New approach to designing drugs supercharges cancer medication

Shape-shifting drug hits tumors in multiple ways, improves outcomes in mice

Peer-Reviewed Publication

WashU Medicine

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WashU Medicine researchers show in mice that their technique to designing medications, in which modular components of anti-cancer drugs are administered separately and assembled in the body using what's known as click chemistry, is more effective than standard treatments at targeting and shrinking tumors. Shown is a drug they designed, labeled in pink and green, bound to pancreatic cancer cells from mice.

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Credit: Shayla Shmuel

Modern anticancer medications that combine tumor-fighting drugs with proteins that specifically target cancer cells are a relatively new class of drug, often given to patients for whom standard chemotherapy has not worked. The drugs are precise, but can attack only one kind of target in the cancer cell at a time. This limits their effectiveness against tumors containing multiple types of targets, which becomes more likely as a cancer progresses or as tumors become resistant to conventional therapies.

Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have shown in mice that it is possible to increase the potential effectiveness of these drugs, which are known as antibody-drug conjugates. By modifying such drugs already approved by the U.S Food and Drug Administration so that they self-assemble in the body and attack more than one cancer target, the researchers dramatically improved the effectiveness of these medications.

The study was published July 15 in Nature.

“We’ve shown that when two cancer-targeting antibodies bind together inside the body, they accumulate at the tumor more effectively and improve treatment response,” said Patrícia M. Ribeiro Pereira, PhD, an assistant professor of radiology at WashU Medicine Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology and a research member of Siteman Cancer Center, based at Barnes-Jewish Hospital and WashU Medicine.

“There is a lot of excitement here because we have shown that it isn’t necessary to create a whole new drug platform for each therapeutic target,” added Ribeiro Pereira. “We can repurpose antibodies that already exist to improve treatments.”

Two drugs in one

In recent years, antibody-drug conjugates have been transforming cancer care, with 15 such drugs approved since 2011 for leukemia and lung, cervical and breast cancer, among others.

The medications combine three components, each with a specialized role. One is the cytotoxic drug that kills a cancer cell when directed to the correct cell. Another is the antibody protein that binds to receptors unique to cancer cells, so that the drug acts specifically within tumors and does not attack healthy tissue. The third is a linking molecule that connects the other two components.

Because each drug can be attached to only one antibody partner, these conjugates are highly specific and attack only cells containing the appropriate receptors. This makes them very effective in relatively homogeneous tumors, but their long-term effectiveness against more complex tumors with a diversity of cell types is limited.

Ribeiro Pereira and her team developed an approach to overcome these limitations using what’s known as click chemistry, a technique that enables adaptable connector molecules to click into a variety of other compounds to form interchangeable molecular structures in a modular way. They created a self-assembling drug apparatus that could tack on a second antibody if needed, thereby doubling the receptor types it could bind to in a tumor.

Both antibodies used in this study are FDA-approved for cancer therapies and target receptors that control tumor growth. One antibody binds to the EGFR receptor; the second, to the HER2 receptor. Another form of the treatment allows two different types of HER2 antibody to bind to different parts of the same receptor, which helps them work together more effectively.

In mice modeling pancreatic, gastric or breast cancer tumors containing cells that expressed EGFR receptors and other cells that expressed HER2 receptors, Ribeiro Pereira’s team first administered an antibody targeting either EGFR or an antibody that binds to a particular portion of the HER2 receptor. The antibodies had all been engineered with one-half of a specialized “click” molecule.

About a day later, the team administered a second type of the HER2 antibody, that binds to a different portion of that receptor, with a drug conjugate and that also carried the complementary click partner. Once in the body, the two antibodies then selectively snapped together. Depending on the approach, the HER2 receptor could be attacked twice as effectively, or both HER2 and EGRF could be targeted at the same time. Both approaches gave the tumor a one-two punch of antibody-drug conjugate — and it made the treatment far more effective than the FDA-approved versions.

Radioactive tags developed by Ribeiro Pereira’s colleagues at WashU Medicine enabled the team to visualize how much drug bound to tumor cells. Ribeiro Pereira and her team found that tumor cells took up much higher amounts of the modified antibody-drug conjugates than is typical for the antibody-drug conjugates that they were derived from, possibly because the click chemistry promotes clustering of antibodies on the cancer cell surface, which enhances internalization by the cell.

