I’d hired this MD/PhD researcher from China, but quickly ran into a cultural roadblock with him. Even though I was head of the lab, apparently since I was a woman, he would not take direction from me.
At least when the sexism is that blatant, you can start to design a work-around.
After about four or five weeks of a failure to communicate, I came up with a plan. On Friday, I’d type up the previous week’s work, what I wanted to do in the following week, then I’d go over to Frank’s office for a few hours on the weekend, explain what I wanted to do, then Frank would type it up. Then Frank would sit in on our Monday morning meetings, as if Frank was the real boss, and I was just part of the team.
I’d go through what I wanted to do, who should engage in what research, I’d look at Frank, and he’d say, “Yes, that’s what should be done.”
Being given direction by a man did the trick. Even after he went back to Shanghai, and I left the NCI, we published a few papers together. To this day, we hold a mutual respect and admiration for each other’s work.
One of the things we accomplished during this time was to make extraordinary progress against Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. We were able to use multi-plex RNA profiling in order to identify targeted drugs and distinguish these drugs based on the patterns of expressed cytokines. Another question we were investigating was why people who had glioblastoma tumors in their brains were showing the presence of cytomegaloviruses, as well as other retroviruses in their brains. Yes, I believe that retroviruses are also involved in many brain tumors.
There was one research project which I was sorry I wasn’t able to bring to completion. We had identified what we thought to be a novel herpes virus, which we tentatively named HHV-9. It seemed to be an especially nasty virus, having the ability to transform B-cells, which is exceedingly difficult to do, using Epstein-Barr Virus (EBV/HHV4). We had a strain of EBV that was highly transforming, which I now believe had XMRV env (envelope) integrated from a lab recombinant. Frank rightfully asks me where I get the data for this speculation. My answer to my mentor is there is none because after I left the lab all the samples were autoclaved. The only support I have is the JY cell line paper I presented in my 2013 talk at Dr. Derek Enlander’s conference on November 13, 2013.
I’d bet money that there was also XMRV integrated into that herpes virus, and that it wasn’t novel at all, but a tissue culture created recombinant. That is, there are Epstein-Barr Virus strains circulating which have retrovirus integrase, envelope sections, or reverse transcriptase, which turns them into para-retroviruses, in which they have many of the properties of a retrovirus. For example, I believe most hepatitis B infections are para retroviruses, caused by contaminated cattle (bovine) albumin, used to maintain these cell lines.
Frank is definitely right that the data isn’t there to support my speculation, but I bet someday I’ll be proven right.
***
As I was setting up the new lab, I went to a Gordon Conference in Ventura, California, March 14–20, 1999, which is where to my great, good fortune, I met my husband, David. We met the day I arrived, March 14. Frank had told me that the sunsets in Ventura were spectacular. So, before the conference started at 7 p.m. that evening I wandered out to the promenade to watch the sunset. As I looked straight out to the ocean and the Ventura pier on a beautiful clear evening, I couldn’t see the sun. In my mind I was having a conversation with Frank in which I was saying, “Very funny, Frank. How can I watch the sunset if I cannot see the sun?”
As if in answer to my silent question, David walked by and said, “If you’re looking for the sunset you have to go to the end of the pier. I’m going that way if you’d like to join me.”
While we walked to the end of the pier, David quizzed me about the conference. I talked and talked about HIV drug development as we watched the sun set over the Santa Barbara hills to the north, a truly spectacular sight.
After the sun had set, David asked if I’d like to go out for sushi or ice cream. I explained that the Gordon conference required full participation in meals for attendees, and politely declined. It was clear that David was older than me and though I didn’t flatter myself that he was asking for a date, I made it clear my passion was science.
A few days later, during an afternoon poster session, I was having a heated discussion with Dr. Peter Duesberg, a Berkeley professor, about whether the HIV virus caused AIDS. “Peter,” I said imploringly. “I know HIV doesn’t cause AIDS. [Though we all knew it was PART of the pathogenesis] But my job is to develop therapies for AIDS-associated cancers. Clearly, when the CD4 T-cells can’t do their job, certain types of cancer will inevitably develop.”
Duesberg would not back down. I was cornered and looking for an escape. Just then I saw David walking down the promenade, where we’d met a few days earlier.
I said, “Pardon me, Peter, an old friend and I are supposed to go for a little walk before the evening session.”
I practically sprinted away from Peter and called David’s name.
When I reached him, I took his arm, then leaned in and said, “Don’t turn around. Just keep walking. You said there’s good sushi around here? I have to be back by the 7 p.m. session. It’s the most important of the conference.”
David didn’t miss a beat.
Several hours later, after lots of sushi, Sapporo, and sake, David had heard all about AIDS drug development and misogyny at the NCI.
At the conference, I’d also met some great researchers from the University of California, Los Angeles, and we set up some collaborations to study herpes viruses, AIDS-associated malignancies, and mouse gamma viruses. In addition to being some great research, it also allowed me to spend more time with David.
David proposed to me on April 1, 2000, my birthday, and yes, I know, it’s April Fool’s Day. I always say God has a sense of humor.
