Along with the acute illness of polio, atomic testing and other sources of radiation put the population at risk for cancer. It’s an open question to this researcher if the polio vaccines were also intended to be cancer vaccines. When human cancer cells (HeLa) were harvested and distributed in 1951 for research, their express initial purpose was for “polio vaccines”. Leo Szilard, of the Manhattan Project and Salk Institute, helped William Scherer and Jerome Syverton at the University of Minnesota design a method for culturing polioviruses on Hela cells. Besides a predictable long-term rise in cancer from radioactive sources, could the polio vaccines bearing viral “cancer genes” contribute to the escalation? Like the statements made by Judyth Vary Baker (page SV40 Monkey Virus, below**) in the quest for a cancer bioweapon, will injected “cancer genes” (if they exist) take in an immune-compromised person?
Dr. Nancy Banks writes in “AIDS, Opium, Diamonds and Empire” on the subject of cancer, ..”new research suggests that ..[what] may be the primary cause of malignant growth..[is] the reduced efficiency of mitochondrial energy conversion as the result of oxidative/nitrosative stress… What is becoming imminently more difficult to suppress is the evidence that impaired mitochondrial metabolism, and specifically the Krebs cycle activity, may promote malignant growth… People diagnosed with AIDS are in a hypercatabolic low oxygen state where the body becomes exhausted in attempting to repair itself.” As she explains, “no virus need apply”. [p58]
But virus was applied. About the same time that HeLa cancer cells were harvested from a dying patient, Ludwik Gross discovered polyoma virus, an agent noted to cause solid tumors in test animals. Gross published his discovery in 1953 according to standard reviews. It’s not certain just when researchers began working with polyoma –perhaps in the late 1940s, or 1950. It is certain that polyoma viruses were the subject of experimentation before Jonas Salk devised his first ‘successful’ polio vaccine in 1952. If the Salk IPV was really a “cancer vaccine”, then the timing of his formula following discoveries of high-yielding “cancer cells” and “cancer viruses” bespeaks a sensible orderly fashion. The claimed IPV contaminant polyoma virus SV40, native to rhesus monkeys, and transferred from monkey kidney tissue in the last stage of vaccine production also presented these findings:
Polyoma Virus: In 1960, future Salk Institute personnel, Renato Dulbecco and Marguerite Vogt, observed cultured polyoma (PY) virus, writing, “results so far..reveal a situation novel in animal viruses and suggest the existence of a host-virus interaction with characteristics reminiscent of temperate bacteriophage. The PY virus was obtained from Dr. Rowe of the [NIH]… Ten weeks after infection [within a petri dish, or in vitro], the cultures appeared to be made up entirely of the new cell type [called ‘transformed’, by new genetic information]. They..contained no more degenerating cells than normal [cultures] and produced little virus. The new cells..had a tendency to grow in interwoven netlike structures.” http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC222842/?tool=pmcentrez; more at https://polioforever.wordpress.com/sv40-monkey-virus/
Transgenic research today indicates that the successful transformation of cells means surviving the incorporation of new genetic material that alters biochemical messaging –the cells may or may not become “immortalized”, either as a cancerous type or an “embryonic” type. Immortalization of cells has also been shown to be reversible. Probability dictates that this research is opening the horizons of “immortal cellular machines” such as DNA computers. The polyoma citation further suggests new models for structure in creating artificial life. Is this what they had in mind in the 1950s?
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HeLa [hee-lah]
“HeLa cells are a human epithelial cervical cancer (cervical cancer), and the first human cells, from which a permanent cell line was established. On 9 February 1951, surgeon Lawrence Wharton Jr. removed the tissue from the patient Henrietta Lacks, a 31-year-old African American woman from Baltimore, in the Women’s Clinic of the Johns Hopkins Hospital. The cells were from the carcinoma of the cervix…The patient died 8 months later… A portion of cells from the biopsy were sent to George Gey, the then head of the cell culture laboratory at Johns Hopkins Hospital. The cells were cultivated and propagated in cell culture so well that since they are widely used in research. The HeLa cells were used in the establishment of the first polio vaccine by Jonas Salk.”
