by Mary W Maxwell, LLB
When I was a student at Johns Hopkins University in 1976, one of our teachers excitedly announced that Carleton Gadjusek had won the Nobel Prize for his discovery of the origin of the brain disease, kuru.
I have my doubts about that disease. I have my doubts that Gajdusek and other persons from the US’s National Institute of Health heard of people in a remote tribe in Papua New Guinea suffering a neurological ailment and went to investigate.
Pardon me if I am carrying my scepticism too far. I have researched the work of the Louis Pasteur and consider him to be an all-around fraud, so saying the same for a lesser-known scholar is not so bad!
I venture to guess that the disease in question, kuru, was a laboratory creation and that it was then spread among the Fore people in PNG. It is a disease similar to scrapie in sheep.
Almost surely scrapie and hoof-and-mouth are tools of sabotage. You can see that they spread in a political way on the map, not according to epidemiological expectations.
In a later article I will use Steve McMurray’s research into PNG events to develop the idea that Fiona Barnett’s main handler, Leonas Petrauskas, had “interesting connections” to the scientists who were busy in PNG.
For now, I want to set the stage by showing that Dr Carlton Gajdusek (1923-2008), a Nobel laureate, was a pedophile. Indeed, he went to jail for it. He had adopted 56 children, mostly boys.
The rest of this article consists of his Obituary in The Guardian.
From The Guardian of February 25, 2009
Carleton Gajdusek, who has died aged 85, had the rare distinction of being a Nobel Prize winner and a convicted child molester. As a medical researcher he studied kuru, an incurable disease that affects the Fore tribe in Papua New Guinea, and showed that it had a long incubation period, but progresses rapidly when it starts, and is unlike any previously understood infection.
It does not provoke an immune response and cannot be destroyed by heat, radiation or formaldehyde. He called the causative agent a “slow virus” and showed that kuru was related to Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease in humans and scrapie in sheep; we now call the organism a prion and know that it is a non-living entity that can reproduce itself.
Gajdusek was born in Yonkers, New York, to east European immigrants. He studied biophysics at Rochester University, graduating in 1943, and medicine at Harvard, qualifying in 1946.
He then did research at Caltech (the California Institute of Technology) under Linus Pauling and Max Delbruch, and research at Harvard under John Enders. All three scientists later became Nobel laureates.
In the 1950s, doing his army service, Gajdusek helped show that the haemorrhagic fever killing US soldiers in South Korea was spread by migrating birds. In 1954, the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) sent him to a camp in Bolivia for native American Okinawans transported there by the US navy after the second world war.
There were so many deaths it was rumoured to be an extermination camp; but he showed that the deaths were by natural causes and fighting. The CDC offered him a job. “You’re a screwball”, said his boss, “but you’re my kind of screwball.”
Gajdusek declined the offer and went to work with another Nobel-laureate-to-be, the immunologist Sir Macfarlane Burnet, in Melbourne. In 1957 Burnet sent him to Port Moresby, New Guinea, to set up part of a multinational study on child development, behaviour and disease, where he heard about a mystery illness called kuru affecting a tribe of the eastern highlands.
The Fore, always willing to adopt new customs, had copied a neighbouring tribe, the Anga, some years earlier and taken up cannibalism. They abandoned it when missionaries told them that eating people is wrong.
Their kuru was more recent and becoming more prevalent. Gajdusek began mapping its incidence, noting that nobody recovered. Dozens of blood samples revealed nothing untoward.
By April 1957 he had 28 cases and 13 deaths. By June he had 200 deaths; most were women and children. Kuru sufferers shrieked, stumbled, jerked and twitched, were belligerent and prone to mirth. Gajdusek wanted to know if the disease was genetic, infectious, environmental or psychosomatic.
He sent brains to be analysed in Australia and at the US National Institutes of Health (NIH). He investigated what the Fore ate, drank or touched. He tried ad hoc treatments: vitamins, steroids, antibiotics. Nothing worked.