The irony is that Ventura was arguably Ground Zero for what I believe has been the greatest crime against humanity, the COVID-19 plandemic. While Frank argues the Holocaust and Native American genocide were greater atrocities, my belief is that COVID-19 was a planned mass murder to cover-up the tens of millions of people infected with animal retroviruses because of a contaminated blood supply and contaminated vaccines. Leading this genocide was Tony Fauci, who for decades has consistently ignored the evidence of human retroviruses other than HIV contributing to AIDS.
Frank believes this statement is far too strong and the existing evidence is far too weak to say this with certainty. I stand by these statements because not a single assertion we’ve made in our books has been shown to be wrong. I believe no statement in this book will be shown to be wrong, either. I appreciate that Frank has family, whom he believes may find their careers adversely affected by such speculations. I believe it is imperative for all of us to step out with boldness to protect every human life at risk in this age of corruption.
In the summer of 2011, as our investigation of XMRV was making me aware of many threads in multiple diseases, I came to believe that those who died in the first wave of the AIDS epidemic were those infected with both HIV and XMRV. XMRV crippled key players in the innate immune response, the plasmacytoid dendritic cells, which make up more than 95 percent of the body’s type 1 interferons and the natural killer cells, which kill cancer cells, as well as virally infected cells. Even now, it’s difficult for me to consider how many lives could have been saved if scientists like Peter Duesberg and their legitimate questions had not been censored.
The destruction of the scientific careers of those who question the prevailing orthodoxy remains an ongoing threat, not just to those brave scientists, but to all of humanity.
***
David and I were married on October 7, 2000. I then spent several months commuting between David in California and the Lab of Anti-Viral Drug Mechanisms at Fort Detrick in Frederick, Maryland. While in California with David, I interviewed with a company called EpiGenX, which impressed me, and they offered me a job as their head of cancer research.<
br />
My last day working as the head of the Lab of Anti-Viral Drug Mechanisms was May 11, 2001, and on May 14, 2001, I started work at EpiGenX. I had been the head of the lab for more than two years and I felt I’d done a great job rebuilding it and placed it on a solid footing. This is the recommendation letter which was sent on my behalf to EpiGenX by one of my long-time colleagues, Stephen B. Baylin:
Dear Ms. King:
It is my great good pleasure to recommend Dr. Judy Mikovits for a position at EpiGenX. Simply put, she is a first-rate scientist who works as hard as anyone I have known. I had the good fortune to collaborate with her on the work she has done and published in DNA methylation, and it was a great experience. She conceived and tackled largely with her own hands a difficult and novel problem regarding effects of the HIV virus on the epigenetic control of interferon expression. A superb MCB paper culminated this work and I think contains data that will prove unexpectedly critical for understanding the clinical aspects of HIV and possibly some therapeutic and prognostic issues as well.
Judy loves science, is creative, and tenacious when pursuing an exciting finding or direction. She has a fine career both in evolution and ahead of her. You would do well to try and recruit her.
Stephen B. Baylin
Associate Director for Research
Director, Cancer Biology Division
Ludwig Professor of Oncology
The John Hopkins Comprehensive Cancer Center2
There you have two recommendation letters, one which summed up about twenty years of my life from being a lab technician, through graduate school, and my post-doc career. The second indicated that after approximately two years and four months of being head of a lab, I impressed people.
Later I learned that Peter Fischinger, who’d given me my shot to be head of the Lab of Anti-Viral Drug Mechanisms, apparently believed the rumors that I was sleeping with Frank. Of course, there couldn’t be a brilliant man and a woman with some brains of her own working together and not have a little something going on the side.
By the way, Frank does not believe this scenario. He believes they separated us in the belief we would fail.
I do not see the two beliefs as incompatible.
Once again, Frank and I are probably both right.
CHAPTER TWO
Interferon as an Anti-Tumor and Antiviral Agent
The cover of the March 31, 1980 issue of TIME magazine changed my life. The screaming headline was “INTERFERON – The IF Drug for Cancer,” along with an extreme close-up of a syringe with a single reddish-pink drop hanging from the tip.
The article gave the history of interferon up to that point. But my concerns were much more down to Earth. I was a senior at the University of Virginia when that story came out. Even then I vividly remembered my favorite grandfather, the one who’d taught me to love baseball, had died from lung cancer when I was twelve years old. I had vowed then as a young girl to take on cancer as my life’s mission.
Another great influence in my life was the University of Virginia, founded by Thomas Jefferson, and its totally student-run honor code. A student could not lie, cheat, or steal. If such an infraction was committed, the sole remedy was permanent dismissal from the University. To some that may sound harsh. But to me it seemed exactly how the world should function. In its explanation of the code, the University stressed how such a strict honor code created communities of trust. To see an honor offense committed and not report it was an honor offense. It was and still is the only one of its kind in the United States. It’s just as our parents taught us.
Our word was our bond.
We honored our word and each other.
It was a wonderful community of trust.
