From: sbharris@ix.netcom.com(Steven B. Harris)
Subject: Re: Visser method
Date: 05 Dec 1996
Newsgroups: sci.cryonics

In <19961205032800.WAA17586@ladder01.news.aol.com> ramole@aol.com
writes:

>I have a general question. As reported in the newspaper, there was a
>demonstration where a rat heart was frozen and thawed, and then started
>beating.
>
>On reflection, beating requires coordination by nerve cells -- otherwise
>a heart just quivers or "fibrulates", doesn't it? So if it beat, this
>would mean that not just muscle tissue, but also nerve tissue survived,
>wouldn't it?
>
>My question is, did it really beat, or was that just poor reporting? And,
>if it did beat, do you (Dr. Visser) agree that nerve tissue survived? If
>so, do you think brain tissue, and brains, might do as well?
>
>Alan Mole  ramole@aol.com



   I am reminded of the story of the old duffer who likes to order
raisin bread at the bakery, because it's on the top shelf, and when the
counter girl stretches up to get it, he can see her legs.  One day as
he is doing this, another old guy who is watching the girl remarks that
he too has to order another loaf.  "Is yours raisin, too?"  "No, but
it's quivering a bit."

   So: do the Visser hearts beat, or do they just quiver a bit?  And if
they beat, do they beat forcefully enough to mount a blood pressure, or
would they just quiver if put under load?

   I suspect that they beat in coordinated fashion when unloaded. That
was what was reported in the news, and that is what makes sense.  Heart
cells individually isolated in a dish each beat, and when they connect
up, they beat in unison, as electrical discharge from one discharges
the next one touching it.  This happens in a ventricle, too-- no
conduction system (which is made out of specialized heart cells anyway,
not nerves) is required.  The only thing a conduction system does is
give you a squeeze from the tip of the heart up toward the atria, which
is more efficient.  But a squeeze starting from anywhere in the heart
will work well enough to keep you alive.

   Will the Visser hearts pump well enough to keep blood pressure up?
That we don't know.  Hearts can take a lot of damage and still beat--
but they can't take destruction of more than about 50% of fibers (and
less if it's done suddenly) and still pump well enough to sustain life.


                                         Steve Harris, M.D.


P.S.  Nerve cells have already been suspended by freezing in liquid
nitrogen-- that's not the problem.  It's doing this to a large
connected mass of them that is the problem.

From: sbharris@ix.netcom.com(Steven B. Harris)
Subject: Re: Virodene P058: A Nut and Her Dimethylformamide
Date: 25 Jan 1997
Newsgroups: misc.health.aids,sci.med

In <32e9f3a8.136628@jhb-news.iafrica.com> mckenzie@iafrica.com
Cameron Mckenzie) writes:

  >>[There] has been an interesting development in South Africa
as a controversial new Drug with much promise is presented
to a  South African Government Cabinet meeting, before the
Medical Community was informed.
  The scientists claim "they had been "blocked" by the Aids
research establishment, who refused to collaborate with them
because they wouldn't share their patent rights". <<


Comment:

One of the three South African scientists in the affair mentioned
above, a rather nasty cardiothoracic surgeon named Olga Visser,
was in the news not long ago with an (as yet unpublished)
technique to freeze rat hearts to liquid nitrogen temperature,
and recover some heart action (contractions) from them, after
rewarming.  Hearts are pretty tough when it comes to freezing,
but this was a pretty impressive achievement, all the same.

Since I'm mightily interested in cryogenics organ research, I did
a little snooping, and was able to discover eventually (partly
from some of Visser's South African colleagues, who dislike her
immensely) that the Visser rat heart cryoprotective agent is
simply N,N-dimethyformamide, (CH3)2-N-CO-H, used in a 25%
concentration.

    O   CH3
    ||  |         N,N dimethylformamide
H-- C - N--CH3


This is a common industrial solvent, which so far as I can tell,
has previously had no uses in medicine (and if you've worked with
it much, you know why-- it smells like fish and fairly low
concentrations will dissolve damned near anything, including red
cell membranes, in my own lab tests).  There had been wierd
noises from Visser at the time that her new rat heart agent was
"totally non-toxic, and had been tested in humans."  These made
absolutely no sense at all, at the time, since it is well-known
that dimethylformamide IS a moderately toxic substance, with 50%
lethal dose being in the range of a couple of grams per Kg body
weight, which is about the same tox range as more familiar
solvents like methanol and ethylene glycol.

