Michael Fumento, biotech expert and Scripps Howard columnist, details FDA-approved breakthroughs like recombinant insulin (1985) and Embril’s dual rheumatoid arthritis/Crohn’s disease potential, predicting cancer control by 2025 via anti-angiogenic drugs and stem cell therapies. He dismisses monarch butterfly risks from GM corn as overblown but warns of "superweeds" and China’s unregulated experiments—e.g., rabbit-gene cotton—while defending Project BioShield’s $6B biodefense funding against conspiracy claims like chemtrails or vaccine toxicity. Fumento insists rigorous oversight and layered countermeasures, including genetic mapping, can neutralize bioterrorism threats, though Bell questions U.S. preparedness for a "biological 9/11." Their exchange underscores biotech’s revolutionary promise amid ethical and regulatory hurdles. [Automatically generated summary]
Good evening, good morning, good afternoon, wherever you may be in the world.
Look at the time zones covering them all in this program.
Weekend version taking off right now.
I'm on the honor to be here with you.
Actually, an open mind throughout the weekend.
Beginning with this hour.
And then tomorrow night, possibly for as many as three hours.
We'll see.
We do have a man tomorrow night who has discovered, I think, some legitimate Martian artifacts that bear real examination.
And I don't want to give away the form on that one, but we'll get that to that tomorrow night.
Tonight, in the first hour open lines, followed by Michael Fumento, who's going to be talking to us about, I guess, the technological revolution going on in biotechnology and how it's changing our world.
Now, I have no idea whether it was real or not, but earlier tonight, somebody sent me a picture of what amounted to a sniper rifle that was designed to fire chips that would be implanted into a human being.
Now, they would, upon being hit with this at a great distance, one presumes, they would then begin to irradiate and they would be tracked by GPS.
This is something you would imagine perhaps our government might have.
You know, it actually showed a picture of the rifle and a description.
Maybe it's hogwash and maybe not.
These days, you have to be careful about washing anything away as hogwash because the next thing you know, you turn around.
And as a matter of fact, that's happened to me over the years on this program more times than I can count.
Something that initially sounds like utter hogwash.
And then kaboom, the next thing you know, it's all across the front pages.
So you have to be very careful.
Looking at what's going on in the world, as usual, nothing good.
It looks like Israel has assassinated yet another Hamas leader in a missile strike, which hit Iskar Saturday, part of a declared campaign to wipe out the Islamic militant group's leadership ahead of a planned Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip.
U.S. basically, you know, talking to the rest of the world, said, talk to the hand.
Israel has a right to defend itself from terrorism, as every nation does.
Baghdad, the news there, not very good.
The U.S. military closed down two major highways going into the capital city, Baghdad, Saturday.
In the latest disruption caused by intensified attacks by anti-U.S.
insurgents, U.S. and Iraqi negotiators reported progress in talks aimed at easing the fighting in Fallujah.
While the besieged cities ought its actual quietest day yet elsewhere, U.S. Marines fought pitched battles against about 150 gunmen near the Syrian border.
Five Marines and scores of insurgents were killed in the 14-hour battle.
So things are not getting better in Iraq.
Now, you know, I've got something I want to say about Iraq.
And to a lot of people, it seems as though I have changed positions or done a flip-flop.
Or, you know, if you listen casually, you might, in fact, come to that conclusion.
But in fact, I thought the incursion into Iraq prior to its occurrence was a very poor idea.
I still don't think it was a good idea.
However, and I spoke out quite plainly and loudly, I think, about it prior to its occurrence.
However, we're there.
That's an indisputable fact.
We are now there.
So there's no point in screeching against it, but rather trying to figure out how to win it.
And win it, we must.
It's a kind of a double-edged sword on the one hand, you know, they're just pouring in across every border they can come across to get to us, try and kill Americans.
But the other edge of the sword is we're keeping them all in one place.
Now, how we ultimately end this, leaving Iraq in some semblance of governable state, a governable state, I don't know.
And then, of course, our exit, probably not for years and years, it would appear.
Vice President Dick Cheney portrayed President Bush and himself as champions of the Second Amendment and the Democratic candidate, John Kerry, as a potential threat to any gun owner, saying Kerry's approach to the Second Amendment has been to regulate, regulate, and then regulate some more.
Adult movie actors, this one's kind of strange.
Adult movie actors said they would keep working in the multi-billion dollar porn industry despite an HIV scare as more producers joined a voluntary moratorium that shut down many sets.
About a dozen porn production companies halted shooting until at least June 8th after two performers tested positive for the virus that causes AIDS.
Hustler Video and VCA Pictures said Friday they are going to halt work, and they will do so indefinitely.
In a moment, we'll look at some of the other news.
Oh, before I get into that, a number of people said, no, you know, that rifle has been reported to be a hoax.
Well, maybe.
But if it's a hoax now, it won't be for long.
They already have the chips that enable tracking of a human being or whatever by satellite and GPS.
So if it's a hoax today and science fiction today, if that is true, then I'll bet you by tomorrow or the next day, the real thing will be there.
Anyway, this from the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
Headline is, this was just released, satellites record weakening North Atlantic current.
A North Atlantic ocean circulation system weakened considerably in the late 90s compared to, say, the 70s and the 80s, according to a NASA study.
The lead author and researcher at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland, and the co-author, an oceanographer at the University of Washington in Seattle began, I believe that slowing of this ocean current is an indication of dramatic changes in the North Atlantic Ocean climate.
The study's results about the system that moves water in a counterclockwise pattern from Ireland to Labrador were published on the internet by the Journal Science on the Science Express website, and then it gives the URL.
The current known as the subpolar geyer, I believe it is, has weakened in the past in connection with certain phases of a large-scale atmospheric pressure system known as the North Atlantic Oscillation or NAO, but the NAO has switched phases now twice in the 1990s, while the subpolar Geyer current has continued to weaken.
Whether the trend is part of a natural cycle or the result of other factors related to perhaps global warming simply isn't known.
It is, quote, it's a signal of large climate variability in the high latitudes.
If the trend should continue, it would indicate reorganization of the ocean climate system, perhaps with changes in the whole climate system, but we need another good five to ten years to say something like that is happening now.
The subpolar zone of the Earth is a key site for studying the climate.
It's like Grand Central Station there as many of the major ocean water masses pass through the Arctic from the warmer latitudes.
They are modified in this basin.
Computer models have shown the slowing and the speeding of the subpolar geyer can influence the entire ocean circulation system.
And this from Reuters.
I always try and quote where I get these things.
This is Reuters and from Anchorage.
Anyone who doubts the gravity of global warming should perhaps ask Alaska's Eskimos, Indians, and elders about the dramatic changes to their land and the animals on which they depend.
Native leaders say that salmon are now, listen to this, increasingly susceptible to warmwater parasites and suffer from lesions and strange behavior.
Salmon and moose meat have developed odd tastes, and the marrow in moose bones is weirdly runny, they say.
The Arctic pack ice is disappearing, making food scarce for sea animals and causing difficulties for the natives who hunt them.
