|
Dr. Mullis was awarded the 1993 Nobel
Prize in Chemistry. This article is excerpted from his forthcoming
book, Dancing Naked in the Mind
Field, to be published by Pantheon.
When I first heard in 1984 that Luc Montagnier
of France's Pasteur Institute and Robert Gallo of America's
National Institutes of Health had independently discovered
that the retrovirus H.I.V. -- human immunodeficiency virus
-- caused AIDS, I accepted it as just another scientific fact.
It was a little out of my field of biochemistry, and these
men were specialists in retroviruses.
Four years later I was working as a consultant
at Specialty Labs in Santa Monica. Specialty was trying to
develop a means of using P.C.R. [polymerase chain reaction,
a D.N.A.-amplification method conceived by Mullis] to detect
retroviruses in the thousands of blood donations received
per day by the Red Cross. I was writing a report on our progress
for the project sponsor, and I began by stating, "H.I.V. is
the probable cause of AIDS."
I asked a virologist at Specialty where I could
find the reference for H.I.V. being the cause of AIDS.
"You don't need a reference," he told me. "Everybody
knows it."
"I'd like to quote a reference." I felt a little
funny about not knowing the source of such an important discovery.
Everyone else seemed to.
"Why don't you cite the C.D.C. report?" he suggested,
giving me a copy of the Centers for Disease Control's periodic
report on morbidity and mortality. I read it. It wasn't a
scientific article. It simply said that an organism had been
identified -- it did not say how. It requested that doctors
report any patients showing certain symptoms and test them
for antibodies to this organism. The report did not identify
the original scientific work, but that didn't surprise me.
It was intended for physicians, who didn't need to know the
source of the information. Physicians assumed that if the
C.D.C. was convinced, there must exist real proof somewhere
that H.I.V. was the cause of AIDS.
A proper scientific reference is usually a published
article in a reliable scientific magazine. These days the
magazines are on slick glossy paper with pictures on the front
and lots of advertisements, a lot of editorial material by
people who are professional journalists, and a few pictures
of girls selling you things you might want to buy for your
lab. The advertisers are the companies that make things for
scientists to buy and the companies that make drugs for doctors
to sell. Therefore there are no major journals without corporate
connections.
Scientists submit the articles in order to report
their work. Preparing articles describing their work and having
them published is crucial to a scientist's career, and without
articles in major journals they will lose their rank. The
articles may not be submitted until experiments supporting
the conclusions drawn are finished and analyzed. In primary
journals every single experimental detail has to be there
either directly or by reference, so that somebody else can
repeat exactly what was done and find out whether it comes
out the same way in their hands. If it doesn't, somebody will
report that, and the conflict eventually has to be resolved
so that when we go on from here we know where "here" is. The
most reliable primary journals are refereed. After you send
in your article, the editors send copies of it to several
of your colleagues for review. They become the referees.The
editors are paid for their work on the journal; the colleagues
are not. But what they do gives them power, which most of
them like.
I did computer searches. Neither Montagnier,
Gallo, nor anyone else had published papers describing experiments
which led to the conclusion that H.I.V. probably caused AIDS.
I read the papers in Science for which they had become
well known as AIDS doctors, but all they had said there was
that they had found evidence of a past infection by something
which was probably H.I.V. in some AIDS patients. They found
antibodies. Antibodies to viruses had always been considered
evidence of past disease, not present disease. Antibodies
signaled that the virus had been defeated. The patient had
saved himself. There was no indication in these papers that
this virus caused a disease. They didn't show that everybody
with the antibodies had the disease. In fact they found some
healthy people with antibodies.
If Montagnier and Gallo hadn't really found
this evidence, why was their work published, and why had they
been fighting so hard to get credit for the discovery? There
had been an international incident wherein Robert Gallo of
the N.I.H. had claimed that his own lab had not been able
to grow the virus from the sample sent to him by Luc Montagnier
in Paris. The virus he was able to grow, he said, came
from samples collected at his end from putatuive AIDS patients.