Tumors treated with the new form of the drugs resulted in significantly improved survival: as much as 90% of the animals survived 120 days after treatment in the pancreatic model, where animals treated with standard antibody-drug conjugates survived less than 80 days on average. The team also was able to optimize the technique to reduce off-target accumulation of the drug in the liver.

While this study tested the drug in pancreatic, gastric and breast cancer models, Ribeiro Pereira said the modified antibody-drug conjugates have the potential to treat many different tumor types and possibly many other diseases, including some that are currently very difficult to treat with conventional medicine. The linking molecules used in this study only take one to three days to manufacture and allow for greater flexibility when creating precision medicines for individual patients because of the versatile click chemistry approach.

“We’re trying to optimize this tool to help antibodies reach tumors that are normally very difficult to treat, such as brain tumors,” Ribeiro Pereira said. “It’s exciting, because the drug development process doesn’t need to start from the beginning — we can use drugs that are already FDA-approved, which could help bring improved treatments to the clinic more quickly. At the same time, the approach is flexible enough to be adapted to new cancer targets as we learn more about what drives treatment resistance.”

Simó C, Vanover AC, Albanus RD, Panikar SS, Shmuel S, Benton A, Giraldo-Guzman J, Luna JM, Xu Y, Berry N-K, Keltee N, Liu J, Dehdashti F, Pereira PMR. Modular in vivo antibody-ADC click to reverse drug resistance in tumors. Nature. July 15. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-026-10789-w

Research reported in this publication was supported by the National Cancer Institute of the National Institutes of Health (R37CA276498 and R21CA291680), internal funds provided by the Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology, and the American Cancer Society (IRG-21–133–64–03) and the Breast Cancer Alliance. Further support came from the Alvin J. Siteman Cancer Center through The Foundation for Barnes-Jewish Hospital and the National Cancer Institute (P30 CA091842). The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health. Other support came from the W. M. Keck Foundation and the American Cancer Society Award (PF-25-1515996-01-PFCDET), National Institutes of Health (K99AG086583), a Gates Sr. Alzheimer’s Disease Research Fellowship from the Alzheimer’s Disease Data Initiative, the National Cancer Institute of the National Institute of Health under Award Number K22CA282357. The Preclinical Imaging Facility was supported by NIH/NCI Siteman Cancer Center (SCC) Support Grant P30CA091842, NIH instrumentation grants S10OD018515 and S10OD030403, and internal funds provided by the Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology. TEM and confocal experiments were supported by the Washington University School of Medicine, The Children’s Discovery Institute of Washington University, and St. Louis Children’s Hospital (CDI-CORE-2015-505 and CDI-CORE-2019-813) and the Foundation for Barnes-Jewish Hospital (3770 and 4642). The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the NIH.

About WashU Medicine

WashU Medicine is a global leader in academic medicine, including biomedical research, patient care and educational programs with 3,100 faculty. Its National Institutes of Health (NIH) research funding portfolio is the second largest among U.S. medical schools and has grown 78% since 2016. Together with institutional investment, WashU Medicine commits over $1.6 billion annually to basic and clinical research innovation and training. Its faculty practice is consistently among the top five in the country, with more than 2,550 faculty physicians practicing at 200 locations. WashU Medicine physicians exclusively staff Barnes-Jewish and St. Louis Children’s hospitals — the academic hospitals of BJC HealthCare — and Siteman Cancer Center, a partnership between BJC HealthCare and WashU Medicine and the only National Cancer Institute-designated comprehensive cancer center in Missouri and southern Illinois. WashU Medicine physicians also treat patients at BJC’s community hospitals in our region. With a storied history in MD/PhD training, WashU Medicine recently dedicated $100 million to scholarships and curriculum renewal for its medical students, and is home to top-notch training programs in every medical subspecialty as well as physical therapy, occupational therapy, and audiology and communications sciences.

