“Dr. Mary’s Monkey”

by Mary Wenworth
09/20/10
Capecodtoday.com HERE...

Lee Harvey Oswald, the JFK assassination are part of this chronicle


In "Dr. Mary's Monkey," Edward T. Haslam weaves a tale of intrigue involving polio vaccines, secret laboratories, a gruesome death, romance, and, yes, monkeys.

Would you believe that Lee Harvey Oswald and the assassination of JFK are also part of this chronicle? Set in New Orleans in the fifties and early sixties, it demonstrates that truth is way stranger than fiction.

Haslam set out to discover what his father, a former Commander in the U.S. Navy and a Professor of Orthopedic Surgery at Tulane, had come across in the New Orleans medical community that not only offended his sense of medical ethics, but also frightened him into silence.


Interview With Edward T. Haslam

When a small child Haslam had sat in Dr. Mary Sherman's lap during one of her visits to the Haslam home. It was to be expected then that her murder, which remains unsolved to this day, would have been a painful event for the whole family. Nevertheless, the senior Haslam, just before his death, would not reveal to his son what he had learned. Only that very powerful people were involved and his son should think twice about "crossing swords" with them.

Haslam's search goes back to 1952 when Dr. Alton Ochsner persuaded Sherman, a well-known and respected cancer researcher and faculty member at the University of Chicago, to come to New Orleans. Ochsner was a prominent surgeon, an influential figure in New Orleans political circles, president of the American Cancer Society, and a staunch anti-communist. He promised Sherman a partnership in his clinic, her own cancer laboratory that would never want for funds because of Ochsner's connections, and an associate professorship at Tulane Medical School.

What were the events over the next fourteen years that led to Dr. Sherman's murder in July 1964- eight months after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy?

The answer to this question begins with the 33,000 Americans a year who had contracted polio during the early fifties. Parental fear that their child would be the next victim of this crippling, and often deadly, disease put enormous pressure on American medical researchers.

A significant step forward occurred when researchers found they could use the kidneys of rhesus monkeys as the culture for growing a vaccine. In early 1955, Dr. Jonas Salk announced that his vaccine would prevent polio. Following his instructions, five commercial laboratories began producing it in preparation for mass inoculations set to begin in April of that year.

As a precaution, Dr. Bernice Eddy, a researcher who worked for the National Institute of Health (NIH) in New Orleans, was ordered at the last minute to safe-test the Salk vaccine. Her finding was shocking: the vaccine itself could cause paralysis.

It heralded the biggest fiasco, to date, in the history of American medicine: unbelievably, the top dogs in the medical community decided to go ahead, anyway. [It is possible that this decision was based on a trade-off: some children would be paralyzed and some of them would die but many more would be protected from the disease.]

In a display of unimaginable arrogance, Ochsner, who had holdings in one of the five laboratories, inoculated his own grandchildren to demonstrate that the vaccine was safe. Both contracted polio. His granddaughter recovered from her paralysis but tragically his grandson died.

Estimates vary, but a significant number of other children also died or had permanent paralysis. Later on, in 1960, Dr. Albert Sabin was believed to have saved the day because his oral vaccine used a weakened virus rather than the dead virus used by Salk. Moreover, it had already been tested extensively in other countries. It began to be distributed here almost five years to the day that Americans had begun receiving the Salk inoculations.

About this time, another unsung heroine of American medicine, Dr. Sarah Stewart proved that a virus caused cancer. NIH officials, in an attempt to muzzle their whistleblower, had shifted Eddy, a close friend of Stewart's, from working on polio vaccine to doing research on influenza. Nevertheless, Eddy began to quietly perform more tests on polio vaccines.

At an October 1961 meeting in Manhattan of the New York Cancer Society, Eddy made a career-ending move. Without the consent of her superiors, she revealed an even more alarming discovery than her first: both polio vaccines were contaminated with a cancer-causing virus!