It is feared that polar bears, to name one species, may virtually disappear from the northern hemisphere by mid-century.
As trees and bushes march north over what was once tundra, so do beavers and they're damming new rivers and lakes to the detriment of water quality and possibly salmon eggs.
Still, to the frustration of Alaskan natives, many politicians down here in what they call the lower 48 in Alaska deny, absolutely deny that global warming is occurring or that a warmer climate could cause problems.
Patricia Cochran said, quote, they obviously don't live in the Arctic, unquote.
Executive Director of the National Native Science Commission, the Anchorage-based Commission funded by the National Science Foundation, has been gathering information for years on Alaska's thawing.
The climate changes are disrupting traditional food gathering and cultures.
According to one leader from the islands there in the Bering Sea, indigenous residents of the far north are finding it increasingly difficult to explain the natural world to younger generations.
As species go down, the level of connection between older and younger go down along with it.
Climate and weather changes even affect human safety, said Orville Huntington, vice chairman of the Alaska Native Science Commission.
It looks like winter out there.
But if you've really been around for a long time like me, it's not winter, he said.
Indians from the interior Alaska village of Hosia say, if you travel that ice, it's not the same ice we traveled 40 years ago.
River ice, long used for travel in interior Alaskas, you might imagine, is thinner now and less dependable than it used to be.
Global warming is believed to result from pollutants emitted into the atmosphere, which trap the Earth's radiant heat and create a greenhouse effect.
Now, many people, of course, for various political reasons, deny that any sort of global warming whatsoever is going on.
I believe these people are simply, well, well, they just simply have their head in the sand.
It obviously is going on.
It's dramatic.
The ice at the north and the south part of the world are disappearing before our very eyes.
And it doesn't matter to me.
I'm tired, bone, weary of the argument which Vacillates back and forth between it is man's hand that is doing it, and it's a natural climactic thing.
I don't care which it is, natural or aided by man's hand or having nothing to do with man's hand.
It doesn't matter.
What does matter is that we begin to recognize that it is occurring.
It will change radically agricultural, what's the right word for this?
In other words, where we ought to plant things to have them grow so that the ground will feed us.
I mean, the areas where the things that we're used to growing, they're just not going to grow anymore in these areas.
They're probably going to end up moving north.
Who knows?
But the trend now is obvious and clear enough.
And, of course, the threat to Europe, we know all about that.
As a matter of fact, there was an article in the New Scientist, I believe it was, blasting the upcoming $100 million-plus movie the day after tomorrow that depicts the freezing of Manhattan and so forth.
Blasting away at it.
And who knows, it may be science fiction.
I don't think it's being forwarded as science fact or something that's absolutely going to happen.
But my taste in science fiction certainly does run to that kind of movie.
And by that, I mean not something that is necessarily absolutely going to happen, but something that based on current science or what a lot of very good people in science believe, you know, from Woods Hole and all the rest, that a sudden climate change is now not only possible, but perhaps even slipping into the probable category.
And we certainly understand very clearly that it's happened many times before in Earth's history.
The cores they bring up and examine are very clear with regard to all of that.
Well, you know, with respect to Major Ed Dames, he's a good friend.
He's been wrong sometimes, and I've called him on that, but he's also been, unfortunately, right quite a number of times.
And so I'm respectful of what he says, and I don't necessarily buy it all.
I'm not a remote viewer.
Although, let me tell you a little secret.
I don't know if this is out, but I just received a copy of the official, you know, back when it was in the CIA, I've got a copy of the actual remote viewing manual.
I hear a dog.
unidentified
My dog is barking at the raccoon that's at the door waiting to be fed.
Do you have any desire, for example, to be able to remote view, to know that something is going to happen, perhaps even remote view the manner of your own death?
Well, maybe with remote viewing, I don't know, but I'm simply suggesting to you, I have received an extremely and long official document that seems to represent the actual official remote viewing manual.
And I'm not going to make it public.
I don't know what its status is, but it did set me to thinking.
I suppose one could read it and then discern from it how to train even oneself in remote viewing.
I don't know.
It's always something, though, that I have resisted.
I don't know if I want to know.
I really don't know if I want to know.
And for that reason, I've had many opportunities to be trained by the best.
But there's something in me that prevents me from wanting to do it.
And yet I'm fascinated by interviewing those who do.
But going to the edge of death, sir, is going to the edge of death.
unidentified
Yeah, but uh I really don't know what it was, but uh I did this probably I'm guessing around six years ago and I did it for probably a few years and going to the edge of death.
In the world things are falling apart Coast to coast To the average Joe It may be hard to tell No, well, I'm the sunclosed Yeah, the truth is out there Ask God, Ben, where?
Area 51 In those amazing rooms We're going in ties to wars and lies Spears out Out of control.
I have a comment on the thing that you were talking about a little bit earlier, about maybe 15, 20 minutes ago, about the global warming and how the politicians don't know it's global warming and stuff like that, the greenhouse gases and stuff.
If global warming is a reality, and it doesn't matter whether it's by our hand or not, if we're even so much as assisting it, then to do something about it would require some economic sacrifice that would be really, really unpopular.
And that's hard for a politician because they're elected people, and when they do unpopular things, then they get that's the way it works, yeah.
unidentified
But I mean, like, it's hard to understand.
We elect these people, and then we expect these people to change us and, you know, change our ways and stuff like that.
Well, rarely do they need our aid for that, but we've got to remember politicians are nothing but a slice of what society is out there in general, right?
They're like the rest of us.
I know nobody wants to really hear that, but they are.
They are nothing but some particularly ambitious people who have been plucked from the flock to lead us, and they want to keep their jobs.
And if they were to begin doing things that were economically seen to be lowering perhaps the quality of your life, let's say you couldn't drive your car the way you used to, say you were forced into carpooling, say you were forced to getting rid of SUVs, or, you know, who knows what it could be.
I'm not really bearing in on any one thing, but suppose your lifestyle were radically changed by a decision some politician made.
Odds are you would not like that and therefore not like the politician and end of job.
And that's what I was saying a little while ago, actually, at the beginning of the program, that so many times I have guffawed at something or another that somebody brings up that just seems absolutely, you know, way over the top.
And then, I don't know, a few months, a couple of years later, it's front-page headlines.
It's a clear channel station just taking over the airwaves all the way to the west coast.
Right.
If I may take just a moment to preface what I'm about to say, I have not had a near-death experience.
However, I have a very, almost an abstract idea I wanted to throw out to you.
And it's this, and here's the preface to the story.
I actually had a hip replacement several years ago.
And during the healing time, I had the misfortune of it, it popped out of the socket, and so I dislocated the hip.
Very, very painful.
Went to the emergency room.
There is a drug that the anesthesiologist gave to me intravenously, and it's an amnesia drug.
And the reason being is, of course, they had me on some painkillers, but as they relocated or actually fixed the problem with the hip, I don't remember them doing so.
And they say, well, because you don't remember, it's like it never happened.
Okay, so that's the preface.