Gallo had patented the AIDS test based on these samples, and
the Pasteur Institute had sued. The Pasteur eventually won,
but back in 1989 it was a standoff, and they were sharing
the profits.
I was hesitant to write "H.I.V. is the probable
cause of AIDS" until I found published evidence that would
support it. Mine was the most minimal statement possible.
In my progress report I wasn't trying to say that it absolutely
did cause AIDS, I was just trying to say that it was likely
to cause it for some known reasons. Tens of thousands of scientists
and researchers were spending billions of dollars a year doing
research based on this idea. The reason had to be there somewhere;
otherwise these people would not have allowed their research
to settle into one narrow channel of investigation.
I lectured about P.C.R. at innumerable meetings.
Always there were people there talking about H.I.V. I asked
them how it was that we knew H.I.V. was the cause of AIDS.
Everyone said something. Everyone had the answer at home,
in the office, in some drawer. They all knew, and they would
send me the papers as soon as they got back. But I never got
any papers. Nobody ever sent me the news about how AIDS was
caused by H.I.V.
I finally had the opportunity to ask Dr. Montagnier
about the reference when he lectured in San Diego at the grand
opening of the U.C.S.D. AIDS Research Center, which is still
run by Bob Gallo's former consort, Dr. Flossie Wong-Staal.
This would be the last time I would ask my question without
showing anger. In response Dr. Montagnier suggested, "Why
don't you reference the C.D.C. report?"
"I read it," I said. "That doesn't really address
the issue of whether or not H.I.V. is the probable cause of
AIDS, does it?"
He agreed with me. It was damned irritating.
If Montagnier didn't know the answer, who the hell did?
One night I was driving from Berkeley to La
Jolla and I heard an interview on National Public Radio with
Peter Duesberg, a prominent virologist at Berkeley. I finally
understood why I was having so much trouble finding the references
that linked H.I.V. to AIDS. There weren't any, Duesberg said.
No one had ever proved that H.I.V. causes AIDS. The interview
lasted about an hour. I pulled over so as not to miss any
of it.
I had known of Peter when I was a graduate student
at Berkeley. He had been described as a truly brilliant scientist
who had mapped a particular mutation to a single nucleotide
in what was to become known eventually as an oncogene. In
the 1960s that was a real feat. Peter went on to develop the
theory that oncogenes might be introduced by viruses into
humans and cause cancer. The idea caught on and became a serious
theoretical driving force behind the research that was funded
under the unfortunate name "War on Cancer." Peter was named
California Scientist of the Year.
Not satisfied resting on his laurels, Peter
torched them. He found flaws in his own theory and announced
to his surprised colleagues who were working on demonstrating
it that it was highly unlikely. If they wanted to cure cancer,
their research should be directed elsewhere. Whether it was
because they were more interested in curing their own poverty
than cancer or that they just couldn't come to grips with
their mistake, they continued to work fruitlessly on the viral-oncogene
hypothesis for ten years. And they didn't seem to notice the
irony: The more frustrated they got, the more they chastised
Peter Duesberg for questioning his own theory and their folly.
Most of them had been trained to obtain grants from the government,
hire people to do research, and write papers that usually
ended with the notion that further research should be done
along these same lines -- preferably by them and paid for
by someone else. One of them was Bob Gallo.
Gallo had been a friend of Peter's. They had
worked in the same department at the National Cancer Institute.
Of the thousands of scientists who had worked fruitlessly
to assign a causal role in cancer to a virus, Bob was the
only one who had been overzealous enough to announce that
he had. No one paid any attention because all he had demonstrated
was an anecdotal and very weak correlation between antibodies
to a harmless retrovirus, which he called H.T.L.V. I, and
an unusual type of cancer found mainly on two of the southern
islands of Japan.