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Journal

Nature

DOI

10.1038/s41586-026-10789-w 

Method of Research

Experimental study

Subject of Research

Animals

Article Title

Modular in vivo antibody-ADC click to reverse drug resistance in tumors

Article Publication Date

15-Jul-2026

 

Vaping or smoking found to reduce fitness in young people by 15%

European Respiratory Society

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Young people who vape or smoke cigarettes have reduced blood vessel functionality, breathing efficiency and exercise capacity compared to those who have never smoked or vaped, according to a study published today in ERJ Open Research.

Dr Azmy Faisal, the lead author of the study from the Manchester Metropolitan University, United Kingdom, explains: “In active, healthy young adults with normal lungs, both vapes and tobacco smoking led to worsened exercise capacity, shortness of breath, and intense leg fatigue.

“Like smoking, our research indicates that vaping can lead to harmful changes to the blood vessels, lung efficiency during exercise and approximately a 15% reduction in fitness compared to those who have never smoked or vaped.”

The study examined 75 people aged 18-30, a third had never smoked or vaped, a third were smokers but had never used vapes, and a third were vapers for approximately 3 years but had never smoked. All participants had normal resting lung function and similar lifestyles, including caffeine and alcohol consumption, and physical activity levels.

Each volunteer took part in an incremental cycle exercise test whilst having their heart, breathing and blood lactate responses measured at increasing difficulty until they reached their maximum. Ultrasound scans and blood tests were also done to look how well their arteries were functioning. Test results found that at their peak exercise ability, the vaping and smoking groups had significantly lower exercise capacity and oxygen uptake by approximately 15%. The lungs ability to blow out carbon dioxide was diminished and lactic acid built up quicker in vapers and smokers at all levels of exercise before they reached their maximum, resulting in increased breathlessness and leg discomfort compared to the group who had never smoked or vaped. Ultrasounds scans and blood samples showed signs of inflammation in the blood vessels. Researchers say these results suggest similar effects of vaping and smoking in young people.

Dr Faisal added: “These findings provide critical information for the general public, healthcare providers, and regulatory authorities regarding potential early risks associated with vape use, particularly for the growing number of young adults who have never smoked but choose to use these products. Additionally, our study supports the UK’s Tobacco and Vapes Act 2026, which prohibits vaping for individuals under 18 and aims to reduce vaping among young adults in the future.”

The team are now planning to conduct a series of MRI studies to better understand the changes within the heart, lungs and skeletal muscles associated with vaping, particularly the underlying mechanisms which lead to lower levels of fitness.

Dr Stamatoula Tsikrika from the European Respiratory Society’s expert group on tobacco, smoking control and health education, based at Sotiria Hospital, Athens, Greece, who was not involved in the research, said: “More and more young people who have never smoked are using vapes. As the popularity of vaping continues to rise, so too do concerns that it is becoming normalised behaviour, functioning as a gateway to nicotine addiction and introducing serious health risks.

“Vapes may contain lower levels of cancer-causing substances, but they can still trigger genetic changes such as DNA damage and inflammation, which are linked to increased lung cancer risk. For people who have never smoked, and are therefore not using vapes as a cessation method, the health consequences of vaping are becoming harder for policymakers and the tobacco industry to justify.”

Dr Tsikrika also commented on the Tobacco and Vapes Bill, passed in the United Kingdom earlier this year: “Ninety-four per cent of smokers start before they are 25 and 22% of 15-16 year olds in Europe are reported to use vapes, by establishing a generational sales ban on nicotine products, the UK has taken a monumental leap towards protecting the health of young people.”

(ends)

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Journal

ERJ Open Research

DOI

10.1183/23120541.00425-2026 

Method of Research

Observational study

Subject of Research

People

Article Title

Reduced vascular function, ventilatory efficiency, and exercise capacity in young adult E-cigarette users

Article Publication Date

14-Jul-2026

 

New cancer drug shows promise in mesothelioma trial

Vermont team controls disease in 67% of patients—by attacking cancer energy system

University of Vermont

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University of Vermont postdoctoral scientist Victoria Gibson and professor Brian Cunniff working in a lab at UVM’s Cancer Center. They are the lead authors on a new study in the journal Nature Communications that reveals an unexpected and promising way to treat the deadly disease mesothelioma—and perhaps other cancers too. Working with RS Oncology LLC, the UVM team will reveal its stage 2 clinical trial results of their new medicine later this year.

