CIVIS Foundation Report 18, Summer 1995

 

 

THE NEW YORK TIMES MEDICAL SCIENCE TUESDAY, MAY 16, 1995

Revisionist History Sees Pasteur As Liar Who Stole Rival's Ideas

 

On May 16, the New York Times announced this professedly "sensational" discovery in a featured article by one of its top medical pundits, Lawrence K. Altman, M.D., whom CIVIS can only call a Johnny-come-lately. This is the second time in two years that America's top newspaper seems flabbergasted by a news item that has always been old-hat to CIVIS.

 

The first time it had happened has been announced in front-page headlines of our Foundation Report Nr. 14, Spring-Summer 1993, when, apparently for the first time in their life, doubts had started creeping up in the minds of the medical pundits of the N. Y. Times that there might be more successful methods with which to conduct medical research than by cutting up or poisoning animals. We had headed that front page with the question: Slow learners?

 

We now ask this question again. In May, Altman had just discovered what seemed to him stunning news about Pasteur, in reviewing a book by a Dr. Gerald L. Geison of Princeton University, described as "one of the few historians of science to base research on laboratory notebooks."

 

But if Dr. Altman and Dr. Geison and other certified pundits had taken the trouble to read Slaughter of the Innocent when it came out as a Bantam Book Original in 1978, and the Publicity Department of America's biggest publishing house sent out review copies to each of the 3500 "science writers" on its list, they could all have announced that "sensational" discovery about 20 years sooner, and along with it far more enlightening and comprehensive information. They would have learned that besides being a liar, Pasteur was also a crook.

 

Louis Pasteur. An analysis of his laboratory notebooks shows serious discrepancies between his actual results and his public statements.

 

Slaughter of the Innocent, p. 181-182: "As for Pasteur, most encyclopedias, including the Britannica and the Americana, credit him with the discovery that germs don't spring into life spontaneously, but originate from other germs, and that heat kills them. But it was Spallanzani who demonstrated this a whole century earlier.  In fact Pasteur profited like few scientists from the discoveries of others. The Dutchman Leeuwenhoek had first seen a germ, Italy's Spallanzani had shown that germs can only come from other germs and heat kills them, Frenchman Cagnard de la Tour had known ever since 1837 that the fermentation of beer is caused by germs that he had identified, Germany's Schwarnm had published a paper demonstrating that meat rots only following an invasion of germs, but in 1864 Pasteur arrogated for himself the merit of all these works by presenting his "germ theory", without even mentioning his trail-blazers, and he was so convincing that London's great surgeon Lister wrote him a letter of thanks, and today's encyclopedias continue attributing to Pasteur exclusively what by rights belongs to others."

 

Throughout his article, Altman demonstrates that he is a certified product of the Ministry of Medical Obscurement and Misinformation, which the founder of the Rockefeller dynasty instituted when our century was young, under the name of General Education Board. With it, America's greatest business genius, whose only formal education had been limited to Baptist Sunday School and an accelerated course of bookkeeping, had taken over the difficult task of educating the American nation, and before long also the rest of the world.

 

Reviewing Geison's book, Altman writes: "His (Pasteur's) most famous experiment was on a young boy, Joseph Meister, who had been bitten by a rabid dog and was doomed to death, and whose mother had pleaded with Pasteur to treat him. Pasteur reported that he had previously used his rabies vaccine on 50 dogs without a single failure."

 

Supposedly, Pasteur "saved" the doomed boy with his "vaccine". Thus Altman perpetuates the myth of vaccination, the most lucrative and enduring medical racket invented before another con man introduced the billion-dollar "war on cancer", and the laboratory-produced AIDS and Ebola scares came along. Altman doesn't seem to have learned yet that the dog that bit Meister was not rabid, and that the boy's great luck was to have survived Pasteur's "vaccine", which killed or severely maimed several other patients, and soon disappeared from the world's pharmacopeia. Pasteur's worldwide celebrated "vaccine" has long been replaced by a succession of new vaccines, each one of which having been foisted on a puzzled public as "more effective and less dangerous" than the precedent.

