I know a couple people were interested by the last posting on this issue. I
was thinking about Chris's post. The problem is not the issue of reverting,
the problem is society doesn't want to revert back to this living. Part of
the reason I think there should be support for a mixture of sustainable
development approach and stronger policy is that maybe the only potential way
to overt disaster. I don't want to sound like a pessimist but most people
will not change their lifestyle until there is a major
disaster, or some event that is so catastrophic that only then will they be
forced to change. Sustainable development takes the burden off society in
that respect.
It does not force radical change, but it takes an approach with some
legitimacy
to the fact, it can help protect the environment.
Have a good one
Li-
=============================================================
<< m: "David Crockett Williams" <[log in to unmask]>
To: "DOE-StrategicPlan" <[log in to unmask]>
Cc: "David B. Hamilton" <[log in to unmask]>; "Bill Kennedy"
<[log in to unmask]>; "Bob Emond" <[log in to unmask]>; "Department
of Energy" <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Breaking New Clean-Energy News
Date: Wednesday, April 26, 2000 2:02 AM
Although my DOE Strategic Plan public comments extended deadline was
yesterday, this breaking news of today is suggested for your consideration
regarding suppression of valuable new clean Emerging Energy Technologies,
and a prior related article on potential breakthrough-science medical
applications.
I suggest that this information be taken into consideration in next DOE
budget proposal for your full investigation of these potential new "world
class science" applications including submissions already sent you by
yesterday and referenced at http://www.egroups.com/group/strategic-plan
Please do all you can to see that this kind of suppression/opposition does
not stall the many of these Emerging Energy Technologies reference at above
site with potential to replace nuclear and fossil fuel power, neutralize
radioactive wastes, etc.
From:
http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0017/baard.shtml
Published April 26 - May 2, 2000
Dr. Randell Mills suspects outsiders tampered with his patent application.
THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK
BY ERIK BAARD
Alternative-Energy Scientist Fights to Save Patent
Dr. Randell Mills's physics and chemistry laboratories may have strangely
united three forces that were presumed distinct: the U.S. Patent and
Trademark office, the Department of State, and the American Physical
Society. Unfortunately for Mills, they appear to have united against him.
This is a case for patent-dependent Nasdaq hopefuls and their investors to
watch.
Mills, a harvard-trained medical doctor and founder of the New Jersey-based
technology start-up BlackLight Power Inc., www.blacklightpower.com, was
awarded a U.S. patent February 15 covering his claim to producing energy by
shrinking the electron orbit of hydrogen below what most quantum theorists
have thought possible for a century. He calls the smaller hydrogen atom a
"hydrino" and theorizes it could lead to a nearly limitless supply of clean,
cheap power (see "Quantum Leap"
http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/9951/baard.shtml and "Doctor Molecool"
below)
The news outraged Mills's fiercest critic, Dr. Robert Park, an APS spokesman
and avid debunker based in Washington, D.C. Park mocked the patent decision
in the press and in his What's New column at www.aps.org. The column comes
with a disclaimer that states, "Opinions are the author's and are not
necessarily shared by the APS, but they should be."
Within days, the patent office pulled back a related chemistry patent for
further review just before issuance, citing comments by Park and others-none
of whom has tested Mills's devices or materials-in mainstream press reports
that Mills must be either wildly mistaken or a fraud. That patent
application, number 09/009,294, was so near issuance that it slipped out in
the PTO's weekly Gazette of allowances as Patent No. 6,030,601.
Mills says Park may have more than the safeguarding of science at heart.
"Park's group is lobbying the government to give them billions of dollars
for 'big science' projects that BlackLight's success would make obsolete.
He's a competitor," says Mills, who is privately funded. "I know it's not
completely analogous, but going to him would be like the patent office going
to Bill Gates and asking, 'Do you think Apple's new operating platform will
work?' "
With the novel hydrino chemistry, Mills says he's developed and had outside
testing of the prototype for what could be a vastly superior class of
batteries. He also claims to have developed compounds for plastic magnetic
storage media and rustproof coatings, also with many independent lab
verifications.
