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Aug. 25, 2022 - Jim Fetzer
01:00:49
Everything You Need to Know About PCR Tests - Tom Cowan
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Hey, welcome everybody.
Today is Wednesday, August 24th, 2022.
And today I'm going to be talking about PCR, otherwise known as polymerase chain reaction.
I don't think I have any other announcements.
I'm not sure yet about Friday, whether it will happen or if so, what it's about.
So you'll have to stay tuned for that.
And I hope everybody's doing well.
So let's get to it.
And the first thing I want to say is this, let me say it like this.
There's, I should not be the one talking about this.
I am not trained in molecular genetics.
I don't know that I ever took a course in, I did take a course in genetics and I think it was even something to do with molecular genetics.
At college, so we're talking 50 years ago.
That was, I think, before, yes, it was before there was such a thing as a PCR.
So, and the other person I'm going to rely on, I'm not going to name her, but she calls herself Tam.
And I will show you the paper that she wrote.
And she, I believe, is in finance, maybe even an accountant or something like that.
I'm not sure exactly what she does.
But as far as I know, she's not a scientist or a medical doctor or geneticist or anything like that of any kind.
But I can tell you that after I read her papers, one on DNA and then one on the PCR, I somewhere between shocked and awed about how clear and brilliantly this person thinks and asks the questions that have not been answered and need to be answered.
And I spent a while trying to look at the original studies she presented and do my own work.
And I basically ended up saying to myself that she did this better than I could ever do it, so I'm just going to go over her paper, basically, and try to explain it as best I can.
So, I will put the paper up there, and I'm going to go through it, so everybody should read this if they want to go back, and then you can follow the original references which she graciously put in there.
But again, this irony, and in a way the sad part, is we should not be the two people who are talking about this.
This should be something that is in the scientific community and in the so-called medical freedom community, but as we know, it isn't.
So, the question then, the first question, why talk about PCR?
What's the big deal about PCR?
So, just to give a little bit of a definition, the purpose of a PCR or polymerase chain reaction, a process that was patented and developed by Carey Mullis, who I will talk about a little later,
is that while it's not the only way that modern scientists, modern molecular biologists, modern virologists, modern geneticists identify DNA, it is certainly the predominant way.
And obviously, the PCR has come to prominence because of COVID, because the, quote, test, and even though PCR is by no means a medical diagnostic test, And we'll get into that a little bit, too.
It has, in some strange way, become the test that has defined who supposedly has the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
And essentially, just about any viral disease is primarily defined by the PCR, quote, test.
So obviously, that makes understanding what a PCR does, how it works, Hugely important.
But not only that, PCR is how we work with, find, and identify DNA these days.
It's not the only way, but it's certainly the predominant way.
So, when you're getting into things like ancestry and You know, finding your ancestry based on DNA or forensic, finding criminals or some sort of legal proceedings.
They use DNA and almost all of these are based on PCR.
And to a certain extent, the whole question of genetic modified organisms is also very much tied to and linked to the process of PCR.
So PCR has made it possible for people to identify what they call sequences or pieces of DNA.
It's allowed them to work with this DNA in a way that was simply not possible.
Because the basic process of PCR is to take bits of genetic material, identify a primer that will stick to certain pieces of that genetic material,
Add enzymes called preliminary polymer polymer races, which reproduce copies of this strand that you've essentially tagged or identified with the primer, so that you can take an on.
findable bits of DNA that there's maybe hundreds or thousands of little strands or maybe more, but simply not enough for you to be able to find or certainly not to work with.
And then amplify them, meaning double them and multiply them so that you can see them, find them, and begin to work with them in a meaningful way.
And so it's really about the process of Amplifying, multiplying bits of DNA so that we can identify it, find it, and work with it.
That's basically the principle or the purpose of PCR.
And as I said, it's the linchpin of modern virology and modern genetics and all of the offshoots that have come from this.
Now to just give you an example of where this comes up, something I actually just found just a few minutes ago.
So here's an article.
It came up on a feed.