Now, as I apply this to life itself, You know, I don't disrespect anybody for their views, if they're Christian, other religions, or atheists.
But as far as I'm concerned, if when we die, there is nothing, we go no place or whatever, and it's just black and we're not aware of it, then would we ever have any memory of this life on earth?
And if there's no memory because we don't exist after we die, then perhaps it never happened.
Now, I know that sounds very abstract, but it is abstract, but I do understand what you're saying.
And it's the great thing to ponder, isn't it?
I vacillate in my own beliefs, and you've got to imagine one possibility, despite all we've done here on the airwaves and all the people we've interviewed with regard to near-death experiences, there's one thing you've got to remember, and that's that's all we've done.
We've interviewed people who have been near death or have experienced what the doctors determine to be Clinical death.
I've interviewed a lot of people like that, but I haven't yet, short of EVPs, interviewed anybody after death.
And so, one possibility hanging out there that nobody wants to consider, but really you have to, is that there is nothing.
That as prior to our birth, so it is following our death, that there is absolutely nothing.
No awareness, no existence, no continuing soul, and all the rest of it.
I don't consider that as a high probability, but I do consider it as a probability with no proof otherwise.
But on the other hand, it sounds like somewhat coherent gibberish.
That phrase doesn't even work.
But I mean, it does sound like something.
unidentified
And the reason I was asking is because with this, I've gone into out-of-body experiences, and I've seen myself move and talk in this language and do things throughout my normal day.
Well, I appreciate the thought, but I don't know about that.
I kind of like what I'm doing right now.
And if I'm asked or have a guest or we talk about the Second Amendment, my position will be very clear on the subject.
Very clear.
But I don't know that I would want to do that as a full-time job.
Nevertheless, I thank you for the thought.
And I am a very strong supporter of the Second Amendment.
We have a right to protect ourselves.
And I'll tell you something.
If you ever are looking for a red flag with regard to when the Bill of Rights and the Constitution really is beginning to crumble in front of your eyes, that'll be it.
When they begin to take away your gun rights, then you have every right to expect the worst.
I mean that.
So every chance you get, support those who support the Second Amendment.
Hey, so I, for a hobby, enjoy learning survival skills and for many years have.
And last weekend when I heard you talk with Ed Dane, kind of made if his projection of the future is true, it kind of makes pursuing survival a futility.
I believe that's the exact phrase that Ed used, wasn't it?
That for a period of time there'd be a Mad Max world, and I have mixed feelings about whether or not I'd want to survive in that atmosphere.
How about the rest of you?
Have you ever thought about that?
That if civilization, such as we know it, and law and order, as such as we know it, crumbled, and it was sort of a man-eat-man kind of deal, and the strongest shall survive, would that be an atmosphere in which you would want to live?
Or would you rather be consumed by that which would cause the Mad Max scenario?
I don't know.
All of that's worth a little thought, isn't it?
From the high desert in the middle of the night, this is Coast to Coast AM.
I'm Art Bell.
unidentified
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From coast to coast and worldwide on the internet, this is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
Ahead of our guest, I've got something I want to read you.
This is from Yahoo News, and it just broke.
The headline is, FDA approves human brain implant devices.
Boston.
For years, futurists have dreamed of machines that can read minds and then act on instructions as they are thought.
Now, human trials are set to begin on a brain-computer interface involving implants.
CyberKinetics Inc.
of Foxborough, Mass has received Food and Drug Administration approval to begin a clinical trial in which four square millimeter chips are going to be placed beneath the skulls of paralyzed patients.
If successful, the chips could allow patients to command a computer to act merely by thinking about the instructions they wish to send.
So in other words, a paralyzed person could move a mouse around and command a computer to do as he wishes.
He would merely have to think about it.
Now, that's incredible.
And so I thought it might be interesting to have somebody like Michael Fumento on.
And so here he comes.
Michael Fumento is an author, journalist, and attorney.
That's interesting.
Specializing in science and health issues.
He is a science columnist for Scripps Howard.
He is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C., received his undergraduate degree while serving in the Army.
And in 1985, graduated from the University of Illinois College of Law, as a matter of fact.
This is going to be very interesting because there's so much ethical ground to cover here.
He's been a legal writer for the Washington Times, editorial writer for the Rocky Mountain News in Denver, was the first national issues reporter for Investors Business Daily.
Mr. Fermento has lectured on science and health issues throughout the nation and the world.
He's authored five books now, and many of his articles have appeared in several national publications around the world.
I wonder what he will have to say about the chip in a moment.
And now it's, as you've already pointed out, it's clearly a lot more advanced than putting a little thing inside somebody's chest to make sure that their heart keeps beating normally.
But implanting something into the neural pathways.
I interviewed a scientist, Michael, not that long ago, who was implanting something into the neural pathways of his arm that had some sort of direct connection to the brain.
He was actually doing this.
I mean, it was his own, he's a scientist, and so he's using himself as a guinea pig.
And now, this story, Chip's actually in the brain and able to send impulses to a computer.
I mean, we're approaching this interesting juncture, Michael, where it seems like the eventual integration of humans and computers, I guess, is inevitable.
However, I really do see the possibility for, I mean, once you're, how can I put this right?
Once you are connected to a computer, you have neural connections to a computer, then I understand that to a certain point we control it, but at some point wouldn't there be the possibility of a bi-directional beginning of a communication?
In other words, at some point, couldn't we really totally begin to integrate with a computer, either using it or it using us?
What I did was I looked at a number of areas in which basically everybody was being told one thing, and it turned out that if you looked at the science, that that one thing they were being told was completely false.
And these were not trivial subjects.
These are subjects that are still in the news today, even though this book came out in 1993.
Things like power lines causing cancer, although fortunately that to a great extent has died down.
But I wrote about Agent Orange.
That's still hot.
I wrote about dioxin in general.
That's still a hot issue.
There are still a lot of things in this book, 11 years old though it be, that are really affecting people in very negative ways that the science didn't support then and certainly doesn't support now.
To me, the most important word in the title probably is is, is changing our world.
Because so many of these things that sound utterly miraculous are happening even as we speak and have been happening.
For example, a lot of people don't know all the insulin in this country is in fact biotech.
It's recombinant.
In other words, they took a gene from one organism and they're now growing into another.
Well, that was FDA approved in 1985, almost two decades ago.
But the pace is improving at an incredible rate.
More and more biotech drugs are being approved by the FDA every year.
And whereas they started off with basically replacement products, a better form of insulin, a better form of human growth factor that no longer had to be removed from cadavers and therefore doesn't cause Jakob Krustfoil disease, the new drugs are not simply better.
They're not substitutes.
They're drugs for which before there was nothing.
One, for example, one whole class are rheumatoid arthritis drugs such as Embril made by Amgen.
Now before Embril came along, if you had rheumatoid arthritis, which is not the kind of wasting arthritis that people get from when they're old or anything like that, it's an autoimmune disease.
Your immune system turns on you.
Until Embrel came along, literally the only thing your doctor had to offer you was an aspirin or ibuprofen.
When it got bad enough, then they would put in new joints.