In spite of his lack of luster as a scientist,
Gallo worked his way up in the power structure. Peter Duesberg,
despite his brilliance, worked his way down. By the time AIDS
came along, it was Bob Gallo whom Margaret Heckler approached
when President Reagan decided that enough homosexuals picketing
the White House was enough. Margaret was the Secretary of
Health, Education, and Welfare, and thereby the top dog at
the N.I.H. Bob Gallo had a sample of a virus that Luc Montagnier
had found in the lymph node of a gay decorator in Paris with
AIDS. Montagnier had sent it to Gallo for evaluation, and
Bob had appropriated it in the pursuit of his own career.
Margaret called a press conference and introduced
Dr. Robert Gallo, who suavely pulled off his wraparound sunglasses
and announced to the world press, "Gentlemen, we have found
the cause of AIDS!" And that was it. Gallo and Heckler predicted
that a vaccine and a cure would be available within a couple
of years. That was 1984.
All the old virus hunters from the National
Cancer Institute put new signs on their doors and became AIDS
researchers. Reagan sent up about a billion dollars just for
starters, and suddenly everybody who could claim to be any
kind of medical scientist and who hadn't had anything much
to do lately was fully employed. They still are.
It was named human immunodeficiency virus by
an international committee in an attempt to settle the ownership
dispute between Gallo and Montagnier, who had given it different
names. To call it H.I.V. was a shortsighted mistake that preempted
any thought of investigation into the causal relationship
between acquired-immune-deficiency syndrome and the human
immunodeficiency virus.
Duesberg pointed out wisely from the sidelines
in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
that there was no good evidence implicating the new virus.
He was ignored. Editors rejected his manuscripts, and committees
of his colleagues began to question his need for having his
research funds continued. Finally, in what must rank as one
of the great acts of arrogant disregard for scientific propriety,
a committee including Flossie Wong-Staal, who was feuding
openly with Duesberg, voted not to renew Peter's Distinguished
Investigator Award. He was cut off from research funds. Thus
disarmed, he was less of a threat to the growing AIDS establishment.
He would not be invited back to speak at meetings of his former
colleagues.
We live with an uncountable number of retroviruses.
They're everywhere -- and they probably have been here as
long as the human race. We have them in our genome. We get
some of them from our mothers in the form of new viruses --
infectious viral particles that can move from mother to fetus.
We get others from both parents along with our genes. We have
resident sequences in our genome that are retroviral. That
means that we can and do make our own retroviral particles
some of the time. Some of them may look like H.I.V. No one
has shown that they've ever killed anyone before.
There's got to be a purpose for them; a sizable
fraction of our genome is comprised of human endogenous retroviral
sequences. There are those who claim that we carry useless
D.N.A., but they're wrong. If there is something in our genes,
there's a reason for it. We don't let things grow on us. I
have tried to put irrelevant gene sequences into things as
simple as bacteria. If it doesn't serve some purpose, the
bacteria get rid of it right away. I assume that my body is
at least as smart as bacteria when it comes to things like
D.N.A.
H.I.V. didn't suddenly pop out of the rain forest
or Haiti. It just popped into Bob Gallo's hands at a time
when he needed a new career. It has been here all along. Once
you stop looking for it only on the streets of big cities,
you notice that it is thinly distributed everywhere.
If H.I.V. has been here all along and it can
be passed from mother to child, wouldn't it make sense to
test for the antibodies in the mothers of anyone who is positive
for H.I.V., especially if that individual is not showing any
signs of disease?
Picture a kid in the heartland of America. His
lifelong goal has been to join the Air Force when he graduates
and become a jet pilot. He's never used drugs and he's had
the same sweet girlfriend, whom he plans to marry, all through
high school. Unbeknownst to him, or anyone else, he also has
antibodies to H.I.V., which he inherited from his mother,
who is still alive, when he was in her womb. He's a healthy
kid, it doesn't bother him in any way, but when he is routinely
tested for H.I.V. by the Air Force, his hopes and dreams are
destroyed. Not only is he barred from the Air Force, but he
has a death sentence over his head.
The C.D.C. has defined AIDS as one of more than
30 diseases accompanied by a positive result on a test that
detects antibodies to H.I.V. But those same diseases are not
defined as AIDS cases when the antibodies are not detected.
