Making and Faking Viruses

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*image of ‘viruses’ in seawater sample

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This post is a “cut to the chase” about the War Upon You – the uncomplicated version of context—drawn forward from the Big Science coup d’etat of World War Two and our cultural entry into the Nuclear/Space Age. The Big Science of biology and genetics goes from “Tobacco Mosaic Virus to Coronavirus” in my review Planting Viruses, as an intertwining parallel to the high-energy technology that brought nuclear missiles, satellites and global communications to the planet.  Radiation, whatever its source, is a biological weapon outside of the limited compatibility range in which we evolved. Radiation co-factored with chemistry –specifically biochemistry— is the basis of Life as we know it. Radiation and chemicals together makes, unmakes, and remakes the living world. Edward Teller, “father of the hydrogen bomb”, remarked that his weapons would “change mankind’s relationship with the universe”. Despite his own chronic health problems related to his work, Teller maintained that “radiation is good for you.”

The very “fine forces” that hold us together as living beings are electro-chemical bonds (not ‘flesh and blood’ per se) under constant over-riding assault from ‘technology’, be it frequencies, gmo foods, medicines, pollutants and the rest. That said, Planting Viruses is following the trail of documentation from TMV to CoV to show how public attention has been diverted away from the real causes of modern epidemics to the pseudoscientific Germ Theory of disease by way of planting viruses from plants! It’s a big, slow story in need of a Teller, you could say, to give it impact —  but a great deal of the evidence is straightforward at the laboratory level. Scientific “maker” culture reduces all to its smallest irreducible parts and “rebuilds” –  “build back better” as we hear it said today, applied to everything that defines us.  Planting Viruses is just one more Lost Chapter in the theft of our humanity, demonstrated here by the breaking of species barriers. Among the questions raised and addressed is the proposition that ‘universal’ polio vaccines of the 1950s were loaded with plant genes and propagated on substrates bearing plant genes, like Hela cells harboring Tobacco Mosaic Virus. The poliovirus, for all the world, is a plant.

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Keep this in mind:

“It’s raining viruses, but don’t panic” (published 2018)

https://www.pri.org/stories/2018-03-09/its-raining-viruses-dont-panic

[article excerpt]

“Viruses and the organisms they infect are extremely highly coevolved,” Suttle explains, “and as part of that process, viruses are really, really good at moving genetic information around. In fact, the field of biotechnology originated [with the discovery] that you could use a virus to move genetic information from one organism to another. The original genetic engineering, if you like, was using viruses to actually move genes around among organisms.”

A large percentage of human nucleic acids — our DNA — is actually viruses that are “still stuck in our genome,” Suttle points out. The placenta of mammals contains a protein that was donated by viruses; major components of our nervous system are the result of genetic information donated from viruses. “Viruses are masters at moving genetic information around and, as a result of that, they’ve been absolutely crucial to the evolution of all organisms,” he says. [end except]

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“Synthetic viruses: a new opportunity…” (published Dec.2009)

“Rapid progress in DNA synthesis and sequencing is spearheading the deliberate, large-scale genetic alteration of organisms. These new advances in DNA manipulation have been extended to the level of whole-genome synthesis, as evident from the synthesis of poliovirus, from the resurrection of the extinct 1918 strain of influenza virus and of human endogenous retroviruses…”  https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20010599/

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Polioviruses are “Members of the family Picornaviridae (genus Enterovirus) and of the family Secoviridae (genus Comovirus) were the first characterized members of the order and infect vertebrates and plants, respectively. The order also includes viruses infecting invertebrates (families Dicistroviridae and Iflaviridae) or algae (family Marnaviridae). Large-scale environmental genomic studies suggest the presence of a large number of uncharacterized picorna-like viruses in the ocean.” https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B9780123846846000707

“The poliovirus is capable of producing an encephalitis, with or without symptoms, in the absence of any damage to the spinal cord. As far as the pathologist is concerned all cases of polio are encephalitic”.[p21] It’s amazing that something so small can do so much damage…But the poliovirus doesn’t attach to and damage just any cell. It is a ‘guided missile’ that does one thing: seek out, damage, and destroy the neurons that “activate” you –the ones that activate your brain and muscles. The poliovirus is the perfect human “Off switch”… https://polioforever.wordpress.com/post-polio/

The author of those words, Richard L. Bruno in The Polio Paradox, appears to sincerely believe in the vaccine prevention of polio and writes nothing about the radiation and chemical cause of polio-like disease, a newly immanent crisis in the United States as the country emerged from World War II and catapulted into the Nuclear Age. Doctors in the 1940s attempting to ‘isolate’ poliovirus (serum) from polio patients were overwhelmingly unable to find the infectious agents.  The mandate to prevent polio with a ‘cure’ in the era of radioactive fallout seems incentive enough to “plant” a virus and use the vaccine in a new kind of “vaccine diplomacy” among nuclear-armed nations.

* Mahoney Type 1 poliovirus

 

The “wild” Mahoney type 1 poliovirus was collected and filtered into solution “virus” in 1941 by Dr. Thomas Francis of the Rockefeller Hospital. Personal physician to the Rockefeller family, Dr. Francis at the time had been newly set up at the University of Michigan on U.S. Army business in the capacity of  a public health laboratory. The Mahoney sample came from the pooled feces of three Cleveland area siblings who were asymptomatic –healthy!—and became the “type species” (first to be discovered) of the picornaviruses, or “prototype” as Eckard Wimmer noted in his 2002 created-from-scratch documents. The Mahoney strain procured in the lab, it turned out, was the deadliest of the recent polio filtrates. Work on another new polio vaccine, ongoing since the 1930s, however, was delayed;  Thomas Francis and his collaborator Jonas Salk were set on the task of making an influenza vaccine during the war. Clinically observed as sickness, there was no difference between polio and flu, but polio was to retain its distinctively special character as “infantile paralysis”—by then, a political definition of great value. All “influenza-like” disease, we now know, can be produced from exposure to radiation and chemicals.

Down Under in Australia’s city of Melbourne, Frank McFarlane Burnet was set on the same task of making an influenza vaccine for his government in WWII, to which he had also recommended the making of bioweapons in the form of intestinal agents. Burnet favorably selected influenza virus over the poliovirus for influenza’s quality of stability in lab experiments –having a larger genome it was less likely to mutate out of existence as poliovirus would were it not for vaccination and revaccination.

Contemporary  investigations reveal that plant viruses are normal commensals of the human gut, as they should be, able to be collected and reconstituted from newborn, exclusively breast-fed infants. In a very small but significant study, modern observers noted that 17 plant viruses were collected from newborn human feces, including tobacco mosaic virus, the “type species” of the helical rod, filamentous group. None of the parents of these newborns used or worked with tobacco, although it is known that TMV ‘infects’ many hundreds of plant species, including the most valuable food crops and flowers. Tobacco Mosaic Virus is the first virus, the prototypical “filtrate” substance obtained and ‘confirmed’ as a disease agent in 1892.  With this tobacco virus “tool”, I propose to demonstrate how TMV mutants and by-products became the “vaccine” viruses of modern allopathic practice.

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Eckard Wimmer, the elderly researcher who created poliovirus from scratch: …”My favorite virus is poliovirus… and in 2002 we published a paper that we had recreated the virus from information on the internet and no virus was necessary…. This was an enormous shock…[because] the parent of this virus…was the computer.”

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“Originally trained as an organic chemist, Wimmer developed a deep understanding and fascination for viruses as replicating (living) biological entities as well as (non-living) aggregates of organic compounds, or, “as chemicals with a life cycle”.^[2][3] After working on the structure of tRNAs and the structure of a plant RNA virus (satellite tobacco necrosis virus), Wimmer chose to study poliovirus in 1968. Poliovirus is the cause of the horrific disease poliomyelitis, which can cause irreversible flaccid paralysis and even death. Neither the molecular biology of poliovirus proliferation nor the mechanism of its pathogenesis was understood in the nineteen sixties…  Using the nucleotide sequence of the genome deciphered in 1981, Wimmer followed up on the work published in 1991 by synthesizing chemically the genome in the form of double stranded DNA (“cDNA”), which was then transcribed enzymatically^[16] into genome RNA and “booted to life” in the cell free system.^[3] This work, published in 2002 by Cello, Paul and Wimmer, was the first test-tube synthesis of an organism in the absence of a natural template achieved outside living cells.^[3] The poliovirus synthesis caught global attention, high praise, ridicule and fierce condemnation…” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eckard_Wimmer

Wimmer’s company : CODAGENICS, is shopping its corona vaccine

“Starting from only viral sequence data (no physical virus), Codagenix can routinely design, construct, and grow multiple live-attenuated vaccine candidates ready for animal safety and efficacy testing in less than one month, and faster if needed as new outbreak strains are identified… We seek to upend the current approach to making live-attenuated vaccines”… https://codagenix.com/vaccine-programs/pipeline/

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In reality… “Except for a few cases, viruses are not surrounded by a membrane. If present, the membrane around a virus particle – as seen in electron microscopic images – stems usually from the host cell. Viruses have no energy metabolism of their own. Consequently, they cannot perform syntheses and are thus unable to replicate themselves…  With plant viruses, the term specificity (or host-specificity) has a very narrow meaning, since no plant virus as such exists….” http://www1.biologie.uni-hamburg.de/b-online/e35/35.htm

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“All viruses are good viruses”…”they are solvents”….”[and] the only way [people] can get a swine flu or a bird flu is if [it] is injected in them” –Aajonus Vonderplanitz, PhD

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From Stefan Lanka: Pathogenic, disease-causing “Viruses Don’t Exist” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NU9f3Vc67oE

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Planting Viruses is a series-in-progress. So far, part three is currently under construction out of a probable five or six. When I finish it, I’ll be back to this spot to post a summary of each segment.

It starts here:  https://jenniferlake.wordpress.com/2021/01/15/planting-viruses-from-plants/

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Planting Viruses Three

*                                                                                                 Pepper Mild Mottle Virus, PMMoV, pictured in Wikipedia

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Part One: Planting Viruses –From Plants!    https://jenniferlake.wordpress.com/2021/01/15/planting-viruses-from-plants/

Part Two: Planting Viruses Two  https://jenniferlake.wordpress.com/2021/01/21/planting-viruses-two/

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Self-assembling nano machines are not simply “inspired by biology”. They are biology. Biology is Nanotechnology.

The revelation of the present –and the point of Planting Viruses—is to show how plant viruses, derived from the original ‘filtrate’ methods made of diseased specimens from Tobacco Mosaic Virus (TMV), have evolved into the bio-nano-technology of today. On the way, we’ll see how human viruses took the same path and ask a bigger Question based on evidence: Are modern (20^th century) “emerging” virus diseases derived from plant viruses? The expanding scope of the virus industry recognizes more and more pathogens infecting a greater range of hosts,  phenomena known as species jumping and host-switching, but read almost any biology research document from a lab of the modern era and you can observe the species-jumping-host-switching activity for yourself by human intervention. Laboratory science in biological ‘evolution’ is not just a practice of learning methods but a goal  in itself with a very long technology-dependent history.

The field of virology is looking for “common ancestors” to prove evolutionary lineage but the ancestors I’m postulating are not viruses at all. We know their names, like Wendell Stanley, Hilary Koprowski, Aaron Klug, Craig Venter, etc. etc. Their names include mathematicians and physicists as well as contemporary software designers and gamers.  (–the learning game ‘Plague, Inc.’, for example)

Do viruses evolve?  –well, that’s a trick question. Viruses and their stuff can disassemble and reassemble, inside or outside of host cell environments. Viruses, like poliovirus, have been made from scratch with laboratory chemicals and formulas but then so has human DNA.

Fabricating DNA Evidence (news from the NYTimes)

https://jenniferlake.wordpress.com/2009/08/19/fabricating-dna/

Entire living organisms such as E.coli bacteria have been made from scratch in labs.  This puts the trick in evolution. Nature does have some ‘keepers’ among the genetic fragments and “virus-like particles” spread over the earth, and those are called “conserved regions” in protein language. Conserved regions, which are small and dispersed orderly segments of proteins, show up along the replicated strings of genetic material in reproducing entities. They may or may not be evidence of evolution, but for the time being, evidence of identity and ‘targets’ for gene testing.  PCR tests, for example, are designed to target and “amplify” conserved regions in genetic specimens. In effect, PCR is a factory for making those certain ‘codes’ of interest and the reason you can stop wondering why a COVID PCR test is not a ‘heath’ test.

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Covid testing is switching to sewerage anyway –despite the ‘social benefits’ of maintaining individual testing –and we’ll look at the sewerage situation with plant viruses. Vaccines made from fecal matter extracts –as it appears all the older vaccines were—injected plant virus particles directly into the bloodstream. It prompts another set of questions about CoV positive tests: if COVID positivity is the outcome of prior vaccination for polio. They have the same ancestors. Poliovirus likeness to plant virus is demonstrated in Part Two.

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Part Three is going to focus on plant viruses infecting humans directly, without the need for an intermediate vector, like insects and vertebrates. It will also describe the peculiar differences between “infection” and “infectious” as it’s used in the literature, therefore determining a qualitative interpretation of “safety” as “non-infectious”, and I’ll apply that to TMV-derived nano-products. And, my favorite part –Pictures!—micrographs and progressive comparisons of “real” plant viruses, and some comparisons to “fake virus” images like the “clathrin-coated vesicels” pictured in Part One.

 

Here’s the Worksheet first (with clips from ‘search)

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“Humans have antibodies against a plant virus: evidence from tobacco mosaic virus”

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23573274/

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Can a plant virus make you sick?

29 April 2010

“Pepper mild mottle virus is present worldwide in field-grown peppers. It is composed of an RNA genome wrapped with many copies of a viral protein that forms a rod-like particle with helical symmetry (pictured)… https://www.virology.ws/2010/04/29/can-a-plant-virus-make-you-sick/

 

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Pepper Mild Mottle Virus, a Plant Virus Associated with Specific Immune Responses, Fever, Abdominal Pains, and Pruritus in Humans

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Conclusions

Our study identified a local source of PMMoV and linked the presence of PMMoV RNA in stool with a specific immune response and clinical symptoms. Although clinical symptoms may be imputable to another cofactor, including spicy food, our data suggest the possibility of a direct or indirect pathogenic role of plant viruses in humans.

… PMMoV is a non-enveloped, rod-shaped, single-stranded positive sense RNA virus classified in the genus Tobamovirus, which includes viruses extremely resistant to physical and chemical agents [8]–[9]. It is one of the major pathogens of Capsicum spp (chili peppers). Complementary data from Zhang et al.‘s study have shown that PMMoV could be detected in non-diarrheic stool from 12 out of 18 individuals living in San Diego, USA or in Singapore, suggesting it might be geographically widespread, and in 3 out of 22 fresh and processed pepper samples. Moreover, the fecal PMMoV was viable and could infect host plants.

…All N. tabacum cultivar Xanthi NN plants inoculated with each of the three PMMoV RNA-positive food products developed local lesions typical of PMMoV infection within 5–7 days post-inoculation (Figures 2a–h)…

…We also identified statistically significant differences in the occurrence of fever, abdominal pains, and pruritus and the detection of specific immune responses to PMMoV in the case-control study. We, therefore, believe that we provide the first evidence that plant viruses may cause disease in humans…

• https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0010041

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*“Pepper mild mottle virus (PMMoV) is a plant pathogenic virus that occurs worldwide on species of field grown bell, hot and ornamental pepper species. It is caused by members of the plant virus genus Tobamovirus- otherwise known as the tobacco mosaic virus family…

The origin of PMMoV has been linked to Tomato mosaic virus, as they both reside in the Tobacco mosaic virus family. The Tunisian Journal of Plant Protection brought about the link between PMMoV to ToMV from a French study dating back to 1964. ToMV affects a wide range of Solanaceous crops and a strain of this virus likely mutated into PMMoV.[3]”

https://m.blog.naver.com/ehongsik60/221532987034

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• Published: 12 August 2020

Tobamoviruses can be frequently present in the oropharynx and gut of infants during their first year of life

 …”Plant viruses have been reported to be common in the gut of human adults, presumably as result of food ingestion. In this work, we report that plant viruses can also be found frequently in the gut and oropharynx of children during their first year of life, even when they are exclusively breast-fed. Fecal and oropharynx samples were collected monthly, from birth to 1 year of age, from three apparently healthy children in a semi-rural community and analyzed by next generation sequencing. In 100% of the fecal samples and 65% of the oropharynx samples at least one plant virus was identified. Tobamoviruses in the Virgaviridae family were by far the most frequently detected, with tropical soda apple mosaic virus, pepper mild mottle virus, and opuntia tobamovirus 2 being the most common species. Seventeen complete virus genomes could be assembled, and phylogenetic analyses showed a large diversity of virus strains circulating in the population. These results suggest that children are continuously exposed to an extensive and highly diverse collection of tobamoviruses. Whether the common presence of plant viruses at an early age influences the infant’s immune system, either directly or through interaction with other members of the microbiota, remains to be investigated…

… surprisingly, [plant viruses] were found as early as 2-weeks after birth in exclusively breast-fed infants. Tobamoviruses, in the Virgaviridae family, were the most abundant, and were present in most of the samples analyzed. Of interest, antibodies to plant viruses have been found in animals, including humans³, and it has also been shown that cowpea mosaic virus can disseminate systemically when orally administered to mice¹². Whether the common presence of these viruses at an early age has an effect in the infant’s immune system and maturation of the gut remains to be investigated…

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-70684-w

 

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Antibodies in the bloodstream are taken as an unequivocal sign of infection by public health authorities. Livestock farmers have, many times over, had their antibody-positive (seropositive) animal herds seized and destroyed as a heavily enforced cautionary measure against the “presence of disease” even when no other signs of disease were manifest. In the animal world, this kind of “herd immunity” can get you killed.  Despite our understanding of antibodies as proof of immunity against disease, this seemingly paradoxical situation is used to define “infection” with pathogenic entities. A pathogen (as I was taught in nursing school)  is a microbe outside of its natural place. We recognize pathogens only in their ability to induce changes, but in the dynamic biosphere of our planet which is continuously building-up, breaking-down and on the move, pathogens are everywhere. Pathogens, in fact, are the “cause” of evolution if we stick to my foundation principle of out-of-place microbes.

Antibodies problems: http://theothersideofvaccines.com/2018/12/7-reasons-why-antibodies-cant-possibly-provide-immunity/

So, where are the “natural places” of some of these pathogens making us sick?  Many of them, of the least in size, belong on a long string of RNA and DNA.  The evolution of microscopic technology itself  took decades of unrelenting improvement and investigation into the tiniest classes of genetic fragments (made of nucleic acids) that amounted to something “microbe-like”.  A new class of ‘subunit’ entities discovered by science learning methods is called “subviral agents” and has emerged to categorize these genetic fragments. In plants these ultra-small pathogens are called “viroids”.

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“Viroids are small (about 300 nucleotides), single-stranded, circular, non-encapsidated pathogenic RNA molecules. They do not code for proteins and thus depend on plant host enzymes for their replication and other functions. They induce plant diseases by direct interaction with host factors but the mechanism of pathogenicity is still unknown [in 2004]. They can alter the expression of selected plant genes important for growth and development…” https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15448723/

[otherwise known as mRNA]

Viroid is a term exclusive to plants — a viroid associated with human disease is called “viroid-like**”. One particular viroid-like infection known in human disease is Hepatitis D, caused by a so-named “delta agent” that uses the Hepatitis B virus as a “helper virus” to provide it with functional parts –and a demonstration case of the HepB being a ‘host factor’. The Hepatitis D virion below looks like a ‘delta’ viroid (in blue) swallowed by a HepB ‘envelope’ shell (red and tan), or a virus-within-a-virus structure.  I’ll post some electron micrograph images of virus-within-virus structures further on.

**Viroid-like particles are also called “virusoids” –here’s a basic explanation of the differences in jargon, including ‘prion’ (infectious protein with no DNA/RNA) . https://courses.lumenlearning.com/microbiology/chapter/viroids-virusoids-and-prions/

Newborns are routinely vaccinated against HepB, a practice begun in 1983 and mandated in the U.S. in 1991.

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So, how did science discover viroids? Accordingly, the credit belongs to Theodor Otto Diener, a Swiss plant pathologist who emigrated to the United States in 1939:

“In 1959, Diener joined the US Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service Pioneering Laboratory for Plant Virology at the Agricultural Research Center in Beltsville, Maryland,^[2] where he investigated the cause of the potato spindle tuber disease. This led to the unexpected discovery of the causative agent, a small RNA molecule, eighty times smaller than the smallest known viruses, for which he proposed the term viroid.^[6][7] Later, viroids were characterized as single stranded covalently closed circular RNA molecules occurring as highly base-paired rod-like structures.^[8] Viroids, together with viroid-like satellite RNAs have been officially endorsed by the International Committee for Virus Taxonomy (ICTV) as a novel order of subviral agents,^[9] which, in its 2014 publication, encompassed 2 families, 8 genera and 32 species.”  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodor_Otto_Diener

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Diener himself wrote the following:

Abstract

“The discovery of the viroid in 1971, which initiated the third major expansion of the biosphere towards smaller living entities—after discovery of the “subvisual” microorganisms in 1675 and that of the “submicroscopic” viruses in 1892—has been officially endorsed by the International Committee on Virus Taxonomy as a new order called subviral agents.