This was in the journal The Atlantic, and I think this may be the same woman who writes a bunch of other bogus articles.
And so this is an example of the ubiquity of DNA in our society and in our, quote, scientific thinking.
So this is, does DNA prove these wild horses came from a Spanish shipwreck?
So they're talking about using DNA to discover the origin of a certain bunch of wild horses at this place, Chinco Teague.
And again, you can see if you follow the links in the article, it links to a paper.
You can see the paper here from Nature, published October 2021.
And this is on the origin of spread of domestic horses from the Western Eurasian steppes.
And they talk about how they figured out the origin of these horse genomes.
And no surprise when you read their methods.
You see that down here, they used PCR amplification as an integral part, and the rest of it is making the libraries.
But basically, they were able to find the sequence through the amplification, the doubling of the sequence, so that they could actually find them and work with them.
So this is simply just another case of how ubiquitous this process of PCR has come in, become in how we think and how we do science, even something like finding the supposed origin of these horses.
Okay.
Now, Now, so let's talk about what I would call the usual criticism or critique of PCR.
So it goes something like this.
Pretty much everybody in all the different communities, so we're talking about conventional virology community, the so-called medical freedom community, which believes in these so-called viruses,
And even to a large extent, or I would say also to a large extent, but this is beginning to be reexamined, in the people who even question the existence of viruses, they still, generally speaking, don't question the fact that the PCR process
Is, as it says, a process where you take unfindable little pieces of DNA and you amplify it or double it based on the exact steps, which I will outline in a minute, of the PCR.
And then you get an amount that you can see and find and work with.
And so everybody agrees with that, more or less.
The question comes in, does this allow you to use it as a diagnostic test for something like a virus or a Mycobacterium tuberculis or Lyme disease?
The organism that causes Lyme disease.
That's where most of the criticism of the PCR process has focused.
Again, not on the actual test, but on the use of the test.
And a particularly prominent, and I would say well done, and I would say even very well done, criticism along these lines was in this paper, which I didn't put on the screen, but it's the Corman-Drawston Review Report, curated by an international consortium of scientists in life sciences.
Including people like Bobby Malhotra and Michael Yeadon and Kevin Corbett, our good friend, and I think Stefano Scoglio and a bunch of other people who we know.
They wrote this paper because they wanted to critique the Drosten paper, I think it's called the Corman-Drosten paper, that was published in Eurosurveillance.
Which really started the whole concept, the whole procedure of doing PCR to test for SARS-CoV-2.
So in other words, Corman Drosten wrote a paper saying they had developed a PCR test that they could use to identify the SARS-CoV-2 virus
And this became the blueprint, the template, for all the subsequent PCR tests that have been used around the world to, quote, identify the virus, identify cases, and to essentially carry out the tyrannical measures which we're all familiar with.
So the criticism of this Corman Drosten paper by this consortium of scientists does not go into whether the PCR itself is valid, but using it as a test.
And I think we're all familiar with this line of thinking.
And it basically goes, the Corman Drosten authors say they never identified a virus, a particle that you could call a virus.
They never identified a genome.
Of course, they couldn't since they never identified a particle.
So how could you identify a genome coming from a particle that you never identified?
And so by what rule of logic or rational thinking or science can you ever identify that you found a piece of something which you never had in its entirety?
How can you say this piece of wicker is part of a wicker chair if you've never seen a wicker chair?
It's simply not possible.
And I would encourage everybody to really consider that.
If you've never had seen a horse, and somebody says, this is nobody has ever seen a horse.
How can you say this hoof belongs only to this horse?
When we know hooves belong to lots of different animals, and you can't possibly say that this hoof belongs to a horse if you've never isolated, identified, found, and analyzed the horse first.
So, you can see directly in this paper, they point this out, and here I'm going to quote from the paper.
And they say there's 10 fatal problems.
The first and major issue is that the novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, is based on in silico theoretical sequences supplied by a lab in China.
Because at the time, neither control material of infectious, live, or inactivated SARS-CoV-2 nor isolated genomic RNA of the virus was available to the authors.
