Dancing Naked in the Mind Field (21 page)
Read Dancing Naked in the Mind Field Online
Authors: Kary Mullis
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 life styles 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 life style 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.
HAVE SLIDES WILL STAY HOME
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, AZT. It kills cells like a cancer chemotherapeutic does. It keeps them from reproducing by preventing them from making new DNA. It also kills HIV. 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 turn. AIDS might kill you, AZT 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 than anything. It may kill the HIV. 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 HIV 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 HIV. 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 a half a million people went for it. No one has been cured. Most of them are dead. The ones that 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 FDA 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 AZT. 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 FDA 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 AZT 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. AZT 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 first-class 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 HIV is the probable cause of AIDS and that I believed people taking the drug AZT 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 has been forced into the “changing of the structuring,” whatever that means to Mr. Smith, of “the above-referenced event.”
Unfortunately, I have made arrangements to attend to 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 $1000 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 $6048.00.
For Mr. Smith’s information, round-trip airfare between San Diego and Raleigh-Durham first class for two is $3048. Addition of our agreed-on honorarium of $3000 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 UCSD 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 only slides (or what he 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 HIV 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 card 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, N.C. 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. Neiman-Marcus has not chosen to include it in their famed Christmas catalogue. 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.