“In 1989, I proposed that, based on their respective molecular properties, viroids are more plausible “living fossils” of the hypothetical RNA World (widely assumed to have existed prior to the evolution of DNA or proteins) than are intron-derived RNAs, which were, at that time, suggested as putative survivors. There were few citations of my proposal—and virtually none of viroids—beyond plant virology unil 1994, when Cheles-Flores critically examined the hypothesis and pointed out a serious difficulty, as well as a process by which this difficulty could be overcome. In 2013, when investigations by Koonin and Dolja revealed that of extant RNAs, viroids “strikingly” display some of the molecular properties posited for the earliest evolving, selfish RNAs (primordial RNAs), but, because extant organisms, aside from higher plants, appear not to harbor viroids, they cannot be regarded as primordial fossils, but appear to have evolved post LUCA (the Last Universal Common Ancestor). Here, I review whether some evidence nevertheless is compatible with the original postulate of the 1989 hypothesis. My analysis reveals no unequivocal evidence for an ancient origin of viroids, but suggests, alternatively, that viroids may have evolved de novo more recently, probably by novel processes similar to those suggested by each reviewer.” https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4807594/

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“…we show that circular RNA replicons analogous to [viroid family] Pospiviroidae emerge if evolution is seeded with minimal circular RNAs that grow through the gradual addition of nucleotides. Further, these rod-like replicons often maintain their structure if independent functional modules are acquired that impose selective constraints. The evolutionary scenario we propose here is consistent with the structural and biochemical properties of viroids described to date.” https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31075860/

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• A) Tobacco Rattle Virus
• B) Tobacco Mosaic Virus
• C) Pepper Mild Mottle Virus

 

 

Obtaining viroids (a word not-yet coined) for experimental purposes dates back to the 1955 Tobacco Mosaic Virus publication by Heinz Fraenkel-Conrat and Robley C. Williams from the Virus Laboratory of the University of California (Wendell Stanley’s lab). The men dissolved TMV in a chemical solution, purified and then reconstituted it in solution, obtaining a ratio of infective particles. Their experiment, set to prove the existence of RNA/DNA, caused quite a stir : “Gunther Stent wrote to Sidney Brenner, ‘Frankel-Conrat seems to have done the biggest thing with TMV since Stanley crystalized it. He can add soluble TMV protein to soluble TMV RNA, aggregate the whole mess into rods of which 0.1% are infective!!! Naturally, you don’t believe it–nor did I or anyone else, but unless he has made up the whole thing it seems that it must be true. You can’t beat that for laughs, can you buddy?’ It was true.”

Reference source http://evilutionarybiologist.blogspot.com/2007/10/this-weeks-citation-classic_26.html

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This electron micrograph image shows their reconstituted virus

 

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*Original document https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC528165/pdf/pnas00725-0006.pdf

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The denaturing and reconstitution of infective TMV at UCBerkeley was paid for by the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, NFIP known as the March of Dimes for polio research, and the National Cancer Institute of the NIH. Rosalind Franklin’s “structure group” at Birbeck, University of London, was also paid by NFIP and NCI to study polio (see part two), and these same entities paid for the development of both influenza and polio vaccines from the beginning of World War II forward.

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When we get to the Common Cold section of this series, we will also see that the ‘discoverer’ of human coronaviruses, Dr. David Tyrell, launched his career as an epidemiologist with the British government following a polio outbreak in his hometown of Sheffield UK, famous for its metal products. Tyrell, however, was notably attached to the WWII U.S. Armed Forces Epidemiological Board (AFEB) during the war and returned to the States in 1951 to work (1951-1954) at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in New York.

Polio is, was, and remains a hub of constancy in nano-bio-tech; structurally identical to the common cold rhinovirus and the cowpea chlorotic mottle virus — its viroid cowpea mosaic virus is mentioned in the citations above as infecting and provoking antibody response in mice –from nature.com: “antibodies to plant viruses have been found in animals, including humans³, and it has also been shown that cowpea mosaic virus can disseminate systemically when orally administered to mice¹².” Cowpea mosaic virus has proven more infective than its parent (or descendent, if evolutionary) and is another darling agent of nano-bio-tech, as are all viroids generally. Viroid research opened the way to new RNA technologies of the 1970s forward.

(search clip)

·  The unique potency of Cowpea mosaic virus (CPMV) in situ …

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32914796

[2020] “Our results indicate that CPMV in situ vaccine outperforms Cowpea chlorotic mottle virus (CCMV), Physalis mosaic virus (PhMV), Sesbania mosaic virus (SeMV), bacteriophage Qβ VLPs, or Hepatitis B virus capsids (HBVc). Furthermore, ex vivo and in vitro assays reveal unique features of CPMV that makes it an inherently stronger immune stimulant…”

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Viroid-type (not showing RNA) protein “disks” of TMV on the left, matched to the UCBerkeley (‘Fig.2) EM graph above, are compared to the assembled TMV rod with the dark RNA coil shown on the right in this illustration.

The next year [1956], Professor Fraenkel-Conrat and his team, which included his wife Beatrice A. Singer, ‘hybrized’ their TMV specimens, mixing the protein disks of one strain type with the purified RNA of another, illustrated below.  TMV mutants from these and other experiments were prepared in Berkeley’s particle accelerators by ‘Bea’ Singer and sent to Rosalind Franklin’s group in London for structural study along with ‘Mahoney’ strain polioviruses (crystals in filtrate). The Mahoney poliovirus strain was collected in 1941 from the feces of three siblings who were asymptomatic and considered the most deadly of ‘wild type’ poliovirus.

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“Tracking the Elusive Viroid”

…”Like a virus, the viroid invades a cell and…forces the cell to duplicate the viroid’s RNA instead of its own. The viroid has no DNA. RNA and DNA are nucleic acids, the molecules of heredity; with the exception of viroids and some viruses, all genes are made of DNA.

“The difference between viroids and RNA viruses is that viroids have no protective protein coat. The scientific dogma in 1971 was that an organism with no protein wasn’t supposed to be able to replicate itself, even with a host cell’s help. And an entity as small as the PSTV (potato spindle tuber viroid)—130,000 daltons—wasn’t supposed to be able to infect anything, even a potato.

“Until that time, scientists believed that the minimum weight necessary for infectivity was about 1 million daltons. (A dalton, also called an atomic mass unit, equals one-twelfth the mass of a carbon-12 atom.)  Diener wasn’t much impressed by scientific dogma. He’d seen it turned upside down too many times. But he was very careful to prove that the viroid really existed. In all, it took him 6 painstaking years”… [1965-1971] https://www.ars.usda.gov/oc/timeline/viroid/

• viroids in their two alternate 2D structures of ‘rod’ or ‘ring’

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“Viruses (Virus particles or virions) are usually units consisting of nucleic acids and coat proteins called capsids. Viroids consist only of RNA, i.e. they contain no protein at all. Except for a few cases, viruses are not surrounded by a membrane. If present, the membrane around a virus particle – as seen in electron microscopic images – stems usually from the host cell (see picture to the left). Viruses have no energy metabolism of their own. Consequently, they cannot perform syntheses and are thus unable to replicate themselves…  With plant viruses, the term specificity (or host-specificity) has a very narrow meaning, since no plant virus as such exists. Instead, plant viruses can be grouped in a number of ‘varieties’. The tobacco mosaic-virus (TMV), for example, multiplies within Nicotiana-species, several other solanaceous plants, and a few species of other plant families. The name of a virus is usually derived from the name of its main host plant. Although with viruses, the term ‘species’ may not quite correspond to the way it is defined in biological systematics, it is perfectly reasonable and common to use it for viruses, too, since all viruses and viroids contain an original genome with a species-specific information. Its continuity over generations is [only] guaranteed by replication in the host cells. The genetic information of viruses is either encoded by single-stranded RNA (most plant viruses), double-stranded RNA (wound tumor viruses), single-stranded DNA (gemini-viruses) or double-stranded DNA (cauliflower mosaic-virus: CaMV). Based on the shape of the virus particle, it is distinguished between rod-shaped and icosaedrical viruses with a capsid that seems almost spherical.”

Picture : Viral membranes. Maturation of the virion (Maus-Friend-leukaemia virus) by budding off the host cell’s plasma membrane. Notice the similar structures of the membrane surrounding the virus and the membrane of the host cell (deHARVEN, New York).

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http://www1.biologie.uni-hamburg.de/b-online/e35/35.htm

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…making new ‘things’ with TMV:

EASY PIEZY

“The pH affects molecular charge, since it is well known that proteins disaggregate as the charge increases, and they aggregate as the charge decreases. Two often quoted examples are hemoglobin (Fanelli et al., 1964) and tobacco mosaic virus protein (Klug, 1979”)…

https://ecfsapi.fcc.gov/file/10307262054844/3-12%20Attachment%20-%20Blank%2C%20Electromagnetic%20Biology%20%2C%202008.pdf

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2015– Metal-Based Nanoparticles (MBNPs)

“This review explores the synthesis of inorganic metallic-based nanoparticles (MBNPs) (metals, alloys, metal oxides) using biological and biologically inspired nanoreactors for precipitation/crystallisation. Such nanoparticles exhibit a range of nanoscale properties such as surface plasmon resonance (nobel metals e.g. Au), fluorescence (semiconductor quantum dots e.g. CdSe) and nanomagnetism (magnetic alloys e.g. CoPt and iron oxides e.g. magnetite), which are currently the subject of intensive research…  Biological nanoreactors for crystallizing MBNPs within cells (magnetosomes), protein cages (ferritin) and virus capsids (cowpea chlorotic mottle, cowpea mosaic and tobacco mosaic viruses), are discussed along with how these have been modified for applications and for the next generation of new materials.  Biomimetic liposome, polymersome and even designed self-assembled proteinosome nanoreactors are also reviewed for MBNP crystallisation and further modification for applications. With the advent of synthetic biology, the research and understanding in this field is growing, with the goal of realising nanoreactor synthesis of MBNPs for biomedical applications within our grasp in the near future.”

https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlehtml/2015/cp/c5cp00375j

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Display of epitopes on the surface of tobacco mosaic virus: impact of charge and isoelectric point of the epitope on virus-host interactions

M Bendahmane ¹, M Koo, E Karrer, R N Beachy

Abstract

The biophysical properties of the tobacco mosaic tobamovirus (TMV) coat protein (CP) make it possible to display foreign peptides on the surface of TMV. The immunogenic epitopes G5-24 from the rabies virus (RV) glycoprotein, and 5B19 from murine hepatitis virus (MHV) S-glycoprotein were successfully displayed on the surface of TMV, and viruses accumulated to high levels in infected leaves of Nicotiana tabacum Xanthi-nn.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10388554/

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Rabies virus is in a family called rhabdoviridae

Rhabdoviridae – Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhabdoviridae

Rhabdoviridae is a family of negative-strand RNA viruses in the order Mononegavirales. Vertebrates (including mammals and humans), invertebrates, and plants serve as natural hosts. Diseases associated with member viruses include rabies encephalitis caused by the rabies virus, and flu-like symptoms in humans caused by vesiculoviruses.

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RHABDOVIRIDAE – Stanford University

https://web.stanford.edu/group/virus/rhabdo/2004bischoffchang/Rhabdo.htm

Rhabdoviridae is a virus family within the Mononegavirales order, which also contains the Bornaviridae, Filoviridae, and Paramyxoviridae families. Rhabdoviridae contains six genera: vesiculovirus, lyssavirus, ephemerovirus, norvirhabdovirus, cytorhabdovirus, and nucleorabdovirus.

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Abstract

“Classical plant rhabdoviruses infect monocot and dicot plants, have unsegmented negative-sense RNA genomes and have been taxonomically classified in the genera Cytorhabdovirus and Nucleorhabdovirus. These viruses replicate in their hemipteran vectors and are transmitted in a circulative-propagative mode and virus infection persists for the life of the insect. Based on the discovery of numerous novel rhabdoviruses in arthropods during metagenomic studies and extensive phylogenetic analyses of the family Rhabdoviridae, it is hypothesized that plant-infecting rhabdoviruses are derived from insect viruses. Analyses of viral gene function in plants and insects is beginning to reveal conserved and unique biology for these plant viruses in the two diverse hosts. New tools for insect molecular biology and infectious clones for plant rhabdoviruses are increasing our understanding of the lifestyles of these viruses.”

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30500682/

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“The Hemiptera /hɛˈmɪptərə/ or true bugs are an order of insects comprising some 50,000 to 80,000 species^[3] of groups such as the cicadas, aphids, planthoppers, leafhoppers, bed bugs and shield bugs. They range in size from 1 mm (0.04 in) to around 15 cm (6 in), and share a common arrangement of sucking mouthparts.^[4] The name “true bugs” is often limited to the suborder Heteroptera…Most hemipterans feed on plants, using their sucking and piercing mouthparts to extract plant sap.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemiptera

 

Plants — “Monocots, as the name implies, are defined by having seeds that contain a single (mono-) embryonic leaf known as a cotyledon. This is a monophyletic group that constitutes a majority of our agricultural biomass and include many important crop staples including, but not limited to, rice, wheat, corn, sugar cane, bamboo, onion, and garlic… the biggest difference of all between monocots and dicots, is the seed… Often incorrectly thought of as a tree, the banana plant is actually a monocot and is closely related to the grass family… https://biologydictionary.net/monocot/

 

Murine Hepatitis Virus (MHV) is a coronavirus

2001, Abstract “Inoculation of mice with most neurotropic strains of the coronavirus mouse hepatitis virus results in an immune response-mediated demyelinating disease that serves as an excellent animal model for the human disease multiple sclerosis. Recent work has shown that either virus-specific CD4(+) or CD8(+) T cells are able to mediate demyelination and also that the antibody response is crucial for clearing infectious virus. Another exciting advance is the development of recombinant coronaviruses, which, for the first time, will allow genetic manipulation of the entire viral genome.” https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11495812/

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1999, “Hybrids of tobacco mosaic virus (TMV) were constructed with the use of fusion to the coat protein peptides…containing the…epitope from the spike protein of murine hepatitis virus (MHV, [coronavirus])… The TMV hybrids were propagated in tobacco plants, and the virus particles were purified. Immunogold labeling, with the use of the monoclonal MAb5B19 antibody, showed specific decoration of hybrid TMV particles, confirming the expression and display of the MHV [coronavirus spike protein] epitope on the surface of the TMV…  Mice were immunized with purified hybrid viruses after several regimens of immunization. Mice that received TMV-5B19L intranasally developed serum IgG and IgA specific for the 5B19 epitope and for the TMV coat protein. Hybrid TMV-5B19, administered by subcutaneous injections, elicited high titers of serum IgG that was specific for the 5B19 epitope and for coat protein, but IgA that was specific against 5B19 was not observed. Mice that were immunized with hybrid virus by subcutaneous or intranasal routes of administration survived challenge with a lethal dose (10 x LD50) of MHV strain JHM, whereas mice administered wild-type TMV died 10 d[days] post challenge.  …These studies show that TMV can be an effective vaccine delivery vehicle for parenteral and mucosal immunization and for protection from challenge with [corona] viral infection.” https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10393897/

Planting Viruses Two

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Have you wondered HOW or WHY a vegetable tests positive for COVID-19?

[search clip]

·  Can Coronavirus Be Transmitted via Fresh Fruits and Vegetables?

http://www.msn.com/en-us/health/nutrition/can-corona…

“Mar 09, 2020 · In fact, a research study from 2013 on coronavirus in strawberries and lettuce found that the virus only survives on produce between four and 10 days”…

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The keyword above is “on” the produce as opposed to “in” the produce, suggesting outside contamination of CoV spreading in 2013.  But a case of Tanzanian paw-paw fruit that tested CoV positive last May took the tack of faulty testing, even though goats tested with the same tool were also positive –animals test positive and develop covid, we’re told, just like people—and was accepted.  But fruit?? A coronavirus gene sequence in fruit?– now, that just can’t be allowed.

It’s a wild story.

[search clip]

Faulty coronavirus tests suspected as fruit tests positive

nypost.com/2020/05/06/faulty-coronavirus-kits…

“May 06, 2020 · Coronavirus test kits have aroused suspicions in Salaam, Tanzania after results taken from goats and fruit came back positive in what the country’s leader has dubbed a “technical error.” https://nypost.com/2020/05/06/faulty-coronavirus-kits-suspected-as-goat-and-fruit-test-positive-in-tanzania/

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In Part One previously, I posted a 2005 vaccine research document that showed SARS-CoV antigen (the immune ‘provocation’ element) genetically embedded in tomato, tobacco, and potato plants as a plausible food vaccine that was demonstrated to be successful. The scientists wanted to show  “that the plant system provides many practical, economic, and safety advantages compared with conventional systems… without injection-related hazards”…

That was 2005.  Here’s the link again:  https://www.pnas.org/content/102/25/9062

Despite an outcry against it be aware that food vaccines are coming back. Tobacco after all is a food, a “Feed The World” kind of nutrient-dense, protein-rich food source (see the previous post Planting Viruses) that has a lot of appeal over, say, worms and insects. It just isn’t a snack like a tomato or a pawpaw and that’s what’s coming back –the whack in your snack!

[search clip]

·  GMO tomato as edible COVID vaccine? Mexican scientists work …

allianceforscience.cornell.edu/blog/2020/05/gmo…

“May 06, 2020 · The only similar work that can be found in the bibliography is the development of a tomato with SARS-CoV antigens, which was responsible for severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in Southeast Asian countries in 2002-2003 and has 70 percent genomic similarity to the pathogen behind the current pandemic”…

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In Part Two, here as you read, we’re going to look back at the small group of researchers who worked with Tobacco Mosaic Virus to discover it’s properties –its structural properties—and how they learned what constitutes “virus,” including the genetic makeup of its proteins, all from architectural models of structure.  Revealed by X-rays, electron microscopes, mathematical algorithms, and cleverly designed cameras –the tech-heavy core of discovery– a simply-derived liquid ‘filtrate’ called “virus” was turned into building blocks of nanotechnology. The Tobacco Mosaic Virus (TMV) today is both a tool and a medium for redesigning biology.

The group, which I’ll call the ‘Structure Group’, has in its members some of the most renown scientists of modern history; Watson & Crick and their Nobel-winning colleague Maurice Wilkins who won their Prize for modeling the structure of DNA; Rosalind Franklin who supplied them with the graphs to prove it; and John Desmond (J.D.) Bernal, the genius who showed them the way. The art and artifice of the Structure Group in London created a cultish destination point of pilgrimage, a Mecca of methods where eager young protein chemists vied for a place. Many of them are still living and teaching today, responsible for the ‘classic’ images of viruses I’ll be showing you in this post.

…Such as…

A Comparison Example: Turnip Crinkle Virus (TCV) is one of a half-dozen plant viruses we’ll look at that were analyzed by students of the London Structure Group. It’s identical to a number of human viruses; poliovirus, rhinovirus, Norwalk virus, and more. Dr. Jim Hogle signed his name (with lab colleagues) to the TCV image ‘map’ below. We’ll meet Jim Hogle briefly in this work as a polio researcher at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla CA, a neighbor facility to the (Jonas) Salk Institute and campus of UCSD in northern San Diego.

Turnip Crinkle Virus (TCV), image source https://www.rcsb.org/structure/3zx8

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and this: Tomato Bushy Stunt Virus (TBSV), identical and structurally ‘solved’ by the same friendly small group of students under tutelage by the Structure Group                     ****************************************************************************************

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*And before I change the subject away from food-borne virus, the U.S. government says that Norwalk virus is the most common viral contaminant on fruits and vegetables.

*Norwalk Virus*

Norwalk virus is structurally alike to Turnip Crinkle and Tomato Bushy Stunt viruses, at least by protein analysis methods, which teaches that surface (capsid) proteins of these “macromolecules” can turn, twist inward, and project outward on “protein hinges”, exposing different amino acids (proteins) on their surfaces with or without changing their gene sequences. They can move, in other words, subject to something acting upon them. Mutants, which occur naturally, or deliberately, and easily from very minor or single alterations of chemistry, can signify a gene change as well as a surface protein shape change.

Part Two will also endeavor to define “virus” in a greater context. Tobacco Mosaic Virus was the first ever created with a scientific purpose, credited to Dmitri Ivanofsky, a Russian botanist who was sent to investigate a failing tobacco crop in the Ukraine.  In the late 1880s, Ivanofsky mashed his diseased leaf samples together, added water, and ‘purified’ the liquid through an ultrafine filter. For decades to follow, indiscriminate liquid filtrate from disease specimens has been called “virus”.  If you had a polio vaccine as a child, the viral component was likely to have originated by this method:

Poliovirus: procured as described

“Materials and Methods

“Virus.–The Lansing strain of poliomyelitis virus used for this study was obtained from Armstrong (2) September 27, 1950, in the form of an infected mouse brain and cord representing the 379th mouse passage [through the brains of others]. It was passed twice through cotton rats in this laboratory. The second passage material was homogenized to a 20 per cent suspension in distilled water with the aid of a Waring blendor and served as a stock pool”…

Document source: “THE INTRACELLULAR DISTRIBUTION OF LANSING POLIOMYELITIS VIRUS IN THE CENTRAL NERVOUS SYSTEM OF INFECTED COTTON RATS* BY CARLTON E. SCHWERDT, I~.D., ANO ARTHUR B. PARDEE, PH.D. (From the Virus Laboratory, University of California, Berkeley) (Received for publication, April 25, 1952)”

https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.274.2913&rep=rep1&type=pdf

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Recent news on Polio, issued August 2013

An article by Scientific American.

“Global eradication of polio has been the ultimate game of Whack-a-Mole for the past decade; when it seems the virus has been beaten into submission in a final refuge, up it pops in a new region. Now, as vanquishing polio worldwide appears again within reach, another insidious threat may be in store from infection sources hidden in plain view. Polio’s latest redoubts are “chronic excreters,” people with compromised immune systems who, having swallowed weakened polioviruses in an oral vaccine as children, generate and shed live viruses from their intestines and upper respiratory tracts for years. Healthy children react to the vaccine by developing antibodies that shut down viral replication, thus gaining immunity to infection. But chronic excreters cannot quite complete that process and instead churn out a steady supply of viruses. The oral vaccine’s weakened viruses can mutate and regain wild polio’s hallmark ability to paralyze the people it infects. After coming into wider awareness in the mid-1990s, the condition shocked researchers.”

https://www.nature.com/news/the-hidden-threat-that-could-prevent-polio-s-global-eradication-1.13557

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“Watson began working on tobacco mosaic virus (TMV), which contains a nucleic acid called RNA. He hoped that his studies would help him eventually learn about DNA. Watson began learning how to make X-ray crystallography images in order to try to show that TMV had helically stacked protein”…

http://www.bookrags.com/studyguide-doublehelix/chapanal016.html#:~:text=Watson%20began%20working%20on%20tobacco%20mosaic%20virus%20%28TMV%29%2C,to%20show%20that%20TMV%20had%20helically%20stacked%20protein.&gsc.tab=0

“In 1952 he determined the structure of the protein coat surrounding the tobacco mosaic virus but made no dramatic progress with DNA. Suddenly, in the spring of 1953, Watson saw that the essential DNA components—four organic bases—must be linked in definite pairs.” https://www.britannica.com/biography/James-Dewey-Watson

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Tobacco Mosaic and Polio viruses were the ultimate study objects of the London Structure Group when Rosalind Franklin joined the Birkbeck College Lab (Univ. of London) in 1953 on the invitation of J.D. Bernal.  In those pursuits, thanks to the intrepid networking of Franklin as history records it, an intimate partnership was forged with the University of California Berkeley. Carlton E. Schwerdt, cited above with his polio mouse-brain virus, sent his wife Patsy from San Francisco to Birkbeck carrying a sealed vial of poliovirus crystals in her purse for the exclusive study of the Structure Group. The polio crystals sent by Schwerdt to Birkbeck, however, were the Mahoney strain of poliovirus considered deadly and the cause of the “Cutter Incident” which suspended the original Salk IPV until ‘fixed’.

