Ending Plague

A Scholar's Obligation in an Age of Corruption

Francis W. Ruscetti, Judy Mikovits, Kent Heckenlively

• Publisher: Skyhorse
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781510764712
• Topic: Sciences biologiques
• Subtopic: Microbiologie et biologie moléculaire

"An engrossing exposé of scientific practice in America."
— KIRKUS REVIEWS From the authors of the New York Times bestselling Plague of Corruption comes the prescription on how to end the plague infecting our medical community. Ending Plague continues the New York Times bestselling team of Dr. Judy A. Mikovits and Kent Heckenlively with legendary scientist, Dr. Francis W. Ruscetti joining the conversation. Dr. Ruscetti is credited as one of the founding fathers of human retrovirology. In 1980, Dr. Ruscetti's team isolated the first pathogenic human retrovirus, HTLV-1. Ruscetti would eventually go on to work for thirty-eight years at the National Cancer Institute. Dr. Ruscetti was deeply involved in performing some of the most critical HIV-AIDS research in the 1980s, pioneered discoveries in understanding the workings of the human immune system in the 1990s, isolating a new family of mouse leukemia viruses linked to chronic diseases in 2009, and offers his insights into the recent COVID-19 pandemic. In 1991, Ruscetti received the Distinguished Service Award from the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Ruscetti offers a true insider's portrait of nearly four decades at the center of public health. His insights into the successes and failures of government science will be eye-opening to the general public. You will read never-before-revealed information about the personalities and arguments which have been kept from view behind the iron curtain of public health. Can we say our scientists are protecting us, or is another agenda at work? For most of his decades at the National Cancer Institute, Dr. Ruscetti has been in almost daily contact with his long-time collaborator, Dr. Mikovits, and their rich intellectual discussions will greatly add to our national discussion. Science involves a rigorous search for truth, and you will come to understand how science scholars are relentless in their quest for answers.

PART ONE

Frank’s Perspective

PROLOGUE

Why Now?

The real safeguard of democracy is education.

—Franklin Roosevelt

Dealing with those vulgar souls whose narrow optics can see little but the little circle of their own selfish concerns.

—Robert Morris to Alexander Hamilton

The forced ending of my scientific career in 2013 was both personally and professionally disturbing to me.

However, it allowed me to join my wife Sandy, who was ready to retire after an excellent career in science, in our favorite place in the world, Carlsbad, California, a magical location next to the Pacific Ocean, just north of San Diego. To my pleasant surprise, the move also proved to be liberating. Most people reach a point in their careers where all the institutional politics and backstabbing hinder the creativity which first drew them to the profession. My absence from the National Cancer Institute (partly located on the grounds of the former United States Biological Warfare Weapons Laboratories at Fort Detrick) in Frederick, Maryland, my home for thirty-eight years, allowed me to reevaluate all the events in my career that rushed by in a blur.

I’ve grown to appreciate the truth of Allen Saunders’s statement that “Life is what happens to us while we are making other plans.” My understanding of what has happened to medical research in its application to public health in the overall context of American history during my lifetime has become dramatically clearer.

My career choice was to join what I considered to be an ancient and honorable society of scholars, which I joined in May 1972, upon earning my PhD. In this contemporary climate of increasing contempt for intellectual honesty, along with the delegitimizing of expertise, one may reasonably ask, why bother?

I believe we should “bother” because, as Gandhi’s statement at the opening of this book said, the single most important obligation of a scholar is the production of knowledge. Knowledge in most fields, but most notably in science, has a long incubation period and has to be laboriously developed. Then, in a more difficult exercise, it must be communicated to a rightfully skeptical conservative audience, bound to the status quo. Skepticism is one thing, but I have found acceptance of paradigm-changing work by many medical researchers, more interested in protecting their own place in the hierarchy than in advancing knowledge, typically goes through a three-step process.

The first step is “no, you’re wrong.”

The second is “no, you’re dead wrong.”

The third is “I knew it all the time.” This acceptance can take decades.

