Big Science is NOT Science. Nixon's "War on Cancer" (1964) replaced scientific research with dogma and central planning.

Big Government destroys everything it touches by overfunding bad ideas. Lessons from the Virus Cancer Program.

In this post I am providing excerpts from the essay: “Cancer and Cronyism at the NIH: Norton Zinder and the Special Virus Cancer Program” by Antoinette Sutto, Robert D. L. Gardiner Historian (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory). It covers the Zinder Commission, which in 1973 already determined that Nixon’s “War on Cancer” was a rather dumb boondoggle overfunding everything but the actual scientific research. It should not surprise anyone that no course correction resulted from this realization. The corporate extraction layer which is called “scientific medicine” today continues marching on to its own ultimate suicide by drowning in money. mRNA cancer vaccines designed by AI is just a logical conclusion of the suicide mission started by Nixon’s admin in the 1960s. That’s why this essay is so important to understand the current state of “not-science”.

Big government funding of research, or anything really, is a central planning model, similar to those employed by the Soviet Union. These central planning (resource control and allocation to political/corporate interests) designed to over-fund the narratives preferred by the power elites, manipulate public opinion, and divert the capital and resources from the true scientific or other forms of societal progress. If the government suddenly pours lavish amounts of money into “Virus Cancer Program” - no money is ever made available, and thus no scientific hypotheses can ever be studied which aims at ANY OTHER CAUSE of cancer. Nobody can ask - what if cancer is not caused by a virus? There is no money and no academic career to be had asking that question. “VCP” hit a total dead end but still managed to spawn the poisoning, life destroying HPV “vaccine”. While other causes of cancer have been proposed and studied since then, none of them really deviated from the pre-determined dogma, enshrined into that original “cancer war”. Today’s mainstream, NIH-funded cancer research is based on the same false foundations of virology and genetics and, with addition of “computational biology” and AI, the apparatus has devolved into meaningless computer modeling and mass poisoning cartel.

After reading these paragraphs, you will, hopefully, be liberated from the notion that ANYTHING in the mainstream, NIH-funded “Hellth science” is remotely sane or should be relied on for personal health decision making. It should be a relief to know that you can fire your idiot doctor, who is likely a 2nd or 3rd generation indoctrinated into the system that 60+ years ago locked into a lucrative dead-end narrative. It should also be liberating for you to know that the related disciplines of virology and genetics are completely false for the same reason the cancer “science” today is completely false - they stem from the government’s over-funding preferred resource- and population control narratives and have nothing to do with natural science.

And all of this should finally convince you that 3 blind mice will never be able to build a spaceship and fly to the Moon, no matter how many trillions of dollars they are given. Nobody can make viruses in a lab, nobody can “modify your genes”, nobody can link you to the Internet via nanobots and remote control you with chemtrails.

This essay is a vignette from the long history of overfunding bad ideas:

The Special Virus Cancer Program, later simply the Virus Cancer Program (VCP), was launched in 1964. It was part of the NCI [National Cancer Institute], which in turn had been founded in 1937 to research causes of and treatments for cancer and promote cancer research. The NCI had supported research into the relationship between viruses and cancer since the early 1960s, and the SVCP was part of that general effort.²

The SVCP did have some peculiarities, however. “From the start [it] relied heavily on the planning techniques used in space and military programs, and, for a biological undertaking, it has made similarly lavish use of resources.”³ The problem with all this was that by the early 1970s, the program had not produced the breakthroughs in treatment, or even the advances in basic knowledge, that its founders and funders had expected. More than this, the way the program was run and how its funds were awarded frustrated large numbers of scientists. This was the background for the appointment of the Zinder Committee to review the Special Virus Cancer Program in March of 1973.