UCBerkeley, many biology historians will tell you, was the seed-point of modern virology as the academic home of Wendell Stanley who created the Virus Laboratory (Stanley Hall) after his prize-winning accomplishment of crystallizing Tobacco Mosaic Virus (1935), thus opening the way.  Crick & Watson’s ‘DNA’ colleague, physicist Maurice Wilkins, spent his time on the Manhattan Project at the Berkeley Virus Lab with Wendell Stanley– and Stanley became a constant friend and asset to the Group.

For as much as the Manhattan Project was a joint British-American enterprise, the spread and control of tobacco was it’s larger and historical counterpart.  No entity on the planet would possibly benefit more (excepting the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation & co.) if tobacco could ‘Feed the World,’ or feed-and-vaccinate the world, than the British American Tobacco corporation –the BAT in your Covid soup. British American Tobacco is the contractor for DARPA’s tobacco corona vaccine. ( See ‘Tobacco Vaccines, by DARPA )

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132) Tobacco Vaccines by DARPA

https://jenniferlake.wordpress.com/2020/09/23/tobacco-vaccines-by-darpa/

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The Movie, Race For The Double Helix, the 1987 British-made film (originally titled ‘Life Story’), is a mostly fair account of discovering the structure of DNA –with a few omissions. Tobacco Mosaic Virus gets a mention, if you can catch it, when Jim Watson (Jeff Goldblum) says, misleadingly, “maybe I should study Tobacco Mosaic Virus, but it’s not DNA”. Watson did in fact study and attempt TMV crystallography without the needed quality results. What Crick and Watson really needed were Rosalind Franklin’s pictures, photograph #51 to be precise, which she called the ‘B’ form –a diffraction grid pattern showing two helical chains. Franklin’s TMV samples had from one to four internal ‘strand’ helices by her evidence. The photo(s) and notes were stolen from her lab and passed to the men by Max Perutz, Francis Crick’s doctoral supervisor at the Cavendish who was himself supervised for his PhD by J.D. Bernal. By then Bernal had already arranged (since March 1952) for Franklin to leave Cambridge (King’s College, and Cavendish Lab at U. Cambridge) and join him at Birkbeck (U. London, across town) to work on TMV.

Worth the watch:  https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_race_for_the_double_helix

Max Perutz ultimately won his own Nobel Prize standing with Crick & Watson in 1962. (left-to-right; F.Crick, M.Wilkins, John Steinbeck, J.Watson, Max Perutz and John Kendrew)

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*Advisors on the movie included Aaron Klug and John T. Finch who were Rosalind Franklin’s own assistants and doctoral students: the two Structure Group members who remained at the hub of Birkbeck, collaborating together for more than forty years and training students of their own (and others) from around the world. Max Perutz and John Kendrew maintained ties with the Birbeck Structure Group (as did Crick and Watson) winning their Nobel together for the structure of hemoglobin and myoglobin.

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“ ‘Rosy, of course, did not directly give us her data. For that matter, no one at King’s realized they were in our hands,’ Watson admitted.”  https://medium.com/s/the-matilda-effect/rosalind-franklin-dna-matilda-8c54e6222848

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Nobel winner Wendell Stanley became “the father of virology”

*** Quote attributed to Francis Crick: “Any child could make a virus”

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 The Structure Group, Birkbeck College U.London

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Lab leaders J.D. Bernal (beg,1937) and Aaron Klug (beg.1958)

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Aaron Klug

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John Desmond ‘J.D.’ Bernal (b1901-d1971) graduated from Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge (London) in 1922 at the age of 21 with a degree in mathematics. From there he was sponsored at the Royal Society’s Faraday Laboratory by William Henry Bragg to learn the art of crystallography (X-ray diffraction physics) and was set to work for the British government studying the structure of graphite. In 1927, he returned to Cambridge as a lecturer in crystallography and by 1934 was made assistant director of the Cavendish Lab. Bernal began studying organic molecules at the Cavendish; oestrin and cholesterol (1929); vitamin B1 and liquid water (1933); pepsin(1934), vitamin D2 (1935) and Tobacco Mosaic Virus in 1937. His doctoral students included Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin, who became his confidant and lover, Alan Mackay and Max Perutz. His nickname in these years became ‘Sage’. Denied a fellowship at the Cavendish in 1937 by Ernest Rutherford, Bernal was invited to Birkbeck, University of London, where he assumed the laboratory developed by Patrick Blackett and moved into the apartment upstairs. He was honored with membership in the Royal Society. After the war, Bernal’s lab expanded to become the Biomolecular Research Laboratory (BRL), set up in two buildings on the University’s Torrington Square, becoming in the process an arm of the British government’s Medical Research Council (MRC). The spirited atmosphere of Birkbeck under Bernal’s influence led to a continuously dynamic interplay of politics and science carried on nightly among students and visitors. Bernal is remembered for his war work (advising heads-of-state and planning for D-Day), his devotion to Soviet communism (which caused ‘distancing’ from his peers in the mid-fifties) and his legacy of books and articles.

“His first adult visit to the USA (his mother was a bilingual English and French speaking American, but he was educated in Ireland and England) was curtailed by the outbreak of World War II in 1939. Post-1945, many of Sage’s visits to the USSR and Eastern Europe (several of whose scientific academies awarded him Membership) and to China and India included both scientific lectures and peace campaigning. He met Khrushchev, Mao Zedong and Nehru, gave a demonstration to Churchill, and participated in committee meetings in the White House, the Kremlin and 10 Downing Street. His experience of less developed countries began with laborious and uncomfortable war-time travel for Mountbatten but thereafter he made many lengthy tours to countries with emerging economies to advise on the development of each nation’s science…   Perhaps Bernal’s greatest scientific contribution was to nurture a clutch of Nobel prizewinners in the development of molecular biology”….  https://www.iucr.org/news/newsletter/volume-15/number-1/book-review

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Aaron Klug (b1926-d2018), born in Lithuania and raised in South Africa, Klug arrived at Cambridge in 1951 to work on his PhD (rec’d 1953). He went to Birkbeck to study Tobacco Mosaic Virus with Rosalind Franklin, along with John T. Finch. Klug and Finch were key investigators of the plant viruses when the lab ‘took a step’ to poliovirus obtained from UCBerkeley.  A peak moment for their small group was the creation and display of ‘person-sized’ models of TMV and poliovirus made for the 1958 World’s Fair in Brussels Belgium. Rosalind Franklin died in the midst of these preaparations –Klug tookover her work and the operational leadership of the lab. In 1962 he received a teaching fellowship at Cambridge and relocated his academic base with the headquarters of the Medical Research Council, maintaining his ties with Birkbeck, especially in course of Bernal’s deteriorating illness brought on by a series of strokes. In 1969 Krug was made a Fellow of the Royal Society. In 1982 he won a Nobel Prize for advancements in crystallographic electron microscopy. Queen Elizabeth II knighted him in 1988 –this one year after the tele-broadcast of “Race For The Double Helix”– and in 1995 he became President of the Royal Society. In Israel, where he was a frequent visitor, Ben Gurion University named an institution for him in 2013, the Aaron Klug Integrated Center for Biomolecular Structure.

“His certificate of election to [president of] the Royal Society reads:

Mathematical physicist and crystallographer distinguished for his contributions to molecular biology, especially the structure of viruses. Development of a theory of simultaneous temperature and phase changes in steels led him to apply related mathematical methods to the problem of diffusion and chemical reactions of gases in thin layers of haemoglobin solutions and in red blood cells. Then the late Rosalind Franklin introduced him to the x-ray study of tobacco mosaic virus to which he contributed by his application and further development of Cochran and Crick‘s theory of diffraction from helical chain molecules. Klug’s most important work is concerned with the structure of spherical viruses. Together with D. Caspar he developed a general theory of spherical shells built up of a regular array of asymmetric particles. Klug and his collaborators verified the theory by x-ray and electron microscope studies, thereby revealing new and hitherto unsuspected features of virus structure.”  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Klug

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Don Casper, who co-developed the “Caspar-Klug” theory of structure was a career collaborator and visitor to the Structure Group.

“Caspar completed his BA in physics from Cornell University in 1950. He joined Yale University from where he earned his PhD in biophysics in 1955.^[1] He was supervised by Ernest C. Pollard. His thesis was on the structure of tobacco mosaic virus (TMV) titled The Radial Structure of Tobacco Mosaic Virus. While waiting for his degree he worked under Max Delbrück at the California Institute of Technology as post doctoral student.^[5] He worked with James D. Watson, with whom he had close professional association throughout his career. After receiving his PhD, he went to England having been awarded a fellowship at King’s College London under Rosalind Franklin and during 1955–1956 worked with her at Birkbeck College in London. Their meeting was fruitful both personally and professionally. He remained one of Franklin’s closest friends during her brief lifetime. In 1956 he and Franklin published individual but complementary papers in the March 10 issue of Nature, together showing that TMV was a hollow rod, rather than a solid structure as generally believed. They also demonstrated that RNA in TMV was wound along the inner surface of the hollow virus…”  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Caspar

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“Kenneth Holmes was born in London in 1934… He obtained his B.A. at St. Johns College, Cambridge. He obtained his Ph.D. in 1959 at Birkbeck College London working on the structure of tobacco mosaic virus with Rosalind Franklin (officially supervised by JD Bernal). Tragically, Franklin died during this period and the work was completed with Aaron Klug… After a post-doc (1960-61) at Childrens’ Hospital Boston, with Don Caspar where he also started to work on muscle structure with Carolyn Cohen, he returned to the newly opened Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge. Here he developed methods and X-ray optics for the analysis of structures by X-ray fibre diffraction. He worked with Aaron Klug on the structure of tobacco mosaic virus… In 1968 he moved to Heidelberg to open the Department of Biophysics at the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research where he remained as director until his retirement in 2003. During this time he completed the structure of tobacco mosaic virus…” https://www.mr.mpg.de/emeritusgruppen/biophysik/holmes/curriculum_vitae#:~:text=After%20a%20post-doc%20%281960-61%29%20at%20Childrens%E2%80%99%20Hospital%20Boston%2C,the%20analysis%20of%20structures%20by%20X-ray%20fibre%20diffraction.

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Rosalind Franklin and her three assistants (Klug, Holmes, and Finch) were funded by the Agricultural Research Council – Holmes was assigned to work on the structure of TMV for his PhD while Klug and Finch investigated additional plant viruses. In all, they produced 17 papers on TMV. In October 1957, with funding from the U.S. (Public Health Service and NIH) they began the study of poliovirus.

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John T. Finch –“John’s first project on TYMV [turnip yellow mosaic virus] was technically demanding because of the very large unit cell (700 Å), then the largest that had been studied… Comparing the patterns from the full and empty particles, they showed that the protein coat was likely to have icosahedral symmetry, with the nucleic acid having lower symmetry (4), in accord with earlier suggestions about the symmetry of the coats of small spherical viruses (Crick & Watson 1956). At the time it was not feasible to take the analysis to high resolution by X-ray diffraction, so John later turned to electron microscopy to study TYMV.

…At the Birkbeck lab… Finch’s “second PhD project involved crystals of poliovirus, which were given to Rosalind in 1957 by Drs Schaffer and Schwerdt from Berkeley… [P]olio was still a scourge in the 1950s. However, Sir Lawrence Bragg (FRS 1921), director of the Royal Institution, was very interested in the project and he allowed John to continue to use the X-ray set up there, even though the containment facilities were no better than at Birkbeck. Aaron wrote out a protocol for storing and handling the crystals, which were transferred to the School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, across the road from Birkbeck. John mounted them there and then took them to the Royal Institution for X-raying. Only crystals mounted in [glass] capillaries could be brought into the laboratory, with adequate supplies of neutralizing formaldehyde close by in case of accidents. The members of the group were vaccinated against polio with the newly available Salk vaccine. X-ray exposures were long, sometimes overnight, and, as someone had to be in attendance, John remembered the nighttime Royal Institution as an eerie place…  The study showed that poliovirus was rather similar to the small, spherical plant viruses also being worked on then, but the analysis was not taken any further.” https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsbm.2018.0028

*(Mrs. Carlton Schwerdt, Patsy, hand-carried the crystal poliovirus from San Francisco to London in her purse)

*

Poliovirus was not just “rather similar to the small, spherical plant viruses” –it was identical, and the ‘next generation’ of  protein crystallographers trained under this group and their associates would have to learn it for themselves.

*

Learning about the identical structure of the small (but ‘macromolecule’) plant viruses and poliovirus came as a “surprise” to crystallographer Michael G. Rossmann, who was convinced by his ‘team’ crystallography expert, Roland Rueckert, not to compete with his friend and colleague Jim Hogle studying poliovirus 1 (the Mahoney strain).  The Mahoney strain makes the best crystals, but it is also considered highly virulent, paralyzing 80% of those infected with it. No infections at the laboratories handling the Mahoney strain (in this work) have ever been recorded. The Mahoney type 1 poliovirus was collected in 1941 from the pooled feces of three children of the Mahoney family who were ‘asymptomatic’ during an outbreak in the Cleveland Ohio area.

*

Poliovirus type1 Mahoney strain

Source: http://www.virology.wisc.edu/virusworld/viruslist.php?virus=p1m

*

GRASP (project) computer-generated video of rotating poliovirus1 http://www.virology.wisc.edu/virusworld/viruslist.php?virus=p1m#youtube

More elaborate video of poliovirus1(Mahoney) modeling structure, movement, and antiviral drug ‘entry’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WBDKmDS734E&feature=emb_logo

                                                                           *****************************************************************

*During most of the 1970s, Michael Rossmann studied Southern Bean Mosaic Virus, although he was eager to work on a human pathogen. He was persuaded to study human rhinoviruses and picked rhinovirus #14.

*

*Southern Bean Mosaic Virus (SBMV), with two views*

*

*

Michael Rossmann –‘MR’– gave an Oral History to Sondra Schlesinger –‘SS’– of Washington University St. Louis in February of 1999. Here’s an edited excerpt:

SS. Let’s spend a little more time on southern bean mosaic virus, because that was really the first time you really had a structure to look at.

MR It was the second virus structure.

SS What you said was that it told you more about evolution than about function.

MR It told us about evolution but then when I started to learn the graphics – I spent a half a year studying the graphics – I worked out all the structural relationships …and of course this was published in a paper..[where] I go into great detail about the way the T=3 symmetry works. And the T=3 symmetry doesn’t actually work quite like Caspar and Klug predicted, but it roughly works. There are deviations and what is accurate and what is inaccurate, what is quasi and what is not quasi. I worked all this out for southern bean mosaic virus…

About that time…in 1980 I went to the Strasbourg International Conference of Virology. I had the opportunity to talk with Roland Rueckert . We were not that far away [from] each other in America but we had to go all the way to France to talk and we decided to combine our projects on rhinovirus. Actually, even before, Aaron Klug had shown that poliovirus crystallizes and so I had Sherin Abdel-Meguid, a post doc with me go to Ellie Ehrenfeld’s lab in Salt Lake City to start working on poliovirus. Of course Jim Hogle was working on poliovirus too and so Roland said you really shouldn’t compete like that. Roland was quite right because we had no idea or very little idea that rhino and polio viruses would be so similar.

SS Maybe this is really hindsight but since you had just found that southern bean mosaic virus and tomato bushy stunt virus were similar, it couldn’t have been quite as surprising to expect polio and rhino to be similar.

MR No, No, in fact, when we did solve rhino virus – it is very, very similar to southern bean mosaic virus – the only difference is that southern bean and tomato bushy stunt have 3 identical subunits A, B and C. In the picornaviruses [rhino and polio,ie ] A is VP1, B is VP3 and C is VP2.

SS I would have thought you would have expected rhino and polio to be similar.

MR No. we really didn’t. But something did happen. Our first crystals, not very good, of rhino virus were actually pseudo-isomorphous to Aaron Klug’s crystals of polio. Then we realized, although we could never do much with those crystals, they weren’t very good. Then we realized there would be a relationship, but not before that. Maybe we were just stupid. Maybe you would have realized [it] as a virologist.

SS No, I think it’s hindsight in a sense…

SS In fact, let’s go back to Francis Crick, we all use the example that he and Watson made about viruses being composed of identical subunits. Did that influence your thinking at all?

MR Yes! Definitely. That was the reason why I wanted to study viruses. They are ideal for molecular replacement.

SS Because they are identical?

MR We didn’t know how identical. Lots of people argued with us.

SS So now we’re just about ready to start with rhinovirus. You had chosen them partly because of your discussions with Roland?

MR Yes and he was extremely helpful…

SS How did you choose which rhinovirus to work on?

MR Roland made that decision. He rightly wanted a rhino virus that was easy to propagate that could be propagated in quantity. He looked into what was a good serotype for that and it was rhino 14…

[end excerpt, page 9 on WORD pagination] http://virologyhistory.wustl.edu/rossmann.htm

*

                           *computer model rhinovirus showing receptors* https://www.sciencephoto.com/media/249476/view

                           *model rhinovirus with antibodies attached * https://www.sciencephoto.com/media/249477/view

*

[excerpt2]

MR…Now what we did for rhino virus was to extend from 6 angstroms, where the map was just nothing really to 3.5 angstrom resolution and the map changed from nothing to something which we could interpret very quickly and we must have got to this on some early date in April [1985]. … we printed out the map and we stacked the map – that took all day… I started looking at it in the evening and, before it was too long into the night, I had been able to trace the VP1 chain and there was some helpful data from Roland and Barbara Sherry about mutations which were involved in binding antibodies and these should be on the surface …and I think it was by the end of that 2nd day [which]..was a Tuesday that we had placed all the amino acids of VP1, 2 and 3. VP1 I had done in the evening [before] and then we did VP2 and VP3 the next day. It was a very, very good map… You might have had 30 steps, I’m not quite sure of the exact number, in going from 6 angstroms to 3.5 and at each step you do many cycles and each cycle takes a long time. It was a big computer operation in which we had made a mistake halfway through and had to backtrack. We wasted about 2 weeks in that but I knew when I saw that 3.5 angstrom map that it was an incredibly good map.

SS At that time what was the resolution for southern bean mosaic virus?

MR About 3 angstoms. The other thing which we realized in those two days was that the structure [of rhinovirus 14] was like southern bean mosaic virus, that VP1 corresponded to the A subunit, VP2 to the C subunit and so on- and that was an immediate realization. Actually, Jim Hogle was working on polio at that time at Scripps in La Jolla and I visited him on a number of occasions. He called me just before lunch so I couldn’t go out with the rest of the lab and by the time the lab got back I was still on the phone. One thing I remember very clearly, I was describing to Jim the structure and I was assuming that Jim had realized this would be like tomato bushy stunt and turnip crinkle which he had worked on in Steve Harrison’ lab and suddenly I realized that Jim didn’t understand what I was saying. I said, ‘Jim, this is like tomato bushy stunt and southern bean mosaic virus.’

[end excerpt, p14]

•                                                                             James M. Hogle

*

**

*

The upshot of Michael Rossmann’s long phone call to Jim Hogle was a decision to help him ‘understand’ and use the rhinovirus model to resolve the structure of poliovirus. A key to this effort was in identifying the ‘canyons’ on the capside surface –the deep depressions which Rossmann figured to be receptor binding sites, where a cell surface and a virus interact. Rossmann’s team also discovered capsid surface mutations where antibodies would not bind to the virus –called escape mutations:

[excerpt3]

MR …we saw that the escape mutations were on the surface. We didn’t have [as] many sequences of rhinoviruses as there were for poliovirus which had just been published. [But we still] saw that these were hypervariable regions and that they were on the surface and were not in the canyon. We didn’t know anything about conservation of residues [the amino acid regularity of sequences that stay the same in replication, from one virus to the next] in the canyon but it immediately suggested why the canyon was there – namely for receptor binding.

SS So you’re saying that the idea of receptor binding came immediately?

MR Yes, within days of the structure… [So] When I wrote the initial draft paper [on rhinovirus], I was looking up all the foot-and-mouth disease virus stuff, all the poliovirus stuff. Unfortunately its my habit that I don’t usually read until afterwards and so I was reading…and it was really a very good education for me at this point.

SS Had the receptor for rhino been identified by then?

MR No, not until 1989…

[cont.]…the polio work now had a lot of help from us because Jim (Hogle) knew what to look for. It was like turnip crinkle virus which Jim had worked on with Steve. He also learned how we had solved it…

SS In the poliovirus work, did they have all these escape mutants?…

MR Oh yes, absolutely, in fact there was a meeting in Philadelphia…in March of 1985 where Philip Minor was and he had escape mutations but he couldn’t organize them [to predict their locations] and [Barbara Sherry] showed him how to do it…

[Inserted by author] When Philip Minor read Michael Rossmann’s oral history he wrote that his ‘data of which there was a substantial pile had well organized long before he met Barbara Sherry at the 1985 Philadelphia meeting… He continued to explain, ‘Polio suffered from its peculiar antigenic properties. Most of the monoclonal antibodies against type 2 and type 3 are against a site which is not normally seen at all in type 1 [the Mahoney strain]. This is hard to believe for such similar viruses and the field fell into a morass of peptides…and immunogenic sites…[which] was seriousy misleading…[and] clearly thought by Michael to have seriously misinterpreted their data…  Philip Minor wrote that he thought that ‘the strange imbalance in immunogenicity in the [polio] virus (which is not seen to the same extent in rhinovirus) has major effects on the pathogenesis and epidemiology of polio and the type specific distribution of disease, and is therefore of absolutely no interest to x-ray crystallographers.’ …..

SS So what were some of the surprises from the rhinovirus work?

MR The biggest surprise which we didn’t expect was that it was like the plant viruses, that animal viruses were like plant viruses. That was a big surprise…

[end excerpts at http://virologyhistory.wust.edu/rossmann.htm]

*

Philip D. Minor is head of the UK government National Institute for Biological Standards and Control and advisory member of the WHO

*

In this slideshow presentation, the author introduces plant viruses and states that Four Families out of eleven plant virus families infect plants and animals.

Slideshow https://slideplayer.com/slide/5327863/

*

….continued…..