To date, no validation has been performed by the authorship based on isolated SARS-CoV-2 viruses or full-length RNA thereof.
Now, quoting directly from the Corman-Drowston paper, and I'm sure most of you have heard this, quote, we aim to develop and deploy robust diagnostic methodology for use in public health laboratory settings without having virus material available.
So in other words, they were amplifying pieces of genetic material Claiming this amplified pieces of genetic material came from a virus which they never had access to.
They never found, they never isolated, they never had the genome.
This should be the end of the paper.
This is frankly a stunning A stunning admission that this is based on illogic, irrational, anti-scientific behavior.
I am stunned that they even let this be published.
Because if they never had a virus, how can they possibly claim that this piece that they amplified came from this virus and This review report appropriately points this out.
They go on in the review report to say, nevertheless, these in silico sequences were used to develop a RT-PCR test to identify the aforesaid virus.
This model was based on the assumption that the model virus is similar to SARS-CoV-2 from 2003 as both are beta coronaviruses.
In other words, they didn't have SARS-CoV-2, so instead they used the template for SARS-1 back in 2003, which was also found, it's also an in silico sequence, it's also an in silico sequence, which was never identified as belonging to a particle, and that was based on a previous in silico sequence, which was never identified as belonging to any particle, and so on and so on all the which was never identified as belonging to any
And so the whole thing is simply based on a house of cards that know at no point was there actually a identified particle that they could make that they could identify a sequence that would allow them to say that this piece or these pieces they were amplifying actually came from this particle.
To actually quote from the paper itself, design and validation were enabled by the close genetic relatedness to the 2003 SARS-CoV and aided by the use of synthetic nucleic acid technology.
Another frankly stunning admission that This was all based on the similarity of a published in silico genome to a previously published in silico genome.
Neither of them were ever found.
So there is no way to say that any of these sequences came from any virus that they never identified.
And so that is the main criticism in the paper.
And then they go on to talk about some of the obvious and glaring errors that were made in the paper based on their own PCR testing standards, as if PCR could ever be used as a test.
Because none of these, quote, viruses have ever been themselves isolated, purified, and characterized.
And so, again, ask yourself over and over, can you find, can you definitively say this piece of something came from that something if you've never had the something to identify, find, observe, and characterize?
So, that's an appropriate criticism of the paper, but that is not the tact that I am going to take in the rest of this talk.
The rest of this talk is, is the PCR process actually amplifying genetic sequences?
Which is a deeper question.
Not just the question that we're all familiar with.
Is it amplifying a sequence from a virus?
That's obviously nonsense.
So the test is obviously meaningless.
But the question, which is really never asked, and I hadn't even heard that it was asked, it was just assumed, is, is the PCR actually amplifying genetic sequences?
Now, the first thing I'm going to say here is one of the basic reasons that people give to prove, they say, that PCR does amplify the genetic sequence that you're looking for, that you're trying that PCR does amplify the genetic sequence that you're looking for, that you're trying to amplify, that you're identifying
Well, Tom, it's obvious because you have a little amount of these genetic sequences before the PCR in the native material, and then you do the PCR, and then you have a lot of these genetic sequences.
So, obviously, you amplified it and doubled it and synthesized these pieces.
How else could you start with a little bit and end up with a lot?
Now, I want everybody to think about that for a minute, because is that actually true?
And so here's the principle.
The principle is If you start with a few of something, and then you come back later, whatever time frame, and you end up with a lot of it, and you can identify a lot of it, is it true that the only possible explanation is that you made more of the few original things?
So let's look at some examples of that.
Let's say I go to my son, who's a baker's house, and I see one loaf of bread.
Then I come with a big truck, and I dump a whole load of flour and starter and baking pans, and I come back later, a week later, and there's a hundred loaves of bread.
What is the most logical, likely explanation?
To me, it would be that my son, somehow in that week, Uh, made an extra 99 loaves of bread.
I don't really see any other possible explanation.
