If a scientific study falls in the forest, and no paid journalists are there to help it make noise, what happens?
Let’s take a close look at the relationship between scientific discoveries, the institutions that fund them and the scientific and lay media as the amplifier that builds the repetitive voice to convince the public of acceptance.
As the world’s oldest and largest general science organization, The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) serves as the parent organization for the Science family of journals, including Science the Journal, its flagship publication that bills itself at center of important scientific discovery, and Science Insider, its sister publication that serves as a lay journal to provide commentary and opinion on discoveries published in Science the Journal.
AAAS serves 10 million people through primary memberships and affiliations with some 262 scientific societies and academies.
So we can consider science Insider then the media or ‘opinion’ arm of Science the journal. As the parent of both, AAAS plays the role of both presenting the data and telling us what to think about it.
That seems like a lot of power. Present the science then tell the public what it means. Or doesn’t.
Now consider who funds AAAS. Yes, the funding comes from outside. And since AAAS cloaks itself in nonprofit status, that money can (and does) come from pretty much anywhere. Behind every good foundation are hundreds of other foundations. And typically every foundation has a for profit counterpart from which it was born, like the Rockefeller Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, etc..
According to Influencewatch, between 1995 and 2016, AAAS received $60.7 million in funding from 352 separate grants. These grants were supplied from the federal government along with many others including The MacArthur Foundation, the Verizon Foundation, The Gordon E. and Betty I. Moore Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, The Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Joyce Foundation.
However, of these, the federal government's largest identifiable source of funding for AAAS was not private or nonprofit, but the NIH itself, having funded a total of over 3.3 million annually between 2008 and 2017.
So if we then drill down to the ‘who’ and the ‘what’ of the funding we can see who are the people at the helm of this funding machine - let’s start with the board of directors for AAAS. We would hope and maybe even assume that there is no conflict or overlap between those overseeing AAAS and those providing them the funding.
Well as it goes we have Susan Amara as both the Chair of the AAAS board and the Scientific Director of the Director of the Intramural Research Program at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH).
And Carolyn Ainsley is not only the Treasurer of the AAAS, in charge of managing all the money. Carolyn is the Chief Financial Officer at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation where she also manages all the money.
Back to the XMRV Research, let’s return to the comment by Suzanne Vernon during a break a the 2010 OFFER Utah Patient Education Conference, where she posed, “Agency heads are scared to death of how the patient population will react if XMRV works out.”
If XMRV works out?? What do they mean? Well as it turns out, 2010 is a significant moment in the story to ask this question — sitting squarely between the publishing of my since forced retraction of my XMRV discovery paper and the onslaught of science journal media designed to bring it down.
The faces and funding are the same, and it doesn’t take much digging to see where the dots connect.
The waning conflict…
The Chasing shadows… And how did this picture of my pen pointing to COVID Syncytia back in 2013 become a featured in both the Discover on July 19, 2013 and Ventura Star on November 23, 2013 — both from a plethora of articles attempting to debunk our work on XMRV? This photo was supplied by a photographer who also served as an educator at University of Nevada Reno - the home of the Whittemore Peterson Institute.
Independent scientific discovery, independent media coverage and the bodies that regulate and oversee these organizations seem to have more in common than one would imagine. Maybe more in common would be better stated as interdependent.
No oversight. No regulation. No liability. Stop All The Shots.