Mills's lawyers won an agreement from the patent office not to act on the
chemistry application until June while the U.S. District Court examines the
case. Meanwhile, Mills continues to take a beating at the agency, which took
his artificial-intelligence patent application away from an examiner who'd
been reviewing it for over a year and placed it in the hands of another, who
quickly rejected it. The office also rejected his patent application for a
hydrino power plant. Mills says he'll contest both decisions.
The 69-year-old Park and 42-year-old Mills have never met, but Park has
blasted Mills since he proposed his theory nine years ago. In March, Mills's
lawyers warned Park and three other scientists to refrain from calling him a
fraud, even if they continue to denounce his theories. "Scientific debate is
sacred-no one wants to silence that," Mills says. "But when you try to
incriminate a business, you've crossed the line. Still, in a way I'm glad
about this. It forces the issue. Now we'll have to put up or shut up, and
they'll have to confront the data or fold." Mills says he's going to back up
his filings with the patent office with more than 40 reports and
publications, and he may request that the National Institute of Science and
Technology test his prototype technologies.
Park says he doesn't know where Mills is on what he calls "the road from
foolishness to fraud," because "the human capacity for self-deception should
never be underestimated." Of course, he offers, even with a crank theory
"there's room for serendipity, but I wouldn't bet on it."
Threats to the hydrino patents could jeopardize Morgan Stanley Dean Witter's
plans to underwrite BlackLight's estimated billion dollar initial public
offering. And some of BlackLight's backers say they're offended when
portrayed as dupes or coconspirators.
"If I wanted to gamble, I'd fly to Vegas," says Rick Barry, whose Eastbourne
Capital Management and its principals invested $5 million in BlackLight
after what he describes as "detailed" due dilligence by him and PacifiCorp.
"I don't think the risk [with Mills] is science fraud. It's can he engineer
a device and can he protect his intellectual property? I thought we were
safe on the latter until this started to unfold."
Along with PacifiCorp, electric utility Conectiv has invested in BlackLight.
Tyco International inherited a sliver stake in the company through its
purchase of Amp Incorporated, a leading producer of electrical connectors.
Individual backers are among the Who's Who of the business establishment.
They include a former chairman of Morgan Stanley and a former president of
PaineWebber. Board members include Dr. Shelby Brewer, a former top
Department of Energy nuclear official, and Aris Melissaratos, former
director of Westinghouse's Science and Technology Center.
So while BlackLight doesn't have the resources of the entire physics
establishment, it has more pull than most start-ups. Its travails at the
patent office have even attracted attention on Capitol Hill.
Responding to evidence presented by allies of BlackLight, senators Ron Wyden
of Oregon and Max Cleland of Georgia say they want to know if an American
Physical Society colleague of Park's at the State Department messed with
Mills's application. One indication of outside influence noted by BlackLight
attorney Jeffrey Melcher was that the patent office says it had lost the
file when it ruled on the chemistry application. "That's not normal for an
agency," says a Senate source. "If there's no record, how can you make a
decision?"
The source says there may have been some improper contact by outside
influences with patent officials, and points to Park's APS associate Dr.
Peter Zimmerman, chief arms-control scientist at the State Department.
Zimmerman boasted in an abstract for an upcoming APS lecture that "my own
Department and the Patent Office have fought back with success" against
"pseudoscientists," but didn't name his targets. His abstract railed
against, among other things, inventors of "hydrinos."
A State Department official, who declined to be identified, said Zimmerman's
abstract, which has since been removed, was missing a disclaimer explaining
that he was speaking only as a private citizen. The official added that
department employees are not allowed to use their titles outside of their
official capacities. "The topic is totally outside our purview and mandate,"
the official said. "His views did not reflect those of the State
Department."