So, we all wondered: what's the point of testing this stuff in
humans at all when toxicity data is well-known, and there is no
possible way that anything like the 25% concentration which
Visser uses on frozen rat hearts, could ever be used on a living
human?

But NOW I think we know what dimethylformamide is/was doing in
humans in a medical setting, in South Africa.  It was being given
to AIDS patients in South Africa, the perfect guinea pigs.  It
seems very likely that Visser's "Virodene P058" is this one and
the same dimethylformamide, the cure for all of the great
problems in medicine AND cryonics.  You heard it here first.  And
isn't Virodene P058 just the coolest name?  Sort of like "T25" in
Scope (aka ethanol), or Retsyn(TM) in Certs (aka copper
gluconate, the green speckles that don't do anything but look
green).

By the way, it is, according to all my sources, a lot easier to
do human medical research in South Africa than most civilized
countries. ["Civilized" countries?]  So long as someone has a
serious illness, and the family agrees, you can do pretty much
whatever you want with them in South Africa, even if they're NOT
kafirs.  If they have AIDS and you want to test low doses of your
new cryogenics compound on them-- hey, no problem.  Might even do
some good for their AIDS-- can't find out if you don't try, now
can you?  Answer me that.

In the "screwed up world" department, I'm told that, due to the
English influence, it's actually easier to do basic research on
terminally ill patients in South African than it is to do basic
research on dogs, our helpless canine friends.  Since the USDA is
giving me personally such a hard time about surgical hypothermia
research using a canine model in California (costly regulations
and all), I guess I could move to South Africa, if things get
really bad.  I suppose that South Africans ARE a better model for
medical research than dogs, although it is true that you never
know if South Africans will act human or not.  It's either that,
or move to mainland China, where the government doesn't really
give a damn about dogs OR people.


                                   Steve Harris, M.D.



Addendum:  Actually, after writing the above, today after more
checking I find that the whole thing is even worse than I
thought.  My South African sources say today that not only was
Visser's DMF given to black patients *exclusively* (it's harder
to get lower on the social totem pole than being a black AIDS
patient in South Africa), but that sometimes it was done even
without informed consent (the patients didn't even KNOW they were
getting a new drug).  Of course, the hospital ethics committee
knew nothing about it.  And this with an industrial solvent which
has well-known toxicity problems, which were not adequately
addressed.  Heads are going to roll about this, especially in
modern South Africa, where the black government has no sense of
humor about such things.

In the U.S., Visser's research with DMF has been partly funded by
a U.S. cryonics organization, the Alcor Life Extension
Foundation, which knew about her work with humans, but probably
weren't sophisticated enough to think anything of it.  This, even
though they had been warned by myself and my colleagues (who are
not associated with Alcor, but who have been watching the rat
heart story with intense interest) that there was something very
strange going on with giving this nasty stuff to people.

For more information on Olga Visser, medical genius, the Alcor
Life Extension Foundation can be contacted in Scottsdale, Arizona
at: 1-800-367-2228.  The Alcor Foundation, an organization that
freezes bodies but isn't terribly interested in yucky science or
ethics, likes any kind of media exposure, so long as their name
is spelled right.  So this should be right up their alley.

                                  SBH

From: sbharris@ix.netcom.com(Steven B. Harris)
Subject: Visseral Disgust, or: Something About Virodene Smells Fishy.....
Date: 26 Jan 1997
Newsgroups: sci.cryonics

Dear Sci.Cryonics

   A month ago, Ms. Olga Visser, a perfusionist in Pretoria who
developed a solution which allows flash freezing of rat heart with
recovery of contractions, had this to say about my skepticism of
whether or not the method would ever be useful for transplantation of
any organ:

   >>Dr. Steve Harris reminds me of the insurance salesman who
believes if he talks fast enough and sounds intelligent, he might
be believed.<<

   Very well-- let us speak now of belief.  Visser's agent
for protection of rat hearts is a 25% solution of N,N dimethyl
formamide, a fishy smelling industrial solvent.  It now appears
from recent news reports that this same Ms. Visser has been
testing out the same chemical on humans, specifically AIDS
patients, calling it "Virodene P058" (no doubt this is
the extropian name for the substance).  According to
Ms. Visser, as quoted in news reports, the stuff destroys
HIV, and has converted AIDS patients to apparently healthy
mere HIV-positives.  Shades of that old quack Hulda
Clark and her Cure for All Diseases-- we are now asked
to *believe* that in the face of establishment resistance,
Olga Visser has managed to discover the answer to
both AIDS and death, if not the problem of taxes and
how to get a grant from the government.