But it would just keep getting worse and worse and worse.
There was no drug from rheumatoid arthritis.
Then Embril came along, and that was made by splicing a protein that already exists in us, but only in tiny amounts, and splicing that into, as I recall, hamster cells.
And grown in hamster cells, it's injected into people, and it's literally, it's a miracle drug.
Absolutely it is.
It doesn't just slow the progression of rheumatoid arthritis.
It can stop it right in its tracks.
It relieves the pain.
It can reduce the swelling to absolutely nothing.
And now, Embril has numerous competitors out there, some of which are probably better than Embril.
Without biotech, you would never get a drug to treat rheumatoid arthritis.
And going beyond that, it turns out that so many of these drugs, including Embril, are being found to be effective against diseases that seem to have nothing in common with the original disease.
Well, Michael, if we continue at the current pace or it continues to speed up as it seems to be doing, in 2025 or so, what kind of world are we going to be living in?
What kind of things might be possible if you sort of do a little projection?
But you see them as controlled perhaps for the lifetime or nearly the original lifetime of the patient and cancer, the fatal cancers today no longer are death sentences.
Instead, you take medications on a daily basis and you stay alive for however long you would have otherwise, pretty much.
And the reason I can project out to 2025 that we'll be able to do that is because we're seeing the first indications of drugs that can do that now.
For example, one of the most recent FDA approvals was for a drug called Neovastat.
Now, this was only about four weeks ago.
Neovastat goes after cancer in a completely different way from the traditional three of slash, burn, and poison.
In other words, surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy.
Neovastat is an anti-angiogenic drug.
What that means is that virtually all cancers, almost all of them, even blood cancers like leukemia, require vascular growth to sustain themselves.
In other words, once they get beyond about the size of a BB, they start sending out chemicals to the body.
These chemicals form veins, and these veins bring in oxygen and other nutrients that not only allow that tumor to survive, but to grow and to metastasize, to send individual cancer cells to other parts of the body.
Well, what Neovastat does, what all anti-angiogenic drugs do, is they prevent, to some extent, the creation of these blood vessels, or else they can even shut the blood vessels down.
But it gets better because there are literally, last I counted, 67 biotech anti-angiogenic drugs in the pipeline, many of them very close to FDA approval.
My dad passed away of cancer, and we were looking into everything, you know, which all cancer patients do, I guess, everything you can find when you're facing a fatal disease.
And I heard rumor of something that was underway at, I think, somewhere in the Bay Area and Stanford.
I don't know.
Anyway, what it did was they would go in and take an actual sample of, of course, every cancer is pretty specific.
And so they would take a sample of that cancer and then in some way change a gene or the genetic makeup of it and then reinject it into the patient.
And the result, rumored result, was that it would go in and attack the specific cancer of that patient without going after other, without killing other tissue.
Michael Fumento is my guest, and we're talking about the bioevolution that's underway right now.
This isn't science fiction, although it was science fiction.
This is stuff you thought perhaps might be in our future, but actually a lot of it, a great deal of it, is here right now.
This is Coast to Coast AM.
unidentified
If only you believe like I believe like I believe in your God, you believe in miracles.
So would I so we're making love for you?
You know we could, you know we could If we wanted to You know we could, you know we could We could exist on the stars It was so easy No
way, no way that I do The only things that we Oh, if only you believe My God, will you believe My God, will you We could buy If only you believe If only you believe The miracles So would I To talk with Art Bell.
Call the wildcard line at area code 775-727-1295.
The first-time caller line is area code 775-727-1222.
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From coast to coast and worldwide on the internet, this is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
But basically, my guest at that time, Michael, suggested that we're on our way to becoming gods, that that is what he believes our evolution eventually will be.
That we will extend our lives.
Perhaps we will even become at some point immortal.
That science will discover how to not only keep us alive longer, not only perhaps conquer cancer, but if necessary, move us into machines.
I know this starts to get pretty far out, but maybe it's not as far out as we think.
We're taking some pretty large steps right now.
And if you look at the anti-aging revolution going on, there's some pretty wild stuff happening, Michael.
And I'll tell you one reason you can't do it, which is really fascinating, is nothing directly to do with biotech, but in a sense, everything is quantum computing.
The best explanation I can give, and the most important one, I think, to your listeners, is simply that in terms of power, it's going to make today's most powerful supercomputer seem like the Commodore 64 you had, you threw away 20 years ago.
Yes, and during this very same time, there are these people, as a story I read at the beginning here, that are endeavoring to hook up even today's computers to our brains.
So when these infinitely powerful computers come along, and we're well on our way, then I don't know, Michael, who's boss?
One is that basically every problem we have, along with a lot of problems we don't even consider problems or haven't conceived of, might in a very, very short time span be fixed.
By that, I mean every single cancer outright cured, things like that in a very short period of time.
Because consider this.
You have a computer that can outthink a human being in any way you want to look at it.
Any way you look at it, they're smarter than we are.
What's the first thing you're going to tell this computer?
Build me a faster computer.
And then it's going to build a faster one.
So we might, in a week's time, in a day's time, go from a computer that's twice as smart as Albert Einstein to one that's 1,000 times as smart, 1 million times as smart, a billion times as smart.
No, as I write about this in my book, even though it's on biotechnology, there is the potential there, I believe, for a computer that intelligent to have a form of consciousness.
And if it does get consciousness, one of two things is going to happen.
Either it will continue to be, in a manner of speaking, our slaves, and it will just answer our questions and solve all of our problems and what have you, even as it continues to be a trillion, a quadrillion times smarter than we are.
There are very intelligent, computer-oriented people like, as you know, Bill Lovejoy is one, Raymond Kurzweil is another, who think that this is probably what's going to happen.
That essentially computers will either rule or else to some extent we will combine with computers in a sort of seamless combination where you kind of really won't be able to tell where the human leaves off and the computer begins.
Well, one has to wonder, for example, Michael, if all of the decisions at a national or even worldwide level were made completely on a logical basis, if human emotion,
human jealousies, and all the things that these carbon things have were not a part of the decision-making, but only logic, you know, Mr. Spock times 10, then we might have a really different world, Michael, a really different world.
Who knows what a computer might design would be as best, you know, for infestations like ourselves.
Yes, and, you know, the human being is the most adaptable creature that we know of.
And one would like to think that whatever comes down the road, we will adapt for better or, you know, we'll adapt to the good things and we'll adapt to the bad things as well.
Well, I suppose that things like our eyes and people who are sightless and our ears and people who cannot hear and then ultimately our limbs, all of these and a great number of our internal organs will simply either be able to be repaired or replaced.
And I know that you don't think about this sort of thing, Michael, but that's going to extend human life a great deal.
And there's already a whole lot of people on the planet.
Won't that bring on, you are a lawyer after all, all kinds of social changes.
I mean, everything will change.
Insurance companies will react in some way to all of this.
It's incredible because previous to that, all we had were skin grafts, which are very problematic in that what you're doing is you're just removing the top layer of a piece of skin, say, on your arm, and moving it to your leg.
