X-Message-Number: 16582 From: Date: Mon, 18 Jun 2001 19:09:29 EDT Subject: On Fraud and Learning Steve Bridge and Mike Perry have raised the very legitimate and important question of what constitutes fraud, and whether the Vissers' behavior met that criterion. I am acutely careful when using words like fraud to describe someone's behavior, especially in a public forum. I did not use this word with regard to the Vissers lightly. In my opinion it is worthwhile to discuss why I chose this word and to deal with a few of the points Steve raises in his post about the Visser affair. Let's start with a dictionary definition. I have only a 1958 Webster's unabridged edition at hand, but I think it will do. The full definition of fraud is long. The first two are the most relevant: "1) Quality of being deliberately deceptive; trickery, willful deceit, dishonesty. 2) An act of willful deception and dishonesty, carried out with a view to securing some advantage, profit &c. to which one is not entitled at the expense of another; (law) some statement or suppression of fact in word or deed with intent to deceive." One problem with any definition like the one above is the problem of what constitutes willful or what constitutes intent in general. These are internal mental states and for this reason we usually solve this problem by referring it to a group of 12 people called a jury in association with a highly structured procedure for presenting both evidence and argument. I suppose it could be argued that until someone is convicted by a jury in court of law they must be presumed innocent of fraud. Certainly, in the criminal sense this is true and I agree with it. But fraud has broader common use and people often clearly meet the dictionary definition without meeting the bar of a civil or criminal trial. It is useful to label these people as such to protect others and to instruct others as to what the signs of fraud are outside of the alien confines of jurisprudence. My first contact with the Vissers' claims came via highly respected Intensivists (critical care medicine physicians) who I interacted with on the Internet. Several of the finest and most Internet visible ICU physicians are from South Africa. It was probably from Dick Burrows that I first heard about the Vissers. The horror of HIV in Africa is a daily grind for Dick and the comparatively few other topnotch physicians who have chosen to remain in a country racked by violence and lethal infectious disease; not to mention an epidemic of irrationality and interracial warfare of vast magnitude. The Vissers first surfaced by being a material force in getting the head of the South African Medicines Council dismissed; ostensibly because he was a physician, a male and was white (and by the way, both compassionate and competent). He was replaced by an African woman who had no medical background whatsoever. This was followed by bribery and the use of calculated political clout (threats in some instances) to move Virodene into clinical testing on people who were not informed of what they were receiving or that this compound had shown absolutely no laboratory evidence of being an effective treatment for HIV. Ziggy's financial manipulations were (and still are) legend in South Africa. There were no controls and no record keeping in the Virodene trials. There was enormous press coverage and hope verging on frenzy that a cheap, effective CURE for HIV had been discovered by South Africans. If we aren't at the "fraud" point already, we get there soon enough when any questions about Virodene were ruthlessly suppressed and the people asking them threatened or punished. It is axiomatic in good science that if you have the public platform and you have a real breakthrough you don't need to use these tactics. The Vissers certainly had the government and the local media in their pockets. They even had the NEW SCIENTIST and some international media in their camp. Frankly, I didn't pay much attention to the people from Durban, Capetown, and elsewhere who were complaining about this latest outrage on medicine in South Africa. It wasn't until I saw the name Olga Visser surface in cryonics that I winced. Viola! Here was a lady claiming she could freeze mammalian hearts and would soon be freezing pig hearts and doing transplants with cryopreserved organs within 5 years! Sound too good to be true? Maybe not unless you knew about the same kind of claims and the ugly tactics being used with them about a cure for AIDS. I found out what both Virodene and her miracle cryoprotectant were from sources I was referred to in the purchasing department of the her University. It wasn't even confidential: she had been ordering DMF in liter quantities and the University was picking up the tab. Steve Bridge argues with some eloquence that Alcor and CI were duped and that the price of all this was worthwhile in that it taught them a valuable lesson. I wish I could agree. I'm not being "argumentative" here to make any political points. That's useless in almost any forum unless you want to sling mud, deceive or engage in clever rhetoric. I'm too tired for that. My point is to inform people about how to detect fraud and not be taken advantage of by it. Of course it is always possible to say "Well, I got defrauded and learned my lesson so it was worth the price." This is true if you've been defrauded in some clever way that is out of the common experience. My travels in the Arabic World certainly taught me about sociopathological fraud I'd not heretofore experienced first hand, or even read about. However, I still don't think it was worth the lousy 50 Egyptian Pounds it cost me. People who get defrauded by ignoring the ingrained social lessons they are taught over a lifetime may be paying what seems to be a fair price to them (and to them it may be fair). But, when these people occupy a position of responsibility to others who place their trust in them, then it is another matter altogether as to whether it was "fair price" or a good thing on balance. So, what went wrong in the Visser case? Why did Steve and others get "fooled" or "mislead?" And just as important, could it have easily and straightforwardly been avoided? It axiomatic in business and science that you don't buy a pig in the poke. You don't plunk down your money before you have reasonable substantiation of claims. Yes, you may expend modest amounts of money to facilitate a demonstration, but you don't buy the North American Rights as part of the validation package. Trust, but verify. First, the demonstration. Second the disclosure. Third independent reduplication. Fourth a contract. Firth the payment. These are commonsense things. Prudent people don't even have expensive repairs on their homes done without a list of references which they check out. Steve and the others at Alcor knew and know the basics of how science works. Good scientists may be reticent about full disclosure, but they don't expect people to skip the independent reduplication step. Whatever you are buying must work in your hands under the same conditions. It can even be the case that you are given Solution X with instructions on how to use it but no details as to what's in it. That is skating the edge of credibility, but if Solution