 

Pasteur had never identified the virus which allegedly causes rabies, but this is one bit of vital information that Dr. Geison surely didn't find in Pasteur's "scientific notebooks" which he examined with naive fascination.

 

Understandably, Pasteur never mentioned in his notebooks his many failures, nor his historic controversy with Bechamp, France's most famous doctor, who ridiculed Pasteur's vaccination theory. But when the French Academy of Science had to decide whether to adopt the vaccination theories of Pasteur, a mere chemist, or the opposite opinion of Bechamp, they opted for Pasteur, because his theory guaranteed an endless source of profits, contrarily to his opponent's theory, which only promised unprofitable health.

 

Dr. Lawrence K. Altman, M.D.

 

This byline sounded a familiar bell when I saw it in the New York Times article of May 16, and it brought me back to Naked Empress, the follow-up to my Slaughter of the Innocent.

 

Proving himself a certified product of JDR's General Education Board, this is how the N.Y. Times medical staff writers hailed one of the most horrific and stupid vivisectionist experiments ever performed until that time on a helpless human guinea-pig, not only under the shield of The Law, but in the name of Science, Progress and Humanity. I now quote bits from Naked Empress, p. 167:

 

On October 26, 1984, at California Loma Linda University Medical Center, a baby girl dubbed Baby Fae, whose parents desired anonymity, was submitted to an unprecedented laboratory ordeal: her defective heart was replaced with the heart of a young female baboon. From the outset, experienced surgeons expressed doubts about the wisdom of such an operation, as indicated in Time Magazine, November 12, 1984:

 

"There has never been a successful cross-species transplant," declared University of Minnesota Surgeon John Najarian, one of the country's leading pediatric transplant specialists. "To try it now is merely to prolong the dying process. Dr. Moneim Fadali, a cardiovascular surgeon at the University of California, Los Angeles, was one of several physicians to suggest that the decision to use an animal organ may have been "a matter of bravado."

 

In fact, one doesn't have to be a transplant specialist to realize that the Baby Fae adventure was bound to fail. Elementary biological notions, or just sound common sense - that most uncommon of all commodities - should suffice.

 

Poor Baby Fae, born with a partially missing heart, was close to meeting her natural end when she was pulled back to increased, prolonged suffering through high-tech interventions.

 

The experimental operation on the defenseless baby stood no chance of succeeding. Not only were the rejection problems far more serious, actually forbid ding, in a cross-species transplant, but there was no reason to believe that the young baboon's heart would grow apace with the recipient's growth. The shorter lived and eventually smaller-sized baboons grow to adulthood much faster than humans - in fact, within a year. It was a case of wild, heedless experimentation, which some people might regard as criminal, or idiotic.

 

However, America's establishment press hastened to present this latest experimental folly as a new "breakthrough", forgetting all the previously announced medical "breakthroughs" that had sooner or later ended in so many breakdowns.

 

Wrote Lawrence K. Altman, a medical doctor, in a Special to the New York Times, datelined October 29, barely three days after the operation, under the head line, "Doctors Say Baby With Baboon Heart Is Doing 'Remarkably Well"': "The doctors said that the 17-day old infant had color and was breathing easily without the aid of a mechanical respirator to which she had been attached for almost a week."

 

This was a wrong bit of information, as it turned out before very long. Nevertheless, in the New York Times of November 6, the same Dr. Lawrence K. Altman hyperbolized, without laughing:

 

"...With every beat the thriving infant makes history as the longest surviving human recipient of a transplanted animal heart. Here is one of the most exciting and potentially important medical stories in recent times. Dr. Leonard L. Bailey, the surgeon who heads the team that did the bold experiment, said, "We know more about newborn heart transplant surgery and immunology than anyone on the globe right now."

 

Meanwhile the incident was growing more grotesque each day. The doctors performed tests on every organ of the experimental baby, including the baboon heart. At the same time they tried to duplicate what was taking place inside the infant's body by transplanting hearts in baby baboons with abandon and administering the same drugs she was receiving - having perhaps never heard that animals react in a very different way to drugs than humans, and in many cases monkeys react more differently from humans than other animal species do. But it all helped to fool the public at large into accepting those jolly gamesters as "scientists" engaged in serious, life-saving "research" rather than a bunch of sadists seeking fame and glory.