  Unfortunately, it also appears that Ms. Visser and her team
have also rediscovered a time-honored way of getting around the
stuffy old medical establishment in order to do experiments on
humans:  one simply does it without asking.  In some cases,
without asking the patients; and in others, without informing the
patients of the risks.  And always, one does it without informing
the hospital ethics committee, which has no idea of what is going
on.  Nor does one mention to the South African government that
all of your test subjects, who are about to get doses of a
mutagen and DNA toxin, all happen to be poor and black.  For
these days, the government of South Africa is lacking in sense of
humor about such things.

  Yes, dimethylformamide is a mutagen, with a great deal
of toxicity for multiple organs. Once upon a time, it was
tried out as a chemotherapeutic agent.  Gram for gram, it's
about as toxic as ethylene glycol or methanol,
and far nastier to the germ line (reproductive) cells than
either of these.  All of which caused us at 21st Century Medicine
some consternation some time ago when Visser announced that her
cryoprotective agent was being tested in humans, and was without
significant toxicity.  "At what doses?" we wanted to know.  At
concentrations similar to those used in cold hearts, the stuff
strips hell out of red cell membranes and kills kidney
slices-- we found that in our own experiments. And at far
lower doses, it kills living whole animals.  So why
would one want to give smaller doses still, to
living people?

   As an experimental AIDS treatment, now comes the answer.  As
AN AIDS TREATMENT???  Only a damn fool would give something with
this record of toxicity to human beings with AIDS, without a huge
amount of published and verified research of the effects of this
substance on HIV replication in vitro (in culture), plus
confirmatory research on its effects on closely related
lentiviruses such as FIV and SIV in animal models (cats and
monkeys).  Where is all of this research?  It certainly isn't
turning up on my computer searches of the world medical
literature.

   Ms. Visser continues in her post to me:

  >>Quite frankly, your general "Soviet style researchers" would
advise a kindly home of safe-keeping, without access to a modem
or type-writer, removal of "M.D" credentials, and some sort of
public warning for similar symptoms as those displayed by
yourself. I personally suggest a permanent holiday, before you do
yourself a permanent injury.<<

   On the contrary, I can now say that I believe it is essential
that Olga Visser be put on some kind of holiday, before she does
someone ELSE a permanent injury-- probably some black person with
AIDS in a Pretorian hospital, who has enough problems in life
without falling prey to a megalomaniac.  And although we cannot
remove Visser's "M.D." credentials, since she hasn't any, this is
perhaps not a bad idea for dealing with her South African
physician-colleagues in this pitiful affair, who surely bear some
responsibility also.

   Speaking of which, we now come to that worshipful U.S. patron
of Visser, the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, which was warned
by us at Biopreservation that there was something awfully strange
about Visser's claims to be doing experiments with
dimethylformamide on humans, but which continued to fund Visser
anyway, and do nothing.  I have to say I was at first a bit
surprised in this, even by Alcor.  When it comes to basic
biological science, Alcor has long lacked the ability to find its
corporate rear with both hands, so to speak-- this many of us
knew.  But they were warned in the Visser case by people who knew
better, so why again did nothing happen?  When it came to ethics,
after all, Alcor has always claimed to hold the high ground, and
to be extra careful not to associate with loose cannons of
various sorts.

