Dr. Mary’s Monkey, Edward T. Haslam, 2007, ISBN 9780977795307
This book offers a very different view of recent American history.
In the 1950s, Jonas Salk developed a vaccine against polio, which then ravaged the United States. It was about inoculating children with dead polio virus, so that their bodies developed immunity. Just before the mass inoculation began, a technician injected a few monkeys with the vaccine. Viruses supposedly dead weren’t exactly dead, which is why thousands of children contracted polio. The safer Sabin vaccine was developed quickly and rushed into production.
The biggest problem for the Salk vaccine was that it was laced with cancer-causing monkey viruses (imagine the panic if that got out). Consider the current epidemic of soft tissue cancers. A secret program was created to search for some type of vaccine. Such a program involved many mice (thousands) and someone to do the daily observation of the mice, someone like David Ferrie (later known in JFK assassination circles). An expelled priest and former airline pilot, he was a longtime CIA asset. A cancer expert was also needed in a project of this type to do the actual mutation of the viruses.
Mary Sherman was a world-renowned cancer researcher with a list of qualifications as long as her arm. It is unknown why she would get involved with a right-wing fanatic like David Ferrie. In 1964, her burned and naked body was found in her apartment. The press went to great lengths to make it look like a sexual murder by lesbian thieves, even though there was no sign of forced entry. The strange thing is that all of her right arm and the right part of her torso had disappeared, as if they had disintegrated. The small fire that was lit in her bed, to cover up the crime, was not hot enough to do so.
Mutant viruses required enormous amounts of power, on the order of several million volts. A linear particle accelerator was powerful enough, but it required heavy-duty wiring. The author found evidence of such wiring at the US Public Health Service Hospital in New Orleans. The author theorizes that, one day, Sherman hit the wrong button, or there was a sabotage, causing all that energy to devastate his body. It was quickly decided to take her back to her apartment, stab her to the exact spot in her heart (it’s possible she was still alive at the time) and cover up her death. This entire arrangement also required a courier to travel from Sherman to Ferrie and back. His name was Lee Harvey Oswald. He was assassinated after JFK’s death to silence him; having him on the witness stand would have made public things that the powerful did not want made public.
This is a wonderful piece of writing. It’s a big reveal and will make the reader look at cancer in a whole new way. It is highly recommended.