Park and Zimmerman have certainly affected patent-office affairs before.
Patent Examiner Tom Valone http://users.erols.com/iri was invited by the
State Department to organize an April 1999 Conference on Free Energy to
explore alternatives to fossil fuels, many of which were controversial.
Zimmerman told an APS gathering that Park asked him to put a stop to it.
"The week before I was to start [at the State Department] Bob [Park] sends
me an e-mail, in which he tells me in some detail about the Conference on
Free Energy under the sponsorship of the Secretary of State's Open Forum. It
says, 'Pete, if you can't get that killed, what's the point of having you at
the State Department?' "
Listen to Speech Clips
http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0017/baard.ram
(clips provided by Infinite Energy magazine)
The conference was evicted from the State Department auditorium and then
from the Department of Commerce.
Park says he then called "an investigative reporter" who writes for Science,
suggesting he look into the patent office. The reporter, APS physicist David
Voss, wrote a scathing article in the magazine's May 1999 issue describing
Valone's personal interest in novel theories, while acknowledging he never
approved patents with questionable backing. Nonetheless, Valone says the
report contributed to his dismissal.
Mills has his own battles to wage. "We intend to fight this all the way to
the Supreme Court," he says, "and enlist whatever resources it takes in
Congress and industry to rightfully win this."
From:
http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0004/baard.shtml
Published January 26 - February 1, 2000
DR. MOLECOOL
BY ERIK BAARD
Quantum Iconoclast Randell Mills's Grand Visions of Microscopic Medicine
Randell Mills is a doctor better known for stirring up trouble in quantum
physics than for giving flu shots. But now he's injecting new vigor into
medical projects he claims will spur breakthroughs in fighting cancer and
AIDS, as well as scanning the human body in three dimensions, in real time.
"You'll go in to see your doctor and he'll check you out with my scanner,"
Mills predicts. "If he finds cancer, you'll be treated for it as an
outpatient with my therapy. If he finds something else-hypertension, an
infection, arthritis-almost any medicine that he'll use will be more
efficacious when he uses my drug-delivery molecule."
Mills is the founder of BlackLight Power Inc., based near Princeton, New
Jersey. The company promises limitless clean energy and fantastic compounds,
based on a "grand unified theory" that is hotly derided by luminaries in
theoretical physics (see "Quantum Leap," Voice, December 28). Meanwhile, in
a smaller laboratory down the hallway from those activities, Mills is
quietly exploring medical innovations that no one seems to be calling nutty.
Mills says he plans to fold his medical ventures into BlackLight Power after
that company has its initial public offering of stock, anticipated this
year. Profits would then be plowed into his medical pursuits, he adds. "To
me it's all the same; it's all engineering," says Mills.
Mills conceived many of his ideas while a student at Harvard Medical School
or shortly after he graduated in 1986. Now 42, he acknowledges that it might
seem odd that he backburnered early successes in medicine. He says he wanted
to milk his brain while it was young and most nimble without the
distractions of business or university politics. Today, he's ready to
implement his designs.
In December 1988, Mills proposed in the peer-reviewed journal Nature how
cancer might be destroyed with such little radiation that it could be
treated on an outpatient basis. He says he was moved to improve cancer
treatment when, as a student, he witnessed the private hopelessness of
doctors caring for an otherwise healthy woman who was being slowly ravaged
by tumors.
Currently, patients are carpet bombed with radiation in the hope that normal
cells adjacent to cancer cells will be able to recover and reproduce, while
malfunctioning cancer cells won't. Patients suffer terribly and injuries
from repeated radiation can accumulate to a point where the cure itself
threatens to become a killer. What Mills tested in mice were essentially the
world's smallest smart bombs.
Dr. Greg Gagnon, assistant professor of radiation medicine at Georgetown
University Medical Center, has investigated Mills's radiation technique,
called Mossbauer Isotopic Resonant Absorption of Gamma Emission, or MIRAGE.