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Credit: Joshua Brown/UVM

Mesothelioma is a rare but aggressive cancer, usually caused by exposure to asbestos. Inhaled asbestos fibers become lodged in the lungs, causing inflammation that can lead to tumor formation decades later. Worldwide, about 30,000 people are diagnosed with mesothelioma each year. Current treatments—immunotherapy and chemotherapy—offer limited benefit. Patients—often men who worked in shipbuilding, oil refining, and asbestos manufacturing—face a median survival of approximately 12 months and a five-year survival rate around 10 percent. 

 "It's a disease of a significant unmet medical need,” says Brian Cunniff, a professor at the University of Vermont.

Now, a study published July 14 in Nature Communications by Cunniff, UVM research scientist Victoria Gibson, and an international team of collaborators reports a counterintuitive new approach to treating the disease—and perhaps other cancers too.

In a “phase one” clinical trial, sponsored by RS Oncology, LLC, people with relapsed mesothelioma were given the new drug and it controlled disease progression in 67% of the patients and in some patients the tumors got smaller. More importantly, the drug was well tolerated and these critically ill patients lived longer than patients given the standard treatments.

Turning Cancer's Own Defenses Against It

Like many cancers, mesothelioma tumors generate elevated levels of “reactive oxygen species”—unstable and damaging molecules that are a byproduct of rapid tumor cell metabolism. To survive under these conditions, tumor cells ramp up production of antioxidant enzymes, including one called peroxiredoxin 3, or PRX3, in the cell’s powerhouses—the mitochondria—that protect tumor cells from these damaging molecules.

The UVM team's insight was to flip the conventional logic of cancer treatment. For years, clinical trials attempted to increase antioxidants to combat cancer, reasoning that lowering reactive oxygen species would slow tumor growth. Those trials largely failed, and some showed that increasing antioxidants promoted tumor growth. The UVM team took the opposite approach: inhibit PRX3, overwhelm the tumor cell with oxidative stress, and kill it.

The trial drug developed by RS Oncology, based on UVM’s discoveries, uses a naturally occurring antibiotic, thiostrepton, to disable PRX3. This causes a buildup of hydrogen peroxide in the mitochondria of tumor cells and triggers their death. Because tumor cells generate more reactive oxygen species than normal cells, PRX3 turns over faster in tumor cells which increases selectivity to cancer cells rather than healthy ones.

When the team deleted PRX3 entirely in mesothelioma tumor cell lines, the results were striking: mitochondrial function decreased, cell proliferation slowed dramatically, and the cancer cells were unable to form tumors in animal tests. Other groups have shown that when PRX3 is knocked out in healthy mice, there were no adverse effects—a finding that addresses a common objection to targeting mitochondria. "People will come up to us at conferences and state that you can't target the mitochondria because they’re too important," said Gibson. "The evidence—that you can knock out PRX3 in mice and there's no adverse phenotype— supports our approach.” In other words, the scientists showed that they could remove the genes for the PRX3 enzyme from developing mice and that the animals functioned normally.  

From the Laboratory to the Clinic

The laboratory foundation for this work was established at UVM’s Cancer Center around 2015. Seeing promising early results with thiostrepton, a team formed RS Oncology, a private pharmaceutical company, to translate UVM findings into the clinic. UVM’s Brian Cunniff—an associate professor in the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at the university’s Larner College of Medicine—serves as the company’s chief science officer. Eventually, the team developed thiostrepton into a novel clinical formulation called RSO-021 and conducted a phase one clinical trial in the United Kingdom under oversight of the MHRA, the UK equivalent of the FDA, between 2022 and 2023.

The drug is administered directly into the chest through a catheter already in place for patients who have “pleural effusions”—a buildup of fluid between the lung and chest wall that affects approximately 90 percent of mesothelioma patients. This local delivery concentrates the drug at the tumor site while limiting systemic exposure.  

The phase one trial met its requirements for safety and tolerability at a 90-milligram dose, with no patient deaths attributed to the drug. Crucially, the team demonstrated on-target engagement in patient tissue samples—confirming that the drug's mechanism of action, observed in cells and mice in the laboratory, also works in human tumors.