And we know that he had the starting material and the expertise and the know-how and the equipment that he needed to do that.
So that seems like it supports the case that if you start with a little and you end up with a lot, you must have made, you must have doubled it, amplified it, made more.
That's the process.
Now, the second example is something I've talked about a lot.
What about paper?
So you have little bits of paper scattered on the lawn, and then come back a week later, there's a whole lot of paper.
Is it true that the paper got into your house, doubled itself, blew up your house, and that's why you have millions of bits of paper scattered all over your lawn?
That's obviously nonsense.
Something happened to the house, the house got blown up, had nothing to do with paper amplifying or multiplying, and that's why you have paper all over your lawn.
Now, what about in a biological system?
So I thought of this example.
So you go to a pond and you measure the amount of free bones, fish bones, floating around in the pond.
And basically you don't see very many, hardly any, because maybe there's a few dead fish in there that have the bones have decomposed or the flesh has decomposed and they're floating around in the pond.
But you don't see very many.
And then you come back a week later and you don't actually know, but what happened in the week is somebody put a big cache of dynamite and explosives in the pond.
They blew up the pond.
And now you see lots of dead fish and lots of bones in the pond.
And clearly it is not true that if you see a little bit of something in the beginning and then you see a lot of it at the end, the only explanation is the little bit must have multiplied.
So you cannot use that as an example just because you supposedly have a little bit of pieces of RNA in the beginning or DNA and then you supposedly have a lot at the end that it somehow doubled or you amplified it.
Now the other thing I want to say is it has become a kind of fashion to
to talk about Carey Mullis as if he was somebody who was clearly on quote our side meaning the free medical freedom side and who knew that the PCR was not to be used as a diagnostic test and you even hear if only Carey Mullis was alive and had not died in on
He died in, quote, suspicious circumstances right before the whole COVID thing started.
We would not be in this mess.
Cary Mullis would have blown the whistle and saved us from this nightmare of using PCR as a diagnostic tool.
So I would say that there's a couple things about that.
First of all, I don't think right now that we can look in any way for any saviors.
Nobody's coming to save us.
Nobody's coming to save us.
And I particularly don't think that Carey Mullis would come to save us.
Because not only was he a true believer that viruses exist and cause disease, even though he may have questioned the intentions or the knowledge of Fauci and others, and he may have said that PCR doesn't prove that somebody is sick,
You can easily demonstrate not only what he said, for instance, when he was asked in a chat at Google, whether he still believed that HIV didn't cause AIDS, and he gave some nonsensical answer about, well, it's not just HIV, it's some ecosystem of HIV.
That's what causes AIDS.
But so he clearly believed in viruses and he clearly believed in the erroneous idea that viruses cause disease.
And it turns out he actually clearly believed even that the PCR process could be used as a test.
Here is one paper, I think maybe the only paper on viruses or PCR as a test, that Kerry Mullis wrote.
It's from June of 1994, and it's all about talking about the clonal expansion, the likelihood of expression of a latent virus Because expressions of previously latent virus exist and immune responses and talks about therefore the availability of diverse and infectious human viruses may have risen significantly.
And then he goes on later in this paper to talk about Because the expression of a previously latent virus with a distinct epitope would provoke a new immune response, then this may have something to do with AIDS.
So, it turns out he was all about viruses, and in fact, if you read his patent for the PCR, he does refer to it as being able to be used as a diagnostic test.
So, I think this idea that we should hold him up as somebody who would have saved us from this mess needs to stop, because this is not the case.
He absolutely seemed to believe that viruses are real, they cause disease, even though, as he himself mentioned, he had actually no evidence that this was the case.
And one of the reasons I bring that up is because if he was clearly wrong about this, I started wondering whether he was actually wrong about the fundamentals of the whole PCR process.
Doesn't prove that he is, but I know that he supposedly, or at least says, he imagined the PCR process while he was using LSD, and I'm not sure that's the best way to conduct logical, rational, scientific thinking.