   With a little reflection, however, I believe that Alcor's
commitment to "ethics" in cryonics will be understood to be a
rather carefully limited thing.  For the Alcor Foundation, the
interests of "frozen patients" come first, you see.  The fact
that what we are told are the "interests" of the "frozen
patients" just happen to coincide exactly with the interests of
the Alcor board of directors in expanding and keeping personal
control over Alcor's monetary assets, is to be understood as a
coincidence.  The Visser publicity was good for the "frozen
patients," so there you have it.  This outweighs all else.  As
for the interests of *living* patients, be they Visser's
patients, Alcor's patients, anybody's patients, except insofar as
they represent potentially profitable frozen meat in Alcor's
dewars (in whatever condition makes little difference for this
purpose)-- Alcor doesn't give a flying f*(% about them.  If one
understands this simple principle, the stranger-than-fiction
episode of Visser, and many other episodes in Alcor's recent
history as well, all become far less opaque.

   Not unrelated to all this, Mike Darwin has recently asked me
to post something about the DSM psychiatric classification of the
personality disorder descriptively called "narcissistic
personality disorder."  I'll be glad to.  Here are the diagnostic
criteria as my handbook lists them.  The more one knows about the
history of cryonics, the more carefully one should read.


                              -- Steve Harris


Addendum:

------------------------------------------------
Diagnostic Criteria for Narcissistic Personality Disorder

The following are characteristic of the individual's current and
long-term functioning, are not limited to episodes of illness,
and cause either significant impairment in social functioning or
subjective distress:

A. Grandiose sense of self-importance or uniqueness, e.g.,
exaggeration of achievements and talents, focus on the special
nature of one's problems.

B. Preoccupation with fantasies of unlimited success, power,
brilliance, beauty, or ideal love [the manual adds "Frequently
there is painful self-consciousness, preoccupation with grooming
and remaining youthful, and chronic, intense envy of others."]

C. Exhibitionism: the person requires constant attention and
admiration.

D. Cool indifference or marked feelings of rage, inferiority,
shame, humiliation, or emptiness in response to criticism, the
indifference of others, or defeat.

E.  At least two of the following characteristic of disturbances
in interpersonal relationships:

1) entitlement: expectation of special favors without assuming
reciprocal responsibilities, e.g., surprise and anger that people
will not do what is wanted
2) interpersonal exploitativeness: taking advantage of others to
indulge own desires or for self-aggrandizement; disregard for the
personal integrity and rights of others
3) relationships that characteristically alternate between the
extremes of over-idealization and devaluation
4) lack of empathy: inability to recognize how others feel, e.g.,
unable to appreciate the distress of someone who is seriously
ill.

From: wowk@cc.umanitoba.ca (Brian Wowk)
Subject: Re: Visseral Disgust, or: Something About Virodene Smells Fishy.....
Date: 26 Jan 1997
Newsgroups: sci.cryonics

In <hkhensonE4Mqsr.LAK@netcom.com> hkhenson@netcom.com (Keith Henson) writes:

>:    Very well-- let us speak now of belief.  Visser's agent
>: for protection of rat hearts is a 25% solution of N,N dimethyl
>: formamide, a fishy smelling industrial solvent.

>I found it to be more or less odorless.  I don't think it is for a lack
>of ability to smell fishy stuff, becaust trimethyl amine is *definitely*
>fishy.

	Pure DMF does have an odor (although it's nothing comapared
to TMA, which outright stinks).  DMF also loses its odor in solution
with water, where water-DMF interactions greatly reduce the vapor
pressure.


>Steve, I am still mystified as to why this stuff works as a
>cryoprotective...

	It's no mystery at all.  ANY small molecule that dissolves
in water is cryoprotective by creating colligative freezing point
depression.  A Medline search will reveal that DMF has been used
as a cryoprotectant by electron microscopists (where fast freezing is
the norm) for years.  You'll even find it in Greg Fahy's publications.
It was ultimately abandoned for organ preservation use as too toxic.


>but I think you might have put forth a mechanism for why
>it works on AIDS (if it does).  AIDS, as we all know, does a rather poor
>job of copying.  If this stuff raises the mutation rate for copying the
>AIDS virus a whole lot, it might be causing a massive drop in the number
>of viable viruses.

	Absolutely.  And so might 1000 other cytotoxic, mutagenic agents.
There are an enormous number of compounds that inhibit HIV in-vitro.
Forget dimethylformamide, why not inject people with *formaldehyde*?
It will certainly kill HIV (with embalming as the only side effect).


