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The San Francisco Tesla Society
"Transmissible Agents of Slowly Progressive Diseases
Parsimony and New Perspectives"
For the first time in recent history, there are concurrent epidemics of four slow virus diseases worldwide. For lack of a better term, "slow virus" is a functional designation comprising lentiviruses, prions, hepatitis C virus (HCV), and several other transmissible agents causing slowly progressive diseases. Of the lentiviruses, HIV has contributed to more than 19 million deaths worldwide, with more than 34 million persons now infected with HIV. Prions are proteinaceous infectious particles associated with scrapie in sheep, bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE = "mad cow" disease), chronic wasting disease in deer and elk, kuru among Foré tribespersons in Papua New Guinea, and variants of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD). Over the past decade, more than a million cattle were destroyed in the United Kingdom and continental Europe to stave off further transmission of BSE to humans, with 92 CJD-related deaths already being attributed to consumption of BSE-tainted products. More than 170 million humans are infected with HCV worldwide. Countless unreported deaths are associated with this pathogen. Are there any common threads linking transmissible agents of slowly progressive diseases? Why are these epidemics occurring now? What are the risks of these emerging pandemics coming ashore in North America?
Roulette Wm. Smith, a past presenter at SF Tesla Society meetings, will address these issues, with particular attention to diseases associated with prions. He examines possible causes and hidden issues often overlooked by health and agricultural policy makers. Smith also will discuss applications to which his "preliophic moleculator" is being put to use in elucidating prion function and variants in CJD, and their evolutionary relationship to molecular mechanisms of long-term memories (LTM). The protonic-electronic-ionic-photonic molecular calculator was described at a previous SF Tesla Society meeting, as was the slow virus hypothesis of LTM.
Smith is the Director of the Institute for Postgraduate Interdisciplinary Studies in Palo Alto. He also is an adjunct professor at the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology in Palo Alto, and the Test Officer for California State University, Dominguez Hills. His overarching research interest concerns providing help for "unknowingly needy" and "worried well." He has published extensively on HIV and AIDS, prions, commonsense, transmissible negativism, and mathematical modeling in the social sciences. Smith earned his Ph.D. at Stanford in 1973. He also attended medical school at the University of California, San Francisco from 1976 to 1980.
For more information about the San Francisco Tesla Society or this event, call (415) 931-2593 or visit us online at http://www.sftesla.org .
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