I'm not saying that rules it out, but it certainly, I think it's time to be suspicious of the entire PCR DNA narrative, because it's, as far as I can see, it's got us into nothing but trouble.
And again, I'm indebted to this woman who wrote this paper, which I am now going to share.
Yeah, let me, before I get into this paper, I did come up with, this is just a regular amplifying DNA, according to Ask a Biologist, So this is standard stuff you can find on the internet.
And I'm not going to go through this, but you can see this if you want to go back and sort of stop this and look at this in more detail.
This goes through the steps that are done in a PCR process.
And they're exactly the same steps that we're going to go through in a minute here.
The only reason I show this is because if anybody thinks, well, these aren't really the steps that they do, according to normal biologists, scientists, these are the steps.
And so you can look at it right here.
So this is the paper that I'm going to go through.
It's called Critical Check, Critical Examination of Theories, Assumptions, and Events that Affect Our Perception of Reality.
It was published on May 8th, one of these two, either July or May, by a woman named Tam, 2022.
So let's go through this.
And before I say that, another principle that I'm working at, which is the same as if you think a virus exists, if you think a tire exists, if you think anything is real, If you want to know whether bread is real, it's pretty important to either have absolute sensory confirmation, and it's really helpful to know the steps of how they arrived at this conclusion.
Could be that you just see it.
But in order to understand what a PCR is doing, you have to know what steps they do.
And I can guarantee if you ask most people who believe that the PCR is amplifying genetic pieces, amplifying DNA or RNA converted into DNA and then being amplified, and you say to them, can you tell me the steps that a PCR does and how each step was verified?
They will not know.
Which means they don't know whether it's doing that or not.
And that's the position that I was in.
I just accepted that everybody seemed to agree that the PCR must be doing that.
I didn't know the steps.
And then now it became time that I had to figure out the steps.
So first, we start with some terminology.
And again, I won't go through this, but you can read all these things, what the actual words mean.
That he got the Nobel Prize in 1993 in chemistry for doing this apparently while using recreational drugs and got patented and sold to Abbott Pharmaceuticals.
So the first thing is how does it work?
And it's, as she says, it's pretty simple.
You extract DNA And then you put it in a PCR box that's sold by the biotech companies like Thermo Fisher and Agilent.
And it does all the rest itself.
So what is it doing?
And here she's referring back to a previous paper she wrote about DNA.
And so I think everybody should read this because it goes through actually how they find DNA.
So here's the very short version of this.
They take cells and they lyse them, which means they mix substances like sputum or blood with synthetic enzymes, proteases.
They put it in a cocktail of acid and alkaline chemicals, which is called a buffer.
The solution is Vortex.
And then incubated at usually high temperatures, usually around 100 degrees centigrade.
And then vigorously spun, i.e.
centrifuged.
And then it comes into a pellet.
And sometimes they use the pellet and sometimes they use the liquid part.
And that's the stuff that contains the DNA.
So a lot of heat, a lot of acids, a lot of bases, a lot of enzymes, a lot of mechanical spinning, and then you supposedly extract this or have a material that has the DNA in it.
Then you precipitate it by adding synthetic alcohol to the previous step, and then the DNA is in the bottom part, the pellet.
And you discard the liquid, and then you wash it with more chemicals and more alcohol, and then you centrifuge it, you discard the supernatant, the liquid part, and you again have a pellet which is considered to be isolated DNA.
So that's now pure DNA.
And then you can put it again in a liquid, or in water, or another chemical, and suspend it, and this is what you can use.
So we have a lot of steps here and no apparent verification along the way that each step is actually doing what it says.
But let's just forget about that for a minute and say, okay, so you end up then with this chemical, which is pure DNA, even though that's pretty difficult to prove.
So then what do you do?
Now you do the PCR, because there wasn't enough of this chemical to find.
So here are the steps for doing the PCR.
And mind you, this is all done in a box that's about yay big.
So it's like a little box you put on your counter.
So the first step is called initialization.
So you take this mixture of chemicals and the supposed isolated DNA that you're putting, that you're going to amplify, and you put the chemicals and heat up the mixture to 94 to 96 degrees centigrade.