>:    As an experimental AIDS treatment, now comes the answer.  As
>: AN AIDS TREATMENT???  Only a damn fool would give something with
>: this record of toxicity to human beings with AIDS, without a huge
>: amount of published and verified research of the effects of this
>: substance on HIV replication in vitro (in culture), plus
>: confirmatory research on its effects on closely related
>: lentiviruses such as FIV and SIV in animal models (cats and
>: monkeys).  Where is all of this research?  It certainly isn't
>: turning up on my computer searches of the world medical
>: literature.

>Steve, two things.  Not all medical research has made it on to the
>computer nets...

	The nets?  The point is that Visser's "research" (in
cryobiology or AIDS) has never been presented ANYWHERE in ANY FORM
whatsoever!  Her (self-professed) speciality is manipulation of
journalists and politicians.  Only this time foreign journalists
are not giving her quite the free ride they did with her
cryobiological claims (bullshit being easier to detect in a
well-known field like AIDS research).

>and the standards used in the US happen to be a good deal
>more restrictive than those used elsewhere.  And, frankly, folk with AIDS
>don't have a lot to lose in a lot of cases.

 	So we should just gather AIDS victims off the streets and
inject them with whatever toxic compounds we happen to think of
without any supervision or peer review?  Keith, are you actually
going on public record as defending what she has done???????

***************************************************************************
Brian Wowk          CryoCare Foundation               1-800-TOP-CARE
President           Human Cryopreservation Services   cryocare@cryocare.org
wowk@cryocare.org   http://www.cryocare.org/cryocare/
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

From: wowk@cc.umanitoba.ca (Brian Wowk)
Subject: Re: Visseral Disgust, or: Something About Virodene Smells Fishy.....
Date: 27 Jan 1997
Newsgroups: sci.cryonics

In <hkhensonE4ontq.5t8@netcom.com> hkhenson@netcom.com (Keith Henson) writes:

>Brian Wowk (wowk@cc.umanitoba.ca) wrote:

>: 	It's no mystery at all.  ANY small molecule that dissolves
>: in water is cryoprotective by creating colligative freezing point
>: depression.  A Medline search will reveal that DMF has been used
>: as a cryoprotectant by electron microscopists (where fast freezing is
>: the norm) for years.  You'll even find it in Greg Fahy's publications.
>: It was ultimately abandoned for organ preservation use as too toxic.

>Ok, as a cryoprotectant good enough to fast freeze rat hearts.  Do
>you know of anything else which will do this?

	I don't know of any concerted effort to find compounds
that will do this, as small organs quench-cooled in liquid
nitrogen is not a model of much interest or relevance to human
organ preservationists or cryonicists.


>Brian, is it possible that DMF has much greater effects on HIV copying
>than it does on human DNA copying?  I don't know, do you?  Almost
>every therapeutic agent we use has toxic effects.  The good ones are
>just more toxic to the disease agent than to us.  (In chemotherapy
>bearly more toxic to the cancer, and most of them are mutagenic.)

	No, I don't know.  I just know that the way to find out
isn't to jump from theory to human trials, bypassing your
institutional ethics committe, bypassing peer review, bypassing
medical research funding agencies, and scheming with domestic
media to stage a highly-publicized impassioned plea for money
in front of the country's top elected officials (the ones
most susceptible to public pressure).  You could not design a
worse example of how to do medical science if you sat down and
tried.

	As to the credibility of the "cure" itself, the claim
is being made by someone who last year claimed a cryobiological
breakthrough that "if funded" would lead to human suspended animation
within two years.  So incredulity should be understandable.


>Brian, I stand by my statement "folks with AIDS don't have a lot to lose
>in a lot of cases."  Especially with a T-cell count of under 50, massive
>weight lose, and 5-10 opportunistic diseases eating on them.  A goodly
>fraction of these people would use euthansia if they could get it.  If
>terminal AIDS cases want to try something which might kill them, like DMF
>or a baboon transplant, why should I object?

	Or I.  I have no argument against dying people trying
anything they want on themselves.  The problem is with scientists
who want to try anything THEY want on dying people.  Yes,
I know in the libertarian sense that's merely a contract
between two people.  But there is also the contract between
the scientist and the institution that employs them (and also
an informal contract with the scientific community as a whole)
to follow time-honored ethics procedures that have been established
to prevent abuses.  Those contracts appear to have been grossly violated.