Gagnon says Mills found a molecule to carry iron into a cell and plant it
flush against DNA, the control center. Then comes the detonation.
The patient is given a tiny dose of gamma radiation, far less than a
standard X ray. The gamma ray photons and iron atoms are tuned to react with
each other in something called the Mossbauer isotope. When an iron nucleus
absorbs a photon, it becomes unstable and releases a small burst of energy
that knocks an electron out of its proper orbit, which then bumps outer
electrons astray. What follows is an Auger cascade, a kind of
microscopically localized electron explosion, Gagnon explains. "The
electrons are shooting off, breaking things all over the place, and then the
iron becomes attached to the DNA fragments. There's no way a cell can repair
so much damage."
Healthy cells tear apart the transport molecule and the iron drifts safely
off.
"It's just an amazingly clever idea. Randy is probably the most intelligent
person I've met," remarks Gagnon.
Dr. John Humm, a medical physicist now at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer
Center who critiqued MIRAGE in Nature, argues that because such mild gamma
rays wouldn't likely penetrate deep into tissue, "there would be severe
limitations on clinical use. But having said that, this is nothing to sneeze
at. The elegance of the idea is impressive. I know of no other way of so
selectively inactivating sections of DNA." Scientists might instead embrace
MIRAGE as a laboratory-setting microscopic cellular probe, Humm says.
Mills counters that while MIRAGE may not work for every cancer, in the years
since the Nature article, he's found other Mossbauer isotopes that can work
at deeper levels. In addition, he says, the radiation used in his original
tests was so negligible that he could increase it by a factor of 1000
without any resulting discomfort to the patient.
Back then, Mills took a stab at bringingMIRAGE to hospitals, but researchers
at would-be partner Bristol-Myers Squibb reported that test results weren't
clear enough to pursue, according to M. Dianne DeFuria, senior director of
business development.
DeFuria doesn't remember details, but adds that another factor could have
been that the radiation therapy "may have involved equipment beyond the
scope of a pharmaceutical company, meaning that we couldn't take it further
alone."
Mills says he's since sharpened his technique to use ultrasound or magnetic
scanners to take aim at malignant growths, and then destroy them with gamma
rays pixel by pixel on a computer screen. Beyond that, he adds, "you should
really think of this as a microscopic scalpel" good for cleaning out
arteries and reducing swollen prostates, among other applications.
"If Randy is now meeting with good success, I hope he will come back,"
DeFuria says. "His mind was certainly appreciated here."
Mills has also demonstrated what might be a better way to use existing drugs
to attack AIDS, herpes, and hepatitis. One of the problems doctors have in
fighting these diseases is that the drugs best able to halt viruses and
bacteria from reproducing often have trouble getting past cell membranes.
They can be modified for that purpose, but that usually means dumbing down
the medicinal value or causing side effects. Also, toxic concentrations of
drugs must sometimes be used in hope that enough will get through.
Mills has designed a type of nontoxic molecule to ferry unadulterated drugs
into cells, says Dr. Jim A. Turpin, who manages a retrovirology lab at
Serquest, a Southern Research Institute company.
In Mills's approach, a drug enters the body as part of a molecule with three
segments. Once past the membrane, the molecule will more likely encounter
oxygen-free radicals, created during respiration, which exist inside cells
in far greater numbers than outside.
The radical excites the first section of the three-part molecule in a
chemical reaction that should release a photon of light. But that light is
instead channeled as bond-shattering disruptive energy running along the
molecular carrier, which then falls away like the spent stage of a rocket.
The drug is left alone to do its work, and the carrier is excreted as waste.
Mills calls his system the Luminide method, because the carrier "is a
light-powered drug-release molecule based on a reaction analogous to that
used by fireflies to glow," and "it just sounds cool."