If an H.I.V.-positive woman develops uterine cancer, for example,
she is considered to have AIDS. If she is not H.I.V.-positive,
she simply has uterine cancer. An H.I.V.-positive man with
tuberculosis has AIDS; if he tests negative he simply has
tuberculosis. If he lives in Kenya or Colombia, where the
test for H.I.V. antibodies is too expensive, he is simply
presumed to have the antibodies and therefore AIDS, and therefore
he can be treated in the World Health Organization's clinic.
It's the only medical help available in some places. And it's
free, because the countries that support WHO are worried about
AIDS. From the point of view of spreading medical facilities
into areas where poor people live, AIDS has been a boon. We
don't poison them with A.Z.T. like we do our own people because
it's too expensive. We supply dressing for the machete cut
on their left knee and call it AIDS.
The C.D.C. continues to add new diseases to
the grand AIDS definition. The C.D.C. has virtually doctored
the books to make it appear as if the disease continues to
spread. In 1993, for example, the C.D.C. enormously broadened
its AIDS definition. This was happily accepted by county health
authorities, who receive $2,500 from the feds per year under
the Ryan White Act for every reported AIDS case.
In 1634 Galileo was sentenced to house arrest
for the last eight years of his life for writing that the
Earth is not the center of the universe but rather moves around
the sun. Because he insisted that scientific statements should
not be a matter of religious faith, he was accused of heresy.
Years from now, people looking back at us will find our acceptance
of the H.I.V. theory of AIDS as silly as we find the leaders
who excommunicated Galileo. Science as it is practiced today
is largely not science at all. What people call science is
probably very similar to what was called science in 1634.
Galileo was told to recant his beliefs or be excommunicated.
People who refuse to accept the commandments of the AIDS establishment
are basically told the same thing: "If you don't accept what
we say, you're out."
It has been disappointing that so many scientists
have absolutely refused to examine the available evidence
in a neutral, dispassionate way. Several respected scientific
journals have refused to print a statement issued by the Group
for the Scientific Reappraisal of the H.I.V./AIDS Hypothesis
simply requesting "a thorough reappraisal of the existing
evidence for and against this hypothesis."
I spoke publicly about this issue for the first
time at a meeting of the American Association for Clinical
Chemists in San Diego. I knew I would be among friends there.
It was a small part of a much longer speech—at most I spoke
for 15 minutes about AIDS. I told the audience how my inability
to find a simple reference had sparked my curiosity.
The more I learned, the more outspoken I became.
As a responsible scientist convinced that people were being
killed by useless drugs, I could not remain silent.
The responses I received from my colleagues
ranged from moderate acceptance to outright venom. When I
was invited to speak about P.C.R. at the European Federation
of Clinical Investigation in Toledo, Spain, I told them that
I would like to speak about H.I.V. and AIDS instead. I don't
think they understood exactly what they were getting into
when they agreed. Halfway through my speech, the president
of the society cut me off. He suggested I answer some questions
from the audience. I thought it was incredibly rude and totally
out of line that he cut me off, but what the hell, I would
answer questions. He opened the floor to questions, and then
decided that he would ask the first one. Did I understand
that I was being irresponsible? That people who listened to
me might stop using condoms? I replied that fairly reliable
statistics from the C.D.C. showed that in the United States,
at least, the number of reported cases of every known venereal
disease was increasing, meaning people were not using condoms,
while using the initial definition of AIDS, the number of
reported cases of AIDS was decreasing. So, no, I didn't understand
that I was being irresponsible. He decided that that was enough
questions and ended the meeting abruptly.
Whenever I speak on this issue the question
always comes up, "If H.I.V. isn't the cause of AIDS, then
what is?" The answer to that is that I don't know the answer
to that, any more than Gallo or Montagnier knows. Knowing
that there is no evidence that H.I.V. causes AIDS does not
make me an authority on what does. It is indisputable that
if an individual has extremely close contacts with a lot of
people, the number of infectious organisms that this individual's
immune system is going to have to deal with will be high.