…the Nixon administration wanted to change how scientific research was managed. Nixon neither liked nor understood the idea of basic, open-ended research and was all for taking control of research planning away from people he termed “nuts” and giving it to, as Mukherjee put it, “a new cadre of scientific bureaucrats” who would “bring a new discipline and accountability to science.”⁵ Robin Scheffler has argued that the controversy over the SVCP and the activities of the Zinder Committee [1973] show scientists in revolt against the centrally managed, contract-focused research program of the NCI, because they feared it would undermine what they saw as more autonomous, independent grant-based research. They were affected by changes in federal research strategy, but they were also the experts whose opinions and cooperation were necessary to the enterprise, and they were able to use the value of their own scientific expertise and their access to the machinery of federal bureaucracy to fend off what they saw as government intrusion into scientific independence.⁶

…The virus model suggested an easy-to-target model for the cause of cancer — viruses — and a relatively simple fix: vaccines.

This is not addressed by the authors of the essay, however, big part of Nixon’s “War on Cancer” had nothing to do with finding cure for cancer. Nixon was transferring the official Bioweapons program from covert military/intelligence funding, into the open - to academia and corporate pharma contractors. Of course, the development of weaponized viruses is hubris scientifically, however, Nixon or his advisors would not know this. They believed it is possible to make flying viruses that cause cancer and unleash them on enemies, or at least use such weapons as a threat. They also believed that they can make vaccines for protecting themselves. Many of the participants of the pandemic preparedness cartel still believe these narratives, too! At the time of Nixon’s plan, the only way to accomplish this transition from covert military programs to academia/pharma without eliciting public backlash was to pretend that all of it was for a benevolent objective of curing cancer.

Biomedical researches found themselves caught in a situation where a lot had been promised politically — the SVCP was compared to the moon landing, and many lay people and members of congress had the impression that a cure for cancer could be as simple as finding the right talent and putting enough money into the effort. The basic research that would have allowed this was lacking, however, and the enterprise as a whole was poorly managed. It ended up becoming a “big science” nightmare for biologists.

…The SVCP was launched in the mid-1960s, during the post-war period of federal largesse in terms of basic research funding. Within a few years after the program’s founding, however, during the late 1960s and early 1970s, there was a move on the federal government’s part toward demanding more immediate returns on investment in scientific research. This was a sharp contrast to the immediate post-war period, when molecular biology research had been supported with the assumption that there would be significant practical gains at some point in the future, even if those gains were not easy to predict or direct at the moment. The social movements of the 1960s also played a role in this shift, as activists and progressive organizations called for more socially useful research, with immediate benefits for ordinary people.⁸ Americans’ expectations of what the federal government could, and should, do in terms of safeguarding public health and preventing disease had expanded. The 1960s and 1970s were, for example, the era of the first pieces of modern environmental protection legislation, such as the Clean Air Act, first passed in 1963 and amended at various points in the later 1960s and 1970s. Less pure motives were also at work. As noted above, President Nixon had no great respect for scientists, but he was interested in “outflank[ing] Senator Ted Kennedy, a potential presidential candidate who was then leading the Lasker forces,” i.e. the alliance of activists and organizations spearheaded by cancer research activist Mary Lasker. Their goal was increased funding for targeted research into cancer treatments.⁹ Changes in management practices within the federal government also played a role. In the late 1960s, “systems analysis” expanded from defense into other areas of the federal government.¹⁰ This included the federal government’s cancer program.¹¹ Systems analysis is a goal-directed management method that involves setting specific targets and mapping out in extensive detail what steps must be taken to achieve these targets with maximum efficiency and how to carry out these steps. It presupposes large organizations, large budgets and large staffs.

Related to the federal government’s interest in systems analysis – but nevertheless distinct – was the rise of “big science.” The term “big science” was coined by Alvin Weinberg, a nuclear physicist, in 1961. Weinberg applied the term to the massive projects in physics and engineering that typified the Cold War-era scientific competition with the Soviet Union. He argued that big science had caused a series of problems for the practice of science itself. The first of these was that the flip side of massive public funding was a need to appeal to the public. As a result, “Big Science…thrives on publicity. The inevitable result is the injection of a journalistic flavor into Big Science which is fundamentally in conflict with the scientific method.” This blurred the line between science writing and journalism, and “issues of technical merit tend to get argued in the popular, not the scientific press,” or in congress rather than in universities. In Weinberg’s view, this led to prominence for the showy rather than the thoughtful.