Maybe that has blinded me to much of the corruption and lies in the world around me. But when I read that TIME article in 1980, I read it with the belief it was the leading edge of medical science. More than forty years later, I still believe in the essential accuracy of what I read. It is maddening to me that we have not made more progress. This is how the article vividly described the development of cancer.
It can start in just one of the body’s billions of cells, triggered by a stray bit of radiation, a trace of toxic chemical, perhaps a virus or a random error in the transcription of the cell’s genetic message. It can lie dormant for decades before striking, or it can suddenly attack. Once on the move, it divides to form other abnormal cells, outlaws that violated normal genetic restraints. The body’s immune cells, normally alert to the presence of alien cells, fails to respond properly; its usually formidable defense units refrain from moving in and destroying the intruders.1
Don’t you feel that much of the last forty years of environmental protection can be summed up in that single paragraph? Who doesn’t worry about human health, either for themselves or for the greater good of humanity? I believe every person reading this book wants humanity to experience the maximum amount of good health and for people to lead long and productive lives. We worry about things like radiation (from our cell phones), toxic chemicals in our food, air, and water, viruses, and whether our genes are functioning for our optimal health.
I thought the section from TIME was similarly excellent in describing the process of cancer development. For some reason, the aberrant cancer cell is created, then, in some process we do not fully understand, tricks the immune system into not responding. I believe every living thing has intelligence. Even though many question whether viruses can even be classified as living things, I am convinced there is an intelligence to their actions as well.
They hijack the cellular machinery to reproduce and spread throughout the body and yet we do not understand how they get the immune system to stand down. Does interferon act as a sharp-eyed policeman, observing the attempted assault, and calling in reinforcements? Or does interferon itself go charging in for the assault?
We now know from studying our endogenous virome (viruses which have become integrated into our genetic code) that the answer is that both are true.
The article did a good job of summarizing the history of interferon, how it was first identified in 1957, and then how a Finnish virologist, Kari Cantrell, was able to start synthesizing larger amounts. The 1980 TIME article continued:
Still, researchers now had enough interferon to move studies out of the laboratory and into the clinic. In 1972, virologist Thomas Merigan of Stanford University, and a group of British researchers began studying IF’s effect on the common cold. Soviet doctors were claiming success in warding off respiratory infections with weak sprays of IF made in a Moscow laboratory. Merigan and his colleagues gave 16 volunteers a nasal spray of interferon one day before and three days after they were exposed to common cold viruses. Another 16 volunteers were subjected to the same viruses without any protection. The results seemed miraculous. None of the 16 sprayed subjects developed cold symptoms, but 13 of the unsprayed did. There was one catch: at the IF strengths that Merigan used, each spray cost $700.2
The problem was the cost of the synthesis. Bring this cost down with new technologies and as the article detailed, the possibilities were endless for every person to prevent infectious disease, and maybe even cancer. The article continued:
In the years since, Merigan and his Stanford team have successfully used IF to treat shingles and chicken pox in cancer patients. In other studies, IF has prevented the recurrence of cytomegalovirus (CMV), a chronic viral disease that sometimes endangers newborn babies and kidney transplant patients. Israeli doctors have also used IF eye drops to combat a contagious and incapacitating viral eye infection known as “pink eye.” Researchers are now trying a combination of IF and the antiviral drug ara-A in patients with chronic hepatitis B infections. Interferon investigators have high hopes that the drug will be equally active against other viral diseases.3
The concept that interferon might also be effective against cancer may have occurred spontaneously to several researchers as the work of Isaacs and Lindemann was confirmed. After all, it had al
ready been shown that some animal cancers were caused by the polyoma virus. Though no human cancer virus had yet been identified, some tumors seemed linked to viral infections.4
This made an enormous amount of sense to me. While an acute viral infection will put a short-term stress on the body, chronic viral infection has the capability to exhaust and degrade the immune system so that cancer cells can replicate out of control.
Can you understand why I was so excited when I read this TIME magazine article? Interferon was showing promise as a treatment for the common cold, shingles, chicken pox, pink eye, and was being investigated for its effectiveness against chronic hepatitis B infection.
Just after graduation, I took a break from the job search for the Memorial Day holiday weekend when I saw an ad in the Washington Post for a technician to purify interferon for the National Cancer Institute. I couldn’t believe my eyes and applied immediately. It was exactly the job I’d hoped for since I did not get into medical school.
I thought I could take a year off, cure cancer, and then I would atone for those Ds in Organic Chemistry, as I could help get the cost of manufacturing interferon down low enough so that everyone could benefit.
I applied, got called for an interview, and began my dream job on June 10, 1980.
You might say interferon was my first great love in science.
Most of that first year at the NCI I was working on several different projects. I worked on the fermentation chemistry team that purified interferon in large amounts from large scale fermentation cultures of the Burkitts’ lymphoma cell line, Namalwa. I also purified other natural products from plants, like the breast cancer therapy, Adriamycin, called the red devil or toyocamycin, and sangivamycin nucleoside analogues which were active against human cytomegalovirus.
Ending Plague Page 19