Turpin tested the technique on HIV-infected white blood cells using the AIDS
drug Foscarnet. With the Luminide carrier, "we measured a minimum ninefold
enhancement of antiviral activity in tissue culture," Turpin says.
Mills says he and Turpin will submit apaper on their findings to The Journal
of Medicinal Chemistry in February. Tests in mice with Dupont Corporation
have been successful, Mills claims, and he plans further studies in animals
and humans. He adds that the method could be used for a host of
applications, from antidepressants to plant pesticides, but purifying the
compounds is difficult.
The National Institutes of Health may be interested in getting behind that
effort with its own manpower and resources. When presented with Luminide
overview materials for an opinion, Dr. Nava Sarver, chief of NIH's targeted
intervention branch in the Division of AIDS, was "a little more impressed
than I thought I would be. There seems to be some real potential there."
Sarver explains that her program helps scientists develop cutting-edge
technologies without taking any profits or making patent claims. Luminide
molecules appear to be suitable for oral administration, Sarver says, and
"anything that increases potency and decreases toxicity is a go."
Sarver cautions that many promising ideas stumble in the final steps of
clinical testing.
For Luminide to be closer to an ideal approach to treating AIDS, Sarver says
she'd like to "tweak" it with Mills to target only infected cells or
systems. "Specificity is the missing link here."
Immunologist Dr. Gillian Woollett of Pharmaceutical Research and
Manufacturers of America agrees that targeting will be important. "It's a
neat idea and there will be a lot of companies keen to talk with him. But he
has some hurdles ahead of him."
If clinical trials for one drug are positive, Woollett says, "Maybe the
floodgates will open. And AIDS is not a bad place to start. This system
seems especially good for use in blood, and oxygen-free radicals are used
most by the immune system."
But AIDS and other infections aren't the most likely killers lurking in
peoples' bodies, Mills points out.
"Let me tell you how you're going to die," he casually offers. "I'll say
you're going to die of heart disease, cancer, or a stroke, and I'll be right
95 percent of the time."
That's why Mills has another project in the works at Harvard that he says
could revolutionize diagnostic medical imaging.
"The guy is amazing," remarks Dr. Samuel Patz, an assistant professor at
Harvard Medical School, with an appointment in the Department of Radiology
at the university's Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston.
"I've worked with him on his medical inventions and he's contributed some
nontrivial creative ideas about a new imaging technique. It's very exciting
and has some real possibilities," Patz says.
Today's scanners work best by giving doctors two-dimensional snapshots of
the human body. Mills claims he's designing a scanner that may, for example,
allow a surgeon to take a live-image virtual reality walking tour through a
patient's beating heart (it could also be used to scan industrial
materials).
Mills expounds. "The machine would work by distinguishing differences made
in the magnetic field at a location by the material itself, like bone versus
lung." Data would stream into a computer through parallel channels from up
to a million points, providing far sharper relief than anything currently
available.
And if a strongly magnetic substance like iron were added to the
bloodstream, through an injection of Geritol for example, "the vascular
system would light up." That would allow a doctor and patient to see blood
vessels growing to feed a tumor, or clots and cholesterol, without any
invasion.
"After seeing this, you wouldn't eat that cheesecake if I told you not to,"
Mills quips.
The calculations involved are Herculean, says Patz, but "Randy has worked
out the mathematics. I'm convinced of that."
Because the scanner would largely rely on existing hardware, "if someone
like a General Electric were to get behind this, we could have a prototype i
n six months," Mills says.
Despite Mills's grand ambitions, he admits to being vexed by complexities in
a genetic sequencer he envisions, and he dismisses dreams of immortality.
"Life is probably limited by arterial flow in the brain. Those vessels wear
out. Maybe someone will find a way of drilling out and retubing them, but
then they'll find something else. There's always a weak link."
--------------------
David Crockett Williams, C.L.U.
General Agency Services [log in to unmask]
http://www.angelfire.com/on/GEAR2000/genagency.html
>>
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