Record­ed June 11, 2006

Lis­ten: MP3 This pro­gram was record­ed in one, 30-minute seg­ment.

REALAUDIO
NB: This stream con­tains both FTR #s 557 and 558 in sequence. Each is a 30 minute broad­cast.

Intro­duc­tion: A recent news sto­ry rein­forced a mytho­log­i­cal expla­na­tion for the ori­gin of AIDS—that it orig­i­nat­ed with chim­panzees in Africa many years ago. In this pro­gram, we vis­it again with Ed Haslam, who has writ­ten exten­sive­ly about simi­an virus­es and their role in cre­at­ing human dis­eases. In this pro­gram, Ed points out that: Dr. Beat­rice Hahn used a blood sam­ple from a chim­panzee (now deceased) housed in a U.S. Air Force lab­o­ra­to­ry in New Mex­i­co; that the researcher pre­sid­ing over the pri­mates in that lab delib­er­ate­ly inject­ed the apes with HIV; that the apes were kept in “nat­ur­al” con­di­tions that per­mit­ted the colony’s alpha male to have sex­u­al rela­tions with mul­ti­ple females in the colony and that genet­ic mark­ers in the genet­ic mate­r­i­al of HIV were at vari­ance with the chim­panzee hypoth­e­sis. In addi­tion, the pro­gram sets forth text from a con­gres­sion­al sub­com­mit­tee hear­ing that direct­ly fore­casts the devel­op­ment of AIDS.

For more about AIDS and the strong prob­a­bil­i­ty that it is a man-made dis­ease, see—among oth­er pro­grams—AFA#16 (avail­able from SPITFIRE), as well as FTR#’s 16, 19, 225, 324, 411, 472, 504, 606, 682, 686.)

1. Sup­ple­ment­ing FTR#269, this broad­cast fea­tures the work of Ed Haslam, author of Dr. Mary’s Mon­key. (For more about Ed Haslam, see—among oth­er programs—FTR#’s 16, 19, 62, 63, 76, 198.) The focal point of the broad­cast is the [fal­la­cious] claim that the ori­gin of AIDS can be traced to chim­panzees in Africa. Ed points out that the cre­ator of this hypothesis—Beatrice Hahn of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Alabama—drew her con­clu­sion on the basis of a blood sam­ple tak­en from a female chim­panzee named Mar­i­lyn. Kept in an Air Force lab­o­ra­to­ry in New Mex­i­co, Mar­i­lyn was part of a group of chim­panzees that were delib­er­ate­ly inject­ed with the AIDS virus!! Fur­ther­more, the chim­panzees in this par­tic­u­lar cap­tive pop­u­la­tion were main­tained in social con­di­tions mir­ror­ing those of their nat­ur­al habi­tat. Main­tained in this colony, the group’s alpha male would have had sex­u­al rela­tions with the oth­er female mem­bers of the pop­u­la­tion, there­by infect­ing them with any virus­es capa­ble of being sex­u­al­ly trans­mit­ted! Obvi­ous­ly this negates the accu­ra­cy of Hahn’s claim! To exam­ine Hahn’s claim in more detail, see arti­cle.

2. The dis­cus­sion of the ori­gins of AIDS takes place in the con­text of dis­cus­sion about the pos­si­bil­i­ty that AIDS is a man-made dis­ease. Mr. Emory read an excerpt from the book A High­er Form of Killing. This excerpt is from tes­ti­mo­ny before a House appro­pri­a­tions sub­com­mit­tee that was draw­ing up the defense bud­get for the fol­low­ing year. (The hear­ings were in 1969.) The tes­ti­mo­ny dis­cuss­es the pos­si­bil­i­ty of using genet­ic engi­neer­ing to pro­duce a dis­ease that would be “refrac­to­ry” to the immune sys­tem. This is vir­tu­al­ly the clin­i­cal def­i­n­i­tion of AIDS. It is worth not­ing that the project was fund­ed, and just such a disease—AIDS—appeared in just the time frame posit­ed. It is also worth not­ing that, in the 2002 edi­tion of A High­er Form of Killing, this pas­sage is omit­ted!!

“As long ago as 1962, forty sci­en­tists were employed at the U.S. Army bio­log­i­cal war­fare lab­o­ra­to­ries on full-time genet­ics research. ‘Many oth­ers,’ it was said, ‘appre­ci­ate the impli­ca­tions of genet­ics for their own work.’ The impli­ca­tions were made more spe­cif­ic that genet­ic engi­neer­ing could solve one of the major dis­ad­van­tages of bio­log­i­cal war­fare, that it is lim­it­ed to dis­eases which occur nat­u­ral­ly some­where in the world. ‘With­in the next 5 to 10 years, it would prob­a­bly be pos­si­ble to make a new infec­tive micro-organ­ism which could dif­fer in cer­tain impor­tant respects from any known dis­ease-caus­ing organ­isms. Most impor­tant of these is that it might be refrac­to­ry to the immuno­log­i­cal and ther­a­peu­tic process­es upon which we depend to main­tain our rel­a­tive free­dom from infec­tious dis­ease.’ The pos­si­bil­i­ty that such a ‘super germ’ may have been suc­cess­ful­ly pro­duced in a lab­o­ra­to­ry some­where in the world in the years since that assess­ment was made is one which should not be too read­i­ly cast aside. . .”

(A High­er Form of Killing; Robert Har­ris and Jere­my Pax­man; Hill and Wang [SC]; ISBN 0–8090-5471‑X; p. 241.)

3. Indica­tive of the skew­ing of the results of the HIV/chimpanzee “inves­ti­ga­tion” is an arti­cle from Nature mag­a­zine. Ed points out that the sci­en­tists quot­ed in the arti­cle say that the “clocks”—genetic mark­ers denot­ing the time sequence of the virus’s mutations—don’t sup­port the chim­panzee hypoth­e­sis of the ori­gin of AIDS. They note that if the clocks are dis­re­gard­ed, the hypoth­e­sis makes sense, and they then endorse the chimp hypoth­e­sis. This is at fun­da­men­tal vari­ance with sci­en­tif­ic pro­ce­dure. If data dis­prov­ing a hypoth­e­sis are dis­cov­ered, this negates the hypoth­e­sis. One doesn’t dis­re­gard data that are diver­gent from the hypoth­e­sis in order to val­i­date a pre­con­ceived con­clu­sion.
(“HIV-like Virus Found in Chimps”; Nature; 5/22/06)