Planting Viruses Three  https://jenniferlake.wordpress.com/2021/01/30/planting-viruses-three/

COVID: Going Down With Polio

 

*

*

COVID-19 vaccinees are going down with polio (tranverse myelitis, Guillain-Barre, AFP paralysis, etc) and its primary form of encephalitis which makes “polio forever” relevant once again. https://www.polioforever.wordpress.com

Today I can say this is the start of polioforever’s last chapter and it all comes down to the simplicity of viral forms –call it Shape Matters Two: The essence of biological currency and the universal foundation of ‘recognition’ from our immune systems and among all creatures. Viruses as we ‘see’ them have three shapes, like primary colors — spheres, rods, and the combined sphere-rod. Everything else is dressing.

*

The primitive nanotechnology of the 20^th century called Virology has come of age with Three Master Keys to the Kingdom: bacteriophage (sphere-rod), poliovirus (sphere) and Tobacco Mosaic Virus (rod). Unmasking the keys and dressing them down will tell the story of viruses in our time, from tobacco mosaic virus to coronavirus, or what some of you know from me as “TMV to CoV”. Breaking down and rearranging these biological master keys for useful purposes was called “metabiology” by Jonas Salk, who coined the term and brought the OPV polio vaccine to fruition as we entered the ‘peak fallout’ period of atmospheric nuclear testing. Polio is caused by radiation and chemical toxins.

*

 

Bacteriophage*

 

poliovirus sphere*                                                                                                                                 icosahedron

 

 

*tobacco mosaic virus rod*

*

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Poliovirus by other names and other species:

Tobacco Bushy Stunt Virus* TBSV*

                                                                                    TBSV*

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Poliovirus electron micrograph

Aggregation of poliovirus*

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………………………………………………………….BMV = Brome Mosaic Virus………………….TBSV = Tobacco Bushy Stunr Virus…………….TYMV=Turnip Yellow Mosaic Virus

 

 

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Cowpea Mosaic Virus*                                                                                          icosahedron, showing pattern of regular pentamer  subunits.

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…transitional forms*

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Human Rhinovirus*

Rhinovirus infections are the chief cause of the common cold. Thrive in the lower temperature of the nose (33oC) They are transmitted by airborne respiratory droplets or contact with contaminated objects. Figure 15.02: A Rhinovirus. Human rhinovirus 16: Picornaviridae; Rhinovirus; Human rhinovirus A; strain (NA). Hadfield, A.T., Lee, W.M., Zhao, R., Oliveira, M.A., Minor, I., Rueckert, R.R. and Rossmann, M.G. (1997). The refined structure of human rhinovirus 16 at 2.15 A resolution:

 

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Norwalk virus*

Cucumber Mosaic Virus,’negative’ image of Norwalk*

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Look again at poliovirus*

 

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carbon*

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*

If you’re uncertain about what you’re really looking at with the virus images (re: the same thing), see the previous posts: ‘Virus: Shape Matters’ and ‘The Nanoflower Shop’ for clarity. After this, a storyline begins about poliovirus and tobacco mosaic virus investigated by a group of researchers who gathered around Rosalind Franklin and J.D. Bernal at Birkbeck College London.  In 1958, this group made two virus models for the Brussels World Exhibition; poliovirus and tobacco mosaic, the subjects of their study.

1958 World’s Fair poliovirus model*

1958 World’s Fair TMV* displayed at Int’l Science Building, Brussels*

 

 

*

The Virus Structure Research Group at Birkbeck College London, under the direction of J.D. Bernal, a communist and transhumanist since the 1920s, included Rosalind Franklin, Aaron Klug, John Finch, Kenneth Holmes and several others; Nobel Laureate Francis Crick, Americans Don Caspar and, by extension, Barry Commoner, the Fraenkel-Conrats, and more. The Birkbeck researchers focused on polivirus and TMV. Crick told the group that ‘any child could make a virus’. In 1958 Crick was invited to become a lifetime staff scientist at the Salk Institute of Biological Studies, then forming in La Jolla near San Diego. His ‘group’ at Birkbeck deferred to him often. Aaron Klug took over leadership of the group after Rosalind Franklin died of ovarian cancer in ‘58 and Crick accepted his honors and appointments in the U.S.

Klug wrote to Crick on Feb.13, 1959:

“Dear Francis,

… I feel it is now appropriate to draw attention to the occurrence of icosahedral symmetry in 5 viruses (although I haven’t mentioned Bea’s result on SBMV). I am now trying to see whether it is possible to classify the ways in which a large virus like Tipula IV might be built up out of subunits, a problem you suggested some time ago. It seems to me that one must start off with…a small virus and then try to make a ‘crystal’ of it, by adding more subunits to try to achieve close packing. In this way…one can arrive at 3 families of icosahedra, namely : truncated icosahedron, small rhomb-icosadodecahedron and snub dodecahedron.”

*

https://collections.nlm.nih.gov/catalog/nlm:nlmuid-101584582X213-doc

“Bea’s SBMV” refers to Beatrice A. Singer, the wife of TMV expert Heinz Fraenkel-Conrat, who worked at the University of California Berkeley ‘Rad Lab’ –the famed ‘Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’ (LBNL, and its affiliate Lawrence Livermore) founded by Ernest O. Lawrence. Singer and her husband were jointly working on Tobacco Mosaic Virus mutants and sharing their samples and knowledge.

“Southern Bean Mosaic Virus (SBMV) .  The virus of our story is Southern Bean Mosaic Virus (SBMV), a humble RNA-containing plant virus that infects bean plants in the South of the United States. Neither SMBV nor its relative TBSV were ever as famous as the animal viruses that are fashionable today as human pathogens (for instance, AIDS virus or common cold -rhino virus-). Small…plant viruses like them were easy to obtain…[and] easy to crystallize and consequently they were the objects of a concerted effort to obtain their atomic structure by X-ray diffraction methods with conventional in-house X-ray sources. Viruses had to be constructed from a few identical subunits. [We call them “virus-like particles”, or VLPs, today—JL]. The icosahedral symmetry of small spherical viruses had been proposed by Watson and Crick in the early fifties[1]… they predicted that the virus envelopes would be highly symmetrical, and most likely icosahedral, containing at least twenty copies of the coat protein in the shell, or capsid.  The detailed arrangement of the proteins in the capsid on the surface, and a preliminary classification of icosahedral viruses was presented by Caspar and Klug in their classic 1962 paper [2].”

https://crystaledges.org/the-ballad-of-the-2-8-angstroms-structure-of-sbmv/

*

Southern Bean Mosaic (SBMV)*

 

 

* 1957

…”Electron micrographs showing details of the internal structure of plant virus crystals are presented to demonstrate the values of the procedure. Crystals of purified tobacco ringspot virus and squash mosaic virus and some portions of turnip yellow mosaic virus crystals have been shown to exhibit hexagonal packing…”

 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/13416310/

*

At Birkbeck lab, Franklin’s graduate student assistant John Finch’s “second PhD project involved crystals of poliovirus, which were given to Rosalind in 1957 by Drs Schaffer and Schwerdt from Berkeley… The study showed that poliovirus was rather similar to the small, spherical plant viruses also being worked on then, but the analysis was not taken any further.” https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsbm.2018.0028

 

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*Rosalind Franklin (b1920—d1958) became posthumously famous for failing to be included in the Nobel Prize given to Crick, Watson and Wilkins for discovering the structure of DNA, presumably learned from her crystallography images of Tobacco Mosaic Virus (TMV):

“Although best known for being the British physical chemist whose crucial experimental data enabled James Watson and Frances Crick to solve the structure of DNA as early as 1953, she received no gracious mention from either of them during their Nobel Prize speeches. Indeed, until 1968 when Watson wrote The Double Helix, she had only received vague credit for stimulating their work rather than specific credit for contributing to their original proposal.” https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/franklin-rosalind

 

*

“Tobacco mosaic virus, which causes tobacco leaves to curl and discolor in patches (hence “mosaic”) had been a model for virus studies since the 1880s; it was a simple, stable, and highly infectious organism. Understanding the structure of viruses was the first step in learning how they caused disease. By 1950 it was known that viruses consisted of protein and DNA or RNA (ribonucleic acid). Bernal and Fankuchen had found that TMV was composed of identical protein subunits. James Watson, during his hiatus from DNA modeling in 1952, worked briefly with TMV and established that the protein subunits were arranged in a spiral. Franklin’s challenge was to find out whether the RNA was in the middle of the spiral, like a candle wick, or embedded in the proteins. She was aided in this work by Aaron Klug, then a postdoctoral fellow in theoretical physics and chemistry, and two research assistants, Kenneth Holmes and John Finch. For a time, the team also included Donald Caspar, an American biophysicist. When her Turner and Newall fellowship ended in 1954, Birkbeck arranged three years of support from the Agricultural Research Council (ARC) for Franklin’s team…

“…1954 also marked Franklin’s first visit to the United States. Invited to the Gordon Conference to give a paper on coal chemistry that summer, she also scraped together funding for visits to virus researchers at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole (where her visit coincided with the 1954 hurricane), Washington University in St. Louis, the University of California in Berkeley, and California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, among others. She made new contacts and renewed older ones, building a network of colleagues whose work complemented and informed her own. She returned home with virus samples and promises of collaboration from leading American scientists such as Wendell Stanley and Barry Commoner…

“[By] the summer of 1956, she was at the top of her profession. She had assembled a fine research team, and their work produced a steady stream of publications. She had established a wide network of research contacts and collaborators, and was invited to meetings everywhere. (Wendell Stanley would later call her “an international courier of good will and scientific information.”) And though she struggled with the ARC over funding (they disapproved of her working on “second hand material” from other labs, among other things) there was a good chance that a grant from the U.S. National Institutes of Health would provide alternative funding. While in America she was honored with a request from the Royal Institution for models of helical and spherical viruses, for an exhibit in the International Science Hall of the 1958 Brussels World Fair. (The five foot tall models–modified from early versions constructed from ping pong balls and plastic bicycle handlebar grips–were well received.)

…. “Work continued on plant viruses–the team prepared over a dozen papers for publication in 1956-57–and Franklin had also started planning a project examining polio virus. She applied for and received a three year research grant from the U.S. National Institutes of Health, ensuring the survival of her research group. In March 1958, the cancer advanced again, and Franklin returned to the hospital. She died on April 16, not quite 38 years old.

“In the obituaries he wrote for the Times and Nature, J. D. Bernal praised her beautifully executed researches, carried out with apparently effortless skill, and her gift for organizing research projects. He noted, “As a scientist Miss Franklin was distinguished by extreme clarity and perfection in everything she undertook. Her photographs are among the most beautiful x-ray photographs of any substance ever taken.” Her life, he concluded, was a perfect example of single-minded devotion to research.”

https://rmp.nlm.nih.gov/spotlight/kr/feature/viruses

 

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“The nature of the three-dimensional architecture of viruses and the assembly of viral subunits and nucleic acids have been among the central issues in virology over the past fifty years. Sir Aaron Klug (Medical Research Council Laboratory, Cambridge, UK), President of the Royal Society of London, offered his own historical perspective on the resolution of TMV architecture and its implications for virus self-assembly. Klug began working with R. Franklin in 1954, just two years before the first big picture of TMV quaternary structure emerged (Franklin et al., 1956). This picture was based largely on the high-quality x-ray photographs Franklin obtained from her samples of repolymerized, nucleic acid–free TMV particles (Franklin, 1955). Franklin thus confirmed J.D. Watson’s deduction that the rod-shaped virus was helical (Watson, 1954), but she also provided evidence that the helix was hollow rather than solid and that TMV RNA was embedded in the protein helix (Caspar, 1956; Franklin, 1956). Experimental evidence from these studies on TMV provided the basis for F.C. Crick and Watson’s contention that all viruses must be built up symmetrically from identical protein subunits that surround the nucleic acid (Crick and Watson, 1956). The elegant simplicity of this observation prompted the witticism, attributed to Crick, that “Any child could make a virus.” In listening to the participants at the Edinburgh symposium, one could not help but note that TMV research has been a serious playground (pace Max Delbrück) for some of the most formidable structural biologists of the twentieth century.”

http://www.plantcell.org/content/11/3/301

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**

*

*

………………………………………………………………………………………………..West Nile Virus*

Virus: Shape Matters

*

Structurally observed, researchers say they cannot tell the difference between influenza and coronaviruses.

*

Coronavirus (left) and Influenza virus (right), above

coronavirus*                                                                                                           labeled as a Covid-19 micrograph from China

and influenza*showing ‘rods and spheres’ (below)

It might surprise you to see both rods and spheres in an influenza micrograph, but the phenomenon appears common.

H7N9 (avian) influenza*

H5N1 (avian) influenza*

Matrix of H5N1*

 

Shape matters

“In his penetrating essays, scientist-author Lewis Thomas, discussing parasitism and symbiosis, described the forces that would drive all living matter into one huge ball of protoplasm were it not for recognition mechanisms that kept self and nonself apart. The origins of these recognition mechanisms go far back in evolutionary history, and many in fact, originated as markers for allowing cells to recognize each other to set up symbiotic households. Genetically related sponge colonies that are placed close to each other, for example, will tend to grow toward each other and fuse into one large colony. Unrelated colonies, however, will react in a different way, destroying cells that come in contact and leaving a rejection zone between the colonies. In the plant kingdom, similar types of recognition occur… The nature of these primitive recognition mechanisms has not been completely worked out, but almost certainly involves cell surface molecules that are able to specifically bind and adhere to other molecules on opposing cell surfaces. This simple method of molecular recognition has evolved over time into the very complex system of the immune response, which however, still retains as its essential feature the ability of a protein molecule to recognize and bind specifically to a particular shaped structure on another molecule. Such molecular recognition is the underlying principle involved in the discrimination between self and nonself by the immune response.” –p2, introduction, Immunology, a Short Course (fourth edition, 2000)by E.Benjamini, R.Coico, and G.Sunshine

*

Coronavirus comparisons to structurally identical viruses, both shape and surface spikes, has a few more surprises. And somewhere out there, if I can find it for my post, must be a corona “rod”.

It may look like this*   The small purple spheres are labeled “coronavirus” and the strange ’caterpillars’ are not labeled at all, shown growing on a Vero (African Green monkey) cell. Could those be “coronavirus” rods?

The rods above, by their shape, look like dead ringers for Marburg virus –the hemorrhagic fever called Marburg emerged in August of 1967 among pharmaceutical lab workers in Germany. The virus turned out to be traced to three shipments of African Green monkeys sent from Uganda. Laurie Garrett (our ‘Cassandra of Covid’) wrote about its emergence in The Coming Plague:

(p53) ”In August 1967 three factory workers in Marburg Germany reported in sick, suffering from muscle aches and mild fevers. The three men were employed at Behringwerke AG, the vaccine-producing subsidiary of pharmaceutical giant Hoechst, and though their ailments looked like nothing more than the flu, it was quite unusual for influenza to appear during Germany’s hot summer months. The men were referred to the Marburg University Hospital. The following day the three men became nauseated, their spleens enlarged and were tender to the touch, and their eyes became increasingly bloodshot…  Day by day more workers from the pharmaceutical plant fell ill… By September, twenty-three patients lay in agony in the Marburg University Hospital wards. Some fifty miles away in Frankfurt, six more individuals contracted the same mysterious disease at the German government’s Paul Ehrlich Institute. Four were also workers employed in pharmaceutical research… (p54) At the same time a third outbreak occurred in Belgrade Yugoslavia, involving a veterinarian and his wife. The thirty-one cases struck terror in European research circles….  (p55) By December of 1967 seven of the patients had died. Most succumbed within sixteen days of their first symptoms…  All of the original cases in Germany and Yugoslavia involved men who worked with monkeys. Furthermore, investigators discovered, each of the men had handled animals, or the tissue of animals, from the East African nation of Uganda.  The investigation narrowed when it was learned the monkeys were all of the same species: Cercopithecus aethiops, a type of vervet monkey common throughout Africa…[and] that all the monkeys came from three shipments of wild animals transported from Uganda to Belgrade, then on to Marburg and Frankfurt. When the first shipment of animals arrived in Belgrade, 49 of 99 monkeys were dead… The veterinarian’s autopsies of the dead monkeys revealed that the animals also had suffered massive hemorrhages…  (p56) Microscopic studies revealed that the Marburg virus could be found in two different forms. The first looked like a caterpillar, its long, thin, tubular shape coated with ‘fuzz’. Inside the tube was RNA (ribonucleic acid), the genetic blueprint of the virus. The ‘fuzz’ along the outside of the virus’s protein tube was a constellation of extruding protein receptors the virus used to gain entry into target cells. In its more mature and dangerous form, the viral tube was rolled up into a tight round coil…”  [end excerpt]

This illustrated coronavirus looks like what ‘mature’ Marburg sounds like.

CoV*                                                                RNA “rolled up into a tight round coil”, shaped like  Marburg’s secondary form, spikes and all.

*

Here’s another hemorrhagic fever virus shape-and-spike ringer for CoV and influenza

 

Lassa fever virus*,                                                           ‘emerged’ in January 1969 Nigeria among American hospital missionaries, sixteen months after Marburg.

*

Readers of John M. Barry’s The Great Influenza will remember descriptions of the dying as suffering the  swift and horrible symptoms of hemorrhagic fever—worse than descriptions of Marburg and Lassa in other popular books.  Within 24 hours to 3 days, worst-case victims with maddening pain suffocated without oxygen, their flesh turning blue, black and bloody, and died drowning in their own blood. The 1918 Spanish Flu, for want of a name, never returned and a causal microbe was never found, but no other descriptions fit this ‘flu’ than what we associate today with Ebola when it emerged in Africa in July of 1976.

Ebola looks like Marburg.

Ebola graphic*

Ebola*

 

*I’m going to suggest that Ebola picture ‘A’ above is a pencil drawing of Tobacco Rattle Virus (below) and possibly Tobacco Mosaic Virus and further suggest that these plant viruses were “humanized” into the pathogenic entities on this post: all of them –coronavirus, influenza, Marburg, Lassa, and Ebola.

TRV*

 

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Ebola-TMV hybrid looks identical to Tobacco Rattle Virus in image ‘c’ provider of EBOV-TMV hybrid:

 Design of virus-based nanomaterials for medicine, biotechnology, and energy.

Wen AM¹,

Steinmetz NF²

https://europepmc.org/article/pmc/pmc5068136

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Tobacco Mosaic Virus*

Ebola*

The value of Tobacco Mosaic Virus in nanobiotech can hardly be overstated:

“TMV Scaffolds Used to Make Other Nanoparticles

“Nanoparticles are well sought into because of their applications in drug delivery and in other nanotechnologies. The tobacco mosaic virus is a symmetrical rod of repeating subunits of protein stacked on top of each other, which has the ability to be reformed into other nanoparticle shapes. Research into diverse nanoparticle shapes are being looked into to see their potential use in in vivo studies^[10]. Research has found that when TMV rods are heated up they can collapse to take on different structures and sizes of spherical nanoparticles. These different sized nanoparticles have the potential to be used in the medical field to find a variety of delivery and imagining agents[10]. The spherical nanoparticles form as a result of heating the TMV to 94 °C for at least ten seconds. The size of the nanoparticles can vary depending on the concentration of the TMV that is in solution at one time[10]. The reported sizes of these spherical nanoparticles are between 50-800 nm in diameter and can range in morphology by changing the temperature and time under heat conditions[10]. For the complete conversion of TMV into the spherical nanoparticles, 125 seconds at 100 °C is required. Shorter times at 100 °C will result in a mix of TMV rods and spheres. Longer times at 100 °C will not change the morphology of the spherical nanoparticles[10]. Further investigation into these different nanoparticle shapes could lead to novel structures that can be used for medical applications in drug delivery that researchers are not yet aware of.”  https://microbewiki.kenyon.edu/index.php/Tobacco_Mosaic_Virus_Uses_In_Pharmaceutical_Research

 

More to come as part 2

The Weight of Evil

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Portal of the Last Judgement, center (2^nd) door of the Notre Dame de Paris façade.

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When I first saw the central Portal of the Last Judgement on the face of Notre Dame in Paris, I was looking up from the portal threshold and perceived the ‘scale’ to be the globe with a life-size devil and his minion manipulating the ‘world’ balance. From a higher visual perspective, he is handling the balance of good-and-evil .  Notice the devil’s right hand is over the top crosspiece of the scale in front of its right shoulder.  From the ground, the demon looks straight down at you as you enter the cathedral.

*Not shown in this picture is the line of pious ‘scholars’ dressed similarly and reading books, coming into the center from the left. The lofty uncommon human figures of the portal all move in one direction—to the right, as you face it.

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A profoundly haunting challenge appears to me in the interpretation of the façade. Built over the course of a hundred years, Notre Dame, like other gothic cathedrals of the era, occupied a central place of power in the emerging civilization of Europe. The Holy Roman Empire under the Church, which established itself as the dominant organizing factor of the Carolingian monarchy begun by Charlemagne,  vaunted its victory over the minds of men,  and was perhaps at its peak in ‘mid-evil’ times as crusades and inquisitions spread across the civilized landscape.  The Portal of the Last Judgement, I take it, is commentary in stone from the builder/designers invoking the inherent evil of institutions of power and ‘knowledge’ –a cautionary tale about human nature ‘set above’ the ordinary and invested with professional rank.

In his book,  1992’s Dumbing Us Down,  John Taylor Gatto might call the portal image the wages of mass schooling and institutional networks.  The ‘devil’s bargain’ in the network is the apparent lightening of the burden of ‘good.’