If a person has 300 sexual contacts a year - with people who
them selves are each having 300 contacts a year - that's 90,000
times more opportunity for infections than a person involved
in an exclusive relationship.
Think of the immune system as a camel. If the
camel is overloaded, it collapses. In the 1970s we had a significant
number of highly mobile, promiscuous men sharing bodily fluids
and fast lifestyles and drugs. It was probable that a metropolitan
homosexual would be exposed to damn near every infectious
organism that has lived on humans. In fact if you had to devise
a strategy to collect every infectious agent on the planet,
you would build bathhouses and encourage very gregarious people
to populate them. The immune system will fight, but the numbers
will wear it down.
The scientific issue gets tangled up with morality.
What I'm describing has nothing at all to do with morality.
This is not "God's wrath" or any other absurdity. A segment
of our society was experimenting with a lifestyle, and it
didn't work. They got sick. Another segment of our pluralistic
society, call them doctor/scientist refugees from the failed
War on Cancer, or just call them professional jackals, discovered
that it did work. It worked for them. They are still making
payments on their new BMWs out of your pocket.
I was invited by the Glaxo Pharmaceutical Company
to speak at a conference. They sent me a letter in December
of 1993 asking me to be the November 1994 symposium banquet
speaker. If that time was not convenient for me, they wanted
me to speak at the November 1995 banquet. Dr. John Partridge,
who was the director of the Chemical Development Division,
had not met me personally but had heard about a lecture I
had given in 1991 at the Gordon Research Conference that,
in his words, was "the most highly praised lecture that I
have ever heard about from my academic and industrial colleagues."
He was looking for "particularly articulate
scientists who bridge the biochemical and medical disciplines
and routinely engage in 'out of the box' thinking."
Well, that certainly was me.
Dr. Partridge wrote that he would be pleased
to pay all my travel and accommodations, as well as an honorarium
of $1,500.
I thought this sounded all right, but I figured
Glaxo could pay me a little more. What made this invitation
particularly interesting to me was the fact that Glaxo was
the largest drug company in the world, and one of their profitable
drugs was the cellular poison being used against AIDS, A.Z.T.
It kills cells like a cancer chemotherapeutic does. It keeps
them from reproducing by preventing them from making new D.N.A.
It also kills. In cancer, there is a rationale at least for
using them, although I personally would never use chemotherapeutics
on myself, cancer or not. But here's the way the explanation
goes.
I think it stinks of an old therapy they used
to use against syphilis: arsenic. The syphilis was surely
going to kill you, the arsenic might kill you, but maybe it
would kill the syphilis first and you would live to fraternize
again. The use of poisonous chemotherapeutics in cancer follows
the same line. The cancer is surely going to kill you. The
chemotherapeutic surely will also, but maybe it will kill
the cancer cells before it kills you. It's a gamble. We will
give you almost enough to kill you and hope it's sufficient
to kill the cancer. I wouldn't go for it myself. I don't need
to take drugs that make my hair fall out. But what the hell,
if somebody wants to take this kind of gamble, it does have
a sort of logic to it. Nothing fun. Nothing you would do for
a headache. But it's a chance somebody might want to take
when the alternative is to die too young to watch their kids
grow up. And some people do recover from cancer even after
they have taken chemotherapeutics.
In the case of AIDS, the same strategy took
a diabolic trurn. AIDS might kill you, A.Z.T. might also.
It will surely make you sick. It will prevent the proliferation
of any rapidly growing cells in your body, including the CD-4
immune cells that your doctor thinks you need now more that
anything. It may kill the H.I.V. It kills it in petri dishes.
But that may not cure you. The damage to you may have already
been done, whatever it is. The complete absence of all H.I.V.
from your body, even if it is accomplished, may not cure you
of AIDS. No one has ever recovered from AIDS, even though
they have recovered from H.I.V. And we are not going to give
it to you in a limited dose as we do in the case of cancer
chemotherapy, where we are gambling that although we are hurting
you, we are hurting the cancer more and maybe you will survive
longer. Here we are not gambling. No one has ever recovered
from AIDS. We cannot expect that you might recover. We are
going to ask you to swallow this poison until you die.
