Part 3: What Will They Think of Next? — poet, teaching artist, mama

*Please first read:
Part 1

In 1964, Dr. Mary Sherman, a widow who worked for 12 years at Tulane University researching bone and soft tissue cancers, was found dead. The details of the scene were disturbing; she had been stabbed, experienced blunt force trauma, and was missing one arm after being found under a mattress that had been lit on fire. No one was ever arrested in connection with her death. Dr. Sherman published papers on viral and cancer research. Why would anyone want her dead?

Recently, a book was published by the son of a scientist who worked at Tulane University’s research lab with Dr. Sherman during those years. Ed Haslam titled his book, “Dr. Mary’s Monkey,” and attributed his fascination with her life, work and mysterious death to his father being haunted by the horrific death of his co-worker. Two reporters from New Orleans magazine, Don Lee Keith, and Bonnie Warren, have also written extensively about Dr. Sherman.

Ed Haslan’s book theorizes part of Dr. Sherman’s work was developing antidotes to a cancer-causing virus. Not long after Dr. Sherman was found deceased, an anonymous human rights complaint that was never substantiated, stated the complainee worked at Tulane Labs with Dr. Sherman. The complaint said researchers at Tulane experimented on prisoners, giving them many cancerous tumors. Haslan further posits that Sherman was also working with the government on ways to kill Castro with a cancer-causing virus during the Cold War. Dr Sherman’s death remains unsolved today.

The idea of giving viruses to the public through government programs is not a new topic. In the 1940s, the early polio vaccines were tainted with a virus known to cause cancerous tumors in animals. Although studies have shown that there were little effects, some studies did show a significant increase in testicular cancer among those who received the polio vaccine. Despite the correlation nothing has ever been proven.

SV40 is a monkey virus that was identified in batches of the polio vaccine, probably from cells (used to create the vaccine) from the kidneys of monkeys infected with the SV40 virus. Whether the virus definitively causes cancer in humans, only more research and time will tell. In 2004, Michele Carbone of Loyola University Medical Center announced the results of a study suggesting that hundreds of millions may have been infected with the SV40 virus by polio vaccines well into the early 1980s. At that time, the Soviet Union was supplying more than 100 countries with vaccines, including the US. The factories in both the US and Russia are plagued with a long list of violations, including samples containing mold, other additives, and unexplainable viruses or bacteria. Why was this virus allowed to be injected into the public, without them knowing, for over 40 years?

Gene therapy is an example of another research process that has been shrouded in intrigue, as well as being a darling of the defense department. In 2016, the US government put gene-editing on the list of potential weapons of mass destruction. In 2013, Dartmouth University researchers published a similar announcement about recent findings in the field of bioengineered weapons. Because of recent advancements in the use of computing, the components of DNA have been encoded into binary code or simply “1’s and 0’s.”

Using computing to map the human genome made the cost of configuring and predicting new genome sequences dirt cheap. Almost any virus on earth could be replicated. Gene therapy, or altering man’s DNA with viruses, whether to control the mind or body, is neither positive nor negative. In benevolent hands, this technology could be used to facilitate use of mobility devices with the user’s thoughts. And if we can make any virus, we can theoretically engineer an antidote to it. The Moderna Vaccine was based on gene therapy technology.

In 2021, The NIH sent notice to members of a federal oversight committee that one of their research teams, an NIH-funded nonprofit named EcoHealth Alliance, led by Charles Lieber, was in deep trouble. The NIH alleged EcoHealth Alliance engineered synthetically enhanced bat-viruses in international laboratories, including Wuhan, China. In 2023, a federal audit of the nonprofit found that the Wuhan arm of its research labs still couldn’t produce sufficient records concerning what they were working on, and further, Charles Lieber had committed tax evasion. He is also suspected of allegedly participating in China’s thousand talents program, a suspected Chinese intelligence operation. Charles Lieber is currently facing 23 years in federal prison for tax evasion and failing to report foreign bank accounts. Similarly to the synthetic blood experiments, DARPA is picking up the research right where Lieber left off.