The second big problem was that the abundance of funding led scientists to throw money at problems rather than thinking up a way to reframe the problem so that it might be solved with the resources at hand — “spending money instead of thought.” Big science also created a problem of too many administrators, or a too-large ratio of administrators to working scientists. “Unfortunately, science dominated by administrators is science understood by administrators, and such science quickly becomes attenuated, if not meaningless.” He also noted the prospect of “pet projects” getting special treatment as far as funding was concerned and “the dangers of creating a political ‘in’ group of scientists who will keep worthy outsiders from the till.”¹²

Many of Weinberg’s criticisms of big science would prove to be prescient as far as the NCI in the early 1970s was concerned. However, it is important to emphasize that Weinberg was not categorically against big science. Ironically, in his more extended treatment of the subject, published in the late 1960s, he argued that given their relevance for human health, molecular biology and biomedical research were good candidates for large, complex research endeavors. He thought that “the biomedical sciences can be force-fed, even more than they are now being force-fed.” More money would attract the best scientific talent and support the best research.¹³

All of this together – cultural, political and administrative developments – formed the context for the review of the SVCP that took place in 1973-1974. The review committee consisted of about a dozen scientists, headed by Norton Zinder. Zinder and his colleagues dug into the progress and results of the program, made site visits, and interviewed people who were involved in awarding the program’s outside grants and contracts. They also spoke on the phone with and received letters from researchers who had had to do with the program in some capacity and whose reactions were, on the whole, negative.

Although it might seem counterintuitive to non-specialists, scientists argued that throwing a lot of money and effort on solving a very particular narrowly-defined problem was not necessarily the best way to gain the knowledge needed to solve it. As biochemist Arthur Kornberg wrote to Nixon’s cancer program advisor Benno Schmidt in 1974, “narrowing the focus of research so sharply limits the serendipitous discoveries which have dominated the modern history of medical research.”¹⁹

The “War on Cancer,” including the SVCP, was sometimes compared to the moon landing — that is, an all-out effort at enormous expense in which American ingenuity and know-how were expected to win the day and deliver spectacular results. Virologists and other experts were skeptical, however.²⁰ Jim Watson, for example, had little patience with the moon landing metaphor for the federal government’s “War on Cancer” in the 1970s. A more realistic ‘moonshot’ comparison, he told the Boston Globe in 1978, would be an attempt to land a man on the moon in the 1920s before the invention of modern rocket technology, by giving contracts to cannon-makers and ladder experts and a lot of administrators — but with no support for basic rocket science.²¹ Jim Watson’s quip to the Boston Globe was not the only such statement. The Wall Street Journal described unnamed scientists as saying that “this ‘targeted research’…smacks of a false analogy to the moon shot program, where the goal was clear and the technology was available. Yet not only do scientists not know the best way to ‘conquer cancer,’ they are not even sure what cancer itself might be. (Some say that the name covers dozens, and maybe hundreds, of diseases.) Furthermore, the programmed approach leaves little room for the chance that new and more productive lines of research might develop….[scientists] say the contract worker simply won’t have the flexibility to follow up chance discoveries, and these are the heart of scientific breakthroughs.”²²

The problems that the Zinder Committee and their contacts and correspondents in the biological and biomedical sciences wrote about look a lot like those of a discipline plunging – or being plunged – into Weinberg’s “big science.” The textbook example of big science in the 1960s and early 70s was the space program and the moon landing, and as noted above, this metaphor was used repeatedly to talk about the SVCP, by both its supporters and its critics. “Big biology” had arrived. But unlike physicists and engineers, biologists were not working on massive projects centered around a large piece of technology, like the atom bomb, a particle accelerator or a moon rocket. The aspects of big science that affected life scientists the most were administrative. There was an increase in the use of contracts to fund science by national funding agencies like the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the NIH, as well as an uptick in the number of administrators at these agencies.³⁴

Biologists discussing the SVCP in the early 1970s expressed many of the same concerns as Weinberg had ten years earlier about “big science” in general – top heavy administration, “pet projects,” in-groups, throwing money at problems rather than thinking them through.