http://helacells.com/History of HeLa S3 cells: http://scienceblogs.com/terrasig/2010/03/hela_s3_part_3.php
HeLa/Henrietta Power Point: “After several Radium treatments Henrietta suffers terribly until she dies…” http://www.louisvilleeye.org/residentPresentations/2010-09-10-Soltau.pdf
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Excerpts from The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, by Rebecca Skloot, 2010 Crown Publishers:
[The voice of Deborah Lacks, Henrietta’s daughter] “When I go to the doctor for my checkups I always say my mother was HeLa. They get all excited, tell me stuff like how her cells helped make my blood pressure medicines and antidepression pills and how all this important stuff in science happen cause of her. But they don’t never explain more than just sayin, Yeah, your mother was on the moon, she been in nuclear bombs and made that polio vaccine. I really don’t know how she did all that, but I guess I’m glad she did, cause that mean she helpin lots of people. I think she would like that.” [Prologue, p9]
“All it takes is one small mistake anywhere in the division process for cells to start growing out of control… Just one enzyme misfiring, just one wrong protein activation, and you could have cancer. Mitosis goes haywire”… [p3]
“It all started on January 17, 1912, when Alexis Carrel, a French surgeon at the Rockefeller Institute, grew his ‘immortal chicken heart’. Scientists had been trying to grow living cells since before the turn of the century, but their samples had always died. As a result, many reserchers believed it was immposible… But Carrel set out to prove them wrong… He hoped someday to grow whole organs in the laboratory, filling massive vaults with lungs, livers, kidneys, and tissues he could ship through the mail for transplantation.
…But Carrel wasn’t interested in immortality for the masses. He was a eugenicist… He dreamed of never-ending life for those he deemed worthy, and death or forced sterilization for everyone else. He’d later praise Hiter for the “eugenic measures” he took in that direction. Carrel’s eccentricities fed into the media frenzy about his work… Carrel was a mystic”… [pp 58-60]
“Not long after Henrietta’s death, planning began for a HeLa factory –a massive operation that would grow to produce trillions of HeLa cells each week. It was built for one reason: to help stop polio. By the end of 1951 the world was in the midst of the biggest polio epidemic in history.” [p93]
“..in April 1952, [George] Gey and one of his colleagues from the NFIP advisory committee –William Scherer, a young postdoctoral fellow from the University of Minnesota– tried infecting Henrietta’s cells with poliovirus. Within days they found that HeLa was, in fact, more susceptible to the virus than any cultured cells had ever been… they knew they’d found exactly what the NFIP was looking for”… “On Memorial Day 1952, Gey…sent Mary to the post office…When the package arrived in Minneapolis about four days later, Scherer put the cells in an incubator and they began to grow. It was the first time live cells had ever been successfully shipped in the mail.” …”When the NFIP heard the news that HeLa was susceptible to poliovirus and could grow in large quantities for little money, it immediately contracted Scherer to oversee development of a HeLa Distribution Center at the Tuskegee Institute… [p95] …it was the first-ever cell-production factory and it started with a single vial of HeLa that Gey had sent Scherer in their first shipping experiment, not long after Henrietta’s death. [p96]
…”Black scientists and technicians, many of them women, used cells from a black woman to help save the lives of millions of Americans, most of them white. And they did so on the same campus –and at the very same time– that state officials were conducting the infamous Tuskegee syphilis studies.
…At first, the Tuskegee Center supplied Hela cells only to polio testing labs.” [p97]
“HeLa was also being used in research that would advance the new field of human genetics” [p99]
“As the Cold War escalated, some scientists exposed Henrietta’s cells to massive doses of radiation to study how nuclear bombs destroyed cells… Scientists cut HeLa cells in half to show that cells could live on after their nuclei had been removed, and used them to develop methods for injecting substances into cells without destroying them.
…At the request of the U.S., Gey took Henrietta’s cells with him to the Far East in 1953 to study hemorrhagic fever… He also injected them into rats to see if they’d cause cancer” [p102]
–they did.
