"Non-lethal" Weapons May Violate Peace Treaties - Nervous system manipulation by electromagnetic fields from monitors - New U.K. vitamin legislation - SARS Virus Genetically Engineered? - Walking North on a Southbound Train - 10 Appalling Lies We Were Told About Iraq - Bush: God Told Me to "Strike at Saddam" - Why I'm a libertarian - The Constitution has become irrelevant - The real declaration
European Petition
------------------
Dear Mr Rudolph and Team, Dear Listers,
Please find below for your information or even participation, the link to the text of a European petition on technological advances like Directed Energy Weapons that use Electromagnetic energy amongst others to function.
This first petition asks for serious debates taking all aspects into account, regulations and investigations.
The signatures will be sent very soon with the text (in French, English and German), by mail to the President of the European Parliament, and won't be uploaded on the Internet.
LINK =
http://members.aol.com/ccapt2001/petition-en.html
This version is quite definite, it might only be edited slightly for small mistakes. An updated second version might be sent again for the autumn or winter term (to be confirmed), any suggestions are welcome.
Thanks in advance for your attention and eventual support.
Best wishes
Nathalie Luthold
CAPT
BP 123
F-95103 ARGENTEUIL Cedex
--------
"Non-lethal" Weapons May Violate Peace Treaties
-----------------------------------------------
Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, director of the Chemical and Biological Weapons Program of the Federation of American Scientists, writes about electromagnetic weapons:
"These weapons are said to cause temporary or permanent blindness, interference with mental processes, modification of behavior or emotional response, seizures, severe pain, dizziness, nausea and diarrhea, or disruption of internal organ functions in various other ways."
"In addition, under the Certain Conventional Weapons Convention, international discussions are now underway that may lead to the development of specific new protocols covering electromagnetic weapons. The current surge of interest in electromagnetic technologies makes the adoption of a protocol explicitly outlawing the use of these dehumanizing weapons an urgent matter."
Hatch Rosenberg, Barbara, Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, Sept-Oct 1994, p. 44.
The Learning Channel featured Dr. Michael Persinger of Laurentian University, Canada. He described weapons using "psycho or influence technology" and electromagnetic frequencies to control what people think, for psychological purposes.
Learning Channel, Weapons of War, Sept. 21, 1997.
The book, The Mind Manipulators, is an account written by Alan W. Scheflin and Edward M. Opton, Jr. Mr. Scheflin taught at Georgetown University and Mr. Opton is a graduate of Yale, Duke and UC Berkeley. The book jacket states:
Ten thousand pages of formerly top secret U.S. Army and C.I.A. documents prove that for twenty-five years the United States government agencies undertook the most extensive mind-manipulation program in the history of the world. Every conceivable method for molding the mind was explored and refined, many of them tested on unwitting American citizens.
Psychologists, psychiatrists, physicians, prison officials, scientists, lawyers and politicians have, for decades, been involved in mind- control research in hospitals, laboratories, universities, mental institutions, medical offices, prisons and schools.
Thoughts can be read remotely and played back; another person will repeat exactly what the victim just thought. Brainwashing and personality breaking techniques are used. Microwave hearing, the hearing of voices beamed into the victim's head via microwaves, is reported in most cases. There are many articles in the open literature discussing "microwave hearing." Dr. Robert Becker wrote the book Body Electric in 1985 and reported that "in 1973 Dr. Joseph Sharp of the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research heard and understood spoken words beamed to him in an echo-free isolation chamber via a pulsed microwave audiogram (an analog of the word's sound vibrations) beamed into his brain. Such a device has obvious applications in a covert operation designed to drive a target crazy with "voices" or undetectable instructions to a programmed assassin."
Victims also allege that dreams and memories are manipulated. Movements and consciousness, heart rate and many bodily functions are reportedly monitored and controlled. These and other symptoms can be correlated to the past well documented mind control research and the extrapolation to the highly likely fact that the mind control research is continuing and is as classified as a Manhattan Project.