Progression-free survival averaged 4.2 months, comparable to current therapies. More significantly, overall survival in the cohort of 15 patients was better than what is seen with existing treatments—a finding Cunniff describes as a potential “game changer.”

"Our overall survival data is very promising and will hopefully persist with additional patients," Cunniff said.

The team’s data also suggests the new drug may also help awaken the immune system to attack or slow the tumor. "Our drug has both cytotoxic activity, it can kill the tumor cells, but it also has immunomodulatory capacity where it can modulate the immune system to now manage the tumor," said Cunniff.

Phase two of the drug trial has now been completed, and results are expected to be presented at a global oncology meeting this year. 

What Comes Next

The research program is expanding on multiple fronts. The UVM and RS Oncology team, in collaboration with the University of Leicester and other institutions in the UK, are developing second-generation PRX3 inhibitors that are more soluble and potentially deliverable as an oral tablet. This might allow the drug to be brought to market more easily and have application with cancer types beyond mesothelioma. At UVM, Victoria Gibson, the lead author on the new study, is remaining as a postdoctoral researcher to help initiate new research using thiostrepton for peritoneal malignancies, including mesothelioma, gastric cancer, and other gastrointestinal cancers, in collaboration with Conor O’Neill, a surgical oncologist at the UVM Cancer Center and UVM Health. "We believe this mechanism could be applicable to other cancers," Cunniff said.

For Gibson, the work is personal. "I've always just had a desire to help people because I feel like everyone has experienced cancer in their life, whether it's them, friends, or family members," she said. Still, when a family member called the lab hoping to enroll her dying father in the clinical trial, Gibson was caught off guard. "We just work in a lab all day working with cells," she recalled, "and the fact that we're making an impact on people, that they're wanting to be on this clinical trial, just was amazing to me."

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Journal

Nature Communications

DOI

10.1038/s41467-026-75153-y 

Method of Research

Randomized controlled/clinical trial

Subject of Research

People

Article Title

Preclinical characterization and phase 1 clinical testing of targeting mitochondrial peroxiredoxin 3 in cancer

Article Publication Date

14-Jul-2026

Congressional MKUltra Hearings as MAGA PSYOP

David Price

 July 1, 2026

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Rep. Anna Luna (R. Florida) kicks off the MKUltra hearing. Image courtesy House.gov.

As a scholar who spent decades using the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and archives studying Cold War CIA operations, it was with great interest that I watched yesterday’s US House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform hearings on “Mind Control and Accountability: Uncovering the Truth of the CIA’s MKULTRA Project.” Because my academic research focuses on the CIA’s use of funding fronts and various specific CIA operations, including its MKUltra program, I was surprised to learn of congressional interest in a program that was terminated over half a century ago.

UKUltra was the code name of a secret CIA program launched after US prisoners of war during the Korean War appeared to be brainwashed, leading the CIA to begin researching the possibilities of “mind control” and a variety of interrogation techniques. Between 1953 and 1973, the CIA used hundreds of witting and unwitting scientists to conduct at least 149 MKUltra subprojects at over 80 institutions, employing hundreds of researchers. Most of this research was unethical, with hideous abuses of research subjects who were often unaware of what was happening to them. This included dosing unsuspecting people with powerful drugs like LSD or potent concentrations of liquefied THC. Other MKUltra-funded research studies followed more conventional protocols, and researchers funded to do the research were often unaware they were conducting research for the CIA. I studied one of these programs, run through a research facility located at the Cornell University Medical School, the Human Ecology Fund, which during the 1950s and 60s funded a variety of seemingly mundane social science research, conducted by unwitting scholars. Some of these research projects studied topics, like cross-cultural stress indicators, that supplied information that would be reused in writing the CIA’s KUBARK interrogation manual, and other horrible CIA projects that MKUltra informed.

While there’s lots of wild speculation about MKUltra in popular culture, most of what is known about the program comes from revelations made during the Church Committee Senate Hearings in the mid-1970s, during that brief post-Watergate moment when the dam holding back so many state secrets broke. Most of the CIA’s records on the program were destroyed, though a small cache listing names of MKUltra research projects was later released in response to a FOIA request made by John Marks, a former State Department employee, which provided us with the precious little documentation we now have on the program.