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Several times over a Teacher of the Year, Mr. Gatto:

“In the growth of human society, families came first, communities second, and only much later came the institutions set up by the community to serve it… Particularly [now] in the United States, spokesmen for institutional life have demanded a role above and beyond service to family and communities. They have sought to command and prescribe as kings used to do…  Institutions, say their political philosophers, are better at creating marching orders for the human race than families are, therefore they should no longer be expected to follow but should lead. Institutional leaders have come to regard themselves as great synthetic fathers to millions of synthetic children, by which I mean to all of us. This theory sees us bound together in some abstract family relationship in which the state is the true mother and father; hence it insists on our first and best loyalty… I want to examine the destructive effects the false claim of institutional prerogative has on both individual and family life… If we return to our original discussion of networks, it will be clear that every one of our national institutions is a place where men, women, and children are isolated according to some limited aspect of their total humanity… [pp60-61]

“If the loss of true community entailed by masquerading in networks is not noticed in time, a condition arises in the victim’s spirit very much like the ‘trout starvation’ that used to strike wilderness explorers whose diet…gradually suffers for want of sufficient nutrients. Networks like schools are not communities, just as school training is not education. By preempting [a majority] percent of the total time of the young, by locking young people up with other young people exactly their own age, by ringing bells to start and stop wprk, by asking people to think about the same thing at the same time in the same way, by grading people the way we grade vegetables—and in a dozen other vile and stupid ways—network schools steal the vitality of communities and replace it with an ugly mechanism. No one survives these places with their humanity intact… [p56]

“It is a fact generally ignored when considering the communal nature of institutional families like schools, large corporations, colleges, armies, hospitals, and government agencies that they are not real communities at all, but networks. Unlike communities, networks…have a very narrow way of allowing people to associate, and that way is always across a short spectrum of one, or at most a few, specific uniformities…  [and] in spite of any genuine emotional attractions that might be there, human behavior in network situations often resemble a dramatic act—matching a script produced to meet the demands of a story. And as such, the intimate moments in the networks lack the sustaining value of their counterparts in community. [pp54-55]   …A community is a place in which people face each other over time in all their human variety, good parts, bad parts, and all the rest. Such places promote the highest quality of life possible, lives of engagement and participation. This happens in unexpected ways, but it never happens when you’ve spent more than a decade listening to other people talk and trying to do what they tell you to do, trying to please them after the fashion of schools. It makes a real lifelong difference whether you avoid that training or it traps you… People interact on thousands of invisible pathways in a community, and the emotional payoff is correspondingly rich and complex. But networks can only manage a cartoon simulation of community and provide a very limited payoff. [pp56-57]

“You must understand that first and foremost the business [of teaching] I am in is a jobs project and an agency for letting contracts. We [schoolers] cannot afford to save money by reducing the scope of our operation or by diversifying the product we offer, even to help children grow up right. That is the iron law of institutional schooling—it is a business, subject neither to normal accounting procedures nor to the rational scalpel of competition…  After an adult lifetime spent teaching school, I believe the method of mass-schooling is its only real content. Don’t be fooled into thinking that good curriculum or good equipment or good teachers are the critical determinants of your son’s or daughter’s education. All the pathologies we’ve considered [in the book] come about in large measure because the lessons of school prevent children keeping important appointments with themselves and with their families to learn lessons in self-motivation, perseverance, self-reliance, courage, dignity, and love—and lessons in service to others, too, which are among the key lessons of home and community life… These lessons cannot be learned in schools as they are. School is… a jail sentence… [pp19-21]

“In fact the name ‘community’ hardly applies to the way we interact with each other. We live in networks, not communities, and everyone I know is lonely because of that. School is a major actor in this tragedy, as it is a major actor in the widening gulf among social classes… [and] schools and schooling are increasingly irrelevant to the great enterprises of the planet. No one believes anymore that scientists are trained in science classes or politicians in civics classes or poets in English classes. The truth is that schools don’t really teach anything except how to obey orders… and…[despite] thousands of humane, caring people [who] work in schools…the abstract logic of the institution overwhelms their individual contributions… [The] institution is psychopathic; it has no conscience…  Schools were designed…to be instruments of the scientific management of a mass population…[and] to produce, through the application of formulas, formulaic human beings whose behavior can be predicted and controlled… It is absurd and anti-life to be part of a system that compels you to…confinement…[and] effectively cuts you off from the immense diversity of life and the synergy of variety; indeed it cuts you off from your own past and future, sealing you in a continuous present…that allows you no privacy and even follows you into the sanctuary of your home demanding that you do its ‘homework’ [pp24-27]

“I want to tell you what the effect on our children is of taking all their time from them…and forcing them to spend it on abstractions…  (1)The children I teach are indifferent to the adult world… nobody wants children to grow up these days, least of all the children…  (2) The children I teach have almost no curiosity and what little they do have is transitory. They cannot concentrate for very long… (3) The children I teach have a poor sense of the future, of how tomorrow is inextricably linked to today. As I said before, they live in a continuous present, the exact moment they are in is the boundary of their consciousness. (4) The children I teach are ahistorical; they have no sense of how the past has predestinated their own present, limiting their choices, shaping their values and lives. (5) The children I teach are cruel to each other; they lack compassion…laugh at weakness…[and] have contempt for people whose need for help shows too plainly. (6) The children I teach are uneasy with intimacy or candor…because of a lifelong habit of preserving a secret inner self inside a larger outer personality made up of artificial bits and pieces of [borrowed] behavior… [The] disguise wears thin in the presence of intimacy, so intimate relationships have to be avoided. (7) The children I teach are materialistic, following the lead of schoolteachers who materialistically ‘grade everything’…  (8) The children I teach are dependent, passive, and timid in the presence of new challenges… frequently masked by surface bravado or by anger or aggressiveness, but underneath is a vacuum without fortitude…. Either schools have caused these pathologies, or television has, or both…  There simply isn’t enough other time in the experience of our kids for there to be other significant causes. [pp30-32]

“Genuine reform is possible but it shouldn’t cost anything. More money and more people pumped into this sick institution will only make it sicker. We need to rethink the fundamental premises of schooling and decide what it is we want all children to learn and why. For…[generations] this nation has tried to impose objectives downward from a lofty command center made up of ‘experts,’ a central elite of social engineers. It hasn’t worked. It won’t work. And it is a gross betrayal of the democratic promise that once made [our country] a noble experiment. The Russian attempt to create Plato’s republic in Eastern Europe has exploded before our eyes; our own attempt to impose the same sort of central orthodoxy using the schools as an instrument is also coming apart at the seams, albeit more slowly and painfully. It doesn’t work because its fundamental premises are mechanical, anti-human, and hostile to family life. Lives can be controlled by machine education but they will always fight back with weapons of social pathology; drugs, violence, self-destruction, indifference, and the symptoms I see in the children I teach. [p33]

….”We’ve got to give kids independent time right away because that is the key to self-knowledge, and we must reinvolve them with the real world as fast as possible so that the…time  can be spent on something other than abstraction. This is an emergency…  Experts in education have never been right; their ‘solutions’ are expensive, self-serving, and always involve further centralization. We’ve seen the results. It’s time for a return to democracy, individuality, and family.” [p38] …I disagree so strongly with the fundamental premise that networks are workable substitutes for families… [that] we shouldn’t be thinking of more school but of less. People who admire our school institution usually admire networking in general…and overlook its negative aspect—that networks, even good ones, drain the vitality from communities…[and] provide mechanical (‘by the numbers’) solutions to human problems, when a slow, organic process of self-awareness, self-discovery, and cooperation is what is required… Aristotle saw, a long time ago, that fully participating in a complex range of human affairs was the only way to become fully human… [p52]

“Networks, however, don’t require the whole person, but only a narrow piece. If you function in a network it asks you to suppress all the parts of yourself except the network-interest part—a highly unnatural act although one you can get used to. In exchange, the network will deliver efficiency in the pursuit of some limited aim. This is in fact a devil’s bargain, since on the promise of some future gain one must surrender the wholeness of one’s present humanity. If you enter into too many of these bargains you will split yourself into many specialized pieces, none of them completely human. And no time is available to reintegrate them. This, ironically, is the destiny of many successful networkers…  The fragmentation caused by excessive networking creates diminished humanity, a sense our lives are out of [our own] control because they are.” [p53]. Dumbing Us Down, by John Taylor Gatto, 1992.

Eugenics and Vaccines

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Turn back the clock a hundred years to a Supreme Court decision that upheld a case of involuntary sterilization in Buck v. Bell (1927), the most famous legal ruling in the American eugenics crusade against the ‘unfit’. The majority decision, written by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., sanctioned the practice of sterilization surgery by public health authorities with these words:

“It is better for all the world if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes. Three generations of imbeciles is enough.”  Holmes was referring to Carrie Buck, her mother Emma, and her young daughter, Vivian, born in March of 1924 while Carrie was institutionalized by the State of Virginia. (source ref. p121, War Against the Weak, by Edwin Black, 2003)

The broad principle of compulsory vaccination, we infer from Holmes, is the preeminent exercise of the state to dispense with any perceived biological threat to society for the common good, established in 1905 (Jacobson v. Massaschusetts) as the right to “vaccinate and revaccinate” according to the dictates of the state. War Against the Weak further informs readers that the influential Holmes “asserted that the idea of inherent rights [of individuals] was ‘intrinsically absurd’,“  and taught as a matter of course in his 1881 lecture series, The Common Law. Citing statistics kept until the end of 1940, Edwin Black reported that in sum “no fewer than 35,878 men and women had been sterilized or castrated—almost 30,000 of them after Buck v. Bell.” (p123) What is not reported by Mr. Black’s statistics is whether and how many of the numbers of sterilized were committed to institutional life sentences as were Carrie Buck and her mother. Carrie’s daughter Vivian was adopted and assessed to be ‘normal’ in every way and eugenical standards shortly fell out of favor.

Rise of the New Biology, or ‘newgenics,’ rapidly followed: “A concerted physicochemical attack on the gene was initiated at the moment in history when it became unacceptable to advocate social control based on crude eugenic principles.” –p9, The Molecular Vision of Life,[sub-head] Caltech, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Rise of the New Biology by Lily E. Kay, 1993. “During the 1930s a new biology came into being that by the late 1950s was to endow scientists with unprecedented power over life. These three decades culminated in the elucidation of the self-replicating mechanisms of DNA and an explanation of its action in terms of information coding, representations that laid the cognitive foundations for genetic engineering. Scientists could now manipulate genes on the most fundamental level and attempt to control the course of biological and social evolution…[p3]… By defining life in terms of fundamental physicochemical mechanisms, molecular biology ultimately narrowed its principal focus…based on the protein paradigm, the premise that the salient features of life—reproduction, growth, neural function, immunity—could be explained through the structures and functions of proteins. In fact, guided by the protein paradigm, research on antibodies occupied a key position with the new biology. This important chapter, however, has been written out of the history of molecular biology.” –p5, ibid.

Let’s write the antibody chapter back in.

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War Against the Weak concludes with “Eugenics Becomes Genetics” and “Newgenics” chapters [pp411-444]] and a statement from James D. Watson, co-discoverer with Francis Crick of double-helix DNA structure, who “told a British film crew in 2003, ‘If you are really stupid, I would call that a disease. The lower 10 percent who really have difficulty, even in elementary school, what’s the cause of it? A lot of people would like to say, ‘Well, poverty, things like that.’ It probably isn’t. So, I’d like to get rid of that, to help the lower 10 percent.” –p442, War Against the Weak

…….more to come……

COVID: Accelerating Electrosensitivity

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I don’t have a TV but I do listen to the radio –NPR precisely– for 2 or 3 hours in the day. It’s the only station I can reliably tune-in, and ever since Sandy Hook when I learned that NPR was the principal partner in that media event, I listen. It’s the EAS (Emergency Alert System) mouthpiece of The Agenda. Our national radio theater is obsessed with the ‘changing world’ scenario of COVID. Radio guest Richard N. Haass, consultant to Bush I, Bush II, and president of the CFR, told the audience that COVID is “accelerating  history” (globalization) and is “not a choice.” Indeed. The “Rockefeller Model” of bottom-up transition is to “make the peaks higher,” or in this case the spikes, as we slide ahead — by the head–  into the Internet of Things.

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Here’s a biology and health lesson from The Invisible Rainbow by Arthur Firstenberg. Everything below is quotation except [bracketts]:

“Porphyrins are light sensitive pigments that play pivotal roles in the economy of both plants and animals…  In plants a porphyrin bound to magnesium is the pigment called chlorophyll…responsible for photosynthesis. In animals an almost identical molecule bound to iron is the pigment called heme, the essential part of hemoglobin that makes blood red and enables it to carry oxygen… Heme is also the central component of…enzymes…in every cell of every plant, animal and bacterium, that transport electrons from nutrients to oxygen so that our cells can extract energy. And heme is the main component of the cytochrome P-450 enzymes in our liver that detoxify environmental chemicals for us by oxidizing them.

“In other words, porphyrins are the very special molecules that interface between oxygen and life. They are responsible for the creation, maintenance, and recycling of all the oxygen in our atmosphere… The high reactivity of these molecules, which makes them the transformers of energy and their affinity for heavy metals, also makes them toxic when they accumulate in excess in the body, as happens in the disease called porphyria… (p136)   The enzymes of the heme pathway are among the most sensitive elements of the body to environmental toxins. (p137).  [In] a world in which toxic chemicals are inescapable, the porphyrin pathway is to some degree always stressed, and only those with high enough enzyme levels tolerate the pollution.

…[In] the early 1990s…Dr. William E. Morton, professor of occupational and environmental medicine at Oregon Health Sciences University…proposed that the controversial disease called multiple chemical sensitivity (MCS) was in most cases identical with one or more forms of porphyria. And when he began testing his MCS patients he found that, indeed, 90 percent of them were deficient in one or more porphyrin enzymes… Morton also found that most people with electrical sensitivity had porphyrin enzyme deficiencies, and that electrical and chemical sensitivities appeared to be manifestations of the same disease. Porphyria, Morton showed, is not the extremely rare [and misdiagnosed] illness it is currently thought to be, but has to affect at least five to ten percent of the world’s population. (p138).

“Porphyrins are central to our story not only because of a disease named porphyria, which affects a few percent of the population [perhaps 40-75 million people] but because of the part porphyrins play in the modern epidemics of heart disease, cancer, and diabetes which affect half the world, and because their very existence is a reminder of the role of electricity in life itself… (p139-140)

“Piezoelectricity, a property of crystals that makes them useful in electronic products that transforms mechanical stress into electrical voltages and vice versa, has been found in cellulose, collagen, horn, bone, wool, wood, tendon, blood vessel walls, muscle, nerve, fibrin, DNA, and every type of protein examined. In other words –something most biologists have been denying for two centuries—electricity is essential to biology… It was Otto Lehmann, already in 1908, who noticing the close resemblance between the shapes of known liquid crystals and many biological structures, proposed that the very basis of life was the liquid crystalline state. Liquid crystals, like organisms, had the ability to grow..; to heal wounds; to consume other substances or other crystals; to be poisoned; to form membranes; spheres, rods filaments and helical structures; to divide; to ‘mate’;..to transform chemical energy into mechanical motion.

…”In 1959, Daniel Eley, at Nottingham University, proved that dried proteins, amino acids, and porphyrins are…semiconductors. In 1962, Roderock Clayton…at Oak Ridge [Nat’l Lab] found that photosynthetic tissues in living plants behave like semiconducters. In 1970 Alan Adler, at the New England Institute, showed that thin films of porphyrin do also. (p143-144).

…”Adding thin films of porphyrins to commercially available photovoltaic cells increases the voltage, current, and total power output. (p145). The properties that make porphyrins suitable in electronics are the same properties that make us alive… The secret lies in the highly pigments, fluorescent molecule called porphyrin. Strong pigments are always efficient energy absorbers, and if they are also fluorescent, they are also good energy transmitters… Porphyrins are more efficient energy transmitters than any other of life’s components.

“There is one more place these surprising molecules are found: in the nervous system, the organ where electrons flow. In fact, in mammals, the central nervous system is the only organ that shines with the red fluorescent glow of porphyrins…under ultraviolet light. These porphyrins…occur, however, …not in the neurons themselves, the cells that carry messages from our five senses to our brains, but in the myelin sheaths that envelop them—the sheaths whose…breakdown causes one of most common and least understood neurological diseases of our time: multiple sclerosis. It was orthopedic surgeon Robert O. Becker [‘The Body Electric’] who, in the 1970s, discovered that myelin sheaths are really the electrical transmission lines.

“In a state of health the myelin sheaths contain primarily two types of porphyrins…complexed with zinc. The exact composition is crucial. When environmental chemicals poison the porphyrin pathway, excess porphyrins bound to heavy metals, buildup in the nervous system as in the rest of the body [where illness like polio (acute flaccid paralysis) or skin lesions occur]. This disrupts the myelin sheaths and changes their conductivity which, in turn, alters the excitability of the nerves they surround. The entire nervous system becomes hyperreactive to stimuli of all kinds, including electromagnetic fields.

“In the nineteenth century, anatomists…supposed that [myelin] must have only a…’supportive’ role, protecting the ‘real’ nerves… They named them glial cells after the Greek word for ‘glue’ [as in gliadin and gluten so-named]… From then on, glial cells were thought to be little more than packing material. Most biologists ignored the [finding] by German physicist Rudolph Virchow in 1854, that myelin is a liquid crystal.

…”However…Becker found quite another function for the myelin-containing cells and took another step toward restoring electricity to its proper role in the function of living things. (p146-147) Becker began to pursue the ideas of Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, thinking that if proteins were semiconductors, maybe bones were too, and maybe electron flow was the secret to the healing of fractures… (p148)

“Once having established that the signals that trigger regeneration are electrical and not chemical in nature, these scientists were in for another surprise. For the DC potentials of the body…[that] are necessary…for regeneration…growth, healing, pain perception and even consciousness, seemed to be generated not in the ‘real’ nerves but in the myelin-containing cells that surround them—the cells that also contain porphyrins. (p151)  …The cells that biologists had considered merely insulation turned out to be the real wires. (p152).

“Everyone knows that the brain consumes more oxygen than any other organ…  [An] Italian team confirmed in 2009…that as much as ninety percent of that oxygen is consumed…by the myelin sheaths… (p153)

“In France, liver cancer has been found to be 36 times as frequent in people carrying a gene for porphyria as in the general population. In Sweden and Denmark the rate was 39 times as high, and the lung cancer rate triple the general rate. Chest pain, heart failure, high blood pressure, and EKGs suggestive of oxygen starvation are well-known in porphyria. (p156) …Insulin levels are usually abnormal… The protean manifestations of this disease, capable of affecting almost any organ, are widely blamed on…a deficiency of heme. Indeed, no porphyrin expert has offered a better explanation.” (p157), The Invisible Rainbow, by Arthur Firstenberg, 2017.

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“Under natural conditions, as they existed before 1889, intense VLF activity, leading to electron rain and the shifting of the Schumann resonances, occurred only during geomagnetic storms. Today, the magnetic storm never ends.” –A.F.

 

Genetically Modified: Tag, You’re IT

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“The history of biotechnology is not well known. It comes as a surprise to most people to find out that it was not a scientific discovery. Genetic engineering technology was deliberately devised by a small group of people who were looking for a way to manipulate life according to their own designs and for their own purposes. Once they identified genes as a material basis for life, they figured out how to manipulate them, using recombinant DNA technology, and they immediately found commercial uses for their products.

   “The underlying conceit is what MIT science historian Lily Kay calls the “molecular vision of life.” It came about, she says, as the result of the effort of a few scientists, along with their academic and philanthropic sponsors, who had a shared vision about how they could use genes to reshape science and society. Kay says this small group of people laid claim to DNA as a means to an end, once they decided that it was ‘the secret of life.’

   “This new ‘protein paradigm’ reduced the enormous complexity of life down to a few component parts and provided a biological basis for the idea that microorganisms could be engineered. This was the ‘new biology.’  …And it offered those who adopted it a previously unimagined mastery over both nature and society.” –pp8-9, Uncertain Peril, by Clare Hope Cummings, 2008

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“The desire for patents and profits sweetened the prospects for all concerned. Kay says the long-standing boundaries between what was ‘public’ and what was ‘private’ were erased as corporate and government interests merged… [And] what emerged was a matrix of control. Biotechnology began to dominate scientific research… In the end, it’s been the triumph of what Kay calls the ‘technocratic approach to life.’ …Whether it was intended or not, the way biotechnology was developed has resulted in a relatively small number of players achieving an unprecedented and overarching level of control over life on earth. It brings to mind the words of Justice William O. Douglas, who warned that ‘ as nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there’s a twilight where everything remains seemingly unchanged, and it is in such twilight that we must be aware of change in the air, however slight, lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness.’ “ –pp10-11, ibid.

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“Can a microscopic tag be implanted in a person’s body to track his every movement? There’s actual discussion about that. You will rule on that –mark my words—before your tenure is over.” –U.S. Sen. Joseph Biden, asked during Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on the nomination of John Roberts to be chief justice of the Supreme Court.

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“We can take proteins, real biological machines, and make them part of a working microelectronic circuit.” –Aleksandr Noy, scientist at Univ. of California Merced, co-author of ACS Nano Letters

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The source of the two quotes above is from the book “Forbidden Gates” by Tom and Nita Horn, published in 2010. The subject and subheading is “How genetics, robotics, artificial intelligence, synthetic biology, nanotechnology, and human enhancement herald the Dawn of Techno-Dimensional Spiritual Warfare and includes this scenario from Nita: “She asked if the biblical mark of the Beast might be a conspiracy employing specific implantable technology only now available. Her theory was gripping. An occult elite operating behind the U.S. government devises a virus that is a crossover between human and animal disease –let’s say, an entirely new and highly contagious influenza mutation [supposing the 2010 publication was directly referencing the H5N1/H1N1 ‘event’ over years 2005-2009] –and intentionally releases it into the public. A pandemic ensues, and the period between when a person contracts the virus and death is something like like ten days. With tens of thousands dead in a few weeks and the rate of death increasing hourly around the globe, a universal cry for a cure goes out. Seemingly miraculously, the government then steps forward with a vaccine. The only catch…given the nature of the animal-human flu, the ‘cure’…rewrites one’s genetics so that the person is no longer entirely human…[and by] receiv[ing] this antidote would become part ‘beast’…thus…’Mark of the Beast’ “

At the time of reading Forbidden Gates, shortly after publication, it was with full awareness that a bioinformatics database called BEAST already existed. It’s in the flu notes, posted on this blog. Biblical ‘scripting’ is, to me, the ominous and perversely-expressed harbinger of the spiritual warfare reality.

As far as I’m concerned, a mass of human tagging began with the 1950s polio vaccines and the introduction of the monkey virus ‘contaminant’ SV40, simian virus #40, in the Salk and Sabin formulas. It’s not a gift of altruism that ongoing worldwide polio vaccination has been the goal of Bill Gates and the foundation, though current vaccines are SV40 free. The theory is basically this: Post-Hiroshima biological surveillance and data collection was mandated to the medical team of the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission (ABCC) on the suggestion of 100 years duration. A multigenerational biological tag was the only means then available, lacking nano-device alternatives, and its expected implementation was imminent after 1950 when the ABCC organized for its longterm assignments. Nuclear testing, which began in Nevada in 1951, expanded the mandate to the U.S. population and beyond. Polio-vaxxed Boomers and their descendents are a potentially trackable demographic. Some military-use nonpolio vaccines of the era also contained SV40. Adding to this view is code for the infective SV40 particle, the T-antigen short form –T-ag.  Tag, really. Is that nerd humor?, an ominous and perversely-expressed harbinger?— or just in-your-face who-doo for future surveillance in ABCC’s project management? The ABCC, of course, is long defunct, but SV40 rages on, fascinating as a subject in the development of  biotech. For now, as a model of tagging derived entirely by my own thoughts on it, I’m going with ‘in your face’ and on the hook. The journey of SV40 through research labs as a ‘recombinant’ gene factor parallels the growth of the biotech industry.