An important aspect of big science that lay outside the scope of the Zinder Committee’s activities was the relationship between scientists and the media. The War on Cancer was in part the result of public agitation by people like Mary Lasker and the American Cancer Society. The Nixon administration had a stake in promoting it. And given the seriousness of the disease, the American public was always eager to read about groundbreaking advances in cancer research. The SVCP was implicated in all of this because it was a targeted research initiative that was supposed to produce tangible results fairly quickly. More than this, the virus model of cancer causation that was the intellectual basis for the SVCP raised hopes that the research might produce a cancer vaccine.

The problem was that there was a significant mismatch between how the SVCP and the Cancer Program in general were sold to the public, on the one hand, and on the other, what the people in charge of running it knew that they could deliver. Scientists and administrators working at the NCI or the NIH or otherwise affiliated with the War on Cancer were naturally well aware that given the state of basic cancer research, the prospects of a cure within the next few years were vanishingly small. This led to significant tension between how the program was presented to the public and what those running it knew they could realistically provide, even under the best of circumstances. Occasionally representatives of the program had to backpedal and argue repeatedly that they had never implied that there would soon be a vaccine against cancer — even though, essentially, they had. In his correspondence with Arthur Kornberg, Benno Schmidt said that “no one responsible for the cancer program believes that this is a research effort that can be managed, predicted or targeted, or that a timetable can be fixed or a price tag set. All[underlined] we offer is an accelerated effort.” ³⁹ “Nobody,” he said, “is under the illusion that the cancer problem is one of implementation of known science or that the research needed to advance cancer knowledge can be targeted or planned.”⁴⁰

The problem was that President Nixon himself had publicly made this very comparison to the moon landing in his second State of the Union Address.⁴³ The idea of a war on cancer in which quick and spectacular results were expected was occasionally echoed even by scientists and medical professionals. In 1974, molecular biologist Sol Spiegelman predicted the isolation of a human cancer virus within the next few years, which would be a big step toward a cancer vaccine.

Ultimately, the best way to understand the controversy over the SVCP is as a collision between big science, the politics of the late 1960s and early 1970s and – crucially – a specific model of the causes of cancer that was soon to disappear. In the 1960s and early 1970s, it seemed that viruses might be part of the cause of cancer in humans. Over the course of the 1970s, research based on this idea developed into a different model, which would not have been possible without the virus-cancer hypothesis, but which no longer assumed that viruses were a significant cause of cancers in people.⁴⁷

…Where does this leave us? Despite the high drama that the SVCP and the Zinder Committee’s review provoked, the practical effects on the SVCP and the NCI were limited. Initially, Zinder expressed hope that “a beginning has been made.” He and the committee had “unsettled the system a bit, if nothing else.”⁵² He was less optimistic a few years later. The NCI had had time by this point to put the committee’s recommendations into practice, but little had changed. “For some time now,” Zinder noted,

“I have been approached by scientists both in and out of the program saying that the abuses of power that we found four years ago are as bad as ever…In addition, there were some simple changes that we requested which, although mentioned in the text of our report, were not even listed in the recommendations that have not been put into effect, although we were assured that they would be”. ⁵³

References:

1 Norton Zinder Collection (NZC), Series: Government Activities, Box 135, Folder: Ad Hoc Advisory Committee for Special Virus Cancer Program, 1973, handwritten note on SVCP dated Sept. 12, 1973.

2 “National Cancer Institute (NCI),” via the National Institutes of Health, https://www.nih.gov/about-nih/what-we-do/nih-almanac/national-cancer-institute-nci, accessed October 6, 2021.

3 Nicholas Wade, “Special Virus Cancer Program: Travails of a Biological Moonshot,” Science 174, 4016 (24 December, 1971): 1306-1311.

4 Stephen Strickland, Politics, Science and Dread Disease: A Short History of United States Medical Research Policy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972; Richard A. Rettig, Cancer Crusade: The Story of the National Cancer Act of 1971 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977); James T. Patterson, The Dread Disease: Cancer and Modern American Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987.

