Signed by Dr. Maurice Stroun
I think Professor Stroun speaks for all of us who have studied and used Dr. Beljanski’s products. My hope is that they will one day become widely accepted as effective treatments by themselves and in conjunction with conventional treatments so that no one need suffer from the illeffects of cancer treatments anymore.
9
A Lasting Legacy
O
ur extraordinary hero, Dr. Mirko Beljanski, died a most heartbreaking death in his home on October 28th, 1998. He succumbed to acute myeloid leukemia, a cancer that he may have treated with his own botanicals, had he had access to them.
Power takes on many forms, and it could be argued that Dr. Beljanski was simply a hard-working and honest pawn in a much larger chess game of power and money played out by the dealings of the large pharmaceutical industry in league with a too-complicit French government.
As Dr. Stephen Coles points out in his book on Beljanski’s life,
Extraordinary Healing
, the French government and pharmaceutical industry have a long history of “working hand-in-hand against natural and nontoxic therapies.”
That coupled with the long-standing animosity against Beljanski exhibited by Dr. Jacques Monod and his successors at the Pasteur Institute, J.P. Aubert, the director for the Department of Biochemistry and Microbial Genetics, and F. Gros, general director, both of whom shared Monod’s likes and dislikes especially in people, made the climate in which Beljanski worked tense at best. Indeed, as I reported in chapter 6, Beljanski’s findings on HIV and other viruses were kept out of the public eye because of the potential controversy surrounding the findings.
Since when do politics and power grabs get in the way of science finding ways to make life better for humankind? It unfortunately happens all the time, and Beljanski’s life can only be compared to a Greek tragedy: a towering genius, working against all odds to find a cure for two of the most dreaded diseases in modern history, struck down and eventually eliminated by the very forces charged with protecting the public interests. But just as the lessons of the great Greek dramas have survived throughout the ages, the work of this great scientist and humanitarian has survived practically against all odds.
Beljanski’s Lab Raided
In France, identical to the way drug consumers are exploited in the United States, a powerful and well-financed pharmaceutical industry claiming to protect the public’s welfare possesses the political and financial means to oppress health professionals who prescribe botanicals which embody the CAIM (Complementary, Alternative, and Innovative Medicine) philosophy. As far back as 1989, members of the French government were working to find ways to stop Beljanski from carrying on his research and helping those afflicted with cancer and AIDS with his botanicals. Dr. Coles reports that one Claude Evin, the minister of social affairs and health at the time, “filed charges of illicit practice of medicine against Beljanski.”
The court that had jurisdiction over Beljanski’s private laboratory at the time decided that the good doctor was not guilty of practicing medicine illegally, but that didn’t stop those who wanted to take Beljanski down. Beljanski’s discoveries were actually keeping people alive. Such results represented a direct threat to the bottom line of the government’s beloved pharmaceutical industry.
As I noted in chapter 4, in late 1993 and into 1994, the French government ordered additional tests of what it deemed to be the Pao pereira extract, labeled at the time as PB-100. The results came up negative. The product that was tested did not exhibit anti-viral properties, but many, including Beljanski’s wife, believe that somehow either the substance was altered or the test was set up to fail. In fact, another test set up by the former head of the Institute for Medicine at the University of Bern in Switzerland, theoretically using the same materials as tested in the French trial, showed that PB-100 did, indeed, have anti-viral properties.
Perhaps all this animosity and foul play was exacerbated by the fact that the Beljanski team had applied and was most likely very close to receiving approval from the
Autorisation de Mise sur le Marché
(the AMM), the French equivalent of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Doctors across western Europe continued to prescribe the formulas, but the authorities were closing in on Beljanski, seeking to shut him down because he was cutting into their profits and tarnishing their credibility. Then a small miracle happened. The then President of France, Franﾍois Mitterrand, suffering from acute prostate cancer, was all but given up for dead by his political opponents and the French press when he started taking Beljanski’s botanicals. I have already reported on this story in the introduction, but I repeat it here because as long as Mitterrand was alive, the government couldn’t touch the beleaguered researcher and his team.
Finally, after a relapse of almost two years, the French president’s cancer got the best of him, and he died January 8, 1996. The
Autorisation de Mise sur le Marché
was close to putting their stamp of approval on the Beljanski formulas but his enemies were too swift. On October 9, 1996, at 6 a.m., the
Groupe d'Intervention de la Gendarmerie Nationale
(the National Gendarmerie Intervention Group), or GIGN, raided Beljanski’s laboratory. The GIGN is the arm of the French special forces whose missions include the arrest of armed criminals, in particular those taking hostages, counter-terrorism, and dealing with aircraft hijacking, and ending prison riots. Sending in the GIGN was clearly overkill, and it indicated the order came from the highest level of government.
During my September 2003 visit to La Rochelle, France, I spoke with a number of former staff members of the Beljanski research team who were at the lab when it was raided. They reported that soldiers and police appeared to be conducting a war and behaved as if in combat. I learned that the military squadron, basically a SWAT team, acted as if these ordinary French citizens, possessing no weapons and with no criminal history, were the worst kind of terrorists. These so-called “terrorists” of course were simply Beljanski’s laboratory staff members— about a dozen—who were frightened into complete paralysis.
With their helicopter overhead surveying the place, whistles blowing, German Shepherd guard dogs lunging at the end of leashes, warnings broadcasted over bull horns, this SWAT-like team, wearing flack vests and waving drawn guns, conducted their invasion on Beljanski’s research facilities with malicious vigor. In this manner, for more than an hour, the squad of military police disassembled Dr. Beljanski’s entire laboratory building. They forced open locked closets, broke into cupboards, confiscated computers and notebooks, removed nutrients and medicines, and herded together rabbits, guinea pigs, and mice.