Scheflin, Alan W., Opton Jr., Edward M., The Mind Manipulators, Paddington Press Ltd., 1978.
The Pentagon's exotic weapons programme, led by the Air Force, is cloaked in ultra-secrecy which forbids any public comment by scientists.
Electromagnetic radiation - basically waves below radio frequencies - was found to prompt human or animal brains to release chemicals that affect behavior. "We could put animals into a stupor," he explained, adding that it would probably be possible to create flu-like symptoms and nausea in humans. Such work continues. In 1995 Air Force generals reviewed more than 1,000 proposed exotic weapons projects. One was called "Put the enemy to sleep/Keep the enemy from sleeping." Another project approved for more research involved brain-wave manipulation.
According to Louis Slesin, editor of Microwave News, the effort is practical. He says such exotic weapons are merely the next logical step to the variety of radio beams used to knock out the electrical systems of aircraft or missiles. "Once you are into these anti-material weapons, it is just a short jump to anti-personnel ones." In effect, humans are also just electro-chemical systems that can be disrupted.
Dettmer, Jamie, It's War, Jim, But Not As We Know It, Scotsman Publications Ltd., Scotland on Sunday, Lexis-Nexis, Aug. 3, 1997, p. 5.
G. Harry Stine foresaw a near future in which men could become like gods through the use of "intelligence amplifiers" implanted in the brains.
Stine wrote that, very soon, intelligence amplifiers - tiny microchip devices either implanted in humans or capable of being temporarily connected to the human brain and sensory channels - will actually allow others to "get inside a person's head." With such devices, we will possess the astonishing ability to hear the thoughts of others.
Researchers have made rapid progress to bring [implantable biochips] to reality. An eye-opening article in Science News reported that, "New electronic techniques are being developed to eavesdrop on the brain."
According to Science News, "The techniques, under study at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, in AT&T labs, and elsewhere, will allow outsiders to direct a person's brain cell conversations and talk directly to the individual's brain neurons. The article also said that current research centers on the eventual employment of integrated circuit chips that can be either implanted in the brain or overlaid with brain cells."
...Stine, an optimist who believes that man will not allow the abuse of these capabilities, nevertheless warns: "It also contains the seeds of unimaginable evil: the actual control of human minds by other humans. Not brainwashing. Not propaganda. Not any of the ancient and well-proven means of mentally or physically imposing one person's will by police action or torture, But the actual control of the human mind."
Marrs, Texe, Project L.U.C.I.D., Living Truth Publishers, 1996, pp. 100-101.
http://www.angelfire.com/or/mctrl/part3.html
--------
Nervous system manipulation by electromagnetic fields from monitors
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Nervous system manipulation by electromagnetic fields from monitors, patent 6,506,148, Hendricus G. Loos of Laguna Beach, Calif. A pulsed electromagnetic field, from either a television set or a computer, can be created to manipulate the human nervous system, inducing sensations that range from relaxation to a "tonic smile," to sexual excitement or "sudden loose stool." Sometimes the pulses cannot be seen on the monitor. "This is unfortunate," the patent notes, "since it opens a way for mischievous application of the invention, whereby people are exposed unknowingly to manipulation of their nervous systems for someone else's purposes. Such application would be unethical and is of course not advocated. It is mentioned here in order to alert the public to the possibility of covert abuse that may occur while being online...."
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=0001A3E4-764F-1ED9-8E1C809EC588EF21
--------
Electromagnetic killers
-----------------------
In life, never believe a corporation, and never believe the government. True investigations must come from the people, or it will never get done honestly.
Sangwin
--------
New U.K. vitamin legislation: onus to prove vitamins are not a health haazard
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Hi Klaus: The U.K. is to introduce legislation which will ban specific vitamins until such time as their manufacturers can prove that their vitamin products are safe. The pertinent paragraph in the short article "Britain to ban vitamin tablets" (THE SUNDAY TIMES, June 29, 2003, main section, page. 3) reads: "Under the law, manufacturers of banned products would have to prove they were safe, which would require tests that they claim would make them 'prohibitively expensive.'"