About half a million people went for it. No
one has been cured. Most of them are dead. The ones who are
not are also taking another drug now, a protease inhibitor.
Who knows what it will do? The manufacturers didn't know when
they started selling it. The FD.A. didn't require them to
show that it would cure AIDS and not kill the patient, any
more than they required them to show that about A.Z.T. They
only required that a surrogate goal be met. A surrogate goal
means that something that we think may be related to the disease
in question may be improved by the drug, like the level of
CD-4 cells, whatever the fuck they are. It's a way to get
around the notion that a drug ought to be effective in curing
the disease that it is sold for before it can be sold. The
surrogate-goal bullshit is an indication that our F.D.A. no
longer serves our needs. Or at least it does not serve our
needs unless we own stock in the pharmaceutical industry and
don't give a shit about health care.
I was interested in giving a seminar about things
like this to the scientists assembled in North Carolina by
Glaxo, formerly Burroughs Wellcome, and by the University
of North Carolina in the name of Frontiers in Chemistry and
Medicine. I was thinking that this technique of killing people
with a drug that was going to kill them in a way hardly distinguishable
from the disease they were already dying from, just faster,
was really out there on the edge of the frontiers of medicine.
In previous interviews and seminars I had said that I thought
A.Z.T. was not only useless against AIDS, but in fact it was
poisoning people. There were large-scale medical studies done
in Europe, called the Concorde Study, that indicated just
this. A.Z.T was worthless against AIDS and harmful even to
healthy people. This conclusion was reached despite the fact
that the study was heavily funded by Glaxo.
I wondered if these people knew how I felt about
their product when they issued the invitation. I notified
Dr. Partridge that I was pleased to accept if they would raise
the ante a little. On January 26, 1994, I received a letter
from M. Ross Johnson, the vice president of the division of
chemistry They were very happy that I had accepted, and wrote
that they would send me firstclass airfare for two, accommodation
expenses, and an honorarium of $3,000. In closing, he asked
me for the title of my banquet presentation.
So far, so good. I responded as requested, explaining
that I intended to speak to this audience about a subject
that should be of tremendous concern to the entire scientific
community. I would speak about the fact that there is no scientific
evidence that H.I.V. is the probable cause of AIDS and that
I believed people taking A.Z.T. were being poisoned.
On October 14, 1994, a month before the meeting,
I received another letter from Glaxo—this time from Gardiner
F. H. Smith. No title. He was sincerely regretting having
to inform me that they could no longer accommodate my presentation.
He said that they would send me a check for $1,000 to compensate
me for any inconvenience.
I responded with the following letter:
Dear Mr. Johnson:
Enclosed please find a copy of a fairly uninformative
letter from a Mr Gardiner Smith, with whom I have not been
in contact or correspondence previously.
As you know, my overall schedule is compact
and very difficult to rearrange on short notice. I have declined,
as a result of my commitment to Glaxo, income from other potential
engagements. With Mr. Smith, I sincerely regret that your
company had been forced into the "changing of the structuring,"
whatever that means to Mr. Smith, of "the abovereferenced
event."
Unfortunately, I have made arrangements to attend
several nonprofit institutional functions in the Southeast
in connection with this trip, appearances which I will not
cancel. Therefore, your company's reluctance, as related perfunctorily
by Mr. Smith, to abide by the terms of your (previous) correspondence
represents a considerable loss of income as well as an unanticipated
expense to me personally.
Mr. Smith's unexplained offer of $1,000 compensation
for my "time and trouble" adds a bit of mystery here as to
who Mr. Smith is and what he must misconceive to be the value
of my time and trouble.
I do not understand what Mr. Smith is exactly
apologizing for in his letter, but I will be kindly expecting
immediately, with or without an explanation from some more
cordial and informed representative of Glaxo, a check for
$6,048.00.
For Mr. Smith's information, round-trip airfare
between San Diego and RaleighDurham first class for two is
$3,048. Addition of our agreed-on honorarium of $3,000 results
in the above figure.