There is scarce new information on MKUltra, so it is surprising to see congressional inquiry over half a century after the program terminated. But as is often the case, these questions about the past have less to do with this horrible past than they do with the horrible present.

In her opening statement, the chair of the Taskforce on Declassification of Federal Secrets, Rep. Anna Luna (R. Florida), made a surprisingly decent statement,

“MKUltra was not a policy failure or an overzealous program that got out of hand. It was a deliberate, systematic governmental operation that subjected American citizens, prisoners, hospital patients, veterans, and ordinary people to LSD electroshock hypnosis, sensory deprivation, and psychological torture without their knowledge or consent. This went on for 20 years on American soil, funded by American taxpayer dollars and authorized by the very top US intelligence apparatus. And this program, when it did end, the men who ran it did not cooperate with investigators. They did not come forward. They committed another crime. They destroyed evidence.”

Luna explained that as Director of Central Intelligence Richard Helms was preparing to leave office in 1973, he ordered the destruction of all CIA MKUltra records. Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, who directed MKUltra, also destroyed all his records. Luna correctly identified these acts as illegal and as the CIA’s obstruction of justice. Luna stressed that Helms and Gottlieb were never meaningfully pushing for their crimes.

Luna made a special point of stressing that for some projects, regular civilian hospitals were used as research sites, with some experimenting on unsuspecting, unconsenting patients. In a revealing moment, her voice slipped into a eye-rolling-sarcastic-tone as she states “…the program ran for a decade, that we know of…” Her focus on government funded hospital based research did not seem accidental, and the task force’s later clash with one of the three witnesses, seems to indicate there is more to this.

The three witnesses delivering sworn testimony before the committee were Dr. Stephen Kinzer, author of the 2019 book, Poisoner In Chief, which tells the story of Sidney Gottleib, the CIA mad scientist director of MKUltra. Tom O’Neill author of CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties, and Dr. Elizabeth Ginexi, a former senior program director at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). As she introduced the witnesses, Luna called all three witnesses “patriots” for their years of research into these CIA crimes.

Dr. Stephen Kinzer testified first. He spoke about the damages of the culture of secrecy and overclassification of documents, explained the details of how MKUltra secretly tried to discover methods of brainwashing and improved interrogation through torturous research, and described Gottlieb as having an unsupervised “license to kill.” Kinzer stressed that it may still be possible to find and release other MKUltra documents that still exist, to unredact existing documents, and to investigate whether some extension of MKUltra exists today using techniques of neuroscience or Artificial Intelligence.

Next, Tom O’Neill testified that CIA officials lied to Congress when they testified in the mid-70s to the Church Committee that MKUltra had been a failure (this is a controversial claim among MKUltra academic scholars, and his single source for this claim is suspect). He recounted his years of research he claims uncovered MKUltra links to Charles Mason and the Manson killings; which remains among MKUltra scholars one of the more controversial claims about the program. O’Neill described documents he discovered claiming MKUltra researchers had discovered methods, using hypnosis and drugs, to implant false memories in subjects, which he described as a “means of gaining the ability to seize control of a person’s perceptions, memories, and ultimately their behavior.”

The final witness was Dr. Elizabeth Ginexi, whose statement completely went off script as she slammed the Trump administration and Congress’s defunding of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) research. She had nothing to say about MKUltra. Going rogue, she testified that what is:

“happening to NIH right now is not reform. It is the replacement of scientific judgment with political control. For eighty years, US federal investment in biomedical research produced outcomes that no private market would have funded. Heart disease is the leading cause of death in the United States. NIH-funded research on blood pressure, cholesterol, and smoking drove a 56% decline in heart disease between 1950 and 1996. Cancer has been transformed. Treatments for breast, lung, prostate, and childhood cancers, along with immunotherapies that converted previously fatal diagnoses into manageable conditions, are traced directly to NIH research.”

Dr Ginexi described the National Institute of Health’s history of sponsoring lifesaving research that no private profit-driven pharmaceutical company would fund. She called out the administration for its role in killing programs that would have helped manage the bird flu outbreak, Ebola, and hantavirus. She made zero mention of MKUltra. While she was still reading her testimony, Chairwoman Luna interrupted her and told her she had used her allotted time.

