In a single exchange with the Nobel Prize winner responsible for identifying our greatest modern plague, HIV/AIDS, he tells you that what has happened to me has been wrong.
However, like me, Luc Montagnier is an optimist: “I think we are at a turning point which may revolutionize medicine. The era now is made of chemicals. We might have things in the vaccines. I think there is no solution but changing the chemicals that are causing these problems and chronic diseases. We have proved that in many cases, these chemicals are causing problems.”11 While my expertise is molecular biology, I cannot help but agree with him that many of the chemicals we are currently using are affecting our health.
And like me, Dr. Montagnier doesn’t worry that his comments might cause him to be “canceled” in our current media environment. A scientist’s obligation is only to the search for truth. That is why free speech is so essential:
I am quite convinced that we should not do what we’re doing now. We should turn other ways. Let’s take the vaccine story now. The new RNA vaccines for COVID-19 are quite a new innovation. Maybe it’s too early. Maybe they’re going too fast. It might have some applications in the future. But we have to be very careful because if we touch our genome, we have to know more about this. We know only 3 percent of our genes are coding. The other 97 percent, we don’t know what it’s doing. Are we going to change our organs with these vaccines? It’s a new thing. Nobody can predict what is going to happen. Maybe more people are going to die of infectious diseases.12
A true scientist is humble before God’s nature. There’s no room for arrogance or hubris. When reasonable questions are excluded from the public debate we’re not looking at science. We’re in the realm of politics, persuasion, and big money.
There are still many true scientists/scholars among us. Several of those, who have investigated some of those chemical and biological toxins contributing to the explosion of cancer, autoimmune, and neuro-immune diseases, contacted me after seeing “Plandemic” or reading our books, Plague and Plague of Corruption. They graciously offered to lend their expertise to solutions, regardless of whether we might disagree on the cause.
We are all grateful to have the support of Dr. Luc Montagnier.
CHAPTER SIX
Environmental Toxins and Oxidative Stress Fuel Retroviral Associated Diseases
A wise man will make more opportunities than he finds.
—Francis Bacon
There have been scientists and physicians who honored the obligation to produce knowledge and communicate it despite the cost in this age of corruption.
We’ve discussed in previous books people like Dr. Jeff Bradstreet and Dr. Timothy Cunningham. Many more brave individuals contacted me after seeing the “Plandemic” video or reading our book. That is one of the great blessings of the past year.
For me, professionally, 2020 was my best year in more than a decade.
Scholars called and emailed me wanting to talk about science and solutions for COVID and many other conditions, seeing many of the same connections that Luc Montagnier discussed with my coauthor, Kent.
***
For most mortals, a single degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) would be enough of an accomplishment to brag about for a lifetime. However, Dr. Stephanie Seneff has four degrees from MIT, in addition to being a senior research scientist at the institute. On the research side this is equivalent to be being a full, tenured professor. From the brief biography of her curriculum vitae:
Stephanie Seneff is a Senior Research Scientist at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. She has a Bachelor’s degree in biology with a minor in food and nutrition, and a Master’s degree, an Engineer’s degree, and a PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, all from MIT. Throughout her career, Dr. Seneff has conducted research in diverse areas, including human auditory modeling, spoken dialogue systems, natural language processing, information retrieval and summarization, and computational biology, among others. She has published over 200 refereed articles in technical journals and conference proceedings on these subjects and has been invited to give many keynote speeches.
Since 2008, Dr. Seneff has become interested in the effect of drugs, toxic chemicals and diet on human health and disease, and she has written and spoken extensively, articulating her view on these subjects. In particular, she has authored over 35 recently published peer-reviewed papers on theories proposing that a low micronutrient, high-carbohydrate diet contributes to the metabolic syndrome and to Alzheimer’s disease, and the sulfur deficiency, environmental toxicants, and insufficient sunlight exposure to the skin and eyes play an important role in many modern conditions and diseases, including heart disease, diabetes, gastrointestinal problems, Alzheimer’s disease, and autism. She has zeroed in on the herbicide glyphosate as being a major contributor to the alarming rise we are witnessing recently in multiple autoimmune, oncological, metabolic, and neurological diseases.1
By any objective measure the career of Dr. Stephanie Seneff has been an intellectual adventure and she has embraced that journey without fear, regardless of where it has taken her. She first stepped foot on the MIT campus as an undergraduate in 1964, and is still working there, even though she says with a laugh, many people claim she’s retired. In her opinion, she’s working harder than ever.