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Who owns your DNA? According to Claire Cummings 2008 book, Uncertain Peril, “Twenty percent of the DNA in the human body is now patented. Many of the genes in your body are already owned by someone else, most likely a pharmaceutical company or an institution. The Regents of the University of California, for instance, own eighty-nine human genes.” –p75, ibid.  Little doubt attends my speculation that an increase in holdings over the last decade put aggregate institutional ownership of human DNA at or near a  majority of stock—live stock. Somehow, between the first successful 1980 “patent on life” case for a genetically-engineered bacterium and the present, ownership of your essential constituents have been transferred to private parties. Quantitatively speaking, only about 10% of ‘you’ is human anyway, long provoking the question of “what is human?” and, by extension, “what is ‘yours’ and ‘not yours’?,” and “when does ‘yours’ become ‘not yours’?”

So far, every time I check into it, the human DNA legal trend is “not yours” and when applied to medical treatment definitely “not yours.” The immune system wrestles with this every day, tasking “self” and “not self,” so I’ll try to work out a parallel here.

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In the meantime, an example of “not yours”:  “…when the Supreme Court ruled on the [patent] case of Ananda Mohan Chakrabarty, a scientist working at General Electric who’d created a bacterium genetically engineered to consume oil and help clean up oil spills…[his] lawyers argued that since normal bacteria don’t consume oil, Chakrabarty’s bacteria weren’t naturally occurring –they only existed because he’d altered them using ‘human ingenuity.’ Chakrabarty’s victory opened up the possibility of patenting other living things, including genetically modified animals and cell lines, which didn’t occur naturally outside the body. And patenting cell lines didn’t require informing or getting permission from the ‘cell donors.’ “   The bold-type emphasis is my addition to the words of Rebecca Skloot from the book ‘The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks’ whose cervical cancer tumor specimens became the famous ‘immortal’ HeLa cell line in 1951.  Skloot mentions another cell line called ‘Mo,’ harvested by a UCLA doctor in 1976 from the abnormal spleen of a patient named John Moore who suffered from hairy-cell leukemia. “A normal spleen weighs less than a pound; Moore’s weighed twenty-two.” –p199  Some years later, during his ongoing medical follow-up which involved long distance travel to UCLA, Moore’s suspicion was aroused when he attempted to change the arrangements of his medical visits to be closer to home. Accompanying offers of plane tickets and a stay at the Beverly Wiltshire hotel, was  “a  new consent form that said: ‘ I (do, do not) voluntarily grant to the University of California all rights I, or my heirs, may have in any cell line or any other potential product… developed from the blood and/or bone marrow obtained from me.’ “   He circled ‘do’ but at his next visit when the consent form was presented again he circled ‘do not’ and soon learned that ‘Mo’ was reaping a windfall. In 1984 Moore filed suit against the physician and UCLA. His doctor, patent in hand, stood to personally gain $3.5 million from the cell line which “at that point [had] its market value estimated to be $3 billion…  Scientists are quick to point out that John Moore’s cells were exceptional, and few cell lines are actually worth patenting. Moore’s cells produced rare proteins that pharmaceutical companies could use to treat infections and cancer. They also carried a rare virus called HTLV…which researchers hoped to use to create a vaccine that could stop the AIDS epidemic. Because of this, drug companies were willing to pay enormous sums to work with his cells.” –pp201-202, ibid.

Moore lost on the first round, then appealed in 1988 and won. His doctor subsequently appealed and won the ‘right to use patient tissues’ and finally “Nearly seven years after Moore originally filed suit, the Supreme Court of California ruled against him in what became the definitive statement on this issue: When tissues are removed from your body, with or without your consent, any claim you might have had to owning them vanishes… [The court] said that ruling in Moore’s favor might ‘destroy the economic incentive to conduct important medical research,’ and that giving patients property rights in their tissues might ‘hinder research by restricting access to the necessary raw materials’…” –p205, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, by Rebecca Skloot, 2010

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The roots of this blog are mentioned in a post called “A Few Words About the Agenda” from November 2009:

“….I started this blog in July09 in the midst of a “pandemic” that is not happening because of a deep foreboding that the Controls being sought are nearly in hand. There is no rational/logical explanation for things like mandatory vaccines, forced healthcare, carbon-footprint permits and the like when it flies in the face of experiential science. What else can it be but the consolidation of the Plan? Every article here in my blog is telling an aspect of this story; One story about One World, where everything coalesces under…the oligarchy…[until] they own you… In ‘their’ future.. ‘we’ are to be made less than fully human to eliminate their competition…  today achievable in physical fact.  How will we be ‘less than human’ –perhaps by becoming programmable DNA computers. Take a look: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_computing

…. The impetus in DNA computing, according to Ehud Shapiro of the Weizmann Institute speaking in 2003, is to find a “molecule that can recognize, cut and join DNA sequences in specific ways”, what he suggests will be “designer enzymes…that can do things and go to places that silicon can’t –such as inside our cells to make and control drugs.” http://www.usc.edu/dept/molecular-science/index.html . Phage and virus already do this naturally –enter our cells and install a program– so the question is begging about the ability of virus-like ‘nano-machines’ harnessed for the activity of synthesizing specific enzymes to run an assembly program. If you were going to ‘assemble’ a DNA computer capable of replicating and replacing its own parts, wouldn’t the ideal machine have an immortal and unlimited source of those parts? Cancer cells are just such an immortal cellular anomaly. A pharmaceutical-generating program that can control cancer cells in the self-performance of chemotherapy has the capacity I would think of becoming an immortal DNA computer, capable of [reproducing] itself with endless ‘perfect copies’ while keeping the overproduction of those cells in check…  Cancer cells may become the needed raw material for constructing immortal bio-bot computers. The staggering potential of DNA computing forecast by Leonard Adleman is that “One gram of DNA can store as much information as a trillion compact discs”. “What’s more”, states the text of the USC webpages above, “myriad DNA molecules can examine every possible [pathway] at once, rather than one at a time as in a conventional computer”. With this much incredible promise, is it likely that the DNA computing science would take a backseat? If I’m on the right track with this projection, a lot of agendas appear to be satisfied. I’m over my head here…  Explanations for the presence of sophisticated and nano-sized materials in food, vaccines and chemtrails are not forthcoming and yet they are turning up in products of every description. At the atomic level, organic, inorganic and cellular materials have new and different properties, most informative of which comes from electrochemical experiments.  As in the past, this new technical platform will be maximally spun-off and exploited in some ultimate pursuit of global mastery… Our bodies will become factories for their bio-bots.

2004– “Recently, simple molecular-scale autonomous programmable computers were demonstrated… allowing both input and output… Such computers, using biological molecules as input data and biologically active molecules as output, could produce a system for ‘logical’ control of biological processes… As proof of principle, we programmed the computer to identify and analyze mRNA of disease-related genes associated with models of…cancer, and to produce a single-stranded DNA molecule modelled after an anticancer drug.” http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v429/n6990/abs/nature02551.html

(end of self-quote from A Few Words About the Agenda)

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”The goal of the government should be one level of health for all the people” —Florence Mahoney, 1965, reference on p209 of Noble Conspirator, Florence S. Mahoney and the Rise of the National Institutes of Health, by Judith Robinson, 2001

This quote is but one of the select bolshevist utterances of the incomparable ‘health’ lobbyist Mrs. Mahoney. Her principal endeavors focused on population control, mental health treatment and social engineering. The span of her nationally influential activity ranged from the 1940s to the ‘90s and “by the year 2000, the National Institutes of Health had become indisputably the world’s leading research entity across the spectrum of biomedicine.” –271, ibid.

The 2009 H1N1 pandemic-that-wasn’t brought in the government initiative called One Medicine, a cooperative paramilitary organization enlisting MDs and DVMs to jointly respond to public health issues. In essence, the One Medicine goal is to devise common protocols of treatment for humans and animals –symbolically, if not actually, leveling the livestock. In biotechnology this is possible because of  genetic ‘homology’, the cross-species similitude of gene chemistry. In natural settings, homology in viruses, viral vectors and host receptors leads to transmission –and in the case of infectious transmission from animals to humans, known as ‘zoonosis’ (zoh-ahn’-nah-sis). I’ll have to check if ‘humanosis’ or ‘homonosis’ is in the lexicon yet. We’re certainly making the animals we love and depend on very sick with ‘public health’ protocols.

Any government that determines the nature of my human physical matter, whether inside or outside the body, to be “raw material” for “important” economic exploit represents neither myself nor the authority to which I submit.

*

Compare…..

Industrial GMOs have a running track record in agriculture, the subject of Uncertain Peril, sufficiently parallel in models of business and ethics to apply to human engineering. I put in the bracketed [noun] substitutions to make a point:

“There are five solid reasons that genetic engineering is not right for agriculture [medicine]. One: it’s bad science. It was developed on the basis of flawed assumptions which have since been discredited by the scientific community. Two: it’s bad biology. It was deployed without regard for its potential for genetic contamination and risks to human health. Three: it’s bad social policy. It puts control over seeds [medical treatment] and the fundamentals of our food and farms [healthcare] into the hands of a few corporations who have their own, not our, best interests in mind. Four: it’s bad economics. After billions of dollars and thirty [now forty and more] years, only a few products have been commercialized, and they offer nothing new. No one asked for genetically modified organisms (GMOs), and given a choice, consumers would reject them. Five: it’s bad farming [healthcare]. GMOs don’t address the real issues plaguing agriculture [humans]; they’re designed to substitute for or increase the use of proprietary weed and pest [drug] control chemicals. Patented and genetically altered seeds [pharmaceuticals] perpetuate the very worst problems of the industrial food [health] system, and they are undermining the autonomy of the farmers [doctors] who use them.”

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Underlying Causes and Coronavirus

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‘You Are What You Eat’ was a government information campaign of the 1970s when biotech was gaining ground in agriculture. The learning program put an emphasis on the benefits of whole grain –certain of which are the gluten/gliadin containing wheat, rye, and barley which we now know compromise the blood-brain barrier, as the glyphosate (Round-up, Agent Orange) herbicide then being introduced compromises the gut by inducing lesions. (That’s subject for another post). The point here is that my earlier influenza research demonstrated that the microbiologists of the last century discovered toxic gut bacteria in the lungs of flu patients, determining it to be the cause of respiratory infection.

Plus this: “…In this account of the discovery of influenza [virus, c1933], researchers at ”Mill Hill” near London accidently infected their lab ferrets with their own flu. [humanosis?] At the time they were experimenting with ‘distemper’, developing a vaccine for the flu-like illness in dogs.”   –see the margin list for “Influenza Special”. If there’s a relationship of gut bacteria to respiratory infection in dogs, I didn’t look for it then, but the common viral agent of contagious gastroenteritis in dogs is coronavirus.  From the Merck Veterinary Manual, 1991 edition: “Coronaviral Gastroenteritis, A highly contagious GI disease of dogs of any age… Canine Coronavirus (CCV) is an enveloped, single-stranded RNA virus antigenically related to the feline coronaviruses (feline infectious peritonitis virus and feline enteric coronavirus) and to transmissible gastroenteritis virus of pigs… Lesions in experimental infections usually are not severe…[but] Naturally occurring cases, especially those with mixed infections, can have severe lesions with frank hemorrhage in the intestinal mucosa…” The 1991 Merck Vet. lists only four species with economically significant coronavirus problems: dogs, cats, pigs and turkeys, but if there are clues in microbe-hunting about CoV transmission, mixed-infections, and treatment, the recommended treatment for Kennel Cough in dogs is vaccines for distemper and parainfluenza (or paramyxovirus infection, PMV) –respiratory infection in turkeys, “which suggests the respiratory tract may be the initial site of infection.” –p1564, ibid.  Bird flu? Do turkeys cough? “The transmission between turkeys is unclear,” so I’ll let that go for the time being. However, turkeys take a wallop with coronavirus! “Coronaviral Enteritis of Turkeys: An acute, highly contagious disease of turkeys characterized by sudden onset… Mortality may be high… The causative agent is a coronavirus, but the clinical disease is complicated by other intestinal viral and bacterial infections… Cold weather, especially freezing, increases survival of the virus.” –p1554.  We’re being told that too, yes? Must be One Medicine on the job. No vaccine for turkeys, says Merck…just quarantine, social distancing, disinfection…  A little global warming would be handy.

A  very different outcome of coronavirus in pigs is the ‘causal agent’ of a frightful disease called ‘vomiting and wasting disease’ (VWD), otherwise known as Coronaviral  hemagglutinating encephalomyelitis virus (HEV) –a brain infection—where “Neonatal pigs become dehydrated, cyanotic, comatose and die…[If] the virus enters a susceptible herd with neonatal piglets, morbidity and mortality may be high… Replication first takes place in the nasal mucosa, tonsils, lungs, and to a very limited extent, in the small intestine [after spread by aerosol]. From these sites of entry, the virus invades…the peripheral nervous system and subsequently spreads to the entire brain stem…” –pp388-389, ibid. I’m posting this not to scare you but to show a greater range of coronavirus. In North America, western Europe, and Australia, where HEV occurs, “Pigs are the only natural host.” This is the kind of information that provokes my attention for bioweapon potential –but ‘bioweapon’ within the meme of low-intensity conflict scenarios. Our ‘common cold’ coronavirus is everywhere.

 

Turn back the clock for a minute on the official U.S. response to SARS in May 2003:

…”Thank you, Mr. Chairman and members of the Committee. I am Jerome M. Hauer*, Acting Assistant Secretary for Public Health Emergency Preparedness. I appreciate this opportunity to share our Department’s response to the SARS virus within the context of public health emergency preparedness… we have reason to be encouraged by the response to SARS for several reasons. First, the identification of the agent that causes the disease was completed in record time. CDC identified the coronavirus within a few short weeks of receiving the first specimens… We are partnering with industry to organize a full-court press on vaccine development… The Command Center maps the distribution of SARS cases across the globe with geographic information system software for use during our planning discussions. The Command Center did not exist a year ago – it became operational last November [2002]… I recently co-chaired a meeting of the Council of Governments with Mike Byrne of the Department of Homeland Security to bring together health professionals from across the national capital region to aggressively prepare for an outbreak of the SARS virus here… the Department is implementing an aggressive research and development program to develop and acquire biological, chemical, nuclear and radiological countermeasures… The most exciting news in the R&D arena is, of course, Project BioShield, announced by the President on February 3, 2003.” http://republicans.energycommerce.house.gov/108/Hearings/05072003hearing917/Hauer1433.htm

*Jerome Hauer, you may remember, was on hand for commentary to major NYC TV media the morning of 9-11, providing the tip that ‘Osama bin Laden’ did it. Hauer was then an officer of New York’s emergency operations center and pKroll security, but his earlier career was in bioweaponry. He directed the neighborhood pesticide-spraying campaign against West Nile Virus when it emerged in NYC in 1999.

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To our sorrow, the legal decoupling of “healthcare” from the biotech industry never happened. It could have, should have, happened long ago in the 1950s and ‘60s amidst the Cold War when advancing biotechnology was pressing countermeasures (like Hauer’s B-C-R protocols) into military operations. The subsequent infiltration and takeover of biotech in medicine forces the euphemism of “healthcare” with the still added integration of I.T. –Information Technology. As I see it, all a very advanced and comprehensive outcome of radiation biology, the mother of modern genetics.

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In June of 2013, Justice Clarence Thomas (former Monsanto lawyer) wrote the decision on human DNA for the US Supreme Court that, “We hold that a naturally occurring DNA segment is a product of nature and not patent eligible merely because it has been isolated,” following more than forty years of neglect while the industry flourished. At stake was the monopolization of a natural gene by one patent holder, able to control its use in research and medicine. The decision opened the pool and, interpreted by the industry, “also said that synthetic genetic material could be patented” –synthetic human DNA. Four years before this decision, August 2009, I posted “Fabricating DNA Evidence” quoting “Scientists in Israel have demonstrated that it is possible to fabricate DNA evidence…if they have access to a DNA profile in a database… without obtaining any tissue from [a] person. ‘You can just engineer a crime scene,’ said [Dr.] Dan Frumkin… ’Any biology undergraduate could perform this.”

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“Synthetic biology is unregulated and self-governing. No one knows what could occur when synthetic organisms are intentionally and unintentionally let loose into the environment. Creating genes that don’t exist in nature is a dangerous business and there is no way to predict how they will behave in living systems.” –p266, Foodopoly, 2012, by Wenonah Hauter (Food & Water Watch)

*

So, while I’m ‘CoVing-in’ with extra spare time, I’m dwelling on the tagging, tracking, and surveillance milieu of our present situation juxtaposed with notions of human rights because biotechnology is rewriting the genes of our Constitution and incapacitating the judgements therefrom:

 

FYI, The Human Rights which we extend around the globe, and teach to students of ‘public health’, “include but transcend the conventional classes of human rights…in a remarkable variety of international human rights and humanitarian laws… Never before…has there been such universal recognition of the claim that everyone…is entitled to rights—in particular, what have been aptly called ‘life integrity rights.’ These include the right to life, the right to personal inviolability—not to be hurt; the right to be free of arbitrary seizure, detention, and punishment; the freedom to own one’s body and labor; the right to free movement without discrimination; and the right to create and cohabit with family.” –p39, War and Public Health, 2000 updated ed., editors Levy and Sidel.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all [mankind] are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights… [and] that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it… Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly, all experience hath shown, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms of government to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government and to provide new guards for their future security. The history of the present… is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having, in direct object, the establishment of an absolute tyranny… To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world…” A Declaration by the Representatives of the United States of America… July 4, 1776

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…part two coming soon…

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Atomic Oswald Two

The “bulletin board” saga  continues from the original post, for ease of reading, now after two years of filling in the holes. Atomic Agent Oswald leaves off in the detailing of the 1959 defection of Robert E. Webster, employee of the Rand Development Corporation of Cleveland Ohio, described as a CIA front.

*Catch up with the original post here: https://jenniferlake.wordpress.com/2015/03/26/atomic-agent-oswald/

Robert Edward Webster* defected to the USSR on Saturday October 17, 1959, allegedly at a meeting in the American embassy of Moscow accompanied by his “employers” H. James Rand and George H. Bookbinder –however– according to E.J. Epstein’s chapter notes in Legend, Webster defected under duress from a Soviet police station by handing over a written statement.

Webster’s so-called defection came one day after Lee Oswald’s arrival in Moscow on the 16th. There was commotion at the embassy that day, the 16th, when “Russell A. Langelle, the chief security officer in the Moscow embassy, was charged with espionage, declared persona non grata.. [after being]‘kidnapped by five unidentified Russians’ who had then threatened him and his family and tried to blackmail and bribe him into becoming a Soviet espionage agent.” p277, Mole, by William Hood,1982. –the Langelle story appeared in the New York Times Oct. 18. “…Langelle returned to the United States on 25 October…” p280, ibid. Six days later on Saturday 31 October, exactly two weeks after Webster, Lee Harvey Oswald entered the embassy to announce his defection. No record yet  indicates the presence of additional people from Rand Development or the Commerce Department during Oswald’s defection.

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The window on Webster’s world reveals a fascinating subset of intelligence activity with direct bearing on the heart of this thesis, perhaps the most speculative aspect of the posts regarding a counter-proliferation role for Oswald. Internal memos from the CIA requested by the HSCA investigation note that Rand and Bookbinder had traveled previously in 1958 to the USSR with “Brigadier General” W. Randolph Lovelace, an eminent physician with Atomic Energy Commission contracts who co-founded the Lovelace Clinic in Albuquerque New Mexico. One memo reads: “For your information, only Rand, Bookbinder, and Lovelace have had frequent contact with Soviet officials both in the United States and the USSR, including Mikhail Ilich Bruk, formerly with the Soviet Ministry of Health, who was identified by AEDONER [Yuri Nosenko] as an agent of the KGB. You will note that Rand was the employer of Robert E. Webster who defected…”

*

Dr. ‘Randy’ Lovelace*  appointed in 1958 to become NASA’s chairman of its Life Sciences. Later in April of 1964, LBJ invested Lovelace as NASA Director of Space Medicine, a post he held for barely 8 months until dying in a small plane crash with his wife and pilot.

   The Lovelace Foundation, research arm of the clinic, housed and tested U-2 pilots and astronauts for the government looking for The Right Stuff. The foundation was created in 1947 when, after losing two sons to polio, Lovelace left his job as Chief of Surgery for the Mayo Clinic and moved back to New Mexico. He hired Dr. Clayton S. (Sam) White to run the foundation on the “Mayo model”.  Dr. White pioneered the AEC contracts, which included nuclear blast effects on humans and the creation of the Fission Products Inhalation Project. The Lovelace Foundation gained extra space for its sophisticated atomic experiments and simulations at Kirtland Air Force Base, home to the Sandia Corporation.

*

“Sandia is the direct descendent of Los Alamos’s Manhattan Project ordnance engineering division that turned the Little Boy and Fat Man bombs into deployable weapons… known as Los Alamos ‘Z’ Division, established at what is now Kirtland Air Base… Sandia became a separate lab in 1949..[and] is the most diverse of the three nuuclear weapons labs… Sandia is also the “foreman” of the..nuclear weapons complex, acting as its liason to the Pentagon… Sandia’s secondary mission is studying nuclear weapons ‘effects’, which are not the horrific effects of nuclear weapons on humans and the environment..[but] the effects of nuclear weapons on nuclear weapons, to make sure they are radiation hardened..[to] operate in..a nuclear war.”

https://nukewatch.org/activemap/SandiaFS5-8-3-12.pdf

The other effects, i.e. on humans, were contracted to Lovelace. This is the era of “nuclear battlefields” where soldiers were expected to take ground contaminated by radioactive fallout. Here’s a sample report of blast and radiation effects produced as a collaboration of the AEC, Lovelace Foundation and Sandia Corp. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc13019/m2/1/high_res_d/CEX-58.8.pdf

                                                                                  *Lovelace Foundation Clinic*

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  Dr. Sam White’s adoring younger brother Byron was at that time making his mark in the world of football and law, and in 1960, Byron R. White became the Colorado manager of the JFK for President campaign. JFK rewarded Byron White by appointing him Deputy Attorney General of the United States, under brother Bobby Kennedy.  The friendship between them dated back to their college days when White met the Kennedy family in London while he was preparing to enter Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. During WWII as an ONI officer, White wrote up the report on JFK’s PT109 incident.