One can't but contrast this new ruling with the absence of such when it comes to possible health hazards from exposure to RF/MWs.
Best, Imelda, Cork, Ireland
--------
SARS Virus Genetically Engineered?
----------------------------------
The mystery surrounding the SARS virus deepens. Dr. Mae-Wan Ho raises further questions on whether genetic engineering could have contributed to creating it.
Sources for this article are posted on ISIS’ members website.Details here. http://www.i-sis.org.uk/membership.php
The SARS epidemic
The SARS epidemic started in the weeks that the ‘allied forces’ were waging war on Iraq to hunt down Saddam Hussein and his still elusive ‘weapons of mass destruction’.
SARS "Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome" is a completely new infectious disease spread by human contact.
By 20 June 2003, World Health Organisation figures registered 8461 cases in 31 countries worldwide, and 804 deaths. The overall death rate is nearly 10% and could be 20% or higher.
Although there are signs that the disease is under control, there are also fears that it may return.
Mystery of the SARS virus
The World Health Organisation, which played the key role in coordinating the research of a dozen laboratories, formally announced on 16 April that a new pathogen, a member of the coronavirus family never before seen in
humans, is the cause of SARS, though lingering doubt has remained. The virus cannot be identified all patients diagnosed with SARS, and it can only be isolated from cultured green monkey kidney cells.
Known coronaviruses are placed in three groups based on similarities in their genomes. Group 1 contains the porcine epidemic diarrhoea virus (PEDV), porcine transmissible gastroenteritis virus (TGEV), canine
coronavirus (CCV), feline infectious peritonitis virus (FIPV) and human coronovirus 229E (HuCV229E); Group 2 contains the avian infectious bronchitis virus (AIBV) and turkey coronavirus; while Group 3 contains the murine hepatitis virus (MHV) bovine coronavirus (BCV), human coronavirus (HuOC43) and others.
The molecular phylogenies published 10 April in the New England Journal of Medicine, based on small fragments of the polymerase gene, have placed the SARS virus in a separate group somewhere between groups 2 and 3.
More detailed analysis, subsequently published in the New England Journal of Medicine, Science and the Lancet indicate that the new virus is not closely related to any known virus at all, human, mouse, bovine, cat, pig, bird, notwithstanding. It is neither a mutant that switched host, nor a recombinant from existing coronaviruses. It is more complicated than that.
SARS virus - a product of genetic engineering?
Two scientists who have genetic engineered coronaviruses in their laboratories, Holmes and Enjuanes, suggested in a commentary in the journal Science that the SARS virus probably "evolved separately from an ancestor of the known coronavirus, and infected an unidentified animal, bird, or reptile host for a very long time before infecting humans and starting the SARS epidemic." (p.1377)
Following soon afterwards, there was a claim that the SARS virus came from the masked civet cat in south China. But that claim could not be substantiated. An alternative hypothesis entertained in the mainstream journals was that the virus came from outerspace.
There are very unusual features to the SARS virus. Its sequence most closely matches that of mouse hepatitis virus (MHV) and Bovine corona virus (BCV), both in group 3. The match is quite good in the middle third of the genome that’s nearly 30 000nt long, and not good at all for the first third or last third of the sequence.
But, antibodies to the SARS virus cross react with FIPV, HuCV229E and TGEV, all in Group 1. And the SARS virus can grow in Vero green monkey kidney cells, which no other coronavirus can, with the exception of PEDV,
another virus in Group 1.
Could the SARS virus have come from genetic engineering? This is a question that Ho and Cummins have put to the scientific community. So far, we have not had a proper reply.
Holmes and Enjuanes stated in their commentary, "SARS-CoV is also unlikely to have been created from known coronaviruses by genetic engineering, because at present it would be impossible to modify 50% of a coronavirus genome without abrogating viral infectivity." (p.1377)
This is a quite a feeble response. The whole point to genetic engineering is that it greatly increases the scope of recombination, and provides selective tools to find the most unlikely recombinants that are still infectious.