One of the more disturbing modern trends in science is the new cottage industry of completely twisting the truth for one’s political agenda. Many of the results in scientific papers cannot be reproduced in the short term, mostly because of technical differences between the labs. The use of these facts by politically motivated citizens and scientists alike to deny science they do not like is often misused to discredit paradigm-changing science. This behavior is not only intellectually dishonest, but displays a complete misunderstanding of the scientific process. The rush to discredit these publications and even force retractions does a foolhardy disservice to scientific scholarship. In paraphrasing scientists from Darwin to Planck, a scientist should not fret over convincing one’s peers. But instead, make certain the work appears in the next generation’s textbooks. New knowledge that stands the test of time makes life sweeter in the succeeding generations.

The misuse of the scientific process by these individuals has the power to corrupt and cheat many brilliant and honest scientists of their rightful place in history. From the very beginnings of our history, Robert Morris and Alexander Hamilton, whose economic brilliance saved the American cause in the revolution and the new country, knew shallow, moneyed self-interests were the biggest threat to the republic. To whitewash their crimes and self-aggrandize their own personal achievements, the powerful elite have the ability to impugn and expunge the work of my collaborators, especially Judy Mikovits. While I am content in the knowledge that, we have made life sweeter for people, regardless of what my peers and their enablers may say, I am not comfortable that the mendacities and misdeeds of these unethical contemporaries go unrecognized.

Given the ability of objective facts to be twisted and turned into untruths, it’s almost certain this will happen to most of what I say here, including my right to be called a scholar. The hardest thing to do is to know the value of one’s own achievements, regardless of the opinions of others. Success in this world is often a mirage, the result of being praised by others or lavished with awards and money, regardless of whether the work has merit or not. Strive for achievement, not the praise of the world.

While struggling to develop a science career in the 1970s, it did not dawn on me that during the next fifty years an increasingly corrupt corporate apparatus was placing most people into economic slavery, where the important decisions concerning every aspect of our lives would be made by the rich elite, who are protected from any political or social consequences.

How did this happen? Corporate America is killing democracy.

The lion’s share of the fault lies with the government whose duty it is to protect its citizens and instead allowed the development of crony capitalism, which is based on a close relationship between rich businessmen and the state. Instead of success being determined by a free market, it is determined by state favoritism in terms of tax breaks, little regulation, and grants.

Think about how different our world is now from 1970. Every aspect of our lives is controlled by the monopolization of corporate America, which makes it easier for foul people to control and undermine our freedoms. Banks are too big to fail, which is socialism for the rich. This has allowed corruption on a worldwide scale. This has led to our increasingly concentrated and corrupt medical system, which is literally killing us, led by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Since the 1870s, the Republican Party has been a pro-business organization that corrupted the public trough and has given us J. P. Morgan, the monopolist banker, then Andrew Mellon, the robber baron/treasurer who caused the Great Depression, and Michael Milken, the “greed is good” junk bond king

The Democratic Party has joined them in becoming the world’s second greatest pro-business party, completely disowning the working man, the middle class, and social justice. The strength of a representative form of government is that we the citizens can fix these massive problems. Most issues are so complex that considerable education is required to make decisions.

But do we have the guts to accomplish returning the government to the people? Do we have the guts to end the rampant corruption?

CHAPTER ONE

Science Saves My Life

An unhappy childhood compels you to use your imagination to create a world in which you can be happy. Use your old grief, that’s the gift you’re given.

—Sue Grafton

As a young boy, I knew nothing of the dark side of organizations that regulate an individual’s life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. I did not realize how much I would find myself in conflict with them over the course of my career. I love to collaborate with people of integrity, and nothing thrills me as much as a provocative question, the answer to which holds the promise of making the lives of millions of people better. But the organizations which cherish such values are few, and I worry that they are continuing to diminish.

My story is as ordinary in its details as millions of my countrymen. Charles Wildberger, my maternal grandfather, was born in New Jersey from parents who emigrated from Switzerland. He married Emma Steffe, whose parents immigrated to the United States from Prussia to escape conscription in the Franco-Prussian war of 1871. They had three sons and six daughters, including my mother Dorothy.

After serving in the Italian army as an ambulance driver on the Austrian front in World War I, my paternal grandfather Dominico immigrated to the United States alone in 1920. He worked as a machine worker to support his wife Cecelia, his daughter Clementine, age ten, and his son Frank, age fourteen, which eventually allowed them to leave Italy in 1928 and join him in America.

