The Virus and the Vaccine: The True Story of a Cancer-Causing Monkey Virus, Contaminated Polio Vaccine, and the Millions of Americans Exposed [2013] by Debbie Bookchin

Author:Debbie Bookchin [Bookchin, Debbie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: !!!, Cancer, Polio Vaccine, Vax - Risk Awareness, read it
ISBN: 9781466848993
Amazon: B00DFFMZL4
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2013-07-02T04:00:00+00:00

16

The Perfect War Machine

THE CARDINAL BERNARDIN Cancer Center at Loyola University, located in the outskirts of Chicago in Maywood, Illinois, is a multimillion-dollar monument to this nation’s preoccupation with cancer. Opened in 1994, the sparkling 125,000-square-foot concrete-and-glass structure boasts that it is the only freestanding facility in Illinois dedicated exclusively to cancer research, diagnosis, treatment, and prevention. The center’s primary patient treatment centers are situated on the ground floor of the building, surrounding a pleasant waiting area that is softened by plush magenta sofas and an airy atrium. The research laboratories encircle the atrium one story above, their proximity to the treatment clinics suggesting that any new scientific breakthroughs are sped to the suffering patients below. But the laboratories are largely hidden from the patients. To reach them you must enter an elevator or secluded stairwell, find your way up to the next level, push through a set of heavy firewall doors, and then continue down a maze of hallways. Here, sequestered in three-dozen laboratories, researchers are striving to unlock the molecular mysteries of cancer.

Michele Carbone’s office—jammed with ring binder notebooks, a microscope, and other research and writing accoutrements—is tucked into a corner of the building and overlooks a parking lot. In two tidy laboratories a few steps down the hall, he and his research team have begun to unravel the exact mechanisms by which SV40 causes cancer.

Carbone’s lab is lively. His laboratory group includes scientists from China, Pakistan, and Italy as well as the United States, and the whir of high-tech laboratory equipment is often punctuated by good-natured Italian banter. One section of the lab is taken up by Carbone’s collaborator, Maurizio Bocchetta, who has made significant contributions to the understanding of how SV40 infection disrupts the normal functioning of regulatory genes inside mesothelial cells. The rest of the group has been led, until recently, by Paola Rizzo, who first teamed up with Carbone in 1993 when he sought her DNA-sequencing expertise during his initial experiments on Pass’s mesotheliomas. It was Rizzo’s DNA sequencing that provided the final confirmation that what was in the mesotheliomas could only have been SV40. Working with Rizzo, Carbone developed state-of-the-art PCR protocols specifically for SV40 detection in mesotheliomas that have been adopted by numerous other laboratories conducting SV40 research.

In one corner of Carbone’s lab, photos of monkeys cut out of a magazine by a lab assistant stare down from a door; elsewhere an Italian-English magnetic word game plastered across the front of a freezer declares nonsensically: “come, music, presente, passion, quest, inferno, tempest. ” But the rest of the laboratory has the appearance of an oversized space module in which real estate is at a premium: Every shelf is labeled and every piece of equipment has its designated place. Two three-foot-high incubators are stacked in a corner. In block letters penned across a swath of blue tape, the bottom incubator warns: “Do not open, virus!!” In the next room, another incubator admonishes, “No cells suspected to contain live viruses are to be lodged inside this top incubator.

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