***************************************************************************
Brian Wowk          CryoCare Foundation               1-800-TOP-CARE
President           Human Cryopreservation Services   cryocare@cryocare.org
wowk@cryocare.org   http://www.cryocare.org/cryocare/
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

From: sbharris@ix.netcom.com(Steven B. Harris)
Subject: Re: Visseral Disgust, or: Something About Virodene Smells Fishy.....
Date: 27 Jan 1997
Newsgroups: sci.cryonics

In <hkhensonE4Mqsr.LAK@netcom.com> hkhenson@netcom.com (Keith Henson)
writes:

Harris
:    Very well-- let us speak now of belief.  Visser's agent
: for protection of rat hearts is a 25% solution of N,N dimethyl
: formamide, a fishy smelling industrial solvent.  It now appears

Henson
>>I found it to be more or less odorless.  I don't think it is
for a lack of abilityto smell fishy stuff, becaust trimethyl
amine is *definitely* fishy.<<

   Comment: perhaps you're just not very sensitive.  The purest
dimethylformamide (DMF) I've been able to find, SIGMA HPLC grade
99.9+ %, still smells definitely fishy.  I will admit that the
more pure the stuff, the less fishy and more ether-like the odor,
so the fish odor may be an impurity from some other amine (in
somewhat analogous fashion to the rotten oyster odor of DMSO).
Still, if you have a source of greater purity, I'd like to know
about it.

Harris
: all of your test subjects, who are about to get doses of a
: mutagen and DNA toxin,

Henson
>>Steve, I am still mystified as to why this stuff works as a
cryoprotective, but I think you might have put forth a mechanism
for why it works on AIDS (if it does).  AIDS, as we all know,
does a rather poor job of copying.  If this stuff raises the
mutation rate for copying the AIDS virus a whole lot, it might be
causing a massive drop in the number of viable viruses.<<


   Comment: Nah, it would surely kill normal replicating cells
(as in the bone marrow) first.  The fact that HIV does a lousy
job of copying means it can get away with a lot of mutations and
still work.  Not so your own cells.

Henson:
  >>One of the more interesting things which has come out in
recent years was the results of the attempted baboon blood
transplant.  The transplant failed, but the patient got a *lot*
better.  Who would have thought that a heavy immune system
suppression of an AIDS patient (in the course of a  transplant
try) would result in an improvement? <<

Comment:
   If DMF does anything for AIDS, it is as a generalized immune
suppressant, due to toxic effects on lymphocytes.  Immune
suppressants *sometimes* have a somewhat paradoxical temporary
effect on some AIDS symptoms, which can be due to nasty cytokines
like TNF released by immune cells.  Also, there is some evidence
that some lymphocyte killing in AIDS is mediated by NK cells, and
perhaps immune suppression slows this down.  In any case, there
are reports of temporary clinical improvements in AIDS victims
given cyclosporin, prednisone, high dose AZT, and/or other heavy
immune suppressives, like the Getty guy who got the baboon cells.

   But none of this has been shown to extend life.  As you may
guess, immunosuppressing somebody already immunosuppressed leads
to its own set of problems.  People feel better, but die of
infection just as fast, or sooner.

   Finally, since inflammation is part of the damage in some
secondary infections in AIDS (Pneumocystis pneumonia), immune
suppression has a role in treating these specific problems.  But
there are better and safer immunosuppressives (like prednisone)
than DMF.  At least prednisone does not mutate your DNA.

Harris:
>>lower doses, it kills living whole animals.  So why
>>would one want to give smaller doses still, to
>>living people?
>>   As an experimental AIDS treatment, now comes the answer.  As
>>AN AIDS TREATMENT???  Only a damn fool would give something with
>>this record of toxicity to human beings with AIDS, without a huge
>>amount of published and verified research of the effects of this
>>substance on HIV replication in vitro (in culture), plus
>>confirmatory research on its effects on closely related
>>lentiviruses such as FIV and SIV in animal models (cats and
>>monkeys).  Where is all of this research?  It certainly isn't
>>turning up on my computer searches of the world medical
>>literature.