One more thing you might consider, Dr. Johnson.
A number of attendees at your meeting will likely have something
to say to me about my failure to appear. You should be careful
to explain there publicly precisely why Mr. Smith felt the
need to inform me that your company has taken the liberty
of "restructuring" in such a way as to be unable to "accommodate"
my presentation. I am not in the habit of canceling public
appearances at such short notice, and would not care to gain
such a reputation on your account. I hope you understand that
this is not' for me or for Glaxo, a trivial matter.
Cordially,
Dr. Kary B. Mullis
On November 30, 1994, I received another letter
from Mr. Smith. It was quite brief, saying that he had received
a copy of my letter to Dr. Johnson. Enclosed was a check from
Glaxo in the amount of $6,048.
This was the most money I had ever made specifically
for not doing something. And it occurred to me that, with
my growing reputation for creating controversy, there might
be many groups or individuals who did not want to hear me
speak. Certainly that was their right, but if people did not
want to hear ideas that would make them uncomfortable, they
ought to be willing to pay not to hear them. With that thought
in mind, I drafted the following offer:
HAVE SLIDES, WILL STAY HOME
Dr. Kary B. Mullis wants to talk to you and
your associates, your friends, your sons and daughters. Is
there anything you can do about it?
YES ... BUT YOU MUST ACT NOW ... SPECIAL OFFER
Dr Mullis won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry
in 1993 and promptly launched a worldwide lecture tour Universities,
research institutes, conventions, high schools, businesses,
community groups, he even addressed "Connect"—a joint project
of U.C.S.D. and the San Diego biotech industry—right on the
beach in front of his very own apartment, which has been described
in the national press as "rented rooms filled with his tools
of seduction. "
He is usually invited to lecture on the Polymerase
Chain Reaction, but when the lights go down and the slides
come on, well...
John Martin, President of the European Society
for Clinical Investigation, said in Nature, "His [Dr. Mullis's]
only slides (or what he has called his art) were photographs
he had taken of naked women with colored lights projected
upon their bodies. He accused science of being universally
corrupt with widespread falsification of data to obtain grants.
Finally he impugned the personal honesty of several named
scientists working in the H.I.V field.... The council of the
European Society for Clinical Investigation will not be inviting
Dr Mullis to further meetings. "
Really do you need this in your community?
Of course not.
And now, for a limited time only you can
be assured that Dr. Mullis will not ever lecture at your society,
school, research lab, etc.
You personally ... and confidentially ...
can assure it.
Call now at (my phone number) and ask for
(my beautiful assistant). Have your Visa or MasterCard ready.
Prevention rates begin at $500 per year guaranteed, and are
progressive with the size and sensitivity of your organization.
You may request personal anonymity or for $79.95 plus shipping
we will send you a Special Service Award embossed with your
name and a special inscription commending your judgment, foresight,
and unselfish devotion to your community. Custom inscriptions
are a little extra but can be especially commemorative.
Think about honoring your boss or one of
your associates by taking advantage of our special "Help a
Friend Stop Mullis" offer Call for details. Don't delay Only
one offer of complete protection per year can be extended
to any single organization. Be first Be smart. Be safe.
Recently, Glaxo Pharmaceuticals found it
necessary to send Dr Mullis a check for $6,048.00 simply to
prevent him from speaking at their annual Chemistry and Medicine
at the Frontiers Conference in Chapel Hill, MC. No one at
Glaxo had seen fit to acquire protection from a Mullis seminar,
and, haplessly Dr. Ross Johnson, now no longer with Glaxo,
had invited him.
I must report that the response to this offer
has been underwhelming. NeimanMarcus has not chosen to include
it in their famed Christmas catalog. So I have continued to
speak out to any forum when I have been given the opportunity.
It is not too late, however If you would like
to give the gift of my silence to an individual or an organization,
all reasonable offers will be accepted.
NOTE: This offer is not open to family
members or employees of Kary Mullis, who are doomed to have
to listen to what I say. *
top
|