That's almost 100 degrees centigrade, the boiling point of water.
And they say this step activates the DNA polymerase.
That is the enzyme which is going to make two copies out of one.
And this is only done once at the beginning of the PCR process.
So this heating up of the chemicals and the original mixture that you're trying to amplify to almost 100 degrees is to activate the DNA polymerase.
Now what is this DNA polymerase?
Well, this used to be an enzyme that they got from E. coli, a bacteria.
And then they started to get something called Taq polymerase, which is apparently found in very hot, hot springs, like I think in Yellowstone, where the temperatures get up very high.
And they can find this heat-stable enzyme, which is able to synthesize two strands of DNA from one.
Now, one of the questions that immediately came to my mind and to Tam's mind when reading this was, how is it that an E. coli has an enzyme, so that's a bacteria that would be absolutely destroyed, has an enzyme which is not degraded by being heated to 100 degrees, almost centigrade?
Now it's possible that this enzyme in the hot springs, which does get up to those temperature, that is activated.
But the question is, is this even proven that they've activated this enzyme by putting this in a hot acid bath?
Then they say the next step is they denature the DNA.
So the mixture is heated up to, again, 94 to 98 degrees centigrade for 15 to 30 seconds.
And this only splits the DNA from a double strand into a single strand.
Now think about that for a minute.
So we have in our original mixture, we have these little bits or pieces of double-stranded DNA.
So we put it in a very hot acid bath.
We put enzymes from E. coli or hot springs in the bath.
Then we heat it up again.
And it doesn't degrade anything, neither the acids, nor the alkalis, nor the buffers, the other buffers, the other chemicals, the magnesium, etc., all the chemicals which I showed you that are put into this PCR.
None of this is degraded.
The only thing that happens is the double-stranded DNA is by some miracle separated into single strands.
So that conveniently the single strands can be amplified or copied.
And think of this like you have a zipper and you put the zipper into a hot acid bath with a bunch of other chemicals.
And the only thing that happens is the zipper unfolds along the middle.
And so now you have separate single strand zippers, which are ready to be amplified or doubled by their complementary sequence.
And all this without any verification or visual evidence or control experiments that I can see or that she could find that proved that this is actually what happens in that step.
So the next step, the annealing temperature stage, they drop the temperature to 50 to 60 degrees, 65, for 20 to 40 seconds.
This allows the primers, which are the short sequences of nucleotides, which tell the polymerase which sequence to amplify, to double.
So it allows the primers and the polymerase to bind to the region we're interested in amplifying.
And usually the perfect temperature is a few degrees lower than the melting temperature of the primers.
You don't want to melt the primers, so you put it at this very specific temperature, and that specifically allows the primers and the enzyme that you've activated in step one to bind to that region.
Now, again, let's think about this for a minute.
So you've separated them into two strands because of heat.
The reason, they say, is the strands between the zipper, the hydrogen bonds, are the more easily broken than the bonds between the actual molecule themselves.
So it unzips like a zipper, because that's the point of least resistance, so to speak.
unzips, and now you lower the temperature, and the primers preferentially attach, along with the polymerase, to make more of these sequences you're interested in.
So one question I had was, why doesn't the complementary strand just reattach?
I mean, if the problem was that you had to use heat in order to detach it, if you've now lowered the temperature, why doesn't it just reattach, in which case you're left with the original double-stranded DNA that you in which case you're left with the original double-stranded DNA that you had in the first place, and no doubling
Is there some special glue on the primers or some special glue on the preliminaries that sticks this preferentially to the single strand area that you want and doesn't, and this, the complimentary strand, which by all rights should be a perfect fit, it somehow doesn't have this glue.
And if there is a glue, what is the glue?
And if there is a glue and you can find the glue, why don't you stick that on the polymerase or on the primers and then you wouldn't need the primers.
You could just stick that on the polymerase and it would synthesize what you want.
It would double amplify what you want without having to use primers.
