, the team leader, and Judy immediately realized that the use of the centrifuge had the potential to cause the virus to become airborne to infect the technicians, including a few who were pregnant. Little was known about the transmission of the first identified human disease-causing retrovirus, its infectivity, or the mechanisms through which it caused disease.
Mark and Judy wrote a letter to their superiors at the NCI requesting additional time and resources to complete the assignment with proper safeguards. The threatening reply from Robert Gallo was a simple edict to meet the deadline or lose their jobs. Additionally, they were not to reveal any of their concerns to the other lab workers. In Judy’s naiveté, she even wrote a letter to the Washington Post, believing they’d take some action. It was her first disappointment in the mainstream media, but certainly not her last.
Luckily, they found a way to get the job done and not put the other lab workers at risk. They decided to work through the night for the most dangerous parts of the procedure, when the pregnant staff were not present. They delivered the purified thirty grams of HTLV-1 and IL-2 on time to the Gallo lab in Bethesda, Maryland.
However, shortly after that, Mark called Judy into his office and handed her a letter. The letter said her job had been eliminated as part of a “reduction in force,” ordered by the NCI. This was an initiative pioneered by President Reagan that was a complete scam. Many people would be fired, but it would be called a Reduction in Force (RIF), with the expectation that they’d be rehired as independent contractors, but without the cost of health benefits or pesky rights of employment law.
Later, Judy was told directly that Gallo himself had pulled the strings which led to the firing of the fermentation chemistry team, specifically for their questioning of safety practices.
Aside from people like Gallo, one of the nice things about the NCI was they’d often have lunch time seminars, given by researchers, that anybody could attend. They were also good places to go job-hunting, especially since when you got “fired,” there was usually a lag time of months before you had to leave. Judy was fortunate enough to attend a talk given by my friend, Dr. Joost Oppenheim, on the subject on Interleukin-1, a cellular communication protein, which like interferon, was being looked at as a possible cancer treatment. When Judy was twelve years old her beloved grandfather died of lung cancer, and it kindled a desire in her to help cure cancer.
Judy was fascinated by Oppenheim’s description of the research, his intelligence and evident goodness, and raced to the podium after he’d finished speaking to talk with him. Oppenheim invited her to have a longer talk with him back at his office, and Judy was excited that she might once again find herself on the leading edge of medicine, developing therapies which might be the cures of the future.
During their discussion, back at his office, Judy let Oppenheim know she was looking for a job and hoped he might have something available in his lab. Oppenheim replied he knew a colleague who’d worked on HTLV-1 and IL-2 who could use a good technician and sent her to me. The interview was scheduled for a few days later and in the interim, Judy read everything she could get her hands on about HTLV-1 and IL-2.
Judy recalls bringing her resume to the meeting and that I was pleasant, but not especially warm. I reviewed her resume and noted with approval that she’d worked in a Biosafety Level 3 facility. Judy mentioned she’d purified IL-2 and HTLV-1, so I naturally asked her, “Oh, have you read the scientific literature concerning HTLV-1 and IL-2?”
“Absolutely,” she replied, brimming with confidence.
&n
bsp; I was trying to lighten the mood and with a hint of mischief asked, “Do you know who wrote those papers?”
A look of mild panic swept across her face. “Well, no, I don’t,” she replied cautiously, before her confidence began to reassert itself. “Because it doesn’t matter who wrote the papers. I simply read the data so I understand the science and can do the job.”
“I wrote them!” Judy recalls me saying, my annoyance plainly visible to her.
I don’t quite remember it that way. I may have said those exact words, but I don’t remember being annoyed.
However, it was clear to me that Judy was embarrassed, as her face flushed red. She thought she’d completely blown the interview. I saw her eyes move about the room, looking desperately for something to save her. I had a poster on the wall of the Boston Celtics, which at that time included Larry Bird, Robert Parish, and Kevin McHale, arguably the greatest front line in the history of basketball.
In those days, there was a player at the University of Virginia, Judy’s alma mater, Ralph Sampson, who was a basketball phenomenon. The Boston Celtics had made an offer to Sampson to leave college at the end of his junior year, but he had not yet replied. “Do you think Ralph Sampson will accept the offer from the Boston Celtics?” she asked.
“He’d be a fool to turn it down,” I answered. “If he lets himself go to the draft, he’ll be picked up by a weak team that won’t be able to protect him from injury. And that will limit his potential.” Sampson stood seven feet four inches, but at less than two hundred and thirty pounds, he was quite thin. Although a guy like that can dominate the court, he can also get easily injured. It’s simple physics. The bigger you are, the harder you fall.
“I don’t think he’ll take the offer,” Judy replied. “Getting that degree means so much to him and his family.” As it turns out, he did not take the offer from the Boston Celtics; he graduated from the University of Virginia in 1984 and was drafted by the Houston Rockets. He was an All-Star for three years, but injuries cut his career short before he could win an NBA championship. Sampson went on to have a successful coaching career at James Madison University and has a lovely family. I still think he would have won multiple NBA championships and had a lovely family.
Ending Plague Page 7