As she pursued her career, she found her greatest strength was the ability to understand large volumes of data, becoming in many ways the classic “data geek,” seeing patterns in the information long before they became visible to others. Unlike many academics who studied health, the fact that her computer science research was not supported in any way by the pharmaceutical industry gave her an enormous amount of freedom to pursue this question.
One of the first associations to pop out from the data was a correlation between the MMR (measles-mumps-rubella) vaccine and autism. That puzzled her as the MMR shot used a live, but weakened virus, and therefore did not contain any mercury or aluminum, two of the most common suspected culprits behind autism. Seneff was so sheltered from the autism storms that at the time she discovered this link she was completely unaware of Dr. Andrew Wakefield, but recalled she thought MMR is a critical factor in autism. As she later recalled:
However, after five years, learning about all the complicated and interesting comorbidities around autism, I still didn’t feel I had the answer. I knew vaccines were connected. But I didn’t think it was the main story. I went looking for something else. That was when it was serendipitous that I just happened to be at a conference with Dr. Don Huber, who is right at the top of my personal list of science heroes. [I only heard Dr. Huber speak once, in 2019, and he is also one of my personal heroes.] He was going to be giving a talk on glyphosate. I didn’t know what glyphosate was, but I thought it looked interesting. It was a two-hour presentation on glyphosate and I walked away from that talk convinced I’d found the answer. It was that clear.
I didn’t know what glyphosate was, but I knew it was the main ingredient in Roundup. I quickly found out it’s the most used herbicide on the planet. And the United States uses more of it than anybody else in the world. Huber talked about glyphosate causing gut problems. He talked about the soil bacteria being linked to the gut bacteria and disrupting the gut microbiome. And I knew the gut microbiome was linked to autism. And he talked about chelating minerals and autism kids have difficulty with manganese, iron, and zinc.
Glyphosate disrupts the body’s ability to arrange the minerals properly. Iron and manganese can both be toxic. But they’re also essential. So, if something is toxic and essential, glyphosate must be putting a monkey wrench into the whole system. You end up with toxicity and deficiency at the same time because you can’t get the numbers right. And you can’t just take more to fix the problem.2
We met at the Autism One Conference in 2010, the same meeting where I met Kent Heckenlively. Autism One was one of the three organizations that never stopped inviting me to participate in annual confere
nces, regardless of any of the negative stories told about me. Stephanie’s slides were as complex as mine, but Stephanie had the gift of explaining the Shikimate pathway much better than I have ever explained DNA methylation. This was a woman who thought about a problem and didn’t simply settle for the first thing that made sense.
Appreciating the complexity of chronic diseases, Seneff knew it was critical to ask the right questions. Questions like: what are the mechanisms? And, are there any other contributing factors? However, scientists in the health field are “paralyzed” because asking these questions puts pharma dollars at enormous risk.
Roundup is the most commonly used herbicide (and is also sprayed on crops as a drying agent) and it does a really good job of killing things, including the beneficial microbes you’re supposed to consume along with the produce. So, what happens to the community of microbes in your gut, better known as the “microbiome,” which is supposed to produce a lot of the nutrients necessary for your good heath?
The answer is glyphosate decimates your microbiome.
If you don’t have the proper type of microbes found in a typical, healthy microbiome, you won’t be able to generate the proper level of things like iron from your food and will suffer from anemia. Kent and I have spent a decade writing these books to bring attention to the three-decades-long plague of corruption perpetrated by the FDA, CDC, and Fauci, similar to what happened with HIV/AIDS. Glyphosate is not the most toxic chemical around, but because people have been told that it’s almost as safe as table salt, they use it so casually, spraying it on dandelions while kids are playing in the yard.