Charles Lieber was not just involved in bat viruses. He was also at the forefront of injectable nano mesh that enables mind-machine communication. His product, mainly developed at Harvard, is considered injectable mesh electronics. The microscopic nano mesh is injected into the subject, and travels to the brain, where it unfurls. It then adheres to brain tissue enabling neurons to cross over it just like regular brain tissue. It’s uses run the gamut from Nerualink medical devices, which Elon Musk was working with Leiber to develop, allowing people to run computers with their minds. Other uses were similar to what Dr. Robinson is doing at Rice University, and are aimed at developing bioweapons for mind-control. These potentially mind-altering devices could be injected like any routine shot, and research into Leiber’s devices, just like his viruses, are being continued on today by DARPA. Considering the evidence that Lieber funneled US money into Chinese lab research, it’s reasonable to say other countries may be in possesion of this technology.

In 2020, French Nobel Prize winner Dr. Montagnier claimed that COVID was engineered in a lab, as part of government funded research to develop a vaccine for HIV in humans. Dr. Montagnier won the Nobel Prize for discovering the virus that causes HIV, and was controversially and vehemently against the use of gene therapy, or mNRA vaccines, stating that the vaccines created too robust of an immune response in humans. Montagnier and other top scientists around the world were categorically shamed for expressing such opinions. Studying viruses, and how to make them better, is big business in the world of research. Within the US, other scientists including researchers at the University of Chapel Hill, published work shortly before the pandemic experimenting with bat coronaviruses. Scientists were engineering the corona viruses by grafting the gene containing the spike protein of the bat virus onto pieces of a SARS strain known for infecting mice. Scientists call these chimeric viruses. The biological definition of chimeric is having parts of different origin. Another term for it is gain of function research, aimed at improving viruses for specific uses.

Along with scientists like Montagnier, US military researcher Dr. Robert Redfield, stated that his opinion early on in the 2020 pandemic was that it was an escaped bioengineered virus. Redfield’s controversial past includes homophobia, falsifying results of an HIV vaccine trial, and more. Because of his track record, no one listened to him on this point, despite him being tapped to lead the CDC during the COVID pandemic. In 2023, the US government admitted that it knew all along that COVID-19 was engineered in a lab.

I am in no way suggesting HIV was engineered; but HIV/AIDS was a pandemic of catastrophic proportions shrouded in government secrecy, just like COVID. And the Band Played On, a film exploring the controversy surrounding the discovery of the HIV virus, is outdated in some ways, but it is worth a rewatch with the 2020 pandemic in mind.

One reason why consent and advocacy is so important in biological research is because the benefit-to-cost analysis is difficult to measure in real time. The results are also difficult to control when they involve biological substances, which some researchers handle before they fully understand how they spread. Our defense department is busy, and it is also enmeshed with the latest medical and bioengineering research. Post COVID, there are still countless studies going on right now, aimed at identifying biological weapons and their antidotes. Medical devices like Dr. Robinson or Chris Lieber’s, could easily be used to read or write a person’s mind, incapacitate their body, or harm them in countless other ways. These technologies exist, are not going away, and are the result of 100 years or more of experiments I have only begun to outline.

Our tax-payer dollars pay for new viruses continuously, that are being engineered and sought out from the bowels of the planet to be studied and replicated. We continue to fund agencies like DARPA at a high cost of 3.9 billion a year. And who will they test new viruses or technology on? Will they be volunteers or unsuspecting participants? And if and when viruses escape, will the public ever know? We may have the latest and greatest technology, but the US has a long way to go with oversight, advocacy, and transparency in the name of public health.

All of the examples in this series so far have described a lack of advocacy or research ethics, rooted in the idea that the suffering of a few will result in the benefit of many. When will we leave Omelas? At what point do we walk away, now that we are capable of whatever we can imagine?

“They leave Omelas, they walk into the darkness, and they do not come back. The place they go towards is a place even less immaginable to most of us than the city of happiness.”

Charles Leiber CEO of EcoHealth Alliance

sources listed in part 4