Another fiasco even bigger than the first! And one with far-reaching consequences. Between 1955 and 1963, millions of Americans had been injected with, or had swallowed, a substance that caused cancer.
How could this have happened? The answer is that little thought had been given to the possibility that life-threatening viruses could be extracted from kidney cultures along with the polio vaccine.

What was done about it? Not much. Both Salk and Sabin resisted informing the American people of this development. A few heads rolled - but not many. The media paid little attention to this catastrophe. [Since Eddy had predicted that it would take thirty years for the cancers to develop, one might surmise that the medical community felt shielded by the prospect that a connection between the vaccine and a cancer would be difficult to prove.]

Haslam drew up charts from statistics obtained from the National Cancer Institute that show that the epidemic began in the 1985 (1955+30) when cancers of five of the body's soft tissues - the skin, breast, prostate, lymphoma and lung - began a dramatic increase.

He writes, "Remember the dreaded polio epidemic of the 1950s with its 33,000 cases of polio each year. Compare that to these numbers from 1994: 182,000 new cases of breast cancer diagnosed; 200,000 new cases of prostate cancer diagnosed; 500,000 new cases of lung cancer diagnosed. The increase in any one of these diseases in the years since 1985 was greater than the entire polio epidemic at its peak!"

It is a significant part of this exposé that these key discoveries were made in national institutions like the NIH based in one particular city. New Orleans was the gateway to the United States for South American countries. Many came to the city for medical treatment. Dr. Ochsner's Clinic, in particular, with its posh accommodations became a destination for Latin America's elite. Ochsner's rabid anti-communism grew out of his personal friendships with dictators like Anastasio Somoza of Nicaragua, Juan Peron of Argentina, and Tomas Gabriel Duque of Panama.

Ochsner was incensed by Fidel Castro's successful 1959 rebellion in Cuba against the US-backed dictator, Fulgencio Batista. Many anti-Castro Cubans and their allies felt that either the 1961 disastrous Bay of Pigs assault or the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis should have occasioned a full-scale invasion of Cuba to "free the Cuban people from the Castro dictatorship." [Of course, none of these people had expressed any concern for the Cuban people when Batista, a real dictator, had been in power.]

A 1976 report from Senator Frank Church's Select Committee on Assassinations showed that the CIA had been busy for more than a decade with inventing new ways to murder Castro. Was using the cancer-causing polio vaccine one of these ideas?

[Douglas's research combined with Haslam's gives us a fairly complete picture that Oswald's activities in New Orleans that portrayed him as a friend of Cuba was part of a plan for Oswald to be involved in carrying out this mission. It also helped set him up to be the "patsy" for President Kennedy's assassination.]

Ochsner had recruited Judyth Vary, a young woman not yet twenty, to work in one of his labs. Almost immediately upon her arrival in New Orleans in May 1963, a bit ahead of her employment date, she became the protégé of Lee Harvey Oswald who had recently returned to his native city. He helped Vary get settled and find work. During this period, Vary married her fiancé, Robert Baker, who came to the city for the ceremony but left immediately for a summer job in the Gulf of Mexico.

Oswald worked with Ochsner, David Ferrie and the local Mafia boss, Carlos Marcello, as well as the CIA and FBI. Vary noted that the Oswald family had apparently had a long relationship with Marcello. David Ferrie had had a rather checkered career as a seminary student, a pilot for Eastern Airlines, and an operative for the CIA. By the time Vary came to know him, he was wearing a homemade orange wig and painting his eyebrows with a black greasy substance. An unforgettable looking character.

Both Vary and Oswald eventually received cover jobs in the Reily Coffee Company where they could come and go in order to do their undercover work. No questions asked. Even though Oswald was also married, had a small child and another on the way, it was not long before the two began an affair that ended with Lee's murder in November of that year.

Ferrie did experiments on mice in his own apartment, but he also rented another that housed an underground lab. It was here that Vary was soon put to work, inspecting new batches of mice that were brought into the secret lab by one or another of the anti-Castro Cubans who came and went from an upstairs apartment. After destroying the mice with the most advanced tumors, Judyth would remove the tumors, grind them up in a blender and take the mixture to Dr. Sherman's home a few blocks away.