The grafts often don't work.
In any case, you only have half the thickness in both your arm and your leg.
Skin grafts are, you know, they're not desirable.
This wonderful new stem cell procedure is incredible.
It is like sci-fi.
So all of these things are being done, even as we speak.
For, I think, thousands of years, people have tried to invent artificial blood, and I think we'll actually have it within five to ten years.
And you're right.
There's also a whole separate branch that I talk about at great length in my book because to tell the truth, a lot of people find it the most fascinating part of my book.
I mean, I've seen the actuarial data that if we wiped cancer off the face of the earth, it wouldn't really extend lifespans that much compared to what I call the macros.
Now, the macros are things that their only purpose really is to extend life itself by tinkering, essentially by tinkering with our genetic makeup.
There are, at my last count, there were about eight different genetic techniques that people were working on, some already in laboratory rodents, none yet in human clinical trials.
Oh, Michael, Michael, I read a story the other day about a mouse, and I bet you read the story too, and it wouldn't exactly come to me, but the mouse was already celebrating some incredible number in human years.
I mean, it had already lived, I don't know, 300 or 400% longer than it should have.
I haven't heard about that one, but there was a famous mouse called the Methuselah mouse.
It's amazing how many creatures now have been named Methuselah this and Methuselah that after the person in Genesis thought to live over 900 years.
And I haven't seen that kind of life extension, but I've seen that which would essentially be the equivalent of human beings living to be about 150 years old.
And so, I mean, Michael, eventually they are going to find the key.
They're going to find the right gene to bend or whatever they do to it, or they're going to find a way to stop these telomeres, this ticking clock from doing its in.
It seems like we're getting very close to some discovery like that.
And the reason we know is because all of these eight different techniques that I told you about, and it might be up to 10 or 12 by now, they all work in a different way.
Now, we know with all medicines, with all therapies, most of them don't pan out, right?
But when you have eight, when you have 10, when you have 12, when you have more new ones coming, you know, being experimented with every year, that tells you one is eventually going to succeed, and then another is going to succeed, and another is going to succeed.
And some of these are very far along.
And the result, I'm convinced, that there will be, within 10 years, an FDA-approved genetic therapy of some sort, whether it's extending telomeres or whether it's doing something else toward genetic makeup that will have, in fact, a dramatic effect on human lifespan that will take us well beyond 120 years.
Well, there's no doubt that there is some going on behind the scenes, but the very fact that it is makes it very hard for me to discover it as well as you.
Well, one thing we have to keep in mind is a lot of this, the U.S. clearly leads the way in medicine, first of all, and in biotechnology, second of all.
Yes.
So, for example, most of the boy in the bubble cures, almost all of them, have come out of France.
So other countries are doing these things as well.
And then you do hear these reports of things coming out of China, which is very big on biotech.
But that is one of the interesting things about biotechnology.
When it comes to gene splicing, there's two, well, pretty much unique things about gene splicing that will give you products that you just can't get any other way.
One is that the most important thing probably is that you can be very specific.
In other words, we've always had gene splicing to the extent of or recombining or transgenics.
These all mean the same thing.
To the extent that the farmer would take the prize bull and the prize cow and he would breed them in hopes of getting the best qualities of both.
Yeah, and they'd have to do this over and over, literally over thousands of years.
The corn we have today took about 5,000 years to develop.
There's no such thing as natural corn.
It was developed by the Mexican Americans.
So that's one thing about gene splicing is you can be very specific.
You isolate one gene or a few genes and you move them over into another organism.
And there's an excellent chance that you will get exactly the trait you want without any traits you don't want.
Well, the other neat thing about gene splicing that you couldn't do the so-called natural way is to take things from one organism that would never mate with another.
You're not going to get a rabbit to mate, for example, with a cotton plant.
Now, sometimes we do take a gene from something that could mate with something else.
We're using the broad sense of mate, of course, when we talk about plants and stuff like that, or bacteria or that sort of thing.
But no, in other situations, for example, the most successful biotech crops we have right now, and that's a lot of my book, The Wonders of Biotech Crops, comes from taking a gene from a bacterium that was discovered 100 years ago and found to be very lethal to moths and to specifically to those that attack plants.
They took a single gene from that bacterium and put it into corn and they put it into cotton.
And now they're putting it into other plants as well.
And the result is that you need far less insecticide for those plants.
Instead, you get a very, the insecticide is built into the plant.
Many advantages of that.
One is, as I said, a lot less spraying.
So you get less insecticide spray runoff into sewers and into rivers and what have you.
A letter to the editor of Nature Magazine came out about four years ago, and it just basically kind of speculated.
They did one experiment, and they speculated that this exactly what I am talking about, this new type of corn with the bacterial gene in it, might be killing, might kill a large number of monarch butterflies.
Now, butterflies in general would be the better term, but monarchs are everybody's favorite butterfly, so they chose the monarch.
And what they found was that if the pollen from the corn lands on the only plant that monarch butterfly larvae or caterpillar, such as it were, if it lands on those plants, these are milkweed plants, that it may cause these caterpillars to not eat and they'll starve and so we'll have fewer monarchs.
And it really was just, it was that simple.
They didn't look at any of the specifics such as the fact that farmers make darn sure that there aren't weeds in their rows.
And milkweed, by definition, is a weed.
And therefore, this isn't, you know, right there you see that this isn't going to be much of a problem.
They didn't look at the fact that when a caterpillar tastes something foreign like corn pollen on top of a milkweed leaf, it'll just go down to the leaf below it that doesn't have any pollen on it.
Well, while all of this, it sounds wonderful to the consumer, you know, I mean, things, a tomato that'll stay on the shelf for 100 years or whatever, I'm sure most of it is wonderful.
But I mean, really, it is realistic to discuss the possibility of unintended consequences as we go down this road, isn't it?
And again, that's another advantage of biotechnology.
The old crossbreeding was generally unintended consequences.
Every once in a while, you got exactly what you wanted, and usually you didn't.
At the very least, you had to do something called backbreeding, whereby you got the good things you wanted, but then you had to keep breeding in order to eliminate the things that you did not want.
Well, with biotech, you can be very, very specific.
There's no need for back breathing, and you very often get exactly what you want the very first time out.
Now, that gives us a certain ability to deal with problems that could, in fact, come up.
And one example that you'll often hear is super weeds.
What that means is you develop a new plant with biotechnology with some wonderful new trait.
Let's say that it grows in very salty soil that would normally kill a plant.
And the techniques that they've used, for example, with these superweeds range anywhere from extremely low-tech, meaning buffer zones, around your plants.
You just plant, for example, we know how far corn pollen flies even when it's very windy.
Well, you plant a buffer zone around your cornfield so that you won't contaminate maybe the non-biotech corn that's in the field next door.
Yeah, you sound like a big booster for this technology.
So I'm just sort of sitting here trying to, you know, really eke from you whether, while I understand there's, you know, safety things and nothing can go wrong, it can.
And things will go wrong with biotech as well, but the amount of control we have with biotech is so much greater than we have with traditional crossbreeding that that is something you always have on your side.