Coronaviruses have been subjected to increasing genetic manipulation since the latter half of the 1990s, when P.S. Masters in Wadworth Center, New York State Department of Health and New York State University at Albany, used RNA recombination to introduce extensive changes into the genome of mouse hepatitis virus (MHV). In a review published in 1999, he wrote, "targeted recombination could be used to create extensive substitutions to the cornavirus genome, generating recombinants that could not be made otherwise between two viruses separated by a species barrier." (p.254)
‘Defective interfering RNAs’ "sequences of the viral genome with large deletions as well as mutations and substitutions or insertions - were used as donor sequences to introduce major substitutions and point mutations into the genome of the viruses by RNA recombination.
In the course of such work, researchers have even isolated a recombinant of cororanvirus with the green fluorescent protein (GFP) gene, presumably from cells in which coronaviruses have been cultured, which has become inserted into the spike protein gene. The GFP gene, originally from a jelly-fish, is extensively used in genetic engineering as a marker gene because it makes the cells that have taken up the foreign genes give off a green glow under uv light. The GFP-coronavirus recombinant could only have come about as an unintended by-product of genetic engineering.
In the same review, P.S. Masters showed that both point mutations and large substitutions can readily be transferred to the last third of the genome of MHV and other coronaviruses. He further indicated that similar strategies could be used to mutate and substitute the first third of the genome, though not for the middle third. "A comprehensive genetic study of the highly complex gene for the RNA polymerase and all of its associated activities [encoded by the middle third of the genome] will likely await either the construction of an infectious full-length clone or the development of an innovative scheme for mutant selection." (p.259)
Is that why the middle third of SARS virus genome has retained good homology to MHV and BCV, which were the first coronaviruses to be engineered in this manner, while the other parts are much more different?
Another feature of the SARS virus is that the spike protein, which determines host range, is unlike the spike protein of any known coronavirus. Instead, it appears to have homologies to segments of the human chromosome 7, according to sequence analysis performed by Howard Urnovitz.
Urnovitz believes that the spike protein of the SARS virus is the result of genetic rearrangements provoked by environmental genotoxic agents, much like those he and his colleagues have detected in Gulf War I veterans suffering from Gulf War Syndrome.
But how did the virus get to south China? A possible answer was provided by Urnovitz: Migratory birds that frequent gene-swapping hot spots like southeast China could have carried the SARS virus there.
Urnovitz himself doesn’t think the SARS virus is the real cause of SARS. Instead, it is the piece of reshuffled human chromosome 7 that others are referring to as the spike protein gene of the SARS virus. That alone is sufficient to trigger serious autoimmune responses in people.
Hence, to create vaccines against that ‘spike’ protein is also tantamount to vaccinating people against their own genes (see "Dynamic genomics", this series http://www.i-sis.org./DynamicGenomics.php).
--------
Walking North on a Southbound Train, Pt. 1
------------------------------------------
http://fornits.com/renegade/peaars.cgi?fetch=6889
Informant: Environmental Research Foundation
--------
Cheney And The CIA: Not Business As Usual
http://www.veteransforcommonsense.org/newsArticle.asp?id=848
10 Appalling Lies We Were Told About Iraq
http://www.veteransforcommonsense.org/newsArticle.asp?id=851
U.S. Should Provide Iraqis and Americans With a More Coherent and Compelling Vision for Iraq's Political Future
http://www.cfr.org/publication.php?id=6076
Bush: God Told Me to "Strike at Saddam"
http://www.veteransforcommonsense.org/newsArticle.asp?id=854
--------
Why I'm a libertarian
http://www.webleyweb.com/tle/libe229-20030629-02.html
Grasping the nettle
http://www.strike-the-root.com/3/knapp/knapp3.html
The road map (to empire)
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/j063003.html
The Constitution has become irrelevant
http://www.sierratimes.com/03/06/27/colonel.htm
In '48 crash, government hid behind national security
http://www.cato.org/dailys/06-30-03.html
The real declaration
http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/180/focus/The_real_declaration+.shtm
l
Informant: Thomas L. Knapp
------------------
Dear Mr Rudolph and Team, Dear Listers,
Please find below for your information or even participation, the link to the text of a European petition on technological advances like Directed Energy Weapons that use Electromagnetic energy amongst others to function.