Henson:
   >>Steve, two things.  Not all medical research has made it on
to the computer nets, and the standards used in the US happen to
be a good deal more restrictive than those used elsewhere.<<

   Comment:
   First of all, MEDLINE references every refereed English
language medical journal on Earth, a lot of good foreign language
journals, and even some lousy journals in many languages that
aren't refereed.  If you can't publish your medical research in
some journal that medline covers, you have no business relying on
it.  The thing about science (as Feynman once noted) is that it's
important first of all not to fool yourself, and you (as the
experimenter with the vested interest) are the easiest person to
fool.  That's why scientists publish: it's the very communal
nature of the enterprise, and only this nature, which insures the
objectivity that makes scientific knowledge different than other
kinds of knowledge.  You have no business betting somebody else's
life on your own research, without having had somebody objective
(even the hospital ethics committee) check it, first.  That's not
only common sense, and common decency, it goes right to the heart
of what makes science science.

   As for whether or not U.S. human use standards are more
restrictive than some other places, there are reasons for this.
Before they were, we did things to people like what Visser has.
In the U.S. we shot people up with plutonium without their knowledge
30 years ago, and let other people go untreated for tertiary
syphilis (if black) just to see what would happen.  Our present
Human Use Committee rules, without which no human research
proceeds in the U.S., were put in place to stop this kind of
thing.  They are (to put it bluntly) what now DO stop that kind
of thing.

   If they don't stop this kind of thing elsewhere (South
Africa), that's a situation to be deplored, sort of like the case
with Hitler's Germany.  Laxity of such rules does not excuse
researchers who take advantage of them to the point that people
get dangerous drugs without informed consent (if they are able to
give it; or the consent of their families if not).  There is such
a thing as the Helsinki code (a.k.a. the Declaration of Helsinki
by the World Health Organization, 1964), which even South Africa
has signed off on.  It's sort of like the Nuremburg code, except
that it's a lot less legalistic, and applies these days to South
Africa pro-actively (as opposed to all those post WWII codes that
were imposed on Germany ex post facto).  The Helsinki code
demands that people know what is being done to them in medical
research (it's very big on informed consent), and that some kind
of independent party in each place watch human research to make
sure that it doesn't get away from everyone in a burst of
misplaced enthusiasm.  If Visser didn't even meet those minimal
standards, as I hear she did not, then she's right outside the
bounds of medical ethics, as agreed on by just about every
medical ethics body on the planet.

Henson:
>>And, frankly, folk with AIDS don't have a lot to lose in a lot
of cases.<<

   Comment: They have to lose what's left of their lives, with
new symptoms from being poisoned to keep them company through
what's left of it.  If the argument that they have little to lose
is valid, why not just throw the kitchen sink at all of them, and
just shoot them up with drugs A through Z, at random?  Or
immunosuppressants and chemotherapeutics, at random?

   Why not?  Because that's not the way you do medical research
in the civilized world, is why not.  First, do no harm, is the credo
of every moral physician.  You don't just try things
on people without a rationale, and immunosuppression is not
enough of a rationale for AIDS (since it has not been proven even
in general to do much for AIDS patients).  Moreover, you don't
try things on people because you have some kind of hidden agenda
for some other work you're doing.

   Do you honestly think, Keith, that Visser was testing DMF on
AIDS, and one day thought to herself "Hmmm, I'm working on my
degree in cryobiology, after all-- I _wonder_ if this would make
a good rat heart cryoprotectant?"  No.  Visser is quoted in one
news article as saying she was working on DMF as a cryoprotectant
FIRST.  So she's got a conflict of interest.  Do you suppose, then,
that when Visser went to all those people with AIDS asking to use
DMF on them (those that she did ask), she told them ALSO all
about her interest in "Virodene P058" as a *cryoprotectant* for
hearts -- one which she needed to be test in humans for reasons
other than AIDS? Remember Helsinki and informed consent.
Had these patients known of this other interest of Visser's, do
you suppose some of them might have started to wonder if just
perhaps they were being used as guinea for some other purpose
which had nothing to DO with AIDS?  That perhaps they were in
the grip of a madwoman?

   What do YOU think?

                              Steve Harris, M.D.