X is rigorously validated and meets the claims made for it, then buying it, along with periodic re-testing (this is what is known as quality control) is acceptable if not palatable. Most consumer products are sold along exactly these lines. Some are frauds in that they are marketed with the full knowledge that they do not meet their claims. This must clearly be so or we would be living in a USA populated almost exclusively by fashionably thin people. On the other hand, KFC chicken and Coca Cola do just fine because people get what they expect and want. Intel sells chips without disclosing every detail of their manufacture. In fact, in industry the devil is often in the details and these are jealously guarded. That's what nondisclosure agreements are about in large part. But there is a long way between buying a performing product that that the manufacturer stands behind, and buying one where only the inventor can make it work. The difference is what is called the prudent man standard and it usually gets suspended only when people are either: a) Stupid or grossly inexperienced, such as is the case with a young child or a moron (both of which Steve clearly is not). b) Emotion overwhelming reason, such as in the case of greed, hate, resentment or other factors being allowed to override the safeguards every reasonable adult knows. And, I would add, knows to be especially important in costly or life or death situations. c) Situations of extreme chaos or desperation where human or environmental factors erode commonsense judgment A sleep deprived, traumatized person coping with a disaster can't reasonably be expected to function at the same level as would be the case in calmer conditions. Here I'm referring to situations like those encountered on the battlefield or natural disasters. A tough day or year at the office doesn't count. So, here are some fairly straightforward steps to avoid another Visser: 1) If it seems to good to be true it almost always is. Let that at very least make you diligent in following the steps below. 2) Assume the worst and try to prove otherwise. 3) Claims must be substantiated and independently verified. It took FRED CHAMBERLAIN to do this. Regardless of what Visser's cryoprotective agent was, he established a rigid and reproducible set of guidelines which were scrupulously adhered to. 4) Related to #3 above, the parameters must be quantified; in others words you have to do measurements. 5) In cases where the phenomenon being evaluated has an inherent degree of subjectivity or difficulty in quantification or evaluating the meaning of the measured outcome, such as whether people prefer Pepsi to Coca Cola, the standards for quantification must be even more rigorous and involve controls over sample size, selection criteria, statistical methods, experimental design, and so on. This is a difficult area in science and even the experts get tripped up frequently. The Vissers were not in any way such a case! 6) Money should be advanced incrementally and in direct relation to what is being purchased. In other words, set milestones and look at the results frequently. 7) Peer review is usually critical. If full disclosure is not possible, the bar must then be set very high. The burden of bearing the costs of independent verification should never be on the customer. If the innovator(s) wants to keep the technology a secret, then s/he must be prepared to pay the price of assuring validation. Intel does beta tests, market studies, collects performance data and the like BEFORE they offer their product for sale. They do this with investors' money and, FYI, the investors usually have full disclosure or they have incredible risk! (Sometimes it is both.) In any event, it is the investors' risk, not the customers'. If you decide to be both, that's fine. But, if you are spending other peoples' money you better let them in on it BEFORE you take that risk. 8) Investigate the background of the people you are dealing with. Doing this in the case of the Vissers would have disclosed a trail of coercion and deceit. Yes, many innovators are persecuted and maligned. But close scrutiny usually shows up a trail of past dishonest behavior. 9) Be aware that any good con artist who engages in fraud must, by definition, seem incredibly sincere. Think about it, it just wouldn't work any other way. A successful liar is one who can't for a moment be perceived to be lying. These people are artists at faking human decency and integrity. That's the take home message of point #2 above. Even then you can be mislead and defrauded, but usually not for reasons of greed or naked self interest. Rather, being defrauded in situations like that is when your best motives are being exploited: a child helping a molester find a lost dog, a person trying to good being duped by a fake charity... 10) When you are in a high fraud risk undertaking like cryonics (or medicine for that matter!) you have a special duty to VERIFY, VERIFY and VERIFY AGAIN. You have a duty to have objective and rigorous data to support scientific claims. If you don't see data and documented results with NUMBERS then you have reason to worry and every reason to be concerned that, whatever the intent of the person or organization, you aren't getting what you think you are. As to the central issue of Whether the Vissers were frauds I must rely on their behavior vis a vis Virodene and their evasive behavior when I questioned them on the facts (not proprietary secrets, but facts about the conditions of other demonstrations). Both Olga and Ziggy Visser lied to me when they stated they had successfully completed similarly rigorous demonstrations. Furthermore, during the course of the Alcor controlled demonstrations Fred Chamberlain had to repeatedly and aggressively intervene to stop deviations from the previously agreed upon procedure. That is deceit. That it was unsuccessful is immaterial to motive. That financial gain was primary is not in question; the Vissers took money from everyone who's confidence they gained. In return they gave nothing but broken dreams and in a few cases financial ruin. I guess to some people $25,000 or $50,000 is not a lot. Maybe that's so. But it is to me and I suspect it is to Mr. Swayze and a lot of other people for whom it would buy cryopreservation. Most tellingly, it is a lot of money to millionaires and billionaires. If you get even $10,000 from one of them you are doing very well indeed. That is why they have so much money. And, having met so many of them (as Steve Bridge well knows) I can say with certainty that very few I've met would consider $25K an acceptable price to pay for being swindled. Finally, I want to repeat again something I said in passing: It was Fred Chamberlain who turned the Visser demonstration into something rigorous. I was there and I was a party to discussions with other principals at the time, and it is abundantly clear to me that it was Fred and Fred alone who did this. This is not meant to be an unconditional endorsement of Fred beyond the facts as they apply here; we've had our differences even on matters of science and proof. However, in this case the credit should go where the credit is due. Mike Darwin Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=16582