Dr. Sherman's work In New Orleans included teaching at Tulane Medical School, doing operations at Charity Hospital, staffing at several children's hospitals and working in Ochsner's Clinic. It appears that another secret lab was at the US Public Health Hospital. Perhaps Sherman started out to develop a vaccine to cure cancer. But ended up dedicating herself to perfecting a biological weapon from the cancer-causing monkey virus.
According to Vary-Baker, Dr. Sherman, herself, helped convince her that it was their patriotic duty to develop a biological weapon that could kill Castro before he unleashed "nukes" on the United States.

When the virus became fast-acting at killing not only mice but also monkeys, it was determined that it needed to be tried on a human. An inmate at Angola State Prison who volunteered for the experiment was brought to the Jackson State Mental Hospital not far from New Orleans where he died from an injection.

Judyth wrote a letter to Dr. Ochsner, complaining that the inmate did not know the possible consequences of the experiment. An angry Ochsner terminated Judyth as well as Oswald from any further connection to the project. In the fall she went back to Florida to a lab job in Gainesville that Ferrie had found for her. In mid-October, Oswald was transferred to Dallas. The two kept in touch by using Mafia safe lines through an arrangement that Ferrie had worked out.

Oswald told Judyth of the plans to assassinate Kennedy and that he hoped to be able to prevent it. If he came out of it alive he promised that they could carry out their plans to elope to Mexico, get quickie divorces, and get married. Their last conversation was on Wednesday, November 21st, two days before the assassination. Instead, Oswald ended up at the age of twenty-four being the scapegoat for the president's murder and being murdered himself. [James Douglas covers this in his book, JFK and The Unspeakable, that has been the subject of an earlier posting on this blog.]

Ferrie called Judyth to tell her that her life would be in danger if she ever told anyone what she knew. [Silent for more than thirty-five years, her book, Me and Lee, is about to be released by Trine Day Books.] (Editor: It is now available through Amazon).

Sherman's grotesquely disfigured body was found in her apartment early in the morning of July 21, 1964. Her right arm had been entirely burned away, leaving only a bone extending from her shoulder. Her right rib cage was gone and her insides lay exposed from her shoulder to her waist. Her face was unrecognizable.

Investigators determined that her body had been taken from another location and placed in her apartment. Incredibly, an autopsy showed that she was still alive after the burn and that the fatal wound had been a stabbing that penetrated her heart. Subsequently, she was stabbed and slashed several times after death and a fire was set in her apartment to make her death look like a random murder or a burglary gone wrong.

The most likely instrument for the hideous incineration of one side of her body was the linear particle accelerator that was secretly installed in the US Public Health Hospital where US Marines guarded it. Sherman would have had access to it and undoubtedly used it in her experiments because the accelerator can be depended upon to weaken a virus with great precision while being relied upon to not kill it.

Was Dr. Mary Sherman killed in July 1964 on the eve of hearings that Warren Commission investigators held in New Orleans because she couldn't be relied on to keep quiet? Neither the motive for her murder nor those responsible for it have ever been identified. In fact, the investigation of her murder was abruptly terminated at the end of two weeks. Who would have had the power to shut it down? [Could the fact that Allen Dulles, a former Director of the CIA, served on the Warren Commission have anything to do with it?]

The story does not end here. Was any use made of this cancer-causing virus? Haslam points out that this virus was labeled SV-40. What about the other 39 viruses found in the vaccine? Was one of them the AIDS virus? If so, how did it get out into the world? Was HIV-1 an undesirable mutation that resulted from using radiation on SV-40? Haslam discusses the ways in which this virus could have gotten into the blood stream of the world's population.

To learn more, go to TrineDay.com to order the book.

[One of the earliest uses of a biological weapon happened in this country at the end of the French and Indian Wars that the British won. The British commander, Jeffrey Amherst, agreed to his lieutenant's request to give smallpox infected blankets to the Native Americans who had fought on the side of the French and were conducting a guerrilla war against Amherst and his troops.]