Congresswoman Luna’s questions cast a broad fishing net. She asked questions about Operation Naomi, Operation Paperclip–the US operation that brought over 1,600 German and Austrian scientists, most of whom had worked under the Nazis during the war, many of whom were Nazi party members. Luna asked if any Nazis were used in MKUltra. Dr Kinzer confirmed they were, and he described how some of MKUltra researchers extended Nazi experiments. Luna asked questions about the MKUltra personnel’s contacts with individuals reportedly involved in the assassination of JFK. O’Neill’s testimony suggested Jack Ruby could have been subjected to MKUltra.

Representative Eric Burlison (R. Missouri) asked if the CIA was involved in a famous 1951 incident in France (known as the Pont-Saint-Esprit mass poisoning) where 200 people in a village were simultaneously dosed with a powerful hallucinogen by eating bread from a local bakery. Dr Kinzer did not know, but he said he had suspicions and wanted more investigation. Burlison asked about Operation Midnight Climax’s interrogation studies, where unsuspecting US citizens were lured into safehouses by sex workers, where they were dosed with LSD, filmed, and interrogated. When Burlison asked O’Neill if he thought that MKUltra secretly continued after 1973, he replied: “I don’t know. I can’t imagine it didn’t though…I imagine it’s being used. I have no evidence of it being used.”

For the record, as someone who distrusts the CIA and who spent years studying MKUltra. I believe MKUltra died within the agency in the 1960s. It died because it didn’t work. The types of mind control they wanted do not exist. The most effective forms of mind control aren’t found in the science fiction tropes these 1950s and 60s CIA operations experimented with, they’re found in the pages of New York Times, broadcasts of Fox News, MSNBC, and Newsmax, and the hundreds of thousands of human and circuit-boarded bots incessantly posting on social media. Certainly, the CIA continued to do all sorts of horrible things, but beyond generating some “useful” interrogation techniques, MKUltra mostly didn’t pan out because a lot of its ideas were unsound.

Representative Eli Crane (R Arizona) asked Dr. Ginexi if her statements were referring to the administration’s efforts to “reform and rein in the NIH.” But Ginexi corrected Crane, saying her remarks were “about the destruction of the NIH, the cancelation of grants, and the political control of the NIH.” Crane ignored her reply and asked her about the NIH funding of the Wuhan laboratory, a topic about which Dr Ginexi replied she knew nothing. But Crane spotted a soapbox opportunity to speechify about how, for years, we were all told to trust science, then “most of what we were told during COVID was a complete lie, and it wasn’t scientific at all.” Unfazed, Dr. Ginexi replied that,

“the number one thing that I think that we’re doing to destroy trust in American science right now is cancelling clinical trial in the middle of those clinical trials. This does incredible harm to the patients who are receiving experimental treatments and it really destroys the trust that we have in how do we recruit patients for future trials if they are knowing that their trials could just simply be canceled for political reasons.”

Crane did not address her points. He instead tripped down an anti-vaccine rabbit hole. But his rant got audience applause which he took as proof that the American people distrusted the NIH. Which increasingly seemed to be the point of this hearing. Rep. Lauren Boebert (R. Colorado) also made a short speech claiming that COVID was propaganda, and in comments apparently directed at Dr. Ginexi, she blamed America’s response to COVID on governmental agencies that are not responsive to Congress’s questions.

These moments of COVID science bashing and anti-government-funded science grandstanding appear to have revealed why the task force seemed interested in MKUltra a half a century after the fact.

Chairwoman Luna asked Dr Kinzer about the role of USAID in MKUltra projects; speculating that since we know that USAID has been used as CIA cover in the past and ”since part of USAID mission was to administer drugs to the poor and needy populations, would the organization have abused its mandate by poisoning foreign populations or creating dissociative states for interrogation or torture?” Kizner replied that he had no direct knowledge of this, but that during the Cold War, many government agencies conducted covert operations.