This first petition asks for serious debates taking all aspects into account, regulations and investigations.
The signatures will be sent very soon with the text (in French, English and German), by mail to the President of the European Parliament, and won't be uploaded on the Internet.
LINK =
http://members.aol.com/ccapt2001/petition-en.html This version is quite definite, it might only be edited slightly for small mistakes. An updated second version might be sent again for the autumn or winter term (to be confirmed), any suggestions are welcome.
Thanks in advance for your attention and eventual support.
Best wishes
Nathalie Luthold
CAPT
BP 123
F-95103 ARGENTEUIL Cedex
--------
"Non-lethal" Weapons May Violate Peace Treaties
-----------------------------------------------
Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, director of the Chemical and Biological Weapons Program of the Federation of American Scientists, writes about electromagnetic weapons:
"These weapons are said to cause temporary or permanent blindness, interference with mental processes, modification of behavior or emotional response, seizures, severe pain, dizziness, nausea and diarrhea, or disruption of internal organ functions in various other ways."
"In addition, under the Certain Conventional Weapons Convention, international discussions are now underway that may lead to the development of specific new protocols covering electromagnetic weapons. The current surge of interest in electromagnetic technologies makes the adoption of a protocol explicitly outlawing the use of these dehumanizing weapons an urgent matter."
Hatch Rosenberg, Barbara, Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, Sept-Oct 1994, p. 44.
The Learning Channel featured Dr. Michael Persinger of Laurentian University, Canada. He described weapons using "psycho or influence technology" and electromagnetic frequencies to control what people think, for psychological purposes.
Learning Channel, Weapons of War, Sept. 21, 1997.
The book, The Mind Manipulators, is an account written by Alan W. Scheflin and Edward M. Opton, Jr. Mr. Scheflin taught at Georgetown University and Mr. Opton is a graduate of Yale, Duke and UC Berkeley. The book jacket states:
Ten thousand pages of formerly top secret U.S. Army and C.I.A. documents prove that for twenty-five years the United States government agencies undertook the most extensive mind-manipulation program in the history of the world. Every conceivable method for molding the mind was explored and refined, many of them tested on unwitting American citizens.
Psychologists, psychiatrists, physicians, prison officials, scientists, lawyers and politicians have, for decades, been involved in mind- control research in hospitals, laboratories, universities, mental institutions, medical offices, prisons and schools.
Thoughts can be read remotely and played back; another person will repeat exactly what the victim just thought. Brainwashing and personality breaking techniques are used. Microwave hearing, the hearing of voices beamed into the victim's head via microwaves, is reported in most cases. There are many articles in the open literature discussing "microwave hearing." Dr. Robert Becker wrote the book Body Electric in 1985 and reported that "in 1973 Dr. Joseph Sharp of the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research heard and understood spoken words beamed to him in an echo-free isolation chamber via a pulsed microwave audiogram (an analog of the word's sound vibrations) beamed into his brain. Such a device has obvious applications in a covert operation designed to drive a target crazy with "voices" or undetectable instructions to a programmed assassin."
Victims also allege that dreams and memories are manipulated. Movements and consciousness, heart rate and many bodily functions are reportedly monitored and controlled. These and other symptoms can be correlated to the past well documented mind control research and the extrapolation to the highly likely fact that the mind control research is continuing and is as classified as a Manhattan Project.
Scheflin, Alan W., Opton Jr., Edward M., The Mind Manipulators, Paddington Press Ltd., 1978.
The Pentagon's exotic weapons programme, led by the Air Force, is cloaked in ultra-secrecy which forbids any public comment by scientists.