5 Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer (New York: Scribner, 2010), 182-183.

6 Robin Wolfe Scheffler, A Contagious Cause: The American Hunt for Cancer Viruses and the Rise of Molecular Medicine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), Chapter Eight.

7 Michel Morange, “From the Regulatory Vision of Cancer to the Oncogene Paradigm, 1975-1985,” Journal of the History of Biology 30, no. 1 (Spring 1997): 1–29; Michel Morange, The Black Box of Biology: A History of the Molecular Revolution, trans. Matthew Cobb (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020), Chapter Eighteen.

8 Doogab Yi, The Recombinant University: Genetic Engineering and the Emergence of Stanford Biotechnology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), pp. 6-8.

9 Patterson, Dread Disease, 248-249.

10 Guy Black, “Systems Analysis in Government Operations,” Management Science 14, no. 2 (October 1967): B41–58; Alain Enthoven, “How Systems Analysis, Cost-Effectiveness Analysis, or Benefit-Cost Analysis First Became Influential in Federal Government Program Decision Making,” Journal of Benefit Cost Analysis 10, no. 2 (2019): 146–55.

11 Barbara J. Culliton, “Biomedical Research (II): Will the ‘Wars’ Ever Get Started?,” Science 181, no. 4103 (September 7, 1973): 921.

12 Alvin M. Weinberg, “Impact of Large-Scale Science on the United States,” Science 134, no. 3473 (July 21, 1961): 161–64.

13 Alvin M. Weinberg, Reflections on Big Science (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1967), 106.

14 NZC, Series: Government Activities, Box 135, Folder: Ad Hoc Advisory Committee for Special Virus Cancer Program, 1973, xerox of Colin Norman, “Cancer research runs into trouble,” Nature 248, April 5, 1974, pp. 465-466.

15 Barbara J. Culliton, “Virus Cancer Program: Review Panel Stands By Criticism,” Science 184, 4133 (April 12, 1974): 145.

16 NZC, Series: Rockefeller University, Box 1, Folder: 1974, Harold Amos, draft report of review of Zinder report, June 10, 1974.

17 Daniel S. Greenberg, “NSF Boosts Use of Contracts for Research / Cancer program is attacked by study,” Change 6, 4 (May 1974): 54.

18 NZC, Series: Government Activities, Box 157, Folder: [unlabeled, “Chemistry search” written on front cover], Report of the Ad Hoc Review Committee (Zinder Committee) for the Special Virus Cancer Program. Hereafter cited as “Zinder Committee Report.” Quote on page 3.

19 NZC, Series: Government Activities, Box 135, Folder: Ad Hoc Advisory Committee for Special Virus Cancer Program, 1973, Kornberg to Schmidt, June 24, 1974.

20 Nicholas Wade, “Special Virus Cancer Program: Travails of a Biological Moonshot,” Science 174, 4016 (24 December, 1971): 1306-1311.

21 NZC, Series: Government Activities, Box 173, Folder: unlabeled, “War on cancer: frustration splits ranks,” Boston Globe, April 24, 1978.

22 NZC, Series: Government Activities, Box 135, Folder: Ad Hoc Advisory Committee for Special Virus Cancer Program, 1973, “Fighting the Cancer War,” The Wall Street Journal, August 1974.

23 Zinder Committee Report, 6.

24 NZC, Series: Government Activities, Box 135, Folder: Ad Hoc Advisory Committee for Special Virus Cancer Program, 1973, Kornberg to Schmidt, June 24, 1974.

25 Zinder Committee Report, 11.

26 NZC, Series: Government Activities, Box 149, Folder: Rev. Cancer, Jerry Schneider, Assoc. Professor of Pediatrics at the University of California, San Diego Medical School, to Zinder, 13 August 1973.

27 NZC, Series: Government Activities, Box 149, Folder: Rev. Cancer, Dr. W. K. Joklik, Duke University Medical Center, to Zinder, August 8, 1973.