So how do we know that that isn't just sticking back together?
So now we go to step four.
During this step, we raise the temperature again to 72 to 80 degrees.
This activates the polymerase and starts attaching free-floating nucleotides to the single strand of DNA.
This step results in the creation of two new pieces of double strand of DNA.
The length depends on how long we want the DNA to be copied.
And they say it can copy a thousand base pairs per minute.
So if you try to conceptualize this, so in the annealing phase, we bind the primers to the region we're interested in amplifying.
And in this stage, we elevate the temperature a little more, and this reactivates the preliminase, which supposedly got activated in the first step.
And then all these synthetic nucleotides that you've added to the mix, the preliminase knows how to attach one arm to the DNA single strand, With the other arm, it attaches, it finds the synthetic primer floating around in this mixture and sticks them in the exact order, one by one.
And it does all this in about 30 to 50 seconds, or 20 to 40 seconds.
It does all this, sticking to the right one, Searching with its other hand for the nucleotide that matches that, the other half of the zipper.
And does that for, say, 20 or so nucleotides.
And after a while, after 20 to 30 cycles, this is doing this in a billion different strands of DNA, single strands, attaching, finding it, sticking it on, next one, attaching, finding, sticking it on.
And it's doing this a billion times in 20 to 40 seconds.
Then they do a final elongation.
This is where the temperature is held to 70 to 74 degrees.
And this allows the polymerase to finish copying whatever strand it's working on.
And then it brings the temperature down to 4 to 12 degrees centigrade.
And that's one cycle.
So essentially, to summarize, we've put a sample of supposedly but not proven purified DNA, which was itself found with a hot acid and alkaline chemical bath.
Then we add that to a box, and then we heat it up, cool it down, heat it up, cool it down, and this is meant to activate the enzyme, get the polymerase to first separate the double strand, the primer identifies the area that you're looking to elongate,
It then preferentially makes one after another, and it does this all in about a minute.
And then you get a billion copies, and that's one amplification cycle.
And then you do this 40 or 30 times, and that takes about 40 minutes.
And now you've made a billion copies of something which had only a few copies before.
And none of this is verified visually.
None of this, do we use control experiments?
What if you put something that doesn't have DNA in it?
Do you still get something that fluoresces at the end more than in the beginning?
And this is basically the process.
And as I say, and you can read more of this, all of the questions that come up, why does it only cleave the DNA at the hydrogen bond in the middle?
Why doesn't it break it down?
Why do these synthetic alcohol and all these other chemicals mixed in it, why do they only Why do they only break the DNA exactly where you want?
Now, another interesting thing is if you add up the number of cycles and the amount of time it takes You find this information, 45 minutes equals, if you do 30 cycles, that's 45 minutes, 1,800 seconds.
That's 30 short cycles.
There's 300 seconds left for the adjustment of the temperature.
That's 10 seconds for each cycle.
Each cycle has three temperature adjustments.
That means there's 3.3 seconds for each temperature change from 95 back down to 50 degrees, back down 3 seconds to go from 74 down to 4 degrees centigrade.
And the first thing that I asked myself when I saw this was, how does it do that?
Where's the refrigerator?
Because my refrigerator can't cool something down from 94 degrees to 50 to 4 degrees in 3 seconds.
And here is the box that all this is being done in.
Now, it is true that they have some sort of thermal device which they say is able to change the temperature that quickly.
I must admit, I have my doubts as to whether that is what's happening.
So, at the end of the day, I think anybody who is asking themselves the question of how does the PCR work, has this been verified, or is this a question of blowing up the pond and seeing a lot more stuff at the end?
Now, I obviously have a lot of questions.
I'm not sure what they're measuring in the beginning or the end.
I would love to hear somebody who may know.
I'm not sure what they're looking at when they say your ancestry is from Puerto Rico or Lithuania or something based on a chemical analysis of something that has been put through a process like this.
I'm not saying that I know what they're looking at in a crime lab.
I'm not saying I know what they're putting in a genetically modified organism.