Representative Timothy Floyd Burchett (R-Tennessee) asked what the chances are that, with recent technological advances, more advanced MKUltra-like techniques could cause a “loner” to take shots at a president? O’Neill referenced the Butler, Pennsylvania, assassination attempt on candidate Trump and the killing of Charlie Kirk and said:

“I just hate to speculate, because I don’t know, I have no firsthand knowledge whether those guys were programed through radio waves or through their computer activity. So I would never hazard a guess except to say what I’ve already said that they developed means that we’ve never been told about many, many, years ago and I imagine they’ve evolved to much more effective now.”

Which is an awful lot of speculation for someone who, with zero evidence, hates to speculate.

Not to be outdone in describing a conspiracy theory without any concrete evidence, Representative Burchet interrupted O’Neill to say:

“Don’t you think that they could cast this broad net through these algorithms and other things, and maybe they don’t know the exact person it’s going to affect, but they know what type of person its to affect, and they know it’s going happen. And that way they can…they can’t predict when it’s going to happen, but they think it will happen. And that they can sort of wash their hands of this whole thing and say, well, we didn’t have anything to do with it. But in effect. They really did because they put this out there and they continue to put it out there.”

Dr. Kinzer replied that what Congressman Burchet described sounded like the MLK assassination and the government’s role in creating a climate where he was considered “the most dangerous man in America.” Which might conceivably be generally a reasonable thing to say in a normal discussion, but in a room where people have been freely speculating about mind controlling radio waves, I wouldn’t be confident that they understand that Hoover’s FBI was spreading leaflets and hate mail about MLK that fed a climate of violence.

Finally, at the conclusion of the hearing, when asked if he had anything to add, Dr. Kinzer explained that:

“There’s a reason why conspiracy theories are so widespread in America. It has to do with the disassociation between what we say we are and do, and what we really are and do. This has become more and more clear to more people. Therefore, they’re suspicious of nefarious dealings by the US, and they’re also suspicious of other things that aren’t nefarious at all, but there’s just this mentality that is created by the covert sphere. And that’s what makes people realize that things that used to seem really farfetched, and not so farfetched after all.”

But this was almost an afterthought to an over hour and a half session, where nothing new about MKUltra was learned, and whose purpose for being held over a half century after the program’s demise was never stated, but the attacks on publicly funded research seemed to clarify.

But stated or not, the reasons for this showboating stunt seemed clear. Kinzer, O’Neill, and Ginexi were props in a broader campaign attacking government spending on research; and while Kinzer and O’Neill appeared unconcerned that their hosts were using their testimony to spread their own conspiracy theories about covid, mind control, a certain type of deep state, along with general attacks on publicly funded science; while Dr. Ginexi did not go along with the sham. Dr. Ginexi’s testimony shed more light on what this hearing was about than what her fellow witnesses did, even though she said nothing about MKUltra.

With all the talk from the congressional task force about their concern about MKUltra’s abuse of research subjects (and it there were horrible abuses), they had no answers to Dr. Ginexi’s questions about the harm being done today to members of medical research studies whose treatments were suddenly cancelled due to the federal research cuts they had approved. Never mind that I find it difficult to believe these congressional representatives would oppose using the torture and interrogation techniques developed by MKUltra-sponsored research against enemies.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for cleaning house at the CIA. If my regime was in power, I would hold hearings on these and many other CIA crimes. I might even ask some of these same questions to these and other witnesses. I’m all for dismantling the CIA as a covert arm of government; for ending the CIA’s decades of covert actions and ending their role (as Philip Agee put it) as the secret police of American capitalism. But these members of Congress and Trump obviously don’t want any of this. They want as many excuses as possible for Acting Director of National Intelligence Bill Pulte to shake things up with agency purges, routing out the old deep state so he can implant the new one, and this hearing was just one more stunt in support of this campaign.

I am thankful that Dr. Elizabeth Ginexi had the courage of her convictions and the presence of mind to appear and give the sworn testimony she did. Her calm and lucid performance helped clarify why this particular committee would choose to delve into this dark chapter of ancient history, and her decision not to harmonize with this thinly veiled attack on the public funding of research was heroic.

David Price is an anthropologist living in Olympia, Washington. His latest book is Cold War Deceptions: The Asia Foundation and CIA, published by University of Washington Press.