Meanwhile, the Americans noted that the brains were similar to those of CJD patients. Burnet proposed sending out a multidisciplinary team. Gajdusek replied that he was that team.
Around this time he visited the Anga. They did not have kuru but did have an interesting form of welcome: the youths persistently offered to fellate him and regarded it as great fun.
After nine months, Gajdusek returned to NIH. There, an American scientist, William Hadlow, wrote saying how similar the brains looked to brains of sheep infected with scrapie.
Gajdusek inoculated chimps with extracts of Fore brains, knowing it would be a long time incubating, and went back to the hospital he had founded for the Fore.
He visited other tribes with paedophiliac traditions, and in 1963 brought to the US the first of his 56 adopted sons, a 12-year-old Anga boy, who landed barefoot in Washington with a bone through his nose. He put them all through high school, and many through university or medical school.
In 1965, two years after they had been inoculated, the chimps started to become ill. Gajdusek consulted a British expert on sheep scrapie, who confirmed that the chimps had died of the same disease that killed the Fore.
It was a triumphant moment for Gajdusek, says the science writer DT Max, author of The Family That Couldn’t Sleep, a history of prion disease research: proof that the disease was caused by an infectious agent. By 1976, when he received his Nobel prize, Gajdusek had published 150 papers.
He published a further 450 papers on “slow virus” diseases and ethnography. In 1974 an American neurologist and neuroscientist, Stanley Prusiner, entered the field and coined the term prion (for proteinaceous infectious particle, and incorporating the first two letters of his surname). Prusiner received a Nobel prize in 1997.
In the 1990s a member of Gajdusek’s lab had told the FBI that something fishy was going on and that clues might lie in Gajdusek’s diaries. They contained nothing incriminating, apart from a Prufrock-like reference to his inhibitions.
The FBI questioned Gajdusek’s adopted sons and found one who was willing to testify; in a taped phone call from the boy, Gajdusek admitted they had masturbated each other.
None of the other boys said Gajdusek had touched them and several were willing to give evidence in his favour. Many distinguished scientists pleaded for clemency for him.
Gajdusek was 74 when he emerged after serving a year in prison, his health broken. He retired to Amsterdam, spending his winters in Tromso, Norway. He was unapologetic about his conviction, taking the view that “boys will be boys”. He is survived by his adopted children.
— End of article from The Guardian
— Mary W Maxwell is the author of Consider the Lilies: A Review of 18 Cures for Cancer and Their Legal Status, a free download
Ahh – nice to read a story with a happy ending – that is to say – the paedo ends up in prison.
“we now call the organism a prion and know that it is a non-living entity that can reproduce itself.”
I have great difficulty believing a non-living entity can reproduce. Does anyone know if this is the only such entity that can perform what I imagine is a miracle?
Mal, it’s not for me to pretend I’m qualified regarding your question, but for political reasons I am mucho skeptical about the whole area of VIRUSES never mind the more esoteric PRIONS.
However, the guy who won a Nobel for prions is alive and you can write to him. Just google Prion for his name. And let us know the answer you get, as I’m sure you will do.
DNA
Interesting article. Just as people like Pasteur, Gadjusek and Arthur C Clarke are held out as icons whereas they are in fact frauds and even worse, the meme-bubble of Albert Einstein needs to be burst.
He is always held out as a genius, yet in truth he was a plagiarist of other people’s ideas (how do you think he made the most of his time as a modest clerk in the Swiss Patent Office?).
Einstein gained fame by advancing his theories (of dubious origin) and achieved notoriety as a sort of “celebrity physicist” – much like today’s “celebrity chefs”. But when challenged to publicly debate his theories by proper physicists he always declined as he was a charlatan.
Right on, Richard. His wife was a brilliant mathematician and Albert thieved her work relentlessly; just as Edison was a fraud who plagiarised Tesla.
The extent of plagiarism today is now an epidemic. I blame this largely on the corporatisation of science and academia, and also on the rise of elitism.