Electromagnetic radiation - basically waves below radio frequencies - was found to prompt human or animal brains to release chemicals that affect behavior. "We could put animals into a stupor," he explained, adding that it would probably be possible to create flu-like symptoms and nausea in humans. Such work continues. In 1995 Air Force generals reviewed more than 1,000 proposed exotic weapons projects. One was called "Put the enemy to sleep/Keep the enemy from sleeping." Another project approved for more research involved brain-wave manipulation.
According to Louis Slesin, editor of Microwave News, the effort is practical. He says such exotic weapons are merely the next logical step to the variety of radio beams used to knock out the electrical systems of aircraft or missiles. "Once you are into these anti-material weapons, it is just a short jump to anti-personnel ones." In effect, humans are also just electro-chemical systems that can be disrupted.
Dettmer, Jamie, It's War, Jim, But Not As We Know It, Scotsman Publications Ltd., Scotland on Sunday, Lexis-Nexis, Aug. 3, 1997, p. 5.
G. Harry Stine foresaw a near future in which men could become like gods through the use of "intelligence amplifiers" implanted in the brains.
Stine wrote that, very soon, intelligence amplifiers - tiny microchip devices either implanted in humans or capable of being temporarily connected to the human brain and sensory channels - will actually allow others to "get inside a person's head." With such devices, we will possess the astonishing ability to hear the thoughts of others.
Researchers have made rapid progress to bring [implantable biochips] to reality. An eye-opening article in Science News reported that, "New electronic techniques are being developed to eavesdrop on the brain."
According to Science News, "The techniques, under study at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, in AT&T labs, and elsewhere, will allow outsiders to direct a person's brain cell conversations and talk directly to the individual's brain neurons. The article also said that current research centers on the eventual employment of integrated circuit chips that can be either implanted in the brain or overlaid with brain cells."
...Stine, an optimist who believes that man will not allow the abuse of these capabilities, nevertheless warns: "It also contains the seeds of unimaginable evil: the actual control of human minds by other humans. Not brainwashing. Not propaganda. Not any of the ancient and well-proven means of mentally or physically imposing one person's will by police action or torture, But the actual control of the human mind."
Marrs, Texe, Project L.U.C.I.D., Living Truth Publishers, 1996, pp. 100-101.
http://www.angelfire.com/or/mctrl/part3.html --------
Nervous system manipulation by electromagnetic fields from monitors
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Nervous system manipulation by electromagnetic fields from monitors, patent 6,506,148, Hendricus G. Loos of Laguna Beach, Calif. A pulsed electromagnetic field, from either a television set or a computer, can be created to manipulate the human nervous system, inducing sensations that range from relaxation to a "tonic smile," to sexual excitement or "sudden loose stool." Sometimes the pulses cannot be seen on the monitor. "This is unfortunate," the patent notes, "since it opens a way for mischievous application of the invention, whereby people are exposed unknowingly to manipulation of their nervous systems for someone else's purposes. Such application would be unethical and is of course not advocated. It is mentioned here in order to alert the public to the possibility of covert abuse that may occur while being online...."
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=0001A3E4-764F-1ED9-8E1C809EC588EF21 --------
Electromagnetic killers
-----------------------
In life, never believe a corporation, and never believe the government. True investigations must come from the people, or it will never get done honestly.
Sangwin
--------
New U.K. vitamin legislation: onus to prove vitamins are not a health haazard
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Hi Klaus: The U.K. is to introduce legislation which will ban specific vitamins until such time as their manufacturers can prove that their vitamin products are safe. The pertinent paragraph in the short article "Britain to ban vitamin tablets" (THE SUNDAY TIMES, June 29, 2003, main section, page. 3) reads: "Under the law, manufacturers of banned products would have to prove they were safe, which would require tests that they claim would make them 'prohibitively expensive.'"
One can't but contrast this new ruling with the absence of such when it comes to possible health hazards from exposure to RF/MWs.
