X-Message-Number: 16561
From: 
Date: Sun, 17 Jun 2001 02:07:27 EDT
Subject: Olga Visser Fraud

In a message dated 6/16/01 Olaf Henry writes:
 
>  Olga Visser reported some very exciting results in reviving
>  rabbit hearts.  That she published these results gave her a good
>  measure of credibility.  It was commendable, that Robert Ettinger
>  and CI underwrote the considerable expense to bring her to the
>  States to duplicate the experiments here.  Among the observers,
>  who watched the attempts to repeat the experiments, was, watching
>  with baited breath, one Charles Platt, who is now accusing others
>  of gullibility.  If CI has extended the benefit of doubt to Ms. Visser
>  for longer than others, then it is presumably because of the enomous
>  importance a successful revival of the rabbit hearts would have had
>  for cryonics.  Sometimes the inattention to a minute detail can make
>  or break the succes of an experiment.  So giving a researcher the
>  chance to repeat the experiment several times could be important.

The is completely incorrect. 

First, Mrs. Visser never published her results in any peer reviewed journal. 
Furthermore, Mrs. Visser never published or disclosed her results in any 
technical format of any kind that I have knowledge of. The only published 
reports of her work were media reports and nontechnical reports in cryonics 
publications and on the Internet.

I was present as an invited scientific observer at the Alcor sponsored 
demonstration and I stayed until the last of the three hearts was frozen and 
thawed. I was the only invited observer who stayed that long. Mrs. Visser and 
her husband Ziggy were complete frauds. This is not a description I use 
lightly. Most situations in science and the rest of the everyday world are 
somewhat more ambiguous, and hard statements like this are rarely merited.

Having said the above, I can say with ease that in my 30 plus years of 
involvement in science I have never personally seen so clear-cut and 
unambiguous a case of fraud. To objectify:

1) None of the hearts Mrs. Visser frozen under controlled conditions showed 
any signs of viability including any evidence whatsoever of 
electrophysiologic activity, let alone actual contractions.

2) All the hearts showed typical post thaw rigor and myocardial blanching 
indicative of myoglobin loss from ruptured cardiac cells. The small amount of 
post-thaw coronary effluent was pink-tinged which is also consistent with 
myoglobin leakage.

3) Coronary flows on the Langendorff apparatus were a small fraction of the 
baseline, prefreeze coronary flows (my notes indicate the average was less 
than 20% with caveat being that two of the hearts had fractures which were 
leaking fluid). This is the typical behavior of straight frozen or otherwise 
massively freeze-injured mammalian hearts upon reperfusion.

4) The attempts of myself and others to duplicate her claimed successful work 
failed: we were able to duplicate the unsuccessful results she showed at the 
Alcor-sponsored demonstration at which Robert Ettinger from CI was present.

5) The entire procedure was meticulously videotaped by Fred Chamberlain and I 
believe this videotape was archived to resolve exactly these kinds of 
questions.

6) Dimethylformamide, her claimed "miracle" cryoprotectant is an old and very 
poor cryoprotective. I have personally observed hearts frozen with 15% DMSO 
in Armand Karow's lab at the Medical College of Georgia in the early 1970s 
which looked far better than Visser's rat hearts even though they were as 
uniformly nonfunctional following cooling to liquid nitrogen temperature 
(-196 C).

7) There were several other Ph.D.s with expertise in cardiac cryopreservation 
and basic cardiac electrophysiology present, as well as several M.D.s and an 
EKG technician with a considerable animal research background. No one 
reported any positive results.

My most vivid and pathetic memory is of Mrs. Visser "massaging" a 
frozen-thawed rat heart nearly fractured into two pieces in a petri dish and 
remarking (and I quote) "If I only had the proper drugs I could get it to 
beat."

Far more tragic than Mrs. Visser's fraud on the cryonics community was the 
damage she did to the South African people. The South African Medicines 
Council is still in disarray after these many years and many people were 
defrauded by the Vissers over their claim that the dimethylformamide or 
"Virodene" as she called it, was a cheap effective cure for AIDS. To those of 
you who are not aware of the situation in South Africa there is no way to 
understand the harm the Vissers did. The degree of desperation in South 
Africa for any effective treatment for HIV is indescribable; as is the terror 
and disruption of the social fabric that HIV is wreaking.

The Virodene fiasco severely disrupted legitimate South African HIV drug 
trials and created a wave of paranoia and hysteria about unethical 
experimentation and exploitation of blacks by white scientists which is still 
felt today. Mrs. Visser still has open indictments against her and her 
husband for fraud and illegal human experimentation (they left South Africa 
before they were indicted). The only grain of justice in any of this is that 
some of the key South African public officials who allowed things to progress 
as far they did were investors in the Vissers' scheme and lost substantial 
amounts of money as a result. 

I was one of the first people to expose Visser as a fraud. I am extremely 
proud of this fact.

Mike Darwin

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