We’ve become aware that gut microbes are really important for our health in many diseases, including autism, Alzheimer’s diseases, inflammatory bowel disease, liver problems, arthritis, and Parkinson’s disease. They’ve been shown to trace back to the gut and the microbiome community, which communicates with the brain. It controls a whole bunch of parameters that influence activity of the metabolic systems. There’s a lot of crosstalk between the gut and the brain.
The gut microbiome also produces a lot of essential nutrients for the host. And many of those essential nutrients that are produced come out of those specific pathways that glyphosate disrupts. It’s been pretty well-established that the enzyme that gets hit hardest by glyphosate, the thing that kills the plant, is an enzyme called EPSP synthase.
And that enzyme is in a biological pathway called the shikimate pathway. And the shikimate pathway is present in pretty much all plants and many microbes. The pathway is used to produce the aromatic amino acids, tryptophan, tyrosine, and phenylalanine. The aromatic amino acids are coding amino acids, which means they go into the proteins. So, if you have a deficiency in those amino acids, then you’ve got a problem with protein synthesis, and that can have a lot of consequences.3
Consider the importance of what Seneff is saying. A common thread between autism, HIV/AIDS, cancer, autoimmune disease, ME/CFS, and Lyme disease is a lack of diversity of microbes in the gut microbiome. In other words, diversity in the gut is a sign of health, and a lack of diversity is a precursor to disease. Simply stated, we need those microbes in the gut that glyphosate is killing to prevent retrovirus-associated diseases like AIDS and ME/CFS.
Seneff and I both appreciate correlation is not causation. Once you see a correlation, then you go looking for a mechanism which might explain it. And we have that explanation. We know that glyphosate kills plants by interfering with the enzyme, EPSP synthase, and messing up the Shikimate pathway. Why should we believe when we ingest glyphosate it would be any different with us? Seneff continued:
These aromatic amino acids are also precursors to neurotransmitters, like dopamine, serotonin, and melatonin. [These are pathways also dysregulated in human retrovirus associated diseases.] They’re also precursors to the skin-tanning agent melanin and the thyroid hormones, and some B vitamins. If your microbes are affected, such that there are troubles in the shikimate pathway, you’re going to have deficiencies in the production of all these compounds, and you have deficiencies in these compounds in all these diseases.4
Seneff and I appreciated the possible synergies in retroviral dysregulation of DNA methylation pathways and glyphosate dysregulation of Shikimate pathways.
I learned so much about the mechanisms of glyphosate toxicity from the Seneff lectures I couldn’t write fast enough. Seneff had many important slides, but when I heard her mention methionine and hydrogen sulfide gas, I really perked up.
Seneff goes on to detail other ways that this bacterial overgrowth of the wrong species can cause problems. Glyphosate also disrupts the synthesis of methionine, a sulfur-containing amino acid, by the gut microbes. Instead, they produce hydrogen sulfide gas, and this causes other problems like bloating and abdominal pain. Hydrogen sulfide gas is also often generated as a result, which leads to methionine deficiency, another common problem in children with autism. Seneff explains:
Methionine is a sulfur containing amino acid and it’s essential. And it’s a precursor to glutathione. And when you get a glutathione deficiency because of the methionine deficiency you get liver damage, because of the oxidative damage. [Methionine deficiency and hydrogen sulfide gas production is a common issue in the ME/CFS patients with XMRV and the inflammatory cytokine signature of XMRVs. Of course, I was thinking of the methyl donor, S-adenosylmethionine.]
You get this whole cascade of health problems. In this recent study on rats who were exposed to glyphosate levels below the regulatory limit, they got fatty liver disease. Glyphosate disrupts the liver metabolism because it actually blocks the bile acid production and disrupts the cytochrome P-450 enzymes, which are crucial for activating vitamin D, which is also linked to autism.5
The Autism One conferences have always been cutting edge science and applied treatment strategies. It’s a tragedy to me that such well-reasoned explanations never make their way into mainstream medicine or media. Glutathione is known as a detoxifier of heavy metals and pesticides. But with glyphosate what happens is those compounds simply stay in the body.