Another thing is that even though I'm not politically, I am not on the side of people who are really big believers in government regulation, the bottom line is that often government regulation does work.
And that while traditional crops, let's say you make a square watermelon, actually it's been done.
Yeah, because they stack better, whatever.
I don't think it ever caught on.
You cross a kiwi fruit with a watermelon.
You can bring that straight to market, and there's no regulation stopping you.
Some years ago, people developed a new type of lettuce that turned out to be very harmful to the hands of lettuce pickers.
But it was brought straight to market.
They didn't bother to test it.
Nobody looked at it.
Next thing you know, it was harming workers.
Well, with biotech plants...
It burned their hands.
There was something in the lettuce that was, I think it was supposed to keep insects away.
But that was brought straight to market because there are no regulations, so to speak, on so-called naturally developed cross-bred plants.
On the other hand, if you use biotechnology, if you move that single gene or those two genes, depending on what you're using it for, you have the FDA, the USDA, and quite possibly the EPA all demanding that you produce records showing that this stuff will be safe.
But I mean, square, a square watermelon, now that's different.
Just kidding, Michael.
Anyway, I'm just on the cautious side of all of this, Michael.
I have this fear, maybe unfounded, or maybe you can tell me it is founded, that we're going to make a more than insignificant mistake with one of these splicings or something, and we're really going to get something we don't want.
All right, well, look, there's a lot of controversy out there right now.
Maybe you can clear it up for me, Michael, about things that have been biotechnology changed or I don't know, improved or whatever.
There's all these improved vegetables, more shelf time, all the rest of it, and great controversy about whether irradiation is really an appropriate thing to do or whether it's healthy for people.
People are distrustful of it.
Is it your impression that everything that's out there has been approved and is safe?
Well, you can't say that just because something's been approved, it's safe.
It doesn't work that way.
But I do believe that the regulations in this country, which by and large are much stricter, for example, than those in the European Union, and you can't even compare the European Union to our friends in China.
As I said, basically, I think China just introduces things and claims afterwards that they were government-approved.
They just stick things out there.
And those are people that you might want to be worried about.
And in fact, I've gone to China and I've picked up strains of flu there that have never made it here.
You know, I got my CDC approved shot and it didn't do any good because they have all sorts of strains of not just flu, but as we know, SARS apparently came out of China as well.
SARS, right?
Because they, again, they just have so many people and they do so often live with not just some animals, but with so many animals, with so many varieties of animals, that it's really a wonderful incubator for disease.
Well, if something really nasty gets loose in China, you know, I was actually kind of impressed with the whole SARS thing and the way it was handled.
What seemed like it would inevitably get out of control actually, well, at least so far, they keep saying it's going to pop back and we're going to be surprised, but they did control SARS, sort of.
But if something really contagious suddenly came out of China in this day and age of jets and international travel, I mean, just with thousands and thousands of people going back and forth, realistically, if it was of high contagion, you wouldn't stop it.
Now, obviously, if you want to work over on the good side of this, and I can hear you're very much an optimist and a booster of this incredible future that we're on our way into right now, is the best way to put it.
But we've just had demonstrated to us recently that people would be willing to take their own lives and the lives of countless other civilians by driving airplanes into buildings and the Pentagon.
So these wonders that can be done in giving people hearing and making corn that will do this and that.
And all this, you know, this splicing of genes and all the rest of it, unfortunately, it also has application in biological weapons, horrible, horrible biological weapons.
If your intent was to do harm with this technology instead of good, I mean, your clear intent to do harm, it's something that's hard to even think about.
I mean, to set something loose, what are the dangers there?
I mean, we're talking about China, and then we're talking about a lot of groups in the world that if they had something in their hands, they could release that would virtually be, for them, say, suicidal, but for the rest of us, deadly.
Yeah, so again, you have to keep in mind that this is an evolutionary development that biological warfare, as you know, goes back for a long time, but it never had the kind of tools that you've been talking about tonight.
Right.
I mean, it used to be you would, for example, you'd give American Indians a blanket, you know, a bunch of blankets laden with smallpox.
And next thing you know, you don't have to go to battle against them because they've all died horrible deaths.
Now the difference is that at some point, they haven't done it yet, apparently, but at some point people are going to be able to take pathogens that are already out there.
It's going to be much easier than building one from the ground up.
Take one that's already out there, for which, say, there's a vaccine, like smallpox, and alter it so that the vaccine is no longer as effective.
I mean, if you made the assumption with technology where it is right now, Michael, that somebody had evil intent, let us say in China, just as an example, doesn't matter, it could be anywhere, but in China, and they had evil intent to produce or modify something existent now that would take out a good part of the world and then put it in the hands of somebody who would use it suicidally.
I don't know, Michael.
I guess I'm saying, aren't we almost to the point where that could be true now or soon?
Because one thing we've done that's very encouraging is we've genetically mapped out all possible bioterror weapons, and in fact, that's only a fraction of the bugs that we've mapped.
All the major killer bugs pretty much by now have been mapped out genetically.
So we're now able to look, for example, as the best example, SARS was mapped out in nine days.
And I'll bet you if they did it today, they could do it in six.
What that allows us to do is to, within a week, you map out the new thing.
Anybody who wants can download it throughout the world, and they can work at developing counter tools to it.
I ended up doing one column saying there's going to be mass hysteria, a second column saying we're in the middle of mass hysteria, and a third column saying, why was there a mass hysteria?
Because epidemiology has actually been my greatest strength for 16 years now.
That's how I got into science writing, and I understand how diseases spread and what they do to people.
And I looked at SARS, I looked at the spread rate, the morbidity rate, the mortality rate, fat, and everything.
But I guess what I'm asking is, next year, whatever it is, or the following year, eventually the technology exists to engineer something that wouldn't be so easily controllable.
And the world, I guess, has to be prepared for one of these things to happen.
Let's imagine a scenario for a second, Michael, in which in some very black lab in China somewhere, somebody develops something that's extremely contagious.
Well, let me give you an example.
You remember the terrible disease that was causing people to bleed out in Africa?
Well, the truth was, according to the 60 Minutes piece I saw, at the end they had the scientist on who said, you know, it was this close, and he held his fingers as close as he could get them, that had there just been one little twist or one little tiny change at the end of the genetic structure of this thing, it would have been airborne and it would have been contagious to humans, and it would have already been spread because there were people out there throwing up on the lawn.
Yeah, it did turn out that ultimately we all know nothing did happen.
And I think for even these people who work with it to speculate, time and again we hear about things suddenly becoming either airborne when they're not normally, and Ebola virus naturally is very, very hard to get.
Most of the people who contract Ebola, almost all of them, are either health care workers who work with patients.
But he was saying, and he was a pretty reputable scientist add-on, that it was that close to being airborne for humans, which would have been, of course.
My overall question is, if some bad guy in China came up with something that was engineered and really nasty and really bad, are we prepared, do you think, right now, to deal with it fast enough?
Because there's going to be bioterrorism, Michael.