But what I do know is that when you speak about genetic diseases, all of which have been found in this way, more or less, not all of them, but most of them.
So for instance, most of the time, we're not even looking at pieces of genetic material, we're looking at proteins, like in, you know, in Uh, sickle cell disease, we look at a protein which we state came from a certain gene mutation.
So we're looking at proteins, or in the case of cystic fibrosis, we say this is a gene mutation, but we diagnose it with a sweat test, which is looking at the amount of sodium chloride in your sweat.
This is a long way from actually seeing the piece of DNA showing that it's abnormal from all other DNA, and that is the reason for the disease.
So this whole question of, you know, what is DNA?
Is it a real chemical found in real living things?
Or how do we find this chemical?
And if we look at how we found the chemical, we have to ask ourselves, since how we find something goes a long way to determining what we're going to find,
Does this that we find with our heating and enzymes and acids and alkalis and magnesium and ammonium and formaldehyde, does this bear any resemblance at all to what is in a living system and what determines what a human being will be like in health or disease or their ancestry or whether they committed a crime?
I'm not saying there's not heredity.
I'm not saying people didn't commit crimes.
I'm not saying there aren't plants that seem to be resistant to Roundup.
What I'm saying is this whole idea that this way that we find genetic material and amplify it so we can find it needs to be much more heavily scrutinized.
And finally, the real reason and the real question I ask myself, and I want everybody to ask at the end of this,
Because I've asked a number of people, can you name something in your life which is better because people know about DNA and know this theory that all of the proteins, all of the heredity are coded for by this chemical called DNA?
Name one thing in your life that's better.
That couldn't have been found out through some other way.
You know, we talk about, well, we have better cows because we work with the genetics of the cow.
We say that a lot.
But the reality is, farmers have been doing that forever by going into their cow and this cow or this bull that always seems to be goring the children or chasing the chickens, so we're going to cull this cow and get rid of it because it's not something that we want to keep around.
That has nothing to do with DNA or genetics or anything but common sense.
That's how we breed the most successful plants.
That's how, you know, apparently like apple trees and all this came about.
Had nothing to do with genetics.
We've spent 50 years investigating genetics and 30 years doing this PCR process so we can amplify genetic sequences.
What in your life have you been treated by or diagnosed that really made a difference that was found through the use of this technology?
Occasionally they give you an explanation for somebody who's obviously not quite right, and they find a protein which they assume must have come from an abnormal gene, usually never finding the gene, or if they did find it, they found it in this method that I was talking about.
But they have no strategy, no helpful ideas to deal with this protein.
If it's a case of cystic fibrosis, they tell you to, you know, be more vigilant about taking antibiotics if you get sick and cough up the mucus in your lung.
And if you have, you know, sickle cell disease, they give you, you know, drugs to stop the crisis.
None of this has borne any fruits As far as helping real people live better lives, none of it.
So at some point, it's got to be time to ask, not just is PCR actually a diagnostic test, not just does these fragments of genetic pieces ever been shown to come from this virus, which it hasn't,
Not to say there is no reason to isolate or do anything or even look for a PCR fragment in a person who's sick or not sick.
There is simply no reason for any of those things.
There is no useful information.
But at some point, somebody's going to have to question this whole process.
How actually do they do it?
And let's come up with ideas and techniques to verify these steps.
How do we know that this DNA double strand was denatured into single strands by heating it up and putting this chemical in there?
How do we actually know that?
What is the confirmation?
Because if we don't have the confirmation, my take right now is that's not proven as to what happens.
I'm not convinced this whole thing is amplifying anything.
Or that these DNA is the cause of any diseases.
And we should actually get off that and try to figure out what really makes people sick.
How come they're stuck in making a certain protein?
And at some point, I'll give some ideas on what that actually means.
So that was a hopefully not too rambling take, and I hope people follow up.
I hope people email me with some of the things we could do to verify this.
And again, I want to shout out to Tam for writing a brilliant paper, much more brilliant than what I just said, much better.
And so if anybody wants to read a real critique, please go to that.
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