I understand that most doctors don’t have the time to do much more than glance at the day’s headlines or journal abstracts. They’re expecting that scientists and public health officials are doing their job with integrity. Sadly, this is not true.
To get the word out on glyphosate, Dr. Seneff is writing her own book, which came out in mid-2021, called Toxic Legacy: How the Weedkiller Glyphosate Is Destroying Our Health and the Environment. In the book, she adds an additional concern about glyphosate. That glyphosate can fool the DNA code, pretending to be the amino acid glycine. This causes it to get inserted into proteins in a spot where glycine was intended. Glycine is the smallest amino acid, and it plays an essential role in many proteins.
Glyphosate is an amino acid, and that’s important. Most toxic chemicals are not amino acids. It’s an unusual aspect of glyphosate. It’s also an amino acid analog of glycine, and glycine is one of twenty or so coding amino acids. The DNA code uses four letters, represented by four nucleotides, which code in sequential three letter units for the assembly of proteins, like beads on a string. Glycine has many essential roles in various proteins. So, when glyphosate gets substituted for glycine, you’re changing the protein. In my book, I show what I call the glyphosate susceptibility motif. It’s a very specific context in which I think glyphosate is very, very dangerous. And if I’m right, I can predict which proteins would be most affected by glyphosate.6
In a 2018 article in collaboration with a researcher from Boston University, Seneff laid out this theory:
One possibility is that glyphosate, acting as an amino acid analogue of glycine, can erroneously become incorporated into proteins in place of glycine. This would lead to a cumulative and insidious toxic effect. Glyphosate is a glycine molecule with a methyl phosphonate group attached to its nitrogen atom. Proline is a coding amino acid that, like glyphosate, has an additional carbon bond on the nitrogen atom. But this does not preclude
its incorporation into a peptide chain, demonstrating that glyphosate could do the same. Because its core structure is a glycine molecule, glyphosate can potentially be misinterpreted as glycine, based on an apparent match to the DNA code for glycine.7
I’m a chemist so to me this is a no-brainer. Glycine incorporates into the proteins which are the workhorses of the body.
Glyphosate is a modified glycine molecule.
In protein synthesis, it’s easy for glyphosate to be mistaken for glycine. Therefore, instead of having your proteins built with glycine, a naturally occurring biological molecule, you’re building them with an herbicide. Yet apparently, they don’t have chemists at Monsanto.
And of course, this process is slow and insidious, not fast and acute. That’s one of the problems with glyphosate because you don’t immediately know you’ve been poisoned. It takes time. It’s a slow kill. This reminds me of aspartame and Dr. Betty Martin’s heroic efforts to get this slow, insidious killer poison out of our food supply. Yet again, even outlawed, corrupt Big Pharma and the FDA look the other way and deny. Slow, insidious poisons could absolutely synergize with slow, insidious lentiviruses or bacteria like Borellia to cause chronic diseases, as theorized by Luc Montagnier and myself. Mainstream medicine and media want to force the principle of Occam’s Razor to deny the complexity of the causation behind these chronic diseases.
As Seneff further explains:
That’s how it can cause all sorts of things. The rise in glyphosate usage over time matches incredibly well with the rise in a long list of debilitating diseases. The correlation coefficients are over 0.95 and the p-value has several zeroes before you get to the first non-zero digit, (such as 0.00000073). So it is very tiny in these correlation calculations. These correlations are stunning.8
We had an even more stunning p-value in our original Science paper. I think we had more than ten zeroes in front of one of the associations of the new family of gamma retroviruses to ME/CFS. That means there was a one in ten billion chance that the virus was NOT associated with the diseases. We never said it proved causation, because we appreciate there were many potential factors involved.
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