Can you imagine the horror of confronting federal agents appearing unannounced on your doorstep, armed with machine guns, demanding access to laboratory glassware, microorganism records, experimental animals, medical equipment, and work-bench supplies as mundane as rubber gloves, treating the entire laboratory facility as a crime scene?
Might you be shocked by seeing your diplomas, award certificates, and hanging pictures seized from the walls? Would you find it even worse witnessing more agents showing up at your private residence, again carrying machine guns, pistols, and rifles, demanding that your spouse open the door for a full search of your sleeping quarters? Could you conceive of the police helping themselves to your computers both in your work place and at home? Is it possible for you to mentally grasp what’s happening when you watch them carting away whatever they choose, with no copies left?
To this day, the French Government has not yet returned most of the confiscated property which encompasses Dr. Beljanski’s entire life’s work, including his laboratory equipment, hand-written notebooks and typed records, computers and office furniture, Petri dishes filled with growing specimens, and stocks of therapeutic substances such as herbs from overseas. Perhaps most important of all, the French Government still holds in its possession the file for
Demande d’autorisation sur le
Marché
(the marketing authorization application for the supplements that was close to being approved). The French military personnel chained the doors shut and permanently closed Dr. Beljanski’s personal research facility, and all without any due process of law. His staff was not permitted even to retrieve their personal items. Shortly after, Dr. Mirko Beljanski, seventy-three years old, was humiliatingly roused from bed, arrested, and taken to the local prison where he was held for twenty-four hours without questioning and a bail that was set so high he couldn’t possibly have paid it.
Worse, he was not given any information about what he was being charged with nor was he advised of his rights. I have no doubt that if the Bastille were still standing, he would have been unceremoniously thrown into the deepest part of the dungeon with the worst of the other political prisoners and left there to rot. (The Bastille was the infamous French prison that housed not only common criminals but people deemed dangerous to the state. The storming of the Bastille, in which commoners demanded the release of all prisoners, marks the beginning of the French Revolution.) Monique, his wife, was put under house arrest in their small apartment in Paris and was not allowed to use the phone to ask for legal advice, nor was she given any information about her husband. Worse, before the standard due process of the law could take over, which would have allowed for charges to be made, evidence to be presented, and a chance for Beljanski to defend himself, the French Assistant Attorney General’s Office ordered the destruction of all Beljanski’s products. The police then went to the AMM and confiscated all of the documents concerning the filing for market authorization.
Under threat of further imprisonment, Dr. Beljanski was forced to discontinue his forty-five years of work in life science and instruct his laboratory employees to go home and keep their mouths shut so that they would not have additional penalties heaped upon them. Worse, the court ordered that all Beljanski products be removed from the homes of those who were taking them. The French authorities, according to
Dr. Coles, using information gained from doctors, made their way from home to home, terrorizing ordinary French citizens, and confiscating their botanicals. It was an egregious violation of basic civil and criminal rights, and it was made worse by the fact that Dr. Beljanski was unable to defend himself, for he had been deprived of the basic right to plead his case before an impartial judge. It was injustice heaped on injustice. Another decree was issued stating that he was not allowed to speak publicly, was not allowed to publish his research, and in the most flagrant violation of the right to free speech, was not allowed to write for the press. Patients, outraged that their botanicals had been taken from them, took to the streets in Paris and Lyons to fight for their right to use the supplements that were saving their lives
.
This true tale of political intrigue and corruption in France is likely the reason why information about Beljanski’s discoveries has not been more widespread. Furthermore, I’ve concluded that ultimately, the French Government is likely to have contributed to Dr. Beljanski’s premature death. Informed persons know that such an overtaxing burden of the magnitude experienced by Dr. Mirko Beljanski can be deadly. In a cruel irony, in part due to stress from the inglorious actions of his nation’s government, Dr. Beljanski contracted the same illness he so successfully fought against in others. Although at seventy-four, his chances were very limited, but he might have saved himself from the agony of dying from the acute form of leukemia that took over his body if he would have had access to his own supplements, products he spent a lifetime developing.
As befits the plot of a Greek tragedy, instead of the acclaim he deserved, the elder Dr. Beljanski was hounded by jealous associates, competitive drug executives, and zealous bureaucrats who prevented him from presenting his marvelous discoveries to the world and saving lives sooner rather than later.
The Last Discovery
But while the French government was able to kill the man, they will never be able to take away the body of research he left behind. Mirko Beljanski, who during the course of his life was driven by a passion for knowledge (be it in biochemistry, pathology or evolution), also made a beautiful discovery near the very end of his career and fortunately was able to publish his findings. The science of it, of course, is complicated, but the gist of it is Dr. Beljanski was close to discovering the very origins of life. He was able, through many years of research, to recreate DNA from scratch. It’s called
de novo
synthesis.
De Novo
is a Latin term which means “created a new” and implies “without a template, without a model, a synthesis from simple elements.” In other words, he was able to create DNA out of simple elements that he and others believed to have existed on earth billions of years before life appeared. DNA, that exceptional molecule of life, has a mysterious origin. No one knows exactly how over the course of evolution this molecule— able to repair itself, replicate, and correctly transmit all the characteristics of a living being—came to exist. Its spontaneous formation seems impossible.
Dr. Beljanski, like many other microbiologists, have long been drawn to the question of the origin of life. What has confounded researchers is that spontaneous production of DNA is a classic “chicken and egg” paradox. Proteins are responsible for synthesizing nucleic acids, yet it takes the DNA and RNA to tell the cell which amino acids to put together to form that protein. Which one came first? At some point, long ago in biological evolution, this very complex DNA molecule was formed. But how?