*   *  *  *Byron R. White with Kennedys

Here possibly was an inside track for the Kennedys to get information about nuclear testing, fallout, and a potential back- channel to the Soviets.

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“A choice of cancer or polio”**:

   Medical technology was listed as the principal commodity of the Atoms For Peace program when the government distributed its manuals in 1956, a broadly defined field already in advanced development. To this day, the standard history of polio omits a causal relationship with radiation. A famed collaboration to produce a global polio vaccine was well underway with the Soviets by 1958.

“The Russian scientists, led by Deputy Minister of Health Dr. Viktor Zhdanov and leading polio expert, Dr. Mikhail Chumakov of Moscow’s Institute for the Study of Polio, actually refined Sabin’s vaccine and developed it into a useful form that could be taken orally. Russian scientists then conducted trials of the vaccine on a massive scale. In all, well over 70 million people in the Soviet Union received the Sabin vaccine. Its successful use in the Soviet Union established the vaccine internationally, and the Sabin vaccine was subsequently widely used in the United States and became the worldwide standard vaccine for the prevention of polio.”

http://www.us-russia200.moscow.usembassy.gov/200th/anniversary.php?record_id=poliofactsheet

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In February of 1962, and again in August, the Sabin polio vaccines were shipped into Cuba for mass inoculations. For the record, it was the CIA chief John McCone, most recently chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, who stood his ground in August of 1962 that nuclear missiles were being deployed to Castro’s Cuba:

“On August 21, Robert Kennedy asked McCone if the CIA caould stage a phony attack on the American military base at Guantanamo Bay as a pretext for an American invasion of Cuba. McCone demurred. He told John Kennedy in private the next day that an invasion could be a fatal mistake. He warned the president for the first time that he thought the Soviets might be installing medium-range ballistic missiles in Cuba. If so, an American sneak attack might set off a nuclear war. [p222] He advocated raising a public alarm about the likelihood of a Soviet missile base. The president instantly rejected that idea, but he wondered aloud whether the CIA’s guerillas or American troops would be needed to destroy the missile sites –if they existed. At that point, no one but McCone was convinced that they did.
…Thirty-eight Soviet ships had docked in Cuba in the past seven weeks, McCone told the president.[p223] Their cargo “might contain missile parts. We do not know.”
…A U-2 flight passed over Cuba on August 29. Its film was processed overnight. On August 30, a CIA analyst bent over his light table and shouted: I’ve got a SAM site! It was a surface-to-air missile, an SA-2, the same Soviet weapon that had brought the U-2 down over Russia.”[p224, Legacy of Ashes, by Tim Weiner, 2007]
*
They tell us this is what the photoanalyst saw on August 30, 1962*

–a characteristic defensive Russian surface-to-air missile(SAM) site*

*

**Song lyrics, The Salt of the Earth: “…Raise your glass to the hard working people… Who need leading but get gamblers instead… And a parade of the gray suited grafters, A choice of cancer or polio” –Rolling Stones, Beggars Banquet 1968

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* Albert Sabin and Victor Zhdanov in 1958 * Governments have concealed the spread of polio (brain infection) occurring with nuclear industry, including x-ray use and electronic RF. Not surprisingly, Oswald’s concealed New Orleans milieu was rooted in activities of cancer and polio. “Webster’s window” in the USSR may have been similar, whether or not Webster himself was any more than a diversionary defector, a “double dangle.”  It is inherent in the study of radiation injuries to encounter cancer and polio.

*

   “In the first five months of 1959, ten million children in the Soviet Union received the Sabin oral vaccine.” http://amhistory.si.edu/polio/virusvaccine/vacraces?.htm

*

“In addition to his accomplishments in the field of public health, Zhdanov chaired the [USSR] Interagency Science and Technology Council on Molecular Biology and Genetics, which among its many functions directed the Soviet biological weapons program.” en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viktor_Zhdanov

*

According to sources, Robert Webster began planning his defection in May of 1959 as a professional visitor in Russia with Rand Development Corp.  Anthony Summers called Rand Development Corp “one of the first American companies to negotiate with the Soviet Union for the purchase of technical products and information… A Congressional Expense Inquiry shows that Rand Development held several CIA contracts. The president of Rand Development, Henry Rand,  has been identified as a senior veteran of the Office of Strategic Services –or OSS– the forerunner of the CIA. So too was another top official of the company, George Bookbinder. Rand Development’s onetime Washington representative, Christopher Bird, was a CIA agent.” p148, Conspiracy, by Anthony Summers, 1980

   The source on Rand Development’s product sharing with the Soviets appears to come from the Mankind Research Unlimited Inc.’s bio-sketch on Christopher Bird. MRU and its fundraising foundation MRF were not incorporated until 1973, but Bird’s professional relationship with Rand dates from his years “after military service”, about the same time that he became the assistant of Cleveland industrial-financier Cyrus S. Eaton for the purpose of organizing the international nuclear disarmament conferences known as ‘Pugwash’, held first in July of 1957. Eaton sponsored and hosted not less than three Pugwash conferences between 1957 and 1959. The extent of Christopher Bird’s involvement with Eaton and Pugwash is not yet known. Cyrus Eaton, who got his start in working life during school summer vacations on the estate of John D. Rockefeller, made many trips to the USSR including a reception to receive the Lenin Peace Prize in 1960.

–see pages 34-35

https://issuu.com/ajweberman/docs/mankindresearchunlimited

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Pugwash 1957 conferees* Pugwash, Nova Scotia, hosted by Cyrus S. Eaton. The Fifth Pugwash conference held August 24-29, 1959 in Nova Scotia was the last hosted by Eaton. It was also the first to engage the threat of chemical and biological warfare (CBW): “most of what Pugwash does, whether on CBW or anything else, takes place under ground rules that forbid disclosure [without consent]… Pugwash came into existence because it was able able to build [on] two attributes –access to policy levels of government and trans-national peer-grouping– into something for which a..need existed: an enduring open framework for East-West dialogue on security-related issues at a time when..mutual sus[icions and propaganda were clogging the more conventional channels of communication… [T]he fact that Pugwash did not seek to operate in the public eye..enabled governments to tolerate it…” http://www.sussex.ac.uk/Units/spru/hsp/documents/pugwash-hist.pdf

*** “Eaton spent his summer vacations working at Rockefeller’s estate and returned to Cleveland upon graduation… Rockefeller offered him full-time employment. An early assignment was to placate property owners whose lawns were being torn up by the East Ohio Gas Company… [D]uring the 1920s ‘he was into everything, buying, selling, swapping, maneuvering, manipulating. His touch was the purest gold,’ wrote E.J.Kahn Jr. in..New Yorker magazine in 1977. His innumerable holding companies owned utilities, steel mills, a major portion of Goodyear Tire, [mines] and..other businesses… As early as the 1920s he was Herbert Hoover’s guest at the White House…” https://isgp-studies.com/organisations/introduction/1957_Pugwash_Eaton_and_Rockefeller.htm

*

“There are no Communists in America to speak of except in the minds of those on the payroll of the F.B.I.,” he said in the spring of 1958. It delights him to be able to bring persons he unquestioningly identifies as Communists into his familiar capitalistic orbit…”  (Oct.1977 New Yorker article by E.J.Kahn Jr.)

http://www.thinkerslodgehistories.com/new-yorker-article-about-cyrus-eaton.html

Eaton made his first well-publicized ‘peaceful trade’ business trip to the USSR in August of 1958.

*

Goodyear Tire and Rubber is another prime example of corporate adventurism into nuclear industry:

“In April 1952, the [U.S.] Atomic Energy Commission announced a proposed new expansion of the nation’s atomic energy program…[which would include] a new gaseous diffusion plant to increase the production of fissionable materials… [T]he commission [chose]..a site in Pike County Ohio for the new plant…   A new name would be brought into atomic energy plant operations when Goodyear Atomic Corporation was selected as the operating contractor in September 1952.”

http://portsvirtualmuseum.org/history-introduction.htm

 The Secret Life of Plants* *coauthors Christopher Bird*and OSS veteran Peter Tompkins* l**

*

Peter Tompkins’ WWII/OSS partisan resistance fighter networks in Italy, Corsica, Sicily, and North Africa were largely assumed by James J. Angleton who became the OSS/CIA station chief in Rome.

*

*Rand at 1957 press conference holding electron microscope image of viruses. Did “Dr. Henry Rand” participate in the “vaccine diplomacy” of the Sabin/USSR polio campaign? Is this the genesis of Rand’s future cancer vaccine? Ultimately, the vaccine question is if the polio/cancer combination was a nuclear battlefield prophylactic to radiation-harden humans. The same protocols, if successful, had applications for nuclear-powered aircraft,  bomber pilots, and deep space travelers.

larger view at https://outlet.historicimages.com/products/rse46835*

*

The CBW Pugwash conference of 1959, hosted by Eaton and assisted by Bird, was organized by Dr. Martin M. Kaplan, a Philadelphia veterinarian who became the chief of medical research for the World Health Organization. In 1955, Dr. Kaplan and his colleague from the Wistar Institute, the controversial Hilary Koprowski, spent time in Kenya teaching the locals how to make ‘primitive’ laboratory vaccines. Koprowski was also competing at the time to make a universal polio vaccine and later became embroiled in his own defense over charges that his African lab work was the origin of AIDS.

* 

*

Researcher Gary Hill:

…“It occurred to me it is not appearance but personality that links these two individuals [Webster and Oswald]. Therefore since…both men appear to have been manipulated in their behavior, then perhaps they were chosen because of their similarities. If so, then the same forces controlled both men…

   “That this company [Rand Development] is a CIA front is not news…however, its interest in hypnosis and mind-control as an intelligence tool may be… Could Bird be the key to Webster’s odyssey? According to [author Dick] Russell, Bird would later become ‘Biocommunications Editor/Russian Translator’ for Mankind Research Unlimited Inc…[with a] company capabilities list included [as] ‘brain and mind-control… acquiring on a daily basis a large amount of unique bio-cybernetics data from Eastern Europe. MKUltra gave the CIA an alternative to false defectors…Programmable defectors..willingly believing [in] false information… It is interesting that at this point the numbers of defectors took a sharp increase… Oswald had been hospitalized and incarcerated for periods adequate to allow the process to occur.” Fourth Decade, July and September 1995 issues

*  

Christopher Bird may at least be a key to Rand Development and the activities of H. James Rand.

   A deeper association of some kind between Rand and Lovelace Foundation is confirmed in the sanitized “papers” collection of Floyd B. Odlum, chairman of the Lovelace Foundation and owner of Atlas Corporation who oversaw a uranium mining empire.

https://www.eisenhower.archives.gov/Research/Finding_Aids/pdf/Odlum_Floyd_Papers.pdf

see personal correspondence item section #9 on page 13 of 105: “James Rand”–this could be either father or son, but coincident with the Lovelace Foundation’s collaborations with the Atomic Energy Commission and National Institutes of Health in the 1951-1953 time period. Also of note in this immediate subsection of Odlum’s papers are “scientific psychic studies” which recurs with specificity from this point onward.

  *** Odlum specialized in the financial investor-funded acquisition, reorganization and merging of companies in the great wave of mega-corporations that arose in the first decades of the 20th century. He owned Consolidated Vultee Aircraft –Convair– when it won the contract to build the first nuclear-powered aircraft.

   Additionally, “In 1951, the Air Material Command..awarded Convair Project MX-1593 a contract to develop..an intercontinental ballistic missile. Convair engineer Karl Bossart named the project “Atlas” and Convair began to develop America’s first ICBM… In 1952, Convair received a contract to develop a supersonic bomber to succeed the Boeing B-47…” http://www.456fis.org/CONVAIR_DIVISION_GENERAL_DYNAMICS.htm

Consolidated Aircraft’s history up to the merge with General Dynamics in 1954:

http://www.reubenfleet.com/consolidated-aircraft/

General Dynamics gained the Convair plants in San Diego CA, Pomona CA, and Fort Worth TX. It “could now bid on U.S. aerospace contracts…  The Convair Division would operate over the next half century primarily as an independent company under the General Dynamics corporate umbrella.”

*

“In 1955 a gift of 320 acres of land from the city of San Diego helped [John Jay] Hopkins to establish the General Atomics Division. In collusion with the City Council, Hopkins was instrumental in persuading the Regents of the University of California [contract operators of Los Alamos weapons lab] to establish a ‘scientific and technical’ branch at La Jolla.” http://www.sandiegofreepress.org/2016/07/general-dynamics-san-diego/  The University of California San Diego was born. Further offspring soon joined the complex as the Scripps Institute of Oceanography and Salk Institute of Biological Studies.

*

A web of personal associations between H.James Rand and Odlum could be present in the following facts:

Rand’s wife, Martha Osborne Rand,was employed by Bonwit Teller, a women’s quality apparel store in New York, bought by the Odlums/AtlasCorp in 1934 and personally managed by (ex-) Mrs. Odlum for the next fifteen years. Other questions raised above have suggestive answers in the environment of Cleveland, the Cleveland Clinic, Case Western Reserve University, the Case Institute of Technology, and the Pugwash collaborations of Bird and Cyrus Eaton.

   Case Western Medical hired Frederick C. Robbins in 1952 who shared the 1954 Nobel Prize in Medicine for groundbreaking work on the isolation and growing of polioviruses, making the Salk and Sabin vaccines possible. Rand had a working relationship with Case Medical personnel, in at least one instance resulting in a successful product in 1947– a heart defibrillator co-developed with Dr. Claude S. Beck who was also hired in 1952 by the University. Dr. Robbins, incidentally, after retiring as the medical dean in 1980, worked on special tasks for the U.S. government which included becoming chairman of NASA Life Sciences Strategic Planning Study Committee during Reagan/Bush. To say that Robbins was well-connected in the nuclear establishment is an understatement. His father, William Jacob Robbins, was a renown plant physiologist, Director of the New York Botanical Gardens and laboratory, and longtime operative of the Rockefeller Foundation. The elder Robbins’ annual fishing buddies counted among them Karl T. Compton of MIT (native to the Cleveland area) and Jerome C. Hunsaker, a titan of aviation and director of NACA, NASA’s predecessor. All had worked for special projects of the Atomic Energy Commission. Frederick Robbins brother, Daniel Harvey Robbins, was a vice-president of Itek Corporation and optics engineer contributing to classified camera work for the CIA, used in the U-2, Corona, and subsequent spy satellites.

https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19910012383.pdf

   Case Technology employed T. Keith Glennan, who became an AEC Commissioner in 1950, returned to Case after his term and became the first chief of NASA in 1958. Glennan was the head of NASA when H.J.Rand and Bookbinder were escorting NASA’s top medical man around the USSR. Floyd Odlum and his second wife, aviator Jacqueline Cochran, were also traveling in Russia in this time period, extending over the defections of Webster and Oswald.

The operating founders of the Cleveland Clinic, the Drs.Crile, father and son, lived next-door to Rand.

*

  James H. Rand III bought this ‘sanitarium’ and hotel in 1934 (his approx. age 22) and renamed it Ohio Institute of Oxygen Therapy, used for research and closed down two years later. The hyperbaric steel sphere was later dismantled for scrap in the war effort. “Oxygen therapy” was precisely the shared interest of Dr. Randy Lovelace and Dr. Sam White which brought them together as colleagues and friends.

http://www.clevelandareahistory.com/2010/02/giant-steel-sphere-used-to-treat.html***

*

Taking the suggestion from Gary Hill that Webster and Oswald were controlled by the same Forces, namely Rand Development Corp. providing oversight of both defectors, a relevant timeline [to be posted] emerges full of possibility. Added to the timeline activity is an even greater resource from the legacy documents of Cyrus S. Eaton: the Eaton Papers at the Western Reserve Historical Society. Cursory perusal of the collection presents nearly every contextual element supporting the Atomic Agent Oswald framework described here.

   While the lists make only guesswork of the contents, the evidence of longstanding personal contact with Eaton includes James H. Rand, Christopher Bird, David Rockefeller, Edward Teller, Lewis Strauss, Clint Murchison Sr. and family, the Mellon family, Rockefeller family members and Rockefeller Foundation, John J. McCloy, John McCone, George Kennan, Roger Revelle (of Scripps Institute of Oceanography), Linus Pauling, Leo Szilard, Allen Dulles, Dean Rusk, Alfred P. Sloan, Leo Cherne, Earl Warren, Harry Byrd, Henry Kissinger and many more recognizable people. Business contacts range over the alphabet from Alcoa, Anglo-American (South Africa), Atlas Corporation, Dresser Industries, Dupont, Kerr-McGee, Itek, Loeb Rhodes & Co, Pfizer, Seagram & Sons, Sears Roebuck, Shell Oil, Standard Oil, RCA, Rio Tinto Zinc, TRW, Texas Gulf Sulphur, Textron (owner of Bell Helicopter), U.S. Rubber, Vanadium Corp. and various mining companies in taconite (iron), uranium, coal, gas, oil, gold, diamonds, copper, platinum, etc. Interwoven are the special project folders like the American National Exhibit in Moscow 1959, Atoms For Peace Awards, Atomic Industrial Forum, American Security Council, March of Dimes, Planned Parenthood, “Gary Francis Powers”, Radio Free Europe, Rotary Clubs Int’l, etc., etc, etc

*

***

….Eaton, Bird, Odlum, Rand and Bookbinder…  all possibly Webster’s defection ‘managers’. Were they Oswald’s managers, too?

“Twice in the span of his Moscow [exhibition] assignment Webster returned home, presumably in line with his work. He was also trying to make up his mind about other things, Rand believes. Apparently there were attempts even then to dissuade him from defecting. When they failed, Rand flew to Moscow and got in touch with Anastas Mikoyan (Mikoyan visited Cyrus Eaton once and is or was second in command of all the Russians). This was in late fall, 1959…” –ref. The Cleveland Plain Dealer, May 19, 1962; http://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=55073&relPageId=159

*

“Mikoyan is still warmly remembered by many Americans for his surprise high-level visit to the United States in 1959 where he opened the Soviet exhibition in New York [N.Y.Coliseum opening night June29, 1959, which may be in error regarding Mikoyan. Mikoyan paid the U.S. an earlier unofficial visit Jan-Feb.] and met with businessmen like Averell Harriman and John J. McCloy… In Washington, he met President Eisenhower and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. In Cleveland he visited.. Cyrus Eaton… That same year, Mikoyan also paid a very important visit to Cuba and fell in love with the island.” https://abovyangroup.org/2014/05/25/mikoyan-enigma/

Anastas Mikoyan, Deputy Premier of the USSR, with J.F.Dulles (Dulles died May 24 1959)*

*

One can generate narrative from the Eaton Papers folder listing alone, regardless of the content of those folders. The plethora of related “groupings” cannot be coincidence. Below is a brief example of one grouping which can be expanded from the same folder list and journalist sources.
 
Box 279, folder: Richardson Foundation, 1956
 
The context of the Richardson Foundation from p77, George Bush, the Unauthorized Biography :  “…Prescott Bush was essentially a covert operative in Washington. On June 10, 1954, Bush received a letter from Connecticut resident H. Smith Richardson, owner of Vick Chemical Company (cough drops, Vapo-Rub)…[which read], ”I want to get your advice and counsel on…what should be done with the income from a foundation which my brother and I set up, and which will begin its operation in 1956…” This letter presages the establishment of the H. Smith Richardson Foundation, a Bush family-dictated private slush fund which was to be utilized by the Central Intelligence Agency… The Bush family knew Richardson through their mutual friendship with Sears Roebuck chairman, Gen. Robert E. Wood… General Wood’s daughter Mary had married the son of Standard Oil president William Stamps Farish… In The late 1950s, the H. Smith Richardson Foundation took part in the ‘psychological warfare’ of the CIA…carried out mainly against unwitting U.S. citizens.”
 
Box 279, folder: Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, 1960-1973
 
Context from Family of Secrets, pp70-75: “While Dimitri von Mohrenschildt clearly enjoyed the high-society glamour [of elite life in the U.S.], in reality his life was heading underground. Dimitri’s lengthy covert resume would include serving in the [OSS] wartime spy agency and later cofounding Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty…  When the Hooker marriage unraveled, Dimitri began seeing Betty Hooker… Betty’s son, Edward Gordon Hooker, entered prep school..[and] shared a small cottage with George H.W. ‘Poppy’ Bush… The relationship between Bush and Hooker lasted…until 1967, when Hooker died of an apparent heart attack. He was just forty-three… In 1937, Betty Hooker and Dimitri von Mohrenschildt married. By then, Dimitri had been hired by Henry Luce as a stringer for Time magazine… Meanwhile, Dimitri’s younger brother George…finished highschool and then joined a military academy… [George de Mohrenschildt came to the U.S. in 1938, moved in with Dimitri and Betty, and eventually] “In 1950, together with Poppy Bush’s old friend and former roommate Eddie Hooker, [George] launched a modest oil investment firm, Hooker and deMohrenschildt with ‘offices’ in New York, Denver, and Abilene…”
 
Box 120, folder: Dresser Industries, 1944-1959
Context from Family of Secrets, Ch.3: “After graduating from Yale in 1948, Poppy [GHWB] headed out to visit ‘Uncle Neil’ at Dresser Industries, which were then in Cleveland. Mallon dispatched [GHW, Barbara, and baby George] to Odessa [Texas]… Poppy’s initial jobs included sweeping out warehouses…but he was soon asked to handle more…[escorting foreign clients and dignitaries]… [T]here is the not-surprising fact that Dresser was well-known in the right circles as providing handy cover to CIA operatives… Continuing his whirlwind ‘training’, Dresser transferred Bush to California…to work the assembly line at Dresser’s Pacific Pump Works…[which was], like Dresser, an important cog in the war machine. The firm…even provided crucial parts for the top-secret process that produced the [first] atomic bombs… In 1950, Dresser was completing a corporate relocation to Dallas, which besides being an oil capital was rapidly becoming a center of the defense industry and its military-industrial-energy elite… Neil Mallon quickly set about bringing the conservative titans of Dallas society together in a new local chapter of the non-profit Council on World Affairs, in whose Cleveland branch he had been active. Started in 1918, the World Affairs Councils of America were a localized equivalent of the Rockefeller-backed Council on Foreign Relations, the presidency of which Allen Dulles had just resigned to take his post at the CIA.”