It was fortuitous that Dominico immigrated alone in 1920 because the Immigration Act of 1924 barred Southern and Eastern Europeans. Italian immigration dropped 90–95 percent. If he’d waited past 1924, I likely would not have been born, for my father and mother would have been separated by an ocean. Some of my eventual critics might have considered that a blessing.

Dominico always used the Ruscitti spelling of the last name. The first time Ruscetti was used was on my parents’ marriage license in 1938.

Years later, my mother told me that Dominico had displayed the medals he was awarded for courage as an ambulance driver on the Austrian front during WWI on the mantelpiece. But as the Italian fascists entered World War II, he took them down and would never show them to me when I asked. He would only volunteer that war was bad and shake his head, a veil of silence descending around him. To this day, reading A Farewell to Arms makes me think of my grandfather. Both my grandfather and father, much to my regret, refused to teach me Italian. They both had seen too many “Italians need not apply” signs and said that, to get ahead in America, I should only speak English.

When I hear people speak disparagingly of immigrants today, I can only remember my family history. America was certainly better than where my parents had come from, but it was still far from being the “shining city on a hill.” We so often think that people of all ethnic backgrounds have gained equality in America, but we’re but a few generations removed from rampant racism, lynchings, physical abuse, and other types of injustice, which could return. Clearly, we have similar injustices today, just primarily aimed at different groups of people. Also, modern problems like the wholesale censoring of those who question the medical mainstream narrative have arisen. The veneer of civilization is thin, a fact we would do well to remember in 2021.

I was born on February 6, 1943, while the Russians were winning the European front of World War II in the streets of Stalingrad. Blizzards were also belting Boston, causing me to spend the first four days of my life in the hospital. Coming of age in Boston, a city rigidly segregated along ethnic lines with obvious class tensions, was both good and bad, with the Cabots, Lodges, and Lowells struggling to retain their power against rising Irish upstarts like the Curleys and the Kennedys.

Despite never having much money, there was plenty to do via inexpensive public transportation to Revere Beach, Fenway Park double headers for twenty-five cents, and NBA double-headers in the 1960s where one might see Wilt Chamberlain, Oscar Palmer Robertson (the “Big O”), or legendary Celtics point guard, Bob Cousy. The children’s museum, then in Jamaica Plain, was a great museum, which pioneered a “hands-on” approach, letting us handle artifacts from different lands and investigate what most interested us.

Our home was on the second floor of a three-floor, six apartment rental. My parents could never pull the trigger on a home purchase and, early on, we did not even have a car. One of the many myths we are served as children is the myth of the happy childhood. Parenting is difficult and a lot must be given up in order to raise children.

Regrettably, I never attempted to understand my parents’ perspective while I lived under their roof.

My mother was perpetually unhappy. Raised voices and constant arguments were the background noise of our lives. In such a small apartment, it was nearly impossible to get any peace and quiet. We three kids never got the space we needed as we got older. I was not a particularly brave child. I was afraid of dogs (being bitten three times and needing a rabies shot one of those times) and terrified of fire (a neighbor’s child burned to death in a Christmas tree fire. I can vividly recall the child’s screams to this day.)

Whenever my dad tried to teach me to ride a bike, swim, or drive a car, my mother would scream at him that I would get hurt and he’d give up. I still wonder what events in her life seemed to make her so fearful of the world. My father and I shared a room. Since he worked a lot of double shifts on the New York, New Haven, and Hartford railroad freight lines, I spent a lot of my spare time alone in the room. I’d get lost in listening to the newest musical trend, rock and roll, as well as the broadcasts of the Red Sox and Celtics games. On Sundays, I listened to the broadcasts of WHDH, which carried the Cleveland Browns football games featuring players like Otto Graham and Jim Brown.

I started school at four and a half years old, and it offered me a chance to get out of the house. At Nathaniel Bowditch Elementary School, I encountered my first conflict with institutional authority. From the first to the fourth grade, the teachers tried to get me to write with my right hand, instead of my left.

I refused.

As punishment, I was made to sit in the last seat in the last row and it was my job to fill the inkwells. From the very beginning, I resolved not to obey insufferably mindless authority. At a parents’ classroom meeting with my first-grade teacher, she mentioned that she would assign the smartest student the duty of pas...