 

There is little doubt that while science writers, medical commentators, editorialists, philosophers, and Christian Barnard himself were having a field day discussing the Baby Fae case, the five-pound bundle of bleeding flesh and bones - fed intravenously, stuck with needles, prodded by rubber gloves, studded with stitches, bearing cannulas, filled with chemicals, hitched to respirators, submitted to dialyses, exposed to Roentgen rays - was suffering torments such as in our civilization only laboratory animals are usually made to endure.

 

That much began to transpire from later reports, contradicting the earlier, far more sanguine news releases. The Medical Center's spokeswoman June Ochs revealed to the New York Post of November 16 that the baby was still on a respirator and intravenous feeding 22 days after the operation, and in a weekly resume the same paper gave the following account of November 12, three days before Baby Fae's death:

 

"The baby's efforts to reject the baboon heart are more intense than first thought. Doctors give Baby Fae a heart stimulant and add another anti-rejection drug Iymphocite immune globulin - to cyclosporine and steroid hormone doses. Bottle feedings are halted, intravenous feedings resume and the baby is returned to a respirator to conserve her strength."

 

The doctors' and copywriters' embarrassed reappraisal began twenty-and-a-half days after the operation, when Baby Fae was finally allowed to find her eternal peace. The report in the New York Post of November 16 went like this:

 

"Baby Fae died at 9 p.m. The five-pound infant had been listed in serious but stable condition earlier in the day. But the infant's kidneys began to fail during the afternoon and she required peritoneal dialysis around 7 p.m. Two hours later the heart that had saved her life in an historic experimental operation October 26, gave out."

 

So far Naked Empress.

 

Time Magazine's editorialist Charles Krauthammer, another staunch paladin of animal experimentation and every profit-oriented venture of the chemo-medical-vivisectionist combine, dedicated an "Essay" to the mayhem and killing of Baby Fae that took up a full page of the magazine's December 3, 1984 issue:

 

"Baby Fae was a means, a conscripted means, to a noble end. This experiment was undertaken to reduce not her suffering, but, perhaps some day, that of others. But is that really wrong? Don't the babies of the future have any claims on us?"

 

It took Loma Linda's medical Brain Trust almost a year to come up with what seemed to them a really smart alibi for their failure, so that they might be allowed to try again. The story in the Los Angeles Times of October 16, 1985:

 

"Baby Fae died because of a 'catastrophic' medical decision to transplant the heart of a baboon that had a different blood type, the surgeon who performed the operation said Tuesday. The infant's blood was type O and the baboon was type AB. "If Baby Fae had the type AB blood group she would still be alive today," Dr. Bailey said. So he put the blame on Baby Fae, instead of on his own stupidity.

 

It is my considered opinion that after that admission, if Justice worked, police should have immediately handcuffed "Dr." Bailey along with his team of fellow "surgeons", to prevent any further assassinations on their part, and marched them all off to jail or to a nuthouse for keeps. Every TV-educated American child today is aware that there are varying blood types, and that it is any medic's first task to make sure the type matches before he performs a transplant or transfusion. Every televiewing child, we said. But clearly not the bunch of grown-up half-wits who were allowed to torture poor Baby Fae to death during more than 20 days, to the gushings of suspenseful hour-by-hour reports and admiration from America's press over the "daring" of those fearless medical pioneers, who once more confirmed what the French doctor G. R. Laurent had declared a few decades earlier:

 

"Vivisection is a school of sadism, and a generation of medical men educated in this practice justifies the most serious concern on the part of the public." (Slaughter of the Innocent, p. 348.)

 

And before him, the well-known German physician, Dr. Wolfgang Bohn, had written in the medical journal Aerztliche Mitteilungen No. 7/8 as far back as 1912:

 

"The proclaimed purpose of vivisection has not been achieved in any field, and it can safely be predicted that it won't be achieved in the future either. On the contrary, vivisection has caused enormous damages, killed thousands of people. The constant spread of the vivisectionist method has achieved but one thing: to increase the scientific torture and murder of human beings. We can expect this increase to continue, for it would be just the logical consequence of animal experimentation."