Best, Imelda, Cork, Ireland
--------
SARS Virus Genetically Engineered?
----------------------------------
The mystery surrounding the SARS virus deepens. Dr. Mae-Wan Ho raises further questions on whether genetic engineering could have contributed to creating it.
Sources for this article are posted on ISIS’ members website.Details here.
http://www.i-sis.org.uk/membership.php The SARS epidemic
The SARS epidemic started in the weeks that the ‘allied forces’ were waging war on Iraq to hunt down Saddam Hussein and his still elusive ‘weapons of mass destruction’.
SARS "Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome" is a completely new infectious disease spread by human contact.
By 20 June 2003, World Health Organisation figures registered 8461 cases in 31 countries worldwide, and 804 deaths. The overall death rate is nearly 10% and could be 20% or higher.
Although there are signs that the disease is under control, there are also fears that it may return.
Mystery of the SARS virus
The World Health Organisation, which played the key role in coordinating the research of a dozen laboratories, formally announced on 16 April that a new pathogen, a member of the coronavirus family never before seen in
humans, is the cause of SARS, though lingering doubt has remained. The virus cannot be identified all patients diagnosed with SARS, and it can only be isolated from cultured green monkey kidney cells.
Known coronaviruses are placed in three groups based on similarities in their genomes. Group 1 contains the porcine epidemic diarrhoea virus (PEDV), porcine transmissible gastroenteritis virus (TGEV), canine
coronavirus (CCV), feline infectious peritonitis virus (FIPV) and human coronovirus 229E (HuCV229E); Group 2 contains the avian infectious bronchitis virus (AIBV) and turkey coronavirus; while Group 3 contains the murine hepatitis virus (MHV) bovine coronavirus (BCV), human coronavirus (HuOC43) and others.
The molecular phylogenies published 10 April in the New England Journal of Medicine, based on small fragments of the polymerase gene, have placed the SARS virus in a separate group somewhere between groups 2 and 3.
More detailed analysis, subsequently published in the New England Journal of Medicine, Science and the Lancet indicate that the new virus is not closely related to any known virus at all, human, mouse, bovine, cat, pig, bird, notwithstanding. It is neither a mutant that switched host, nor a recombinant from existing coronaviruses. It is more complicated than that.
SARS virus - a product of genetic engineering?
Two scientists who have genetic engineered coronaviruses in their laboratories, Holmes and Enjuanes, suggested in a commentary in the journal Science that the SARS virus probably "evolved separately from an ancestor of the known coronavirus, and infected an unidentified animal, bird, or reptile host for a very long time before infecting humans and starting the SARS epidemic." (p.1377)
Following soon afterwards, there was a claim that the SARS virus came from the masked civet cat in south China. But that claim could not be substantiated. An alternative hypothesis entertained in the mainstream journals was that the virus came from outerspace.
There are very unusual features to the SARS virus. Its sequence most closely matches that of mouse hepatitis virus (MHV) and Bovine corona virus (BCV), both in group 3. The match is quite good in the middle third of the genome that’s nearly 30 000nt long, and not good at all for the first third or last third of the sequence.
But, antibodies to the SARS virus cross react with FIPV, HuCV229E and TGEV, all in Group 1. And the SARS virus can grow in Vero green monkey kidney cells, which no other coronavirus can, with the exception of PEDV,
another virus in Group 1.
Could the SARS virus have come from genetic engineering? This is a question that Ho and Cummins have put to the scientific community. So far, we have not had a proper reply.
Holmes and Enjuanes stated in their commentary, "SARS-CoV is also unlikely to have been created from known coronaviruses by genetic engineering, because at present it would be impossible to modify 50% of a coronavirus genome without abrogating viral infectivity." (p.1377)
This is a quite a feeble response. The whole point to genetic engineering is that it greatly increases the scope of recombination, and provides selective tools to find the most unlikely recombinants that are still infectious.
