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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
Nothing's shocking
Yes, I know. To even suggest such a thing is sick and sad and utterly deplorable.
But it's not me, muffins. It's the world we live in. Look no further than escándalo-turned-sitcom No. 2, Kelly Osbourne. Osbourne checked into rehab for a pill problem last spring, and the whole thing is featured on a very special episode of "The Osbournes" tonight. That's right, tonight on MTV, we get to see the high comedy that goes down when Kelly develops a hankering for prescription drugs. Previews show Jack saying to Sharon, "I think she's on drugs," to which she replies disbelievingly, "Oh, no." Then Ozzy asks Kelly, "Nobody gave you any pills or anything?" Meanwhile Kelly stumbles around looking high as a kite. Haw haw haw!
So let's just review some notable features of the cultural landscape today: Hot teens on muff-diving escapades. Catholic all-girls schools populated by lesbian lingerie models. Ashlee Simpson, a pretty blond teenager masquerading as a black-haired lesbian toughie with really bad acid reflux. Kelly Osbourne, a teenager whose hair might be naturally black, but whose appetite for pills suggests she'd prefer to be as stupid and as spaced out as Ashlee Simpson.
Why does everyone want to trade places? Kelly wants to be Ashlee, Ashlee wants to be Kelly, Marissa wants to be Alex, who looks like Ashlee but who really wants to be Kelly ... Why can't we all just do what we do best? Ashlee, you're blond and you belong in hot-pink velour like your trashy sister. Kelly, for chrissakes, you've grown up with a living, breathing example of the dangers of taking too many drugs. What's it gonna take for you to resist the dark side? Marissa, as a wise friend once told me, you really don't know if you're hungry or not until Mr. Cheeseburger is staring you right in the face. Try to be sure that you're hungry before you order Mr. Cheeseburger, or you're going to have a heartbroken bisexual punk-rock girly on your hands, real quick-like.
Shot felt round the world
Enough with counseling troubled teens. You know what would make a really huge escándalo, an escándalo to end all escándalos? How about if a highly esteemed Western doctor were to blame for the spread of the AIDS virus? What kind of outrage would result if you could pinpoint the human being responsible for setting into motion the events that eventually caused the deaths of 26 million people -- and counting?
Not surprisingly, this scandal is known as medical science's most hated hypothesis, and there's no shortage of doctors, scientists and naysayers anxious to discredit the notion, put forth in Edward Hooper's controversial 1999 book "The River," and in an upcoming documentary on the Sundance Channel called "The Origins of AIDS" (Monday, Feb. 7, at 9 p.m. EST), that the polio vaccine caused the initial spread of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.
Back in 1955, a doctor named Hilary Koprowski was using monkey tissue (minced kidneys, to be precise) to culture a polio vaccine, but insists that only safe monkey tissue was used -- never, ever did he use the more risky chimpanzee tissue in producing his vaccine. Chimp tissue often contains SIV, a virus considered a precursor to HIV. Strangely enough, though, at the same time Koprowski was administering mass polio vaccinations in Central Africa, he was operating an animal laboratory that housed huge numbers of chimpanzees. In the film, several witnesses who worked in the lab testify to having removed chimpanzee kidneys, and a few say they were used in producing the vaccines. On top of that, in his book, Hooper demonstrates a strong correlation between the mass polio vaccinations of the '50s and those areas where AIDS first broke out.
While there are plenty of arguments against the hypothesis that Hooper and the filmmakers present, including tests performed on old polio vaccine samples, which failed to find any traces of SIV or DNA indicating that chimpanzee kidneys were used to prepare the vaccine, it's tough not to emerge from this engrossing documentary with a distinct feeling of distrust. The gaggle of scientists and doctors circling the wagons at a conference at the Royal Society is more than a little eerie, and Koprowski's lack of documentation of much of his work during that time doesn't do much to ease suspicions. The main point of investigating the ideas Hooper presents is not, after all, to point the blame at a respected doctor whose work with polio vaccines has been widely praised, particularly since the implications of using chimpanzee tissue weren't completely understood back then. The point is that further study is clearly warranted, yet the utter disdain for the polio vaccine hypothesis seems sure to impede such studies and is antithetical to the kind of open, inquisitive approach that's demanded by any scientific inquiry as important as this one.
But then, let's face it, the medical community is about as good at admitting its own culpability and failure as Fonzie was. In this crazy mixed-up litigious world, you can hardly blame doctors for getting their backs up when someone suggests that they were wr... wr... wron...