“[Researchers] mastered the techniques of cell culture and simplified them to such a degree that, as one researcher put it, they’d “made it possible for even the rank amateur to grow a few cultures” [p139]
“By the 1960s, scientists joked that HeLa cells were so robust that they could probably survive in sink drains or on doorknobs. They [Hela cells] were everywhere. The general public could grow HeLa at home using instructions from a Scientific American do-it-yourself article, and both Russian and American scientists had managed to grow HeLa in space. Henrietta’s cells went up in the second satellite ever in orbit…
When the first humans went into orbit, Henrietta’s cells went with them so researchers could study..how cancerous and noncancerous cells responded to zero gravity. What they found was disturbing; in mission after mission, noncancerous cells grew normally in orbit, but HeLa became more powerful, dividing faster with each trip. And HeLa cells weren’t the only ones behaving strangely. Since the start of the [1960s], researchers had been noticing two new things about all cultured cells. First, it seemed that all normal cells growing in culture eventually died or underwent spontaneous transformation and became cancerous. This phenomena was exciting for researchers trying to understand the mechanisms of cancer because it suggested that they might be able to study the moment a normal cell becomes malignant.
…The other unusual thing scientists had noticed about cells growing in culture was that once they transformed and became cancerous, they all behaved alike –dividing identically and producing exactly the same proteins and enzymes, even though they’d all produced different ones before becoming malignant. Lewis Coriell, a renowned cell-culturist, thought he might have an explanation. He published a paper suggesting that perhaps “transformed” cells behaved the same..because they’d been contaminated by something –most likely a virus or bacterium– that made them behave similarly. Almost as an aside, he pointed out..all transformed cells seemed to behave identically to HeLa, he wrote, which could mean that HeLa was the contaminant.” [p139]
“In September 1966, a geneticist named Stanley Gartler.. announced that he’d found ‘a technical problem’ in their field… Gartler..told [a conference] audience that, in the process of looking for new genetic markers for his research, he’d found eighteen of the most commonly used cell cultures..all contained a rare genetic marker called glucose-6-phosphate-dehydrogenase-A (G6PD-A) which was present almost exclusively in black Americans. And even among them it was fairly rare.
…Gartler knew he’d found the source of the problem…”they are all HeLa cell contaminants.” …It turned out Henrietta’s cells could float through the air on dust particles. They could travel from one culture to the next o unwashed hands or used pipettes; they could ride from lab to lab on researchers’ coats and shoes, or through ventilation systems. And they were strong; if just one HeLa cell landed in a culture dish, it took over, consuming all the [nutrient] media and filling all the space. Gartler’s findings did not go over well.” [p153]
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“The serious problem of HeLa cell contamination in cancer and vaccine research is revealed in Michael Gold’s A Conspiracy of Cells: One Woman’s Immortal Legacy and the Medical Scandal It Caused. Even Jonas Salk, who developed the legendary Salk polio vaccine, was fooled when HeLa cells contaminated his animal cell lines. He admitted this years later in 1978 before a stunned audience of cell biologists and vaccine makers. In experiments performed in the late 1950s on dying cancer patients, Salk tried injecting them with a cell line of monkey heart tissue – the same cell line he used to harvest polio virus for his famous vaccine. He hoped the monkey cell injections would stimulate the immune system to fight cancer. However, when abcesses developed at the site of injections Salk began to suspect that he might be injecting HeLa cells rather than monkey cells, and he stopped the experiment.