*

The vignettes above are but a subgroup that can be drawn from a larger group including Box 352, folder: U.S. Rubber Company, 1928-1965. The U.S. Rubber Co. was purchased by W.A. Harriman and Co. in 1928 which promptly installed Prescott Bush as its international sales executive. U.S. Rubber sponsored an array of intelligence activity within its extensive reach. This grouping can also include Box 294, folder: Slick Airways Inc 1956-1972., owned by Texas oilman, adventurer, and CIA operative Tom Slick who also sponsored MK-Ultra programming. Perhaps it suffices to demonstrate that Eaton’s business, and the legacy of his document collection, was an extension of the Anglo-American intelligence establishment.

*

Economic Warfare

*

An Economic Defense Advisory Committee (EDAC) policy paper issued by the U.S. Dept. of State in January 1959 notes that “..Only the Department of Commerce [ headed by Sec. Adm. Lewis L. Strauss] has made recommendations for changing current policy…[to] the reversal of the present attitude toward ‘peaceful trade’ and the substitution of the economic warfare approach… which would deny US exports of strategic or nonstrategic goods to the USSR unless such exports are individually determined to be to the advantage of the US.” https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1958-60v04/d342, 
   The CIA weighed-in with this addition: (item report #d335) “The Soviets probably genuinely desire an increase in US-USSR trade. The possibilities for expanding this trade are severely restricted, however, by the limited range of Soviet goods likely to be marketable in the US…  We believe it reasonable.. to modify certain administrative restrictions, especially export licensing, [so that]US export to the USSR might expand over the next few years…  the USSR [can balance trade].. by selling more gold to the Free World…  [T]his special estimate, submitted by the CIA, was prepared by CIA, INR, and the intelligence organizations of the Departments of the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, and the Joint Staff. All members of the U.S. Intelligence Board concurred in this estimate on October 7 [1958] with the exception of the representatives of the Atomic Energy Commission and the Federal Bureau of Investigation who abstained on the grounds that the topic was outside their jurisdiction.”

*

Perhaps it is emblematic of the FBI and AEC to secretly share their joint responsibility for global nuclear security intelligence –withheld even from the U.S. intelligence community at large . Readers of Atomic Agent Oswald are familiar with the collaboration of the FBI/AEC “dual agent” program (1949-1964), mediated by the FBI’s Charles Bates between the principals, J.Edgar Hoover and Lewis Strauss, and among the erstwhile agents. No remnant of the publicly available declassified file covers the period from 1954 to 1964 (file closed Sep30, 1964)  as the world witnessed new international trade in atomic technology.

***Here’s an example of that trade in hindsight: “[I]n 1957, as part of the Atoms For Peace program, Washington had the components for a TRIGA Mark I reactor delivered to [the Belgian] Congo. This compact facility was made by..General Atomic and installed by on-site Belgian technicians. It went operational in 1959 ..[and was] hailed..as a symbol of progress in Africa…[even as] the young nation quickly descended into civil war and chaos… Twenty years later, one of the fuel rods suddenly turned up in Italy. Smugglers offered the uranium, which was at least 20-percent enriched, to what they thought were buyers from the Middle East– in reality agents of the Italian police’s Central Investigating Service… [A]uthorities apprehended twelve people, all of them members of the mafia…” pp154-155, A Short History of Nuclear Folly, by Rudolph Herzog, 2012.

……So, what was jurisdictional to the FBI and AEC regarding economic warfare policy in commercial trade?

“As the investigative arm of the Department of Justice, the FBI is responsible, among its other duties, for catching spies… Contrary to popular belief however, the FBI does have some agents overseas. They are assigned to American embassies, usually under the cover of ‘legal attaches.” [p.203, The Invisible Government, 1964]

“Because of the law which set it up and its close relationship to the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy in the Congress, the AEC is one of the most independent branches of the Invisible Government. One of Eisenhower’s parting admonitions to Kennedy was: ‘You may be able to run lots of things around here. But one of them you can’t run is the AEC.’“ [p201, The Invisible Government, by David Wise and Thomas B. Ross, 1964]

*  AEC chairman John A. McCone (center) 1958* *“McCone gained a reputation as an uncompromising supporter of John Foster Dulles’ doctrine of massive retaliation, the Air Force’s atomic warfare theories, and the hard-line strategy against the Soviet Union.” p196, The Invisible Government

*

Roswell Garst (left foreground) offered hybrid corn to the USSR in January 1959, and again for the cameras on Krushchev’s goodwill tour of the U.S., September 15-27, 1959. The Russians wanted industrial chemicals and steel.

*

   As far as U.S.-USSR atomic relations were concerned, 1959 was an historic breakthrough year under the sway of a nuclear test moratorium. On September 15, after the closure of Moscow’s American National Exhibit, Nikita Krushchev and entourage flew to Washington for a 12-day visit. The first order of business on that day was a Krushchev meeting with Eisenhower and a separate meeting of the Soviet atomic energy chief, Vasily S. Emelyanov, with the AEC’s John McCone.

*

*Ambassador Lodge managed Eisenhower’s presidential campaign*

*

On September 17, Krushchev and his party boarded a train for New York City, accompanied by an American escort, Ambassador and US representative to the U.N. Henry Cabot Lodge Jr.  Lodge wrote in his personal notes of the “conversation with Krushchev on the train…[that] he used it as occasion to bring up the subject of nuclear tests… On the negotiations on the cessation of nuclear tests he said that we wanted to get intelligence operators into the Soviet Union….”  http://www.dosfan.lib.uic.edu/ERC/frus/frus58-60×1/11soviet5.html

*

 The same day in New Orleans, from the premises of the Int’l Trade Mart,  Lee Oswald was booked on a freighter to Europe.

*

*

NUCLEAR EXCHANGE

In the name of peace and progress, an immediate schedule of travel was arranged for select officials and scientists: “The exchange of delegations took place at a time –October 1959– when the Soviets were America’s only nuclear rival… The American delegation consisted of top AEC brass…” https://ornl.gov/blog/ornl-review/alvin-weinberg-and-scientific-diplomacy-cold-war

Another Soviet delegation arrived in the U.S. in November: [newspaper clip] “This visit by the Russian scientists is in implementation of the information exchange arrangements agreed to during Prof. Emelyanov’s visit to the United States in September, and is similar to the recent tour of Soviet atomic energy installations by Chairman McCone of the USAEC with a group of U.S. nuclear scientists.” 

[newspaper clip] “The Brookhaven National Laboratory..received a visit from the party of top Soviet[s]..which has been touring various atomic energy installations in the [U.S.] since November 5… [F]inal meetings [are] in Washington…”

http://www.nyhistoricnewspapers.org/lccn/sn86071739/1959-11-26/ed-1/seq-1.pdf

“[AEC] Chairman John A. McCone and his Soviet counterpart, Professor Vasily S. Emelyanov, signed a Memorandum on Cooperation on November 24, 1959, covering exchanges of visits and information on several unclassified areas of peaceful nuclear application.”

https://energy.gov/sites/prod/files/AECHistory

*

    Undersecretary of Commerce Frederick H. Mueller with McCone*

*

The American atomic contingent, led by AEC chairman McCone, took the initiative of visiting the USSR shortly after Krushchev’s 12-day tour. The exact itinerary, arrival and departure, of McCone’s party is not known to this researcher –only this item  from the New York Times: “McCone Flies to Leningrad”…”Leaves Moscow for Leningrad”, NYT p23, dated October 11, 1959

http://spiderbites.nytimes.com/pay_1959/articles_1959_10_00004.html

*

This newspaper notice follows by one day Oswald’s arrival in Helsinki, Finland:

“The State Department was later concerned that Oswald had received his [USSR] visa in Helsinki in a shorter period of time than usual, which would indicate that there might have been some preparation for his defection. The Warren Commission’s analysts.. assumed that Oswald received his visa on October 14 after arriving in Helsinki on the tenth [a Saturday], though he may have applied for it as late as the twelfth [Monday], leading to the conclusion that ‘Oswald probably received his visa four days after he applied for it, but he may have received it only two days later.’  They [WC] recognized that the speed with which Oswald received his visa could lend credence to the CIA theory they quoted as suggesting that ‘Soviet authorities had advance warning of Oswald’s arrival and had been ready and waiting to handle him rapidly once he arrived.’ ” p288, Legend, the Secret World of Lee Harvey Oswald, 1978, by Edward Jay Epstein

*

As of October 1959, the whereabouts of Robert Webster were unknown to Americans:

“Webster…disappeared on September 10, 1959. Upon returning to the United States, Dr. Rand, Webster’s employer, reported his disappearance to the State Department, and the U.S. Embassy in Moscow wrote a note to the Soviet Foreign Ministry requesting information on Webster. When he had received no reply regarding his former employee by October 14, Rand returned to Moscow. On October 17 [Rand] and Richard L. Snyder of the American Embassy obtained an interview with Webster who had been brought to Moscow from an undisclosed address in Leningrad, then handed Snyder a signed statement renouncing his United States citizenship… He told Snyder that he would send him his American passport as soon as he returned to Leningrad. (According to the CIA defector list, Webster handed Snyder his passport on October 19, 1959.)” p291 (Notes) Legend, ibid.

If the Legend notes are accurate and Webster surrendered his American citizenship at a police station and then left the city –for a month-long vacation with his girlfriend, as it stands– avoidance of the U.S. Embassy may have preserved his anonymity with embassy staffers. If the embassy needed to write “a note to the Soviet Foreign Ministry requesting information on Webster”, what didn’t they know? Is it possible that Robert Webster assumed the identity of Lee Oswald at this time to make a record of Oswald’s pre-defection activity in England, Sweden and Finland?

   According to Mark North in Act of Treason: “On 6/3/60 Hoover sent a memo to the State Department entitled ‘Lee Harvey Oswald, Internal Security’ in which he stated ‘Since there is a possibility that an imposter is using Oswald’s birth certificate, any current information the Department of State may have concerning subject will be appreciated.’ The [birth] certificate had disappeared in New Orleans around the time of Oswald’s defection to the Soviet Union.” p57, Act of Treason, by Mark North, 1991.

   Oswald’s means and timing of travel from the U.K. is still unknown and in dispute: He told the U.K. customs office, on or about October 9, that he planned to spend a week in England. Late the next day, “According to Finnish hotel records, he checked in midnight on Friday at the Torni Hotel in downtown Helsinki, then moved on Saturday to the less expensive Klaus Kurki Hotel where he remained registered for five days. Swedish intelligence has found evidence that Oswald traveled to Stockholm during this period…” pp93-94, Legend

   In addition to later statements from Marina that her husband worked for the American exhibition, there is a more direct reference in Legend that suggests Webster was using Oswald’s name: “The close coincidence between the movements of Oswald and Webster, as well as their not dissimilar physical appearance, possibly accounts for a number of mistaken identifications. Fritz Dieter Jaeger of the German Merchant Marine told the FBI in 1963 that he had met Oswald in Leningrad in 1961 and gone to the movies with him. It turned out that he had met Webster.” p.292, ibid.

*

6-week concentrated timeline of the Webster–Oswald defections:

September 4 —last day of the American National Exhibition in Moscow. In Santa Ana CA, Oswald is released from his MACS unit and goes to the local courthouse to apply for a passport which he receives Sept. 10

September 10 or 11 — Webster ‘disappears’, reportedly last seen at a party attended by KGB to celebrate his defection.

September 11 — Oswald is formally discharged from the active duty Marines. He arranges bus travel to Ft. Worth TX, arriving Sept. 14

September 15 — Krushchev, Atomic minister Emelyanov and entourage arrive in Washington D.C. for a goodwill tour. Oswald visits his brother’s family.

September 17 — Krushchev advises Ambassador Lodge, on the subject of nuclear test cessation, to ‘get intelligence operators into the Soviet Union.’ Later the same day, Oswald books an ocean passage to Europe on the S.S. Marion Lykes. He registers at the Liberty Hotel –his birth certificate is stolen, according to the FBI.

September 20 — Oswald sails for the port of LeHavre, France

September 21 — Webster is granted a Soviet passport.

*

Over the course of the next two weeks, Krushchev returns to the USSR and a U.S. Atomic Energy delegation headed by John Alex McCone arrives in Moscow.

*

October 8-10 — Oswald disembarks in France (8), ferries to U.K. (9), and flies to Helsinki (10) arriving at approx. midnight

October 11 — McCone and company ‘leave Moscow for Leningrad’. Webster is assumed to reside in Leningrad.

October 12 — Oswald applies for a Soviet visa at the consulate in Helsinki. He receives it October 14

October 14 — H.J. Rand, from the U.S., reports his former employee Webster is missing. Rand arranges travel to Leningrad.

October 17 — Rand and Bookbinder accompany Webster to Moscow where he defects from an OVIR office

October 18 — Webster and KGB girlfriend/co-worker leave together for a one month vacation in Sochi.

Oct. 17-19 — Oswald makes his first ‘attempt’ to defect. On Oct. 20, he is called to a meeting by Soviet authorities about defection.

*

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AEC chief McCone’s official atomic exchange visit with the Soviets in October of 1959 presents a remarkable intrigue for coinciding with the Webster/Oswald defections.Had they revived the FBI/AEC Dual Agent program? Is this a display of coordinating the “same forces” controlling both men? The background of this timing plays out amidst thousands of professional ‘exchange’ visitors and tens of thousands of tourists crossing the Atlantic between the U.S. and USSR, not to mention visitors and defectors from other countries. The Lacy-Zaroubin Agreement signed in January of 1958 formalized a negotiated minimum of professional visitors; from scientists to ballet dancers to film crews and students. Ruth Paine is associated with a 1958 exchange student effort from the anti-nuclear Society of Friends in Philadelphia. Mind-control theme research from the guests and hosts of gnosticmedia.com relate that George DeMohrenschildt co-operated the Russian Student Fund with CIA- affiliated anthropologist R. Gordon Wasson.

   The relevance of questions concerning McCone’s oversight of Oswald is substantiated in the immediate aftermath of the assassination: McCone “rushed to Hickory Hill…to be with Bobby” and was present for the phone call confirming JFK’s death. “A few minutes later, he and Robert left the house and walked around the lawn, speaking privately…” These were the moments in which RFK asked McCone ‘if they had killed my brother’ according to RFK aide Walter Sheridan.   “McCone returned to [CIA] headquarters at around 1530, summoned the CIA Executive Committee… [I]ssued orders for all stations and bases… [and] directed that a special cable channel be established so that all [communication] traffic related to Lee Harvey Oswald..went to a central repository, and he sent a [blank] to Parkland Hospital..to coordinate activities with the Secret Service and the FBI. After the Secret Service obtained a graphic film of the assassination taken by.. Zapruder, McCone had the National Photographic Interpretation Center (NPIC) officers.. prepare briefing boards…”. In the months ahead, as the Warren Commission set upon its duties, “…DCCI Marshall Carter recalled that McCone said he would ‘handle the whole [commission] business myself, directly’…” http://www.nsarchiv2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB493/docs/intell_ebb_026.PDF

   In this 2015 ‘report’ by David Robarge, published by the CIA’s own Studies on Intelligence, is noted that “Mr. McCone withheld evidence the CIA secretly monitored Oswald’s mail after he attempted to defect… [and] it suggests the White House may have directed him to hide the information.” It just doesn’t say which White House.

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   John McCone, in a  1988 legacy interview, elaborated on a few features of his early career after graduating from UCBerkeley: “I knew Ernest Lawrence…an extraordinarily bright young man…And I saw him on and off until the war [WWII] started and he became involved with the Manhattan Project.” [Q: Did you know him when he was working on the first cyclotron?] “Yes, I raised some money in the early 1930s to help him develop his cyclotron…We are talking about a very small unit and small amounts of money –hundreds of dollars, not thousands…to build a little machine…  So, it wasn’t any great undertaking but it was the opening step in the whole area of [U.S.] nuclear science.” [Q: Tell us about your business interests after World War II.] “After the close of the war, we [e.g.Steve Bechtel] liquidared the shipbuilding companies… Then we returned, Mr. Bechtel and I, to our original objective of construction-engineering…[and] we had a shipping enterprise that I was very much interested in…And so we came back in the shipping business, with tankers and so on…  We had some manufacturing activities and the Joshua Hendy company in Sunnyvale [CA] and I was looking after those. And then in 1947, my life was kind of divided.. in government…[and] I wanted to do it. So, in the late 1940s I guess, I dissolved my interest with the Bechtels and acquired all of the equity in Hendy and directed that strictly toward the shipping business. I liked that type..of shipping that I was in, which was bulk movement of oil and ore…and I carried that on until 1970 when I liquidated all my business activities and retired.”

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* Joshua Hendy Iron Works, Sunnyvale : “Hendy was acquired in 1946 by Westinghouse to make equipment for electrical utilities” http://www.asme.org/about-asme/who-we-are/engineering-history/landmarks/34-joshua-hendy-iron-works/

“In the postwar period, the [Hendy] plant continued to produce military equipment including missile-launching and control systems for nuclear-powered submarines. It also produced.. nuclear power plant equipment.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua_Hendy_Iron_Works

Hendy today: U.S. Air Force Satellite Test Center, Onizuka Air Force Station, http://facilities.fhda.edu/_downloads/HABS Onizuka

“After the war, Mr. McCone took over the Joshua Hendy Corp., a shipping firm that operated a fleet of tankers and cargo vessels…” [obituary] https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/local/1991/02/16/john-mccone-cia-director-for-kennedy-johnson-dies/…

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McCone, as president of Hendy, became a member of President Truman’s Air Policy Commission: “I had not served in government at all when President Truman, in 1947, appointed a five-man Air Policy Commission… Through the recommendations of the Air Force, with whom I had worked very closely, I was asked to..serve as a counselor to that commission…[But]..ahenry Ford, who was the fifth member, was asked to withdraw by his board of directors..[concerned about] conflict of interest. So he withdrew and the president asked me to take the fifth position…which I did..on the condition that I devote time to the military aspects and that others could devote their time to civil aviation. So I wrote the part of the report dealing with the military myself. I took that part..before it was released, over to [Sec.of Defense] Forrestal and he read it and said….’why don’t you come in and act as acting deputy [secretary of defense]… So the next day…it was agreed…  That’s the day that changed my life because it got me into government. I carried my business interests at the same time… The reson for that was that I was never committed exclusively to serving government as many men are. I preserved a two-track existence…[and] Throughout my business career…I was in close touch with military activities… [with] a respect for some of the officers and civilians that were involved in it. I had great respect for Forrestal, great respect for [John J.] McCloy and [Robert A.] Lovett…”

http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/conversations/mccone/mccone-con1.html

[conversation, The Eisenhower Years]

[Q: You served Eisenhower as head of the Atomic Energy Commission. Tell us about the argument that you made during that time concerning a possible test ban.]

“We were testing through the 1950s and there was a demand to stop it… [W]e made various attempts at a treaty which would suspend nuclear tests in the atmosphere. Everybody was in favor of it. It had to be a treaty that could be verified, so then they, the Soviets, proposed a moratorium. They said that they would not test. This was appealing to Eisenhower but it was not appealing to me as chairman of the [AEC] because our resources were detecting what they were doing. They would not guarantee against their violation of any arrangement. We wouldn’t know if they were continuing with development tests…[i.e] small weapons but large enough to advance the state-of-the-art as far as they were concerned. It posed a very tough argument to the president… pursued all the way through the last year of the Eisenhower administration and on into the Kennedy administration.”

[Q: Your first contacts with the Kennedy administration were also over the test ban issue?]

“There were several members of the Joint Committee [on Atomic Energy] who came to me and asked me if I would go and talk to President Kennedy…  I wouldn’t do it… [But] then after a little while [October 1961] the Soviets suddenly exploded a big bomb [the largest ever] that was detected… And at that point President Kennedy asked if I would come talk to him and I did. That was the first meeting on this subject…”

[Q: Did the debate on the test ban involve you in further controversy?]

“In 1956 Adlai Stevenson had made a speech in San Diego in which he advocated that the United States unilaterally abandon all testing of nuclear devices. He was quite sure that if we did, the Soviets would follow the lead. I violently opposed that approach because I didn’t think the Soviets would follow. I didn’t think we had the detection devices to know whether they were following for sure, and that became a source of argument….  In any event, we finally got an arrangement with the Soviets that was satisfactory. We improved our detection capabilities so that they could not light a match without our knowing it…”

[Q: When President Kennedy brought you in to offer you a government job, were you surprised?]

“Sure, I was very much surprised. I never expected to serve in his administration in any capacity.”

[Q: ..because you were a Republican?]

“Because I did not know Kennedy. And I did not know..any of the people who were in his administration. I made this report [for him] when the Soviets violated the test moratorium. I thought that was the end of it. Then he asked me to come in and see him, and he proposed to me that I become the director of Central Intelligence…  This surprised me…  and he said a very interesting thing…  ‘Now, there are only four people besides…Allen Dulles that know we are having this discussion  [and] I don’t want anybody else to know about it’ …So, I..[only] talked to my wife about it, and we decided to go ahead…”

—1987-1988 interview of John A. McCone by Harry Kreisler, alumni of UCBerkeley

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The old UCB Rad Lab (1920s and 1930s)**

                    **new Rad Lab c.1940

   **E.O. Lawrence’s first working cyclotron c.1928 **1932, Lawrence with a 27inch table top model*

   Around the same time (1988) that the elderly McCone was dusting off his remembrances for UCBerkeley, a new book about his business activities was due for release — “Friends in High Places” by Laton McCartney, which was predominantly a look into the Bechtel Corporation run by McCone’s friend and partner Stephen D. Bechtel (Sr.).  ***

   Bechtel, the family held corporation, boasts today that “We have designed or built more than half of the nuclear power plant construction projects in the U.S. and provided services on 88% of them over the years.” And this just for the U.S.

http://www.bechtel.com/services/defense-nuclear-security/nuclear/

   The relationships making this possible revolve around McCone and date back no later than the early 1930s when the former UCBerkeley schoolmates, John McCone and Steve Bechtel, reconnected with each other in 1931, according to McCartney. Left out of ‘Friends’ is McCone’s early sponsorship of Ernest Lawrence and the Berkeley Rad Lab –the man and the lab that hired-on physicist Luis Alvarez in 1936. Alvarez’s sister was Lawrence’s devoted secretary. Luis Alvarez gave his approving imprimatur to the Warren Commission, the altered Zapruder film, the “shots from behind” and “single bullet” theories of the JFK assassination. Also missing from ‘Friends’ was the ownership of Joshua Hendy Iron Works by nuclear reactor builder and supplier Westinghouse.

   It was up to McCone as chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, expressly selected, to carry on the work of his predecessor, Adm. Lewis L. Strauss, and preside over the moratorium and disarmament goals of the American president.

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NEXT: Atomic Oswald Three