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The Hagahai
controversy
In part two of a three part
article DOMINI SENGI* talks about the controversy that arose in
1996 following the scurry act by PNG-based United States
scientists then attached with the Goroka-based PNG Institute of
Medical Research (PNGIMR) in whisking away by helicopter 'blood
samples' drawn from a male Hagahai tribesman consigned for
highly specialized genetic culture collection laboratories
overseas.
The PNG Hagahai blood was somewhat of a novelty and enigma to
geneticists, microbiologists and virologists alike. It had the
chemical characteristics identified by science as HTLV-I
(PNG-1). It was a retrovirus - viruses that cause slow death of
its host over time. What further interests me was that it was a
relative strain of the HIV/AIDS virus whose characteristic is
known to science as HTLV-III. The symbol HTLV stands for Human
T-cell Lymphotic Virus that lodge itself within the white blood
cells and attack this blood producing cells of the human immune
system.
I had by then inclined to think that given the relative
similarities with the HTLV-III, certainly the Hagahai virus
holds by all probability, some firm genetic or virological clues
to solving the HIV/AIDs epidemic that was gripping the world of
science and threatening human security around the world.
Furthermore, the Hagahai strain itself was isolated by none
other than Dr Robert Gallo, who at that time was accused of
scientific fraud by French scientists over claims he stole the
HIV/AIDs virus and made it his own.
My search had indicated Dr Gallo, a noted
virologists/microbiologist became what he is much to the
tutelage of Nobel Laureate Dr Carlton Gajdusek who had a long
association with the PNGIMR. Dr Gajdusek became world famous in
the 1960s for discovering and isolating yet another PNG-based
virus, the Kuru, a retrovirus of the brain that kills people
slowly. Kuru is known for causing the 'laughing sickness' among
the Fore tribe of the Eastern Highlands Province and other
diseases of the brain.
I am of the firm belief that the Hagahai strain isolate and the
mad rush to patent it without prior informed consent and
knowledge of the Hagahai subject, the PNG Medical Research
Council and Government had all the markings of bio-piracy by US
scientific agents.
I had related the close connections and relations of the
scientists and collaborating institutions to conspiracy theories
doing their rounds in the Europe and the industrialized world in
the early 80's relating HIV/AIDs virus as a biological warfare
germ created at the Fort Detrick P4 Lab in 1977 thereabout as
part of former US President Richard Nixon's Cold War weapons
agenda.
An angle to this theory suggests the germ warfare was aimed at
eliminating the black race off the surface of this earth through
HIV/AIDS.
Retired East Berlin microbiologist Jacob Segal of Humbolt
University wrote a report read throughout Eastern Europe and the
West that claimed the AIDS virus was made at Fort Detrick from a
deliberate mixture of visna and HTLV-I. Segal's assertion was
publicly distributed at the 1986 Summit of the Non-Aligned
Movement for which PNG is a member which convened in September
in Harare, Zimbabwe.
According to Segal, he has but refused to reveal documents
proving that US prisoners were injected with various
experimental combinations of visna and HTLV-I until a perfect
lethal form. HIV, he claims was indeed the perfect lethal form.
Visna is a retrovirus found in sheep.
The Segal notion that AIDS was the result of a sinister CIA plot
found favour in many quarters, particularly in African countries
that felt unjustly targeted and blamed by mainly American
scientists as the origin of AIDS.
Also in the US at the same frame of time, Dr Robert Strecker
from Los Angeles gained a large following for his claim that
AIDS virus was manufactured by crossing Bovine Leukemia Virus (BLV)
and Visna virus from animals into man to make the AIDS virus and
growing it human tissue culture and that's AIDS causing cancer.
For me, there was in the US no body alive and expert than
Carlton Gajdusek and his student Robert Gallo who have the
scientific insight into how human-based latent retroviruses
could jump the species barrier.
Indeed it was Gajdusek's ground-breaking scientific discovery in
the 60s involving the experimentation using the kuru virus with
that of monkeys and chimpanzees that proved the linchpin in
science that viruses could now jump the species barrier thus,
creating for the world of science a molecular model for
sophisticated forms of cloning and genetic engineering that
would then follow. I remain unfazed by counter-claims that such
basic models hadn't yet been invented in 1977.
Certainly and if I was President Nixon, I wouldn't have been
looking too far than Fort Detrick, Drs Gajdusek and Gallo and
the Kuru virus to start my cold war germ warfare programme.
The fundamental question arises whether beginning with
Gajdusek's kuru and linchpin discovery, President Nixon's Cold
War Biological Weapons project, the Segal AIDS conspiracy
theory, and the subsequent mad rush to marginalize the
AIDS-out-of-Fort Detrick claims by the US Government, was the
scurry and helicopter ride of the Hagahai virus out of the
jungles of PNG justified given the relative similarities in the
chemo-geneology of the Hagahai virus and the AIDS? Did both our
viral representatives - kuru and the Hagahai - collectively have
been the cause and effect of solving America's and the world's
most fatal epidemic? I will leave these questions for all to
ponder over in the meantime.
According to US Patent Laws, the isolation of the virus involved
a 'scientific process' and hence, scientists involved in the
process by rights were required by the USPTO regulations to name
themselves as 'inventors' of the cell line, hence are therefore
assigned legal rights to the virus and holders of the subsequent
patent had it been granted.
At this point I came to appreciate the rush. For geneticists
especially, a homogenous, freely evolving and intra-breeding
group of people, not interbreeding with those outside their
homogeneity is a 'gold mine'.
The application for granting of the US patent number 5,397,696
was already in queue and I found myself up against time. Through
the assistance of the late Francis Zabala, a close African
friend of mine who was then UPNG Computer system manager, I
contacted biotechnology experts with the Canada-based Rural
Advancement Foundation International (RAFI), a non-governmental
organization to assist with access to USPTO patent filing system
using the US Freedom of Information Act for further data
relating to the Hagahai virus patent application. PNG was late
to lodge a formal protest during the preparatory stage of the
patent application as there was no information before us.
Given the lack of much political and diplomatic will to maneuver
toward seeking an advisory opinion at The Hague-based
International Court of Justice (ICJ), mounting a global
offensive against the US scientist and the USPTO using the RAFI
network was the only option available.
Domestically, I took to the Fourth Estate issues such as prior
informed consent accusing those involved for adopting primitive
inducement techniques for securing such consent. This is to
arouse public opinion and views to support the international
NGOs.
I had also found that the US scientific team together with their
PNG counterpart produced little evidence of formal prior
informed consent, admitting in the process the use of primitive
'inducement' techniques in deriving such consent. The NGO
network exploited this to the fullest.
Locally based scientists fled the country, not after one of them
was stopped in the get-away trail to produce documentation
wanted by government relating to the so called study of the
Hagahais.
My research further established that this known scientist had
been named as a 'co inventor' of the cell line patent without
the intelligent knowledge of the PNG Government, including the
PNG Medical Research Council at that time, that had direct
fiduciary duty to protect the Hagahai person.
*The writer is a former Foreign Service
Officer and currently General Secretary Peoples National
Congress Party
Next week: My people, my blood, my revelation
 
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