Coronaviruses have been subjected to increasing genetic manipulation since the latter half of the 1990s, when P.S. Masters in Wadworth Center, New York State Department of Health and New York State University at Albany, used RNA recombination to introduce extensive changes into the genome of mouse hepatitis virus (MHV). In a review published in 1999, he wrote, "targeted recombination could be used to create extensive substitutions to the cornavirus genome, generating recombinants that could not be made otherwise between two viruses separated by a species barrier." (p.254)
‘Defective interfering RNAs’ "sequences of the viral genome with large deletions as well as mutations and substitutions or insertions - were used as donor sequences to introduce major substitutions and point mutations into the genome of the viruses by RNA recombination.
In the course of such work, researchers have even isolated a recombinant of cororanvirus with the green fluorescent protein (GFP) gene, presumably from cells in which coronaviruses have been cultured, which has become inserted into the spike protein gene. The GFP gene, originally from a jelly-fish, is extensively used in genetic engineering as a marker gene because it makes the cells that have taken up the foreign genes give off a green glow under uv light. The GFP-coronavirus recombinant could only have come about as an unintended by-product of genetic engineering.
In the same review, P.S. Masters showed that both point mutations and large substitutions can readily be transferred to the last third of the genome of MHV and other coronaviruses. He further indicated that similar strategies could be used to mutate and substitute the first third of the genome, though not for the middle third. "A comprehensive genetic study of the highly complex gene for the RNA polymerase and all of its associated activities [encoded by the middle third of the genome] will likely await either the construction of an infectious full-length clone or the development of an innovative scheme for mutant selection." (p.259)
Is that why the middle third of SARS virus genome has retained good homology to MHV and BCV, which were the first coronaviruses to be engineered in this manner, while the other parts are much more different?
Another feature of the SARS virus is that the spike protein, which determines host range, is unlike the spike protein of any known coronavirus. Instead, it appears to have homologies to segments of the human chromosome 7, according to sequence analysis performed by Howard Urnovitz.
Urnovitz believes that the spike protein of the SARS virus is the result of genetic rearrangements provoked by environmental genotoxic agents, much like those he and his colleagues have detected in Gulf War I veterans suffering from Gulf War Syndrome.
But how did the virus get to south China? A possible answer was provided by Urnovitz: Migratory birds that frequent gene-swapping hot spots like southeast China could have carried the SARS virus there.
Urnovitz himself doesn’t think the SARS virus is the real cause of SARS. Instead, it is the piece of reshuffled human chromosome 7 that others are referring to as the spike protein gene of the SARS virus. That alone is sufficient to trigger serious autoimmune responses in people.
Hence, to create vaccines against that ‘spike’ protein is also tantamount to vaccinating people against their own genes (see "Dynamic genomics", this series
http://www.i-sis.org./DynamicGenomics.php). --------
Walking North on a Southbound Train, Pt. 1
------------------------------------------
http://fornits.com/renegade/peaars.cgi?fetch=6889 Informant: Environmental Research Foundation
--------
Cheney And The CIA: Not Business As Usual
http://www.veteransforcommonsense.org/newsArticle.asp?id=848 10 Appalling Lies We Were Told About Iraq
http://www.veteransforcommonsense.org/newsArticle.asp?id=851 U.S. Should Provide Iraqis and Americans With a More Coherent and Compelling Vision for Iraq's Political Future
http://www.cfr.org/publication.php?id=6076 Bush: God Told Me to "Strike at Saddam"
http://www.veteransforcommonsense.org/newsArticle.asp?id=854 --------
Why I'm a libertarian
http://www.webleyweb.com/tle/libe229-20030629-02.html Grasping the nettle
http://www.strike-the-root.com/3/knapp/knapp3.html The road map (to empire)
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/j063003.html The Constitution has become irrelevant
http://www.sierratimes.com/03/06/27/colonel.htm In '48 crash, government hid behind national security
http://www.cato.org/dailys/06-30-03.html The real declaration
http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/180/focus/The_real_declaration+.shtm l
Informant: Thomas L. Knapp
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