Mark Nelson-Rees, a HeLa cell expert and one of the 1978 conference attendees, offered to test Salk’s line if it was still available. Salk graciously agreed and the monkey cells indeed proved to be HeLa cells which had invaded and taken over the monkey cell line. According to author Gold, Salk thought there were adequate ways to separate viruses from the tissue cell lines they were harvested in, so that it really didn’t matter what kind of cells were used. Even if vaccines weren’t filtered, and even if whole cancer cells were injected directly into a human, Salk believed they would be rejected by the body and cause no harm. In those days doctors didn’t much believe in cancer-causing viruses. Nowadays, no researcher would dare try injecting cancer cells into a human being. But in the 1950s Salk had done it accidently. He had injected HeLa cells into a few dozen patients and it hadn’t bothered him a bit.”–Alan Cantwell MD ; http://www.whale.to/m/quotes27.html
Dr. Nancy Banks treats readers to a quote from Peter Duesberg: “Even very few oncogenic retroviruses –those endowed with cancer genes– hardly play a role as carcinogens for two reasons. First, viral cancer genes accidentally acquired are never kept by retroviruses after they are generated because they are entirely useless to the virus… Second, even if a rare oncogenic retrovirus infects an immunocompetent animal, a small tumor will appear within days after the infection, only to disappear again as the animal develops antiviral immunity. Antiviral immunity kills both the virus and all virus-infected cells.” [p54, AIDS, Opium, Diamonds and Empire]
From “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks”, pp 127-130: “Chester Southam had a frightening thought: What if Henrietta’s cancer cells could infect the scientists working on them? [George] Gey and several others had already shown that some rats grew tumors when injected with live HeLa. Why not humans?..’There is the possible danger’, Southam wrote, ‘of initiating neo-plastic disease by accidental inoculation during laboratory investigation, or by injection with such cells or cell products if they should be used for production of virus vaccine.’ Southam was a well-respected cancer researcher and chief of virology at Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Researc. He and many other scientists believed that cancer was caused by either a virus or an immune system deficiency, so Southam decided to use HeLa to test those theories… He told [cancer patients] he was testing their immune systems; he said nothing about injecting them with someone else’s malignant cells.
“Within hours, the patients’ forearms grew red and swollen. Five to ten days later, hard nodules began growing at the injection sites. Southam removed some of the nodules to verify that they were cancerous, but he left several to see if patient’ immune systems would reject them or the cancer would spread…
“Southam eventually removed most of the HeLa tumors, and those he didn’t remove vanished on their own in a few months. But in four patients, the nodules grew back. He removed them, but they returned again and again…
“Since those patients all had cancer to begin with, Southam wanted to see how healthy people reacted to the injections, for comparison’s sake. So, in May 1956, he placed an ad in the Ohio State Penitentiary newsletter… Southam began injecting prisoners in June 1956 using HeLa cells that his colleague, Alice Moore, carried from New York to Ohio in a handbag… Soon tumors grew on the prisoners’ arms just as they’d grown in the cancer patients…Southam gave multiple cancer cell injections to each prisoner, and unlike the terminally ill patients, those men fought off the cancer completely. And with each new injection, their bodies responded faster, which seemed to indicate that the cells were increasing the inmates’ immunity to cancer.
“In the coming years, Southam injected HeLa and other living cancer cells into more than six hundred people for his research, about half of them cancer patients. He also began injecting them into every gynecological surgery patient who came to Sloan-Kettering’s Memorial Hospital or its James Ewing Hospital. If he explained anything [to patients] he simply said he was testing them for cancer.”
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**Part of the JFK assassination conspiracy was a plot to kill Fidel Castro by giving him cancer with injections and x–rays. In the words of Judyth Vary Baker (Lee Oswald’s girlfriend), during her film segment of the documentary The Men Who Killed Kennedy, Ms. Baker revealed her role as a 19-year-old cancer researcher:
[from the episode “The Love Affair”, segments 3 and 4]
“I convinced Dr. Ochsner and others that the real thing we needed to do was pull down Castro’s immune system by using several ploys, and then when the cancer’s introduced into his body, it would be found in his blood system and they’d put him in front of the x-ray again and again and again. Supposedly he’d be getting treatments to kill the cancer when actually his immune system was getting destroyed. That could be done, in other words, Castro could be eliminated by using x-ray and they’ll think that it’s the side effects from lung cancer. And that was my idea”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uBbe0jexWn4&NR=1[the secret US ‘cancer’ team]..went to Jackson Mental Hospital..[with] these prisoners that were going to be injected…and at that time those prisoners received the injections that were necessary to begin that terrible round of injections and x-ray, injections and x-ray..that they hoped would actually kill these people.”
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