What a delight it was, Mary, to have read your courageous expose of a touchy topic, and to that you dare question the whole Pasteur ideology. When in 1994 I publicly began to question the homicidal gassing allegations – and demanded to see the murder weapon, I alluded to Pasteur’s works and viruses, as that was raised during the 1980s and 1990s HIV-AIDS controversy [which subsided when in an Adelaide court case legal constraints sided with the existence of the HIV virus and Dr. Eleni Papadopulos Eleapolous’ witness did not survive the challenge from the guru of the HIV-AIDS hypothesis, Robert Gallo. See for brief overview: http://virusmyth.com/aids/hiv/cjinterviewep.htm and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGpRIEHDKQA.%5D
I was quickly advised to let the Pasteur matter rest because it would distract from the homicidal gassing fraud. But I saw a close resemblance to how those protecting the homicidal gassing myth were modeling their method of attack used on Holocaust questioners. AIDS dissenters were “ritually defamed” in their workplace, within their community, and then nationally-globally. This was then capped off by introducing special legal constraints to protect the lie at any costs and exemplary court cases were held that fixed the dogma into legal concrete. The witch-trial mentality had re-emerged – just like the International Military Tribunals’ Nuremberg war crimes trials, which solidified its “findings” by repeating its monstrosity in the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials, from 20 December 1963 to 19 August 1965.
The fact is that at this very moment Germany is prosecuting individuals who dare question the homicidal gassing claims – age does not matter! Ursula Haverbeck is just on 90, and others are not so young either: Monika and Alfred Schaefer, Gerhard Ittner, Wolfgang Froehlich, Horst Mahler, Sylvia Stolz, and just the other day in Austria, Dr Hans Berger, on remand for 18 months, died in prison! Why are these individuals not mentioned in global media releases that specialize in human rights abuse cases?
I think I have a (((fair))) idea why.
Dear Fredrick, I don’t get this bit. Please explain, it sounds important:
“This was then capped off by introducing special legal constraints to protect the lie at any costs.”
And did you know that AIDS dissident Robert Strecker passed away recently? A great man.
When AIDS was first attributed to a virus it was called the HTLV III virus (Human T-call Lymphocyte Virus), because of its similarity to the HTLV I & II types. The name was later changed to the HIV virus to conceal the connection with these other viruses. I & II are basically leukaemia-causing viruses. A good start for any researcher to play with I suppose if a blood-borne, deadly disease is requested.
I well recall the problems encountered by Toben and others, and the shrieking condemnation by pseudo-Jews of anyone who dares question official histories that are backed by force. I look forward to the day when Ashkenazim Israelis are tested for DNA evidence of lineage from the ancient Israelites. All will fail, which they know full well to be the case. That will precipitate the backing off of fundamentalist Christians, which in turn will end US military and financial support of Apartheid Israel.
As the Mahatma, Mohandas Gandhi stated, no organisation has the right to invade the land of another nation for purely religious reasons… which was the case in Israel.
I got a laugh when one American AIPAC member accused Schlomo Zand of being anti-Semitic,especially as the actual Semites are Misrahim, Sephardi, and Palestinians, but not Ashkenazim.
Toben, the injustice done to you will one day be reversed.
Incidentally, I have pretty much the same contempt for Palestinians as I do for Israelis, but I oppose all military invasions and genocides; and I am implacably opposed to racial elitists, which Israel has recently legislated itself to be.
Here are a few more interesting articles on prion disease:
Prions as Bioweapons?
https://www.defenceiq.com/air-land-and-sea-defence-services/articles/prions-as-bioweapons
Do Vampire-Like Proteins Make Coronavirus More Contagious?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jvchamary/2020/04/17/prion-like-coronavirus/?sh=3f326be4680e
There may be a possibility that prion disease is sexually transmissible:
Study raises possibility of sexual spread of CWD in deer
https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2020/01/study-raises-possibility-sexual-spread-cwd-deer