How the Academic-Governmental-Industrial Complex Stifles Scientific Innovation
Across North America and elsewhere, independent scientists are increasingly worried that freedom of thought and discourse among fellow professionals is under grave threat. One such scientist who has long endured attack on his academic freedom is Dr. David Rasnick. Rasnick is a chemist and biologist noted for research questioning the orthodoxy about HIV/AIDS. For raising doubt on common misconceptions he is vilified by the mainstream. In this article we examine Rasnick’s concerns and offer readers some insight into how propaganda about HIV/AIDS and man-made global warming sprout from the same Establishment root: the Academic-Governmental-Industrial Complex (AGIC).
The AGIC is a multi-national business enterprise that has kept science in its enthrall due to the mega bucks on offer to researchers. Dissenters are denounced and starved of funding in this monolithic culture. Without numerous competing sources of funding, the centralized gatekeeping mechanisms of government grants have led to a scientific community too readily possessed by Group Think.
Group Think is the collective corruption of the decision-making processes. Group thinkers have an illusion of invulnerability, collective rationalization, stereotypes of outgroups, self-censorship, mind-guards, and belief in the inherent morality of the group.
As psychologists have shown:
“They typically have defective decision-making, involve the incomplete survey of alternatives and objectives, poor information search, failure to appraise the risks of the preferred solution, and selective information processing. Not surprisingly, these combined forces are predicted to result in extremely defective decision making performance by the group.” [1]
David Rasnick has the courage to stand up for his personal scientific convictions. According to PubMed, Rasnick has contributed to 18 scientific papers on protease-related research, and written a book about the aneuploidy theory of cancer. Rasnick’s complete CV and publication list is posted on his website. He dares to advance new ideas that question common AGIC scientific assumptions even if they may threaten entrenched interests (and investments). AGIC investments are worth many hundreds of billions of dollars to those who serve the system. Even those who passively kowtow to it are, in effect, sustaining the Establishment view.
Those of us who dare to flag up concerns about how the AGIC operates aren’t madcap ‘conspiracy theorists’ whatever mainstream media detractors (who serve the status quo) might say. Of course, the MSM will naturally shy away from applying any such ‘KoolAid drinker’ epithet to former US President Dwight Eisenhower. The outgoing president famously gave a speech a half a century ago decrying the impending AGIC dominance. [2]
As Eisenhower’s famous Farewell Address of 1961 spelt out so eloquently, individual scientists, academic institutions, government and industry are becoming so interconnected that they are forming an unstoppable force not necessarily working for the betterment of mankind.
Recognised as being in the forefront of the defense of the diminishing freedoms of scientists, David Rasnick first detailed his fears in 2002. [3] He and other principled scientists refuse to abide by any such norms that are more about preserving a status quo rather than discerning who is right or wrong on any given topic. In fact, as Dr. Rasnick has learned from experience, “without free inquiry and open debate, it is not possible to know what is right.”
As with other vast amoral enterprises, monopolistic ‘Big Science’ is operating not for the greater good, but at the expense of us all. Unrelenting in self-service, the AGIC will more than likely kill off debate and stifle free/open scientific inquiry; opting for mediocrity rather than giving credence to those with contrarian ideas, however, creditable.
It isn’t just those like Rasnick in the field of medical science who see the writing on the wall. Government climate ‘scientists’ have for three decades been promoting an unproven hypothesis about dangerous human-caused global warming. A Canadian scientist prominent in the battle against junk greenhouse gas climate science is Joseph E Postma. He confirms Rasnick’s fears; “ Ideally science should be about pursuing its own antitheses, but in practise it doesn’t, because people need to get paid, and want to get paid. And then you also have political corruption and political activism, etc.“
Postma, Rasnick and other independent scientists understand that the AGIC has become so powerful that it can even be seen to pressure heads of state to conform. As Rasnick notes, both Bushes, Clinton and Thabo Mbeki (former president of South Africa) were pawns in the AGIC game. “To demonstrate who’s boss, Clinton declared AIDS a Threat to National Security just a week before Mbeki’s AIDS Advisory Panel convened,” notes Rasnick. [4]
Rasnick’s first exposure to the intimate connection between government and industry occurred in the late 1970s when he was in graduate school. He recalls, “Captopril (the first of a new class of anti-hypertension drugs) was approved by the FDA. Within days of approval, the official USA definition of what constituted hypertension was lowered, conveniently adding millions of potential customers for the new drug.“
Today, 90 percent of Americans with hypertension would be cured by simply going to Canada, Europe, etc., where the old definition for high blood pressure is still used.