It's going to happen.
Are we really prepared to deal with it fast enough to snuff it out, kind of like SARS, or would it be a harder battle?
Yeah, well, who would have thought that they would do something as low-tech as taking fully-fueled jets and flying them into Yeah, who would have thought?
Right, which is why we need to and are developing, as I said, it's not just broad-spectrum treatments, it's broad-spectrum vaccinations and detection devices as well.
Biotech is being used.
They now have handheld devices that have some various organisms in them.
For example, you just bring them into a room that has anthrax in it and the lights start going off or the beeper.
I don't know exactly what the alarm system is.
But these things are handheld.
They didn't have those a couple of years ago when that nut was sending anthrax to people through the mail.
So, you know, this is how, again, this is a perfect example to my mind of biotechnology as both a weapon and a shield.
And, you know, we've got to keep, we're going to keep building the shields.
Well, I just have this awful feeling that there is this cold biotechnological war going on and that it's really going on hard.
You know, are trying to crank up some kind of defense for it and those who are working on the bad aspects of it, I have this terrible feeling that it's really hot and heavy.
And here's the reason I feel that way, Michael, because a dirty nuke or even a regular nuke, if it goes off, there's going to be an area of devastation.
Anyway, it's going to end up to be a regional, horrible as it would, it would be a regional event.
But the prospect of real serious bioterrorism is potentially a worldwide event.
No, not at all, which is again why we have to have just as many layers as possible.
Everything from sending spies into these countries to having people in think tanks, not like my think tank, but there's talk that the government convenes groups of science fiction writers to dream up the weapons of the future.
I suggested that a couple years ago, and somebody told me we're already doing it.
Yeah, but they didn't do it because Mike Fumanzo suggested it.
It's a good idea.
Get science fiction writers together to think of what the bad guys are going to do before the bad guys even think of it, much less before the bad guys can start to do it.
So we need that layer.
We need to work on vaccines.
We need to work on broad-spectrum drugs.
We need to work on evacuation procedures.
We need every single layer we can get to protect against bioterror weapons, but also against nuclear weapons And, you know, just everything there is out there.
It's one of those things you have to kind of think about every now and then.
And so I'm glad we've got Michael on.
I understand he's very pro this technology and probably doesn't much like talking about this aspect of it.
But, you know, there's absolutely no question about it.
If somebody had something like this, if it got into the wrong hands, the hands of people who would drive airplanes into buildings, then they would use it.
We're sort of off in this area of bioterror, and we'll be right back.
I know full well that I've taken Michael, Michael Fimento, my guest, whose books, by the way, always plug your guests' books.
Bioevolution, How Biotechnology is Changing Our World, and Science Under Siege.
Those would be the, I guess, two latest books that you'd want to tend to.
Now, Michael is, by my judgment, unabashedly, a big booster of this kind of technology.
And I am by nature suspicious and ask really hard questions.
So that's probably taken us in a direction.
I know you wanted to come on and sort of tell us about all the miracles that are happening right now.
And I've kind of pushed you in a different direction, Michael.
But here, one of your own questions.
This concerns, it's just my nature to ask these kinds of questions, but as this biotechnological miracle continues to evolve in front of us, there are going to be perhaps advantages.
There may even be the possibility of an in vitro intervention that would make a child, oh, I don't know, 100% smarter than it would have been otherwise.
Miracles of that kind are pending.
And when they get here, number one, like everything else, cures for diseases and stuff that drug companies and biotech companies produce is going to be expensive.
So if we run into that kind of miraculous an occurrence, it's going to be expensive, which means that rich people will be able to afford to do these kinds of things, and middle class and poor, well, probably not.
You know, and then of course there'll be issues with insurance companies and all the rest of it.
But in the end, you know, the rich will get it, and the poor and the middle class may not.
No, you're basically right, but you also have to put it in context that the rich will always, you know, the rich get lobster and the poor get a McDonald's supersized meal.
The rich get porschas and the poor get killas and civics.
It's always been that way.
But it also tends to have been this way in recent decades that the rich tend to just get things earlier than the not-so-rich.
So the rich got the DVD players first.
They got the plasma.
They're still getting, you know, They're still the only people getting plasma screen TV, so far as I know.
But they are paying for the technology, which eventually does trickle down to the masses, so that you and I, a few years from now, will actually be able to afford that plasma TV.
You know, during this last newscast at the top of the hour, Michael, the newscast I was listening to, they said that there were new names being added to the Vietnam Memorial.
And, you know, there are people who died as a result of exposure to Agent Orange.
There's a massive amount of medical literature out there that is repeatedly ignored in favor of a good story.
And the best of it...
Not if you're a tree or if you're a bush, but if you're a human being, we know that the people with the most massive exposures, people who were at chemical plants that literally exploded, one in Italy, one in Germany, the people who actually sprayed Agent Orange in Vietnam, the Operation Ranch Handers, these people, we can measure the dioxin in their blood to this day, even though they were exposed decades ago.
And these people time and again turn out to have no more cancers or you name it than anybody.
By mistake, he did say that dioxin, as a result, would not be considered carcinogenic.
And we all know, everybody knows, to use his expression, that dioxin is.
Talk to the people of Vietnam who were exposed to Agent Orange, and you will see.
And the reason why the government or he would not claim that it is a problem is that we wouldn't want to pay reparation.
But I was not going to start that way.
I was going to start by asking him if he was working with or on behalf or speaking on behalf of Monsanto and if he had any relationship with any biotech company or any vaccine company Because vaccines are also known not to work.
Unfortunately, just as I was asking if you were connected, we were disconnected.
So I don't know how much of the question you missed, but I got the caller here.
And the real question was, Michael, you're very pro this technology.
That's obvious.
The caller wants to know if you're connected with Monsanto or some big company like that or some any connection at all to perhaps making some company that makes vaccines or do you have any industrial connections we should know about?
But every now and then this phone system does that.
It just absolutely does that.
So I have no choice.
We're going to have to try and call him again.
It's a very annoying thing, right in the middle of a very important question, which we were sort of getting an answer to.
In fact, I'm curious about the whole thing.
And that is to say, The connection.
He mentioned government money.
Michael, it happened again.
I'm very sorry.
This phone system just occasionally boom dumps everything, and there's nothing in the world I can do about it.
Again, it's very important we understand that you're not part of the industry, and you're saying you're not, but then I wasn't totally clear on, you said grants from the government, for example, and corporations, or just what?
Assuming our phone system stays together here, proceed, please.
unidentified
Okay, hi, Michael.
You were mentioning something about implications for horrible things such as warfare in regards to technology and science.
And Michael, you were mentioning something earlier when you were talking about brain-computer interface and something about someone has to counter these things, and you're not big on government regulation.
So I just wanted to get your take.
Tommy, you were mentioning class consciousness earlier, so I wanted to get your take on gender consciousness.
I just wanted to ask what you think about working toward or what's your position on feminist values or feminist science, countering masculine science and ideas of progress?
What I was wondering about was with the killer bacteria.
Well, by the way, I do agree with the technology, I believe, in general.
But something that kills every bacteria, if somehow, either by way of a demonic force or an evil force that did it on purpose or even by accident, if it was introduced into the environment, would that pose some kind of a problem with regard to natural decomposition processes that occur not only in nature but within our own bodies?
But it does talk about, for example, talks about Project BioShield, which is supposed to get $6 billion in funding over the next 10 years to deal specifically with these things.
Now, in this article, I do, in fact, talk about these companies that are trying to develop, as I put it, a single weapon to kill every type of bacterium.
One's called IBIS and one's ISIS.
I think they're both out.
Yeah, they're both out in California.
What they're dealing with is something that would be strictly within a single human's body.
For better or worse, you would have to administer it to that human.
It's not going to go beyond that human any more than, say, tetracycline or Cipro is going to go beyond the person to whom you administer it.
And that's why I'm asking the question, because I'm hoping there's a great answer for it.
you had said that this type of vaccine that would kill all bacteria could be localized to a certain person.
And I was concerned about inadvertent side effects, like if it were in me, would it somehow disrupt the ordinary decomposition processes that allow me to digest food and so forth in my body?
Because there are a lot of normal processes that are driven by bacteria.
And then also if this I answered that earlier in the show.
First of all, it wouldn't be a vaccine.
This would be taken as a pill.
And absolutely.
When I say every type of bacteria, I mean every type.
But tetracycline, erythromycin, they tend to do that as well.
They kill a lot of good bacteria.
And it's just a matter of either letting the good bacteria restore themselves or else you can actually do things as simple as eating live cultured yogurt can help.
And that's good, because I had heard through the overuse of antibiotics that we were getting down to the sort of the bottom of the bin in terms of our last-ditch resource kind of antibiotic, right?
Yeah, that, like all these things, is exaggerated because we are coming up with broader spectrum things all the time.
But ultimately, we do need something that will target what we're looking for now is things that target parts of the bacterium that don't develop defensive systems, that don't mutate.
Yeah, you know, with regard to this BioShield idea, if there really were an attack that involved bio weapons, has enough attention been paid to the distribution network necessary to get to the masses?
Can we challenge the people that are listening, you know, that might have some influence to try to bring that topic up and spread it and push it so that people could maybe have some awareness?
Yeah, that's what you should be aware of is that BioShield, while budgeted at about $6 billion, the money is not going through as quickly as it should be.
Congress has better things to do, like that pork barrel highway project.
unidentified
That's right.
That's what I'm getting at.
We don't need to talk about whether they do, but if they don't, the real thing is to get the message out and to get some awareness and to maybe change some people's attitudes about it so that it becomes a priority.
$6 billion will go a long way if we actually spend the money.
And right now we're not spending it as quickly as we should.
And one result of that probably is going to be that, no, we're not ready to distribute these things as they become available.
unidentified
Yeah.
Well, I have a lot of faith in science, you know, and I would hate to, you know, badmouth it because there's a dark side, but we do have to spend, you know, the necessary resources on making sure that things like distribution networks and effectivity are going to be in place.
Unfortunately, I always see things somehow darker.
It's just my nature, Michael.
Me, I see a hearing going on after some terrible bioterror sort of disaster, asking government people, grilling them with senators asking, well, why was the United States not prepared to distribute an agent when we knew there was a significant possibility of a bioterror attack on the United States?
One of the people in the Senate or in the Congress wrote a book about this, and he said it was so convenient that the day that the government had to vote on the Patriot Act that everyone was rushed out of the building, and they never had time to read the Patriot Act, yet they were forced to sign it the next day.
I hate to tell you this, but having worked with people on the hill and having worked down the hill for over the past too many years, 20 years, congressmen never read the bills they vote on.
They make these bills longer and longer and longer.
The Clean Air Act amendments of 1990 that I wrote against literally stacked up about a foot and a half tall.
And, you know, call me a conspiracyist, what have you.
I'm convinced that part of the reason they made it so thick was in order to make sure that lots of things would get hidden that nobody would ever find.
The EPA made its decision essentially back in 1990 that they were going to find that this thing was carcinogenic regardless of how the information came out.
They put out a draft report, a very fat draft report that they thought nobody would read.
I read it.
I wrote about it.
And I showed that the very studies that they cited as showing that it was carcinogenic showed quite the opposite.
For example, one study would show it causes leukemia, but none of the others did.
One study says it causes lymphoma, but none of the others did.
Some of the studies found no cancers in any place.
Well, the EPA says, aha, you see, it caused a lymphoma in one place and it caused a leukemia in another, therefore it's a carcinogen.
No, science-based analysis says if you're not finding the same types of cancers in different studies, that these are things, these are called statistical artifacts.
unidentified
Right, sure.
And Stanford University doesn't know what they're talking about, and neither does Berkeley, Correct?
Very often, Stanford and Berkeley and Johns Hopkins and Harvard will produce flawed data.
Nobody is perfect.
And they're also, they make decisions based on grant proposals as well.
I don't happen to know what you were talking about specifically.
unidentified
I'm sorry.
I learned as a chemist with almost a PhD degree that dioxin was the most cancer, the most highest cancer-causing substance known to man in terms of milligrams.
It killed them outright using something called an LD50, which if you were a chemist, you would know what an LD50 is, and you would know that it has nothing to do with carcinogenesis.
unidentified
I knew what an LD50 is, and I disagree with you totally.
A human is more like a guinea pig, a hamster or a bullfrog.
unidentified
I'm willing to believe what the MS Research Center is using as one of the criterias for determining what is carcinogenic or not.
I don't think you are qualified.
No, I agree with you that LD50 would be a totally we're discussing things that are probably too scientific for the average audience, but LD50 would be totally inappropriate.
But on vaccines, I will tell you that you should read Against All Evidence, which lists 900 medical references showing that vaccines have absolutely no effect on epidemics.
And then look into the research on the toxicity of vaccines that show that they are extremely toxic to destroy children's brains.
And I think you should sift medical science in a different way that you should.
People desperately need to learn more about the world we live in.
We can't keep withdrawing into sitcoms and even on nice plasma screen TVs and stuff like that.
And the reason we need to learn more about the world is so that we can help handle this world.
There is a lot of stuff in my book that is just plain fascinating.
But you know, there's a lot of stuff in there that could literally help save your life.
A lot of stuff in there that I've used to help save other people's lives because people come to me and say, I've got this cancer.
Is there anything in biotech that maybe my own doctor doesn't know about?
And I'll say, well, you know, actually four weeks ago, they just approved this new drug, and here's how it works.
So it's got a self-help aspect to it.
There's just a whole lot in this book for scientists write to me and said, you know, you wrote about my own field, and I didn't know this in my own field.
When I talk about the importance of clinical trials, I'm simply saying they're advanced enough that we're no longer talking about a Petri dish or we're no longer talking about a lab rat that we're now testing in humans.
But the bottom line is most things in, say, phase one of the three phases, they fail.
Most drugs that even make it into phase one fail.
So the fact that it's in clinical trials, you're right.