28 Zinder Committee Report, 10.

29 Zinder Committee Report, 10.

30 Wade, “Travails of a Biological Moonshot,” 1307.

31 Zinder Committee Report, 11.

32 NZC, Series: Government Activities, Box 149, Folder [unlabeled, with “Dr. Zinder” written on the cover], Zinder to Dr. Arthur Upton, September 12, 1977.

33 Zinder Committee Report, 16.

34 Greenberg, “Science Policy: NSF Boosts Use of Contracts for Research / Cancer Program Is Attacked by Study.”

35 NZC, Series: Rockefeller University, Box 1, Folder: 1974, James Whitman to Zinder, April 2, 1974.

36 NZC, Series: Government Activities, Box: 149, Folder: Rev. Cancer, Joklik to Zinder, August 8, 1973. Emphasis in original.

37 Zinder Committee Report, 13.

38 NZC, Series: Government Activities, Box: 149, Folder: Rev. Cancer, Joklik to Zinder, August 8, 1973.

39 NZC, Series: Government Activities, Box 135, Folder: Ad Hoc Advisory Committee for Special Virus Cancer Program, 1973, Schmidt to Kornberg, July 11, 1974. Emphasis in original.

40 NZC, Series: Government Activities, Box 135, Folder: Ad Hoc Advisory Committee for Special Virus Cancer Program, 1973, Schmidt to Kornberg, June 18, 1974. Entire sentence underlined in original.

41 NZC, Series: Government Activities, Box 135, Folder: Ad Hoc Advisory Committee for Special Virus Cancer Program, 1973, President’s Cancer Panel, assessment of the National Cancer Program January 25, 1973, page 14.

42 NZC, Series: Government Activities, Box 135, Folder: Ad Hoc Advisory Committee for Special Virus Cancer Program, 1973, Report of Ad Hoc Review Committee of the Institute of Medicine, National Academy of Sciences, Assessment of National Cancer Program Plan, pages 12-13. Emphasis in original.

43 Daryl E. Chubin and Kenneth E. Studer, “The Politics of Cancer,” Theory and Society 6, 1 (July, 1978): 57.

44 NZC, Series: Government Activities, Box 135, Folder: [unlabeled], Clipping “Cancer Viruses” from The Nation Tuesday, March 26, 1974.

45 NZC, Series: Government Activities, Box 149, Folder: [no label, “Dr. Zinder” written on the front cover], NCP special communication, August 17, 1977, copy of testimony of Guy R. Newell, M.D., Deputy Director of the NCI, before the Intergovernmental Relations and Human Resources Subcommittee of the House of Representatives, page 1.

46 NZC, Series: Government Activities, Box 149, Folder: Rev. Cancer, Comments on the report of the ad hoc review committee of the Virus Cancer Program, January, 1974.

47 Daniel T. Kevles, “Pursuing the unpopular: a history of courage, viruses and cancer,” in Robert B. Silvers, ed., Hidden Histories of Science (New York: New York Review of Books, 1995), 69-109; Morange, “Oncogene Paradigm”; Morange, Black Box of Biology, Chapter Eighteen.

48 NZC, Series: Rockefeller, Box 1, Folder: 1974, Mathilde Krim to John Maloney, July 11, 1974, page 2.

49 NZC, Series: Government Activities, Box 135, Folder: Ad Hoc Advisory Committee for Special Virus Cancer Program, 1973, Kornberg to Schmidt, July 16, 1974.

50 Horace Judson, The Eighth Day of Creation: Makers of the Revolution in Biology. Commemorative Edition. (Cold Spring Harbor: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, 2013), 925-7.

51 NZC, Series: Rockefeller, Box 1, Folder: 1974, Zinder to S. R. Wagle, May 29, 1974.

52 NZC, Series: Rockefeller University, Box 3, Folder: unlabeled, Zinder to J. M. Price, May 16, 1974.

53 NZC, Series: Government Activities, Box 149, Folder: [no label, “Dr. Zinder” on front cover], Zinder to Arthur Upton, September 12, 1977.

Art for today: Summer is Here, oil on panel, 11x14 in.