Once captopril set the precedent, a plethora of drugs with limited benefit, if any (e.g. cholesterol drugs), are now massively over-prescribed for a host of real and hypothetical conditions. The explosion over the last 30 years in screening tests (for everything under the sun) and vaccines (public school children in California receive over 30 vaccinations) is due to the simple logic that the whole population of a country is the customer base.
It is no wonder that independent scientists are rallying to breakaway organisations such as Principia Scientific International (PSI) and the Office of Medical and Scientific Justice (OMSJ). Dr. Rasnick’s colleague is Clark Baker, CEO of omsj.org and Baker has countless examples of his own:
“When I met David Lewis PhD last year, he said that government scientists are paid to corroborate and support government policy. Independent thinking is not permitted. Lewis was forced out of the EPA [Environmental Protection Agency] after exposing the dangers of government-approved dumping toxic industrial and biological waste on farmland.”
In the mid 1980s, Dr. Rasnick’s professional life was rolling merrily along until he discovered there were problems with the accepted dogma on AIDS. “When I attempted to talk with colleagues about these problems, something very strange happened. They would not talk to me – nearly three decades later, they still won’t talk,” says Rasnick.
“I lost a number of colleagues and friends because I questioned AIDS dogma,” he laments. Thirty years on and raising questions about AIDS is still taboo. To many it seems clear that the 1980’s AIDS panic was the benchmark of how the AGIC could succeed in engendering mass fear by deft use of ‘Scientific Doomsday Mania.’ From the 1990’s, government climatologists applied the same modus operandi, and backed by a compliant mainstream media, succeeded in creating mass fear of global warming – all until the ‘Climategate‘ email scandal of 2009 exposed such claims as the product of pervasive academic fraud.
The leaked Climategate emails showed how peer pressure among academics is a powerful force. And while the climate malfeasance genie may have already escaped the bottle, we still await the day its counterpart in medical science is let loose. Until such time, in order to preserve a collaboration with a parasitology colleague, Rasnick and his colleague long agreed not to talk about AIDS. Rasnick says:
“In the late 1980s it was clear something crazy was going on. I began studying the history of science in great detail and continue to do so. Along the way, I came across a very important book, ‘Disciplined Minds,’ (2002) by Jeff Schmidt that gives a critical look at salaried professionals and the soul-battering system that shapes their lives.” [5]
Schmidt’s book provided Rasnick with an explanation for the rapidity with which doctors and the majority of scientists silently agreed not to engage in any discussion of the obvious problems with the contagious/HIV hypothesis of AIDS. Dr. Rasnick laments, “Years later, we see identically the same thing happening with global warming—including language and ad hominems (e.g. being labeled “denialists”).
Dr. Rasnick’s friend Serge Lang (now deceased) was a world-famous mathematician and member of the National Academy of Sciences. “Over the years, he challenged any “big shot” he discovered spreading misinformation or misusing science or mathematics to further personal goals,” asserts Rasnick. In his book ‘Challenges,’ Lang detailed questionable academic, scientific, and political behavior, in various combinations. The book reflects Lang’s fundamental interest in the area where the academic or scientific world meets the world of journalism and the world of politics. To Lang’s surprise, “It turned out that the National Academy of Sciences happened to be involved in all of them in some way or another. I provide a review of ‘Challenges,’ plus other material on Lang.” (see Supplemental Material, below)
If Rasnick’s analysis is correct, a skeptic asked: “then why are Americans still quite successful in becoming Nobel laureates if so much corruption exists in U.S research?” The questioner apparently assumes prizes such as the science Nobels are not—or at least not significantly—influenced by AGIC. If only that were true.
“Prizes and research grants are examples of the quid pro quo old-boy network,” bemoans Dr. Rasnick. “For instance, the Nobel Prize has been used recently to give notice that a scientific question has been settled and debate should stop (i.e. 2008 Prize for HIV).” But that abuse has been going on for years. As evidence, Rasnick cites the research of author Peter Duesberg who described the inordinate power and influence of the American Nobel Laureate David Baltimore. [6] In 1991 the New York Times reported on the scandal-fueled resignation of David Baltimore as president of Rockefeller University. [7]
Below Rasnick and his OMSJ colleagues have identified where other bogus Nobel prizes have evolved over the years. These include:
- just plain wrong (Johannes Fibiger (1926)-claimed nematode caused gastric cancer, later proved wrong-honest mistake);
- fraudulent (Daniel Gajdusek (1976)-claimed kuru was caused by slow viruses acquired by cannibalism, later proved fraudulent and wrong on both counts);
- assure Nixon’s war on cancer was not a complete failure (Michael Bishop & Harold Varmus (1989)-claimed mutated genes cause cancer-still unproved, probably wrong);
- ludicrous and possibly politically based (Stanely Prusiner (1997)-claimed infectious proteins called prions cause mad caw disease);
- premature, not clear why awarded (Richard Axel & Linda Buck (2004)-for lock and key theory of odorant receptors-but many problems with this theory that do not plague the competing theory of molecular vibrations, first advocated by Sir Malcolm Dyson in 1938 and currently championed by Luca Turin, among others, and supported by recent experiment evidence);
- politically/financially based and unproved (Harald zur Hausen (2008)-claimed human papilloma viruses (HPV) cause cervical cancer); (Françoise Barré-Sinoussi & Luc Montagnier (2008)-for discovery of HIV, the putative cause of AIDS, probably wrong).
So how do we go about putting science back on the right track?
Rasnick insists, “The first thing we must do is to free science from the clutches of mega-bucks.” He insists numerous competing sources of funding must replace the centralized gatekeeping mechanisms of government grants. “A small move in this direction appeared briefly in 2002, when the board of Second Renaissance approved the establishment of a new research institute of science in northern Italy. A year later, the board changed its mind.”
A guiding principle of the new institute was moderate funding so that its scholars could pursue big questions instead of big interests. The new institute was to give a voice to the voiceless, to attract and support those scientists and communicators and translators for the public who have a track record of being ostracized, punished, vilified, and just plain ignored by the mainstream institutions of science, journalism, media, and the arts.
Since large scientific institutions suffer from the same problems that plague all large institutions, the scale of the new institute was to be of human dimensions. Healthy science is the product of creative individuals, who may or may not work in collaboration with a few colleagues. “The maximum population of the institute would have been 50, including the head, scientists and other scholars, including a minimal support staff,” adds Rasnick.
He also suggests that to protect the new institute from becoming rigid, stale, a center of dogma and political power, a gatekeeper that rewards conformity and punishes dissent, the head of the institute and the board of directors would be appointed for no more than five years. “Likewise, resident scientists and other scholars would be supported for no more than three years at a time.” There would be continual reassessment and evaluation of what the institute is, what it should be doing and how it goes about its business.
Rasnick continues, “Since science and scientists are largely a mystery to most people, the new institute would attract journalists, political scientists, artists of all types, and others as appropriate and support them on equal terms with the scientists.” These non-scientific professionals, insists Rasnick, would observe all activities of the institute. They would closely interact with the scientists at will. They would be free to criticize or praise, to simply report and analyze. Their primary function would be to find out what is going on and communicate that to the world through their skills and art. They would be expected to make the resident scholars justify and explain what they are doing in plain language.
So, doesn’t Rasnick’s vision seem to be a reasonably path forward? It’s about time that the public interest was served to ensure the “null hypothesis” antedote to AGIC’s often unchallenged scientific claims. “In short, what I’m advocating is grass-roots science,” concludes David Rasnick. Surely, humanity and science per se deserves this.
************
[1] Marlene E. Turner & Anthony R. Pratkanis, Twenty-Five Years of Groupthink Theory and Research: Lessons from the Evaluation of a Theory, 1998, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 73, 105–115.
[2] Eisenhower, D., Farewell Address. www.eisenhower.archives.gov (accessed online: November 3, 2013)
[3] Rasnick, D., Science threatens Democracy,(2002), in Supplemental Material.
[4] Rasnick, Supplemental Material, AIDS/Thabo Mbeki, May 2000
[5] Jeff Schmidt’s Disciplined Minds can be found at:http://disciplined-minds.com
(a review of Disciplined Minds is in Rasnick’s Supplemental Material(2000))
[6] Duesberg, Peter, ‘Inventing the AIDS Virus,’ at pages 362-3.(provided in Rasnick’s Supplemental Material).
[7] Serge Lang (see Supplemental Materials) published Questions of Scientific Responsibility: The Baltimore Case in Ethics and Behavior 1993, 3(1):3-72.
SUPPLEMENTAL MATERIAL
To assist PSI readers in better coming to grips with this wide-ranging subject Dr. Rasnick offers a wealth of information available on his website: www.davidrasnick.com .
Dr. Rasnick’s Supplemental Materials on the AGIC is at:
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/2djlfmrg92q9n7h/FEUTMc7TTA
The folders contain other folders, files, audio interviews and movies. Readers can view any individual file, audio file, or movie without downloading it. Just click the folder once to open it or click a file once to read it online. Or you can download any and all files and folders. To download as a .zip file the entire contents of an open folder, click the gear icon